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Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

Music in the renaissance.

ex "Kurtz" Violin

Andrea Amati

Double Virginal

Hans Ruckers the Elder

Cornetto in A

possibly Georg Voll

Sixtus Rauchwolff

Claviorganum

Lorenz Hauslaib

Tenor Recorder

Rectangular Octave Virginal

Rebecca Arkenberg Department of Education, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2002

Music was an essential part of civic, religious, and courtly life in the Renaissance. The rich interchange of ideas in Europe, as well as political, economic, and religious events in the period 1400–1600 led to major changes in styles of composing, methods of disseminating music, new musical genres, and the development of musical instruments. The most important music of the early Renaissance was composed for use by the church—polyphonic (made up of several simultaneous melodies) masses and motets in Latin for important churches and court chapels. By the end of the sixteenth century, however, patronage had broadened to include the Catholic Church, Protestant churches and courts, wealthy amateurs, and music printing—all were sources of income for composers.

The early fifteenth century was dominated initially by English and then Northern European composers. The Burgundian court was especially influential, and it attracted composers and musicians from all over Europe. The most important of these was Guillaume Du Fay (1397–1474), whose varied musical offerings included motets and masses for church and chapel services, many of whose large musical structures were based on existing Gregorian chant. His many small settings of French poetry display a sweet melodic lyricism unknown until his era. With his command of large-scale musical form, as well as his attention to secular text-setting, Du Fay set the stage for the next generations of Renaissance composers.

By about 1500, European art music was dominated by Franco-Flemish composers, the most prominent of whom was Josquin des Prez (ca. 1450–1521). Like many leading composers of his era, Josquin traveled widely throughout Europe, working for patrons in Aix-en-Provence, Paris, Milan, Rome, Ferrara, and Condé-sur-L’Escaut. The exchange of musical ideas among the Low Countries, France, and Italy led to what could be considered an international European style. On the one hand, polyphony or multivoiced music, with its horizontal contrapuntal style, continued to develop in complexity. At the same time, harmony based on a vertical arrangement of intervals, including thirds and sixths, was explored for its full textures and suitability for accompanying a vocal line. Josquin’s music epitomized these trends, with Northern-style intricate polyphony using canons, preexisting melodies, and other compositional structures smoothly amalgamated with the Italian bent for artfully setting words with melodies that highlight the poetry rather than masking it with complexity. Josquin, like Du Fay, composed primarily Latin masses and motets, but in a seemingly endless variety of styles. His secular output included settings of courtly French poetry, like Du Fay, but also arrangements of French popular songs, instrumental music, and Italian frottole.

With the beginning of the sixteenth century, European music saw a number of momentous changes. In 1501, a Venetian printer named Ottaviano Petrucci published the first significant collection of polyphonic music, the Harmonice Musices Odhecaton A . Petrucci’s success led eventually to music printing in France, Germany, England, and elsewhere. Prior to 1501, all music had to be copied by hand or learned by ear; music books were owned exclusively by religious establishments or extremely wealthy courts and households. After Petrucci, while these books were not inexpensive, it became possible for far greater numbers of people to own them and to learn to read music.

At about the same period, musical instrument technology led to the development of the viola da gamba , a fretted, bowed string instrument. Amateur European musicians of means eagerly took up the viol, as well as the lute , the recorder , the harpsichord (in various guises, including the spinet and virginal), the organ , and other instruments. The viola da gamba and recorder were played together in consorts or ensembles and often were produced in families or sets, with different sizes playing the different lines. Publications by Petrucci and others supplied these players for the first time with notated music (as opposed to the improvised music performed by professional instrumentalists). The sixteenth century saw the development of instrumental music such as the canzona, ricercare, fantasia, variations, and contrapuntal dance-inspired compositions, for both soloists and ensembles, as a truly distinct and independent genre with its own idioms separate from vocal forms and practical dance accompaniment.

The musical instruments depicted in the studiolo of Duke Federigo da Montefeltro of Urbino (ca. 1479–82; 39.153 ) represent both his personal interest in music and the role of music in the intellectual life of an educated Renaissance man. The musical instruments are placed alongside various scientific instruments, books, and weapons, and they include a portative organ, lutes, fiddle, and cornetti; a hunting horn; a pipe and tabor; a harp and jingle ring; a rebec; and a cittern .

From about 1520 through the end of the sixteenth century, composers throughout Europe employed the polyphonic language of Josquin’s generation in exploring musical expression through the French chanson, the Italian madrigal, the German tenorlieder, the Spanish villancico, and the English song, as well as in sacred music. The Reformation and Counter-Reformation directly affected the sacred polyphony of these countries. The Protestant revolutions (mainly in Northern Europe) varied in their attitudes toward sacred music, bringing such musical changes as the introduction of relatively simple German-language hymns (or chorales) sung by the congregation in Lutheran services. Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525/26–1594), maestro di cappella at the Cappella Giulia at Saint Peter’s in Rome, is seen by many as the iconic High Renaissance composer of Counter-Reformation sacred music, which features clear lines, a variety of textures, and a musically expressive reverence for its sacred texts. The English (and Catholic) composer William Byrd (1540–1623) straddled both worlds, composing Latin-texted works for the Catholic Church, as well as English-texted service music for use at Elizabeth I ‘s Chapel Royal.

Sixteenth-century humanists studied ancient Greek treatises on music , which discussed the close relationship between music and poetry and how music could stir the listener’s emotions. Inspired by the classical world, Renaissance composers fit words and music together in an increasingly dramatic fashion, as seen in the development of the Italian madrigal and later the operatic works of Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643). The Renaissance adaptation of a musician singing and accompanying himself on a stringed instrument, a variation on the theme of Orpheus, appears in Renaissance artworks like Caravaggio’s Musicians ( 52.81 ) and Titian ‘s Venus and the Lute Player ( 36.29 ).

Arkenberg, Rebecca. “Music in the Renaissance.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/renm/hd_renm.htm (October 2002)

Additional Essays by Rebecca Arkenberg

• Arkenberg, Rebecca. “ Renaissance Violins .” (October 2002)
• Arkenberg, Rebecca. “ Renaissance Keyboards .” (October 2002)
• Arkenberg, Rebecca. “ Renaissance Organs .” (October 2002)

Related Essays

• Painting in Italian Choir Books, 1300–1500
• Renaissance Keyboards
• Renaissance Organs
• Art and Love in the Italian Renaissance
• Burgundian Netherlands: Court Life and Patronage
• Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi) (1571–1610) and His Followers
• Courtship and Betrothal in the Italian Renaissance
• The Development of the Recorder
• Elizabethan England
• Flemish Harpsichords and Virginals
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• Joachim Tielke (1641–1719)
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• The Spanish Guitar
• Titian (ca. 1485/90?–1576)
• Violin Makers: Nicolò Amati (1596–1684) and Antonio Stradivari (1644–1737)
• Woodcut Book Illustration in Renaissance Italy: Venice in the Sixteenth Century

List of Rulers

• List of Rulers of Europe
• Central Europe (including Germany), 1400–1600 A.D.
• Florence and Central Italy, 1400–1600 A.D.
• France, 1400–1600 A.D.
• Great Britain and Ireland, 1400–1600 A.D.
• Iberian Peninsula, 1400–1600 A.D.
• Low Countries, 1400–1600 A.D.
• Rome and Southern Italy, 1400–1600 A.D.
• Venice and Northern Italy, 1400–1600 A.D.
• 15th Century A.D.
• European Decorative Arts
• High Renaissance
• Musical Instrument
• Northern Renaissance
• Percussion Instrument
• Plucked String Instrument
• Renaissance Art
• String Instrument
• Wind Instrument

Artist or Maker

• Amati, Andrea
• Amati, Nicolò
• Beham, Hans Sebald
• Cuntz, Steffan
• Hauslaib, Lorenz
• Rauchwolff, Sixtus
• Ruckers, Hans, the Elder
• Vell, Georg

Online Features

• The Artist Project: “Cory Arcangel on the harpischord”
• MetMedia: “Double” from the Sarabande of Partita no. 1 in B minor by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) and Gigue from Partita No. 2 in D minor by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)

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The Philosophy of Music

Philosophy of music is the study of fundamental questions about the nature and value of music and our experience of it. Like any “philosophy of X,” it presupposes knowledge of its target. However, unlike philosophy of science, say, the target of philosophy of music is a practice most people have a significant background in, merely as a result of being members of a musical culture. Many people take music to play a significant and valuable role in their lives. Thus, as with the central questions of metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, not only can most people quickly grasp the philosophical questions music raises, they tend to have thought about some of those questions before encountering the academic discipline itself.

Music arguably presents more philosophical puzzles than any other art. Unlike painting, its works often have multiple instances, none of which can be identified with the work itself. Thus, the question of what exactly the work is is initially more puzzling than the same question about works of painting, which appear (at least initially) to be ordinary physical objects. Unlike much literature, the instances of a work are performances, which offer interpretations of the work, yet the work can also be interpreted (perhaps in a different sense) independent of any performance, and performances themselves can be interpreted. This talk of “interpretation” points to the fact that we find music an art steeped with meaning, and yet, unlike drama, music—at least “pure” instrumental music—has no obvious semantic content. This quickly raises the question of why we should find music so valuable. Central to many philosophers’ thinking on these subjects has been music’s apparent ability to express emotions while remaining an abstract art in some sense.

This entry focuses almost exclusively on contemporary philosophy of music (i.e., work since the mid-twentieth century) in an analytic vein. For a historical overview, see the entries on the history of Western philosophy of music: antiquity to 1800 and history of Western philosophy of music: since 1800 . For much broader introductions to philosophy of music, covering its history, major figures, connections with other disciplines, and a wider range of topics, see Gracyk & Kania 2011 and McAuley, Nielsen, & Levinson 2021. Useful single-author overviews include Scruton 1997, Kivy 2002, Hamilton 2007, and Kania 2020.

Most analytic work has primarily discussed Western classical music. (For criticism of this tendency, see Alperson 2009.) In the last 25 years, there has been increasing recognition that different musical practices may not only suggest different answers to the same philosophical questions, but also raise different philosophical questions. Apart from Western classical music, popular Western traditions, such as rock and jazz, have received the most attention. Non-Western musical traditions have received little attention. (Exceptions include S. Davies 2001: 254–94 and 2007; Alperson, Nguyen, & To 2007; S. P. Walton 2007; and Higgins 2007.)

1.1 Music Alone and Together

1.2 the definition of “music”, 2.1 the fundamentalist debate, 2.2 higher-level ontological issues, 3.1 emotions in the music, 3.2 emotions in the listener, 4.1 basic musical understanding, 4.2 higher-level musical understanding, 5.1 music’s artistic value, 5.2 music’s moral value, other internet resources, related entries, 1. what is music.

It is plausible that song is the most common kind of music listened to across history and the globe. Moving images (film, television, videogames, etc.) are ubiquitous in the contemporary world, and most have musical soundtracks. Nonetheless, most philosophy of music considers what Peter Kivy calls music alone (1990)—instrumental music with no non-musical aspects, elements, or accompaniments. At least three reasons can be given to defend this narrow focus. First, pure music often presents the most difficult philosophical problems. The maudlin text of a song plausibly contributes to the song’s expressiveness; it is more puzzling how a piece of music alone could be emotionally expressive. Second, though the problems are more difficult, the solutions are likely to be more easily evaluated with respect to music alone. Just as apportioning blame is easier when one person is responsible for a crime than when the blame must be divided between a number of conspirators, the success of a solution to the problem of musical expressiveness may be clearer if it can explain the expressiveness of music alone. Third, the expressiveness of music alone will play a role in the expressiveness of musical hybrids such as song or film. Though its text may contribute to the expressiveness of a song, for instance, the musical aspects of the song must play some role. A maudlin text set to a jauntily upbeat melody will clearly not have the same overall expressiveness as the same text set to a plodding dirge. Though expressiveness is used as an example here, these same points apply to discussions of musical understanding and value.

Even if these three reasons are compelling (see Ridley 2004 for a sustained critique), music’s combination with other media raises further philosophical questions. There is no space to consider those questions here, but on the aesthetics of song, see Levinson 1987; Gracyk 2001; Bicknell & Fisher 2013; and Bicknell 2015. On music drama, see Kivy 1988b, 1994; Goehr 1998; and Penner 2020. On film music, see Carroll 1988: 213–225; Smith 1996; Levinson 1996b; and Kivy 1997a. See also the chapters in part V of Gracyk & Kania 2011. On hybrid art forms more generally, see Levinson 1984 and Ridley 2004.

Explications of the concept of music usually begin with the idea that music is organized sound. They go on to note that this characterization is too broad, since there are many examples of organized sound that are not music, such as human speech, or the sounds non-human animals and machines make. There are two further kinds of necessary conditions philosophers have added in attempts to fine tune the initial idea. One is an appeal to “tonality” or essentially musical features such as pitch and rhythm (Scruton 1997: 1–79; Hamilton 2007: 40–65; Kania 2011a). Another is an appeal to aesthetic properties or experience (Levinson 1990a; Scruton 1997: 1–96; Hamilton 2007: 40–65). As these references suggest, one can endorse either of these conditions in isolation, or both together.

The main problem with the first kind of condition is that every sound seems capable of being included in a musical performance, and thus characterizing the essentially musical features of sounds seems hopeless. (We need only consider the variety of “untuned” percussion available to a conservative symphonist, though we could also consider examples of wind machines, typewriters, and toilets, in Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Sinfonia Antartica , Leroy Anderson’s The Typewriter , and Yoko Ono’s “Toilet Piece/Unknown.”) Defenders of such a condition have turned to sophisticated intentional or response-dependent theories of tonality in order to overcome this problem. If the essentially musical features of a sound are not intrinsic to it, but somehow related to how it is produced or perceived, we can classify just one of two “indiscernible” sounds as music.

If one endorses only an aesthetic condition, and not a tonality condition, one still faces the problem of poetry—non-musical aesthetically organized sounds. Levinson, who takes this approach, excludes organized linguistic sounds explicitly (1990a: 272). This raises the question of whether there are further distinctions to be made between arts of sound. Andy Hamilton defends a tripartite division, arguing that sound art , as opposed to both music and literature, was established as a significant art form in the twentieth century (2007: 40–65). This is one reason that Hamilton endorses both tonal and aesthetic conditions on music; without the former, Levinson is unable to make such a distinction. On the other hand, by endorsing an aesthetic condition, Hamilton is forced to exclude scales and Muzak, for instance, from the realm of music. Kania (2020: 296–301) suggests that it is a mistake to think that music is necessarily an art. He argues that we should distinguish the medium of music from its artistic uses, just as we do in the cases of language and literature, depiction and painting, and so on.

Jonathan McKeown-Green (2014) makes trenchant criticisms of definitions of music that assume that the nature of music is settled by our conception of music (395, italics removed). He argues that no such definition could be future-proof, since it would be hostage to our changing conception of music. At best, we would end up with a kind of sociological history of music that would fail to fulfill any of the functions of a definition. McKeown-Green singles out the definitions of Kania (2011a) and Levinson (1990a), stated in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, as of this hopeless kind. But Kania (2020: 302–5) argues that McKeown-Green’s criticisms apply equally to the looser definitions of Hamilton and S. Davies (2012).

Having discussed complications, it’s worth returning to the basic idea of “organized sound.” Most theorists note that music does not consist entirely of sounds. Most obviously, much music includes rests. You might think that silence can function only to organize the sounds of music. One counterargument is that an understanding listener listens to the rests, just as she listens to the sounds (Kania 2010). Another is to provide putative cases of music in which the silences do not structure sounds as ordinary rests do. John Cage’s 4′33″ is frequently discussed, though there is broad agreement that this piece is not silent—its content is the ambient sounds that occur during its performance. (See Dodd 2018 for dissent.) Anyway, S. Davies (1997a), Dodd (2018), and Kania (2010) all argue that Cage’s piece is not music—Davies and Dodd because its sounds (if any) fail to qualify as organized, Kania because they fail to meet a tonality condition. Wadle (forthcoming) argues that the piece is music, because of its contextual connections to previous musical works. Kania considers several other contenders for the label of “silent music,” arguing that there are indeed extant examples, most notably Erwin Schulhoff’s “In Futurum” from his Fünf Pittoresken , which predates Cage’s 4′33″ by some 33 years.

2. Musical Ontology

Musical ontology is the study of the kinds of musical things there are and the relations that hold between them. The most discussed issues within this field have been the metaphysical nature of works of Western classical music (the “fundamentalist debate”), and what it is to give an “authentic performance” of such works. Recently there has been growing interest in the ontologies of other Western musical traditions, such as rock and jazz, and discussion of the methodology and value of musical ontology. (For more detailed overviews of these debates, see Matheson & Caplan 2011, and Nussbaum 2021.)

Musical works in the Western classical tradition admit of multiple instances (performances). Much of the debate over the nature of such works thus reads like a recapitulation of the debate over the “problem of universals”; the range of proposed candidates covers the spectrum of fundamental ontological theories. We might divide musical ontologists into the realists, who posit the existence of musical works, and the anti-realists, who deny their existence. Realism has been more popular than anti-realism, but there have been many conflicting realist views. We begin with two unorthodox realist views before moving on to more orthodox Platonist and nominalist theories, concluding with a consideration of anti-realism.

Idealists hold that musical works are mental entities. Collingwood (1938) and Sartre (1940) respectively take musical (and other) works to be imaginary objects and experiences. The most serious objections to this kind of view are that (i) it fails to make works intersubjectively accessible, since the number of works going under the name The Rite of Spring will be as multifarious as the imaginative experiences people have at performances with that name, and (ii) it makes the medium of the work irrelevant to an understanding of it. One might have the same imaginative experience in response to both a live performance and a recording of The Rite of Spring , yet it seems an open question whether the two media are aesthetically equivalent. But see Cox 1986 and Cray & Matheson 2017 for attempts to revive idealism.

David Davies argues that musical works, like all works of art, are actions , in particular the compositional actions of their composers (2004). Thus he revives what we might call an “action theory” of the ontology of art. (An earlier defender of such a view is Gregory Currie (1989), who argues that artworks are types of action, rather than the particular actions with which Davies identifies them.) Although deciding between theories of musical ontology is always to some extent a matter of finding a balance between the benefits of a theory and its cost in terms of our pre-theoretic intuitions, action theories have a particularly hard row to hoe since they imply that an instance of a work is some action performed by a composer, rather than a performance. In order to make up for such damage to our intuitions the theoretical benefits of an action theory would have to be quite extensive.

Most theorists think that some kind of Platonist or nominalist theory of musical works is more plausible than those so far considered. Platonism, the view that musical works are abstract objects, is arguably still the dominant view, though it seems to be losing ground to sophisticated nominalisms. Its great advantage is its ability to respect more of our pre-theoretic intuitions about musical works than other theories can. On the other hand, it is the most ontologically puzzling, since abstract objects are not well understood. Nonetheless, Platonism has been tenacious, with much of the debate centering around what variety of abstract object musical works are. What we might call “simple Platonism” (known simply as “Platonism” in the literature), is the view that works are eternal existents, existing in neither space nor time (Kivy 1983a, 1983b, Dodd 2007). Puy (2019) presents a variation according to which musical works are higher-order types, of which the types other Platonist thinks are works are specific versions of works. (See D. Davies 2021 for discussion.)

According to “complex Platonism,” musical works come to exist in time as the result of human action. The complexity is motivated by a number of features of musical practice, including the intuition that musical works are creatable, the attribution of various aesthetic and artistic properties to works, and the fine-grained individuation of works and performances (e.g., in terms of who composed them, or what instruments they are properly performed upon) (Ingarden 1961; Thomasson 2004; Wolterstorff 1980; Wollheim 1968: 1–10, 74–84; Levinson 1980, 1990b, 2012; S. Davies 2001: 37–43; Howell 2002; Stecker 2003a: 84–92).

Nominalists identify a musical work with something concrete. The most obvious candidate is a collection of performances, whether the collection be understood as a set (Goodman 1968; Predelli 1995, 1999a, 1999b, 2001), a fusion (Caplan & Matheson 2004, 2006), or something more esoteric (Tillman 2011; see also Moruzzi 2018). Charles Nussbaum (2007: 143–87) and P. D. Magnus (2012) argue for a close analogy between musical works and species. Nussbaum (2021: 334) points out that a sophisticated nominalist theory of species has been developed in great detail over the years by Ruth Millikan (1984, 2000). While such views are attractive because they appeal only to the least problematic kinds of entities, they face serious challenges. Though many of our claims about musical works may be paraphraseable into claims about sets of (possible) performances, some seem to make intractable reference to works. For instance, most performances of The Rite of Spring—even including the possible ones—include several wrong notes. Thus it is difficult to imagine how the paraphrase schema will avoid the nonsensical conclusion that The Rite of Spring contains several wrong notes, if the work consists entirely of performances. In response to this problem, most nominalists add to the collection of performances some provenential item, such as an original score or act of composition. Whether this addition can solve the problem without necessitating the reintroduction of an abstract entity is one question any nominalist must address.

Intermediate between Platonism and nominalism are the views of Philip Letts (2018) and Guy Rohrbaugh (2003). Letts argues that any view of musical works as types would be improved by identifying those types with their associated properties, a proposal that may be developed in a Platonist or nominalist direction. Rohrbaugh’s view of musical works as historical individuals “embodied in,” but not constituted by, physical things such as scores and performances closely resembles to the views of Nussbaum and Magnus, discussed above, but Rohrbaugh takes the work to be an abstract object over and above its embodiments. (For discussion, see Dodd 2007: 143–66.)

In contrast to all these realist views stand those of the anti-realists, who deny that there are any such things as musical works. An early proponent of such a view is Richard Rudner (1950), though it is difficult to say whether he is best interpreted as an eliminativist or a fictionalist, the two anti-realist views currently on the table. According to eliminativists, there are no such things as musical works, and thus we ought to stop trying to refer to them. Ross Cameron (2008) defends such a view, but only with respect to “Ontologese”—the language we speak when we do ontology. He argues that ordinary English locutions such as “there are many musical works” can be true without there being any musical works. (For critical discussion, see Predelli 2009 and Stecker 2009.) According to fictionalists, the value of discourse about musical works is not truth, and thus we ought not to abandon the discourse despite the non-existence of its subject matter, but rather to adopt a different, make-believe attitude towards it (or perhaps we already do so). (See Kania 2008; for criticism, see D. Davies 2011: 45–50, Letts 2015, and Nussbaum 2021: 337.)

Much of this debate over the fundamental ontological category to which musical works belong has turned on “technical” issues, that is, controversial general metaphysical claims about the nature of properties, causation, embodiment, and so on (e.g., Howell 2002; Trivedi 2002; Caplan & Matheson 2004, 2006; Dodd 2007; Hazlett 2012; Kleinschmidt & Ross 2012; Dodd & Letts 2017; Cameron 2008). In the face of this, some theorists have pointed out that musical works are cultural entities, and thus the methodology appropriate to uncovering their ontological status might be quite different from that of general metaphysics (Goehr 1992; S. Davies 2003a; D. Davies 2004; Thomasson 2006). For further discussion of the methodology of musical ontology, see D. Davies 2009, 2017; Predelli 2009; Stecker 2009; Dodd 2010, 2013; Mag Uidhir 2012b; and Nussbaum 2021.

It might seem that, since musical works are ontologically multiple, once we have figured out their true nature, we will know what relation holds between the work and its performances, namely, whatever relationship holds between entities of that kind and their instances. However, since the fundamentalist debate is about the basic ontological category to which works belong, resolving that debate may leave open many questions about the relation between a work and its performances. For instance, is the use of a harpsichord required to instance Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 in performance? Would producing harpsichord-like sounds on a synthesizer do just as well? What about using another keyboard instrument from Bach’s time, or a modern piano? Learning that musical works are, say, eternal types will not necessarily help settle this issue of “authentic performance,” which is perhaps the most discussed music-ontological issue, of interest to philosophers, musicologists, musicians, and audiences alike. (For an excellent overview of the authentic performance debate, see S. Davies 2001: 201–53. For an investigation of authenticity with respect to things other than instantiation of the work, see Kivy 1995; Gracyk 2001, 2009, 2017; Bicknell 2015; and Cray 2019.)

There have been two sources of widespread confusion in the debate over authenticity in performance. One is a failure to recognize that authenticity is not simply a property, but a relation that comes in degrees and holds with respect to different aspects of its target. Something may be more authentic in one regard and less authentic in another (S. Davies 2001: 203–5). Another is the assumption that authenticity is an evaluative concept, in the sense that “authentic” implies “good.” That this is not the case is clear from the fact that an authentic murderer is not a good thing (S. Davies 2001: 204). Thus, our value judgments will be complex functions of the extent to which we judge performances authentic in various regards, and the values we assign to those various kinds of authenticity.

The central kind of authenticity that has been discussed is authenticity with respect to the instantiation of the work. Most agree that the fullest such authenticity requires the production of the right pitches and rhythms in the right order. (For skepticism based on the history of the practice, see Dyck 2014; Ravasio 2019a; and the discussion in Dodd 2020b and Ravasio 2020.) Pure sonicists argue that this is sufficient (e.g., Kivy 1988a). Timbral sonicists argue that these pitches must also have timbres reflecting the composer’s instrumentation (e.g., Dodd 2007: 201–39). Instrumentalists argue that such sounds must be produced on the kinds of instruments specified in the score (e.g., Levinson 1990c). Much of the debate is over what kinds of aesthetic or artistic properties are essential to musical works. If the limpid textures of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 are essential to it, then one cannot authentically instance the work using a grand piano instead of a harpsichord. As such, the debate reflects a wider one in aesthetics, musical and otherwise, between formalists (or empiricists, or structuralists), who believe that the most important properties of a work are intrinsic ones, accessible to listeners unaware of the historical and artistic context in which it was created, and contextualists , who believe that a work is essentially tied to its context of creation. Stephen Davies has argued for a strong contextualism, claiming that one cannot give a single answer to the question of whether particular instrumentation is required for the fully authentic instantiation of a work. Works can be ontologically “thicker” or “thinner” as a result of the specifications of a composer working within certain conventions (1991, 2001). The more properties of a fully authentic performance a particular work specifies, the thicker it is. Thus for some works (typically earlier in the history of Western music) instrumentation is flexible, while for others (e.g., Romantic symphonies) quite specific instrumentation is required for fully authentic performances.

In addition to the question of what constitutes authenticity, there has been debate over its attainability and value. Those who question its attainability point to our historical distance from the creation of some works (Young 1988). We may no longer be able to read the notation in which the work is recorded, or construct or play the instruments for which it was written. If so, full authenticity is not attainable. But we rarely have no idea about these matters, and thus we might achieve partial authenticity (S. Davies 2001: 228–34). Those who question the value of authenticity often target kinds other than work-instantiation. For instance, one might question the value of producing a performance that authentically captures the sound of performances as they took place in the context of a work’s composition, on the basis that musicians were not as highly skilled then as now, for instance (Young 1988: 229–31). Such arguments, though, have no consequences for the value of work-instantiation. Some argue that although we might attain an authentic instance of a work, the idea that we might thereby hear the work as its contemporaries heard it is wishful thinking, since the musical culture in which we are immersed enforces ways of listening upon us that we cannot escape (Young 1988: 232–7). Thus the point of such authenticity is questioned. In response, we may consider not only the possibility that we are in a better position to appreciate historical works than contemporary ones, but also the remarkable flexibility people seem to show in enjoying many different kinds of music from throughout history and the world (S. Davies 2001: 234–7).

Julian Dodd (2020a) argues that there is more than one way to be true to a musical work, and thus to produce an authentic performance: One can comply with the score, or one can be true to the music’s overall integrity or point (136). When the two conflict, interpretive authenticity trumps score-compliance authenticity (147) because the fundamental norm of work-performance practice is to perform it in a way that evinces a subtle or profound understanding of it (163), while score compliance is valued only because it tends to lead to such performances. Andrew Kania responds that it is unclear whether, even by the lights of Dodd’s own theory, Dodd’s central examples are cases of interpretive authenticity trumping score compliance (Kania 2022: 131–2). More importantly, he argues that Dodd’s conception of the music’s overall integrity or point misses the importance of the surface-level details to a work’s meaning or content. Kania suggests, instead, that the fundamental norm of the practice is to evince an understanding of the work through complying with its score (2022: 127, italics altered).

Moving on from authenticity, a second area that may be independent of the fundamentalist debate is that of comparative ontology. (For dispute over this framing issue, see Brown 2011, 2012.) Just as classical works from different historical periods may be ontologically diverse, so may works from different contemporary traditions. Theodore Gracyk has argued that instances of works of rock music are not performances. Rather, the work is instanced by playing a copy of a recording on an appropriate device (1996; cf. Fisher 1998). Stephen Davies has argued that rock is more like classical music than Gracyk acknowledges, with works for performance at the heart of the tradition, albeit works for a different kind of performance (2001: 30–6). Gracyk’s view has been amplified and defended in attempts to find a place for composition, live performance, and performance skill within his basic framework (Kania 2006, Bruno 2013, Bartel 2017, Magnus 2022).

Work on the ontology of jazz has centered on the nature of improvisation, particularly the relation between improvisation and composition (Alperson 1984, 1998; Valone 1985; Brown 1996, 2000; Hagberg 1998; Gould & Keaton 2000; Sterritt 2000; and Young & Matheson 2000; Bresnahan 2015; Love 2016; Magnus 2016). This has been a useful reminder that not all music is the performance of pre-composed works (Wolterstorff 1987: 115–29). However, improvisation can occur within the context of such a work, as in the performance of an improvised cadenza in a classical concerto. Some have argued that there is not as significant a distinction between improvisation and composition as is usually thought (Alperson 1984). Others have argued that all performance requires improvisation (Gould & Keaton 2000). Yet others restrict the possibility of improvisation to certain kinds of musical properties, such as “structural” rather than “expressive” ones (Young & Matheson 2000). However, none of these arguments are compelling. Usually they turn on equivocal use of terms such as “composition” and “performance,” or beg the question by defining improvisation in terms of deviation from a score or variation of a limited set of “expressive” properties.

Though jazz is not necessarily improvisational, and very few jazz performances lack any sort of prior compositional process, the centrality of improvisation to jazz presents a challenge to the musical ontologist. One might argue that jazz works are ontologically like classical works—composed for multiple, different performances—but that they tend to be thinner, leaving more room for improvisation (Gould & Keaton 2000; Young & Matheson 2000). The difficulty is to specify the work without conflating one work with another, since tokening the melody may not be required, and many works share the same harmonic structure. As a result, some argue that the performance is itself the work (Alperson 1984; Hagberg 2002; S. Davies 2001: 16–19). One problem here is parity with classical music. If jazz performances are musical works in their own right, it is difficult to deny that status to classical performances of works, yet this seems to multiply works beyond what we usually think is necessary. A third possibility is that in jazz there are no works, only performances (Brown 1996, 2000: 115; Kania 2011b). This is counterintuitive if “work” is an evaluative term, but it is not obvious that this is the case.

Julian Dodd (2014a) argues that the kinds of considerations adduced in favor of these views confuse questions of ontology with questions of value. Jazz is ontologically like early classical music, according to Dodd: the focus of critical attention is the improvisatory performance rather than the composition it instantiates, but that composition is no less a musical work for that difference in critical emphasis. (See Fisher 2018 for an attempted reconciliation.) Similar considerations might be adduced against the increasingly complicated ontologies of rock referred to above. Such arguments return us to debates about the methodology of musical ontology.

3. Music and the Emotions

The most widely discussed philosophical question concerning music and the emotions is that of how music can express emotions. (For a more extensive introduction, see part II of Gracyk & Kania 2011; for a thorough treatment, see S. Davies 1994.) There is a second group of questions centered around listeners’ emotional responses to music. These include questions about why and how we respond emotionally to music, the value of such responses, and why we choose to listen to music that elicits “negative” responses from us, such as sadness. Theorists typically restrict themselves to “pure” or “absolute” music on the grounds that it is easier to understand how music with an accompanying text, say, could express the emotions evident in the text. However, an important criterion for the evaluation of such music is how appropriately the composer has set her chosen text to music. So an accompanying text is clearly not sufficient for the musical expression of an emotion. Thus, a better reason for initially putting such music to one side is perhaps that the interrelation of music and text, or other elements, is likely to be highly complex, and best approached with as well-developed a theory of the more basic phenomena in hand as possible. (For an extended criticism of this approach, see Ridley 2004: 1–104.)

Pieces of music, and performances of them, are standardly said to be happy, sad, and so on. Music’s emotional expressiveness is a philosophical problem since the paradigm expressers of emotions are psychological agents, who have emotions to express. Neither pieces of music, nor performances of them, are psychological agents, thus it is puzzling that such things could be said to express emotions.

One radical way to solve the puzzle is to deny that music is emotionally expressive. A major burden of such eliminativism is to explain away the widespread tendency to describe music in emotional terms. This has been attempted by arguing that such descriptions are shorthand or metaphor for purely sonic features (Urmson 1973), basic dynamic features (Hanslick 1854), purely musical features (Sharpe 1982), or aesthetic properties (Zangwill 2007). There are many problems with such views. For one thing, they seem committed to some sort of scheme for reduction of expressive predicates to other terms, such as sonic or musical ones, and such a scheme is difficult to imagine (Budd 1985a: 31–6). For another, anyone not drawn to this theory is likely to reject the claim that the paraphrase captures all that is of interest and value about the passage described, precisely because it omits the expressive predicates (Davies 1994: 153–4).

Conventionalism is the view that music’s expressiveness is a matter of the conventional association of certain musical elements, such as slow tempi, with certain emotional states, such as sadness. Such conventions must play a role in some cases of expression—for instance, cases of particular musical instruments (e.g., the snare drum) being associated with particular situations (e.g., war) and thus emotions (e.g., foreboding). But such conventions seem unlikely to account for all musical expressiveness, since much of that expressiveness seems less arbitrary than conventionalism would suggest. It seems implausible, for instance, that the convention for funeral dirges might just as easily have that they should be quick-paced and in major keys. Even in cases like the snare drum, it seems possible that the instrument was chosen for the battlefield in part because of the expressive character of its sonic profile.

The cliché that music is “the language of the emotions” is often considered as a possible starting point for a theory of musical expressiveness. The idea combines the attractive simplicity of conventionalism with the formalist notion that music’s order is to be understood in terms of syntax. (See Lerdahl & Jackendoff 1983 for a theory along the latter lines.) However, although Deryck Cooke (1959) and Leonard Meyer (1956) are often cited as proponents, it is not clear that anyone holds a full-blown version of the theory. The central problem is the great disparities between language and music, in terms of the ways in which each is both syntactic and semantic (Jackendoff 2011). A serious subsidiary problem is that even if music were about the emotions in the way that language can be, that would not account for music’s expressiveness . The sentence “I am sad” is about the emotions, but it is not expressive of sadness in the way a sad face is, though you could use either to express your sadness. Most people agree that music’s relation to emotion is more like that of a sad face than that of a sentence. (This last criticism is also applicable to Susanne Langer’s theory (1953) that music is about the emotions in a symbolic yet non-linguistic way.)

We now turn to theories that attempt to connect the notion of music’s expressiveness to actual felt emotions. One obvious way to do so is to argue that pieces of music or performances of them are expressions of such emotions—those of the composer or performer. There are two major problems with this “expression theory.” The first is that neither composers nor performers often experience the emotions their music is expressive of as it is produced. Nor does it seem unlikely that a composer could create, or a performer perform, a piece expressive of an emotion that she had never experienced. This is not to deny that a composer could write a piece expressive of her emotional state, but for the expression theory to be an account of musical expressiveness, at least all central cases of expressiveness must follow this model, which is not the case. Moreover, if a composer is to express her sadness, say, by writing a sad piece, she must pen the right kind of piece. In other words, if she is a bad composer she might fail to express her emotion. This brings us to the second major problem for the expression theory. If a composer can fail to express her emotions in a piece, then the music she writes is expressive independent of the emotion she is experiencing. Thus music’s expressiveness cannot be explained in terms of direct expression.

Those usually cited as classic expression theorists include Tolstoy (1898), Dewey (1934), and Collingwood (1938). (A classic critique is Tormey 1971: 97–127.) These theorists have been defended in recent discussions, however, from accusations that they hold the simple view outlined above (Ridley 2003, Robinson 2005: 229–57). Jenefer Robinson has attempted to revive the expression theory, though she defends it as an interesting and valuable use of music’s expressiveness, rather than an account of expressiveness itself (2005: 229–347; 2011).

A second way to link music’s expressiveness with actual felt emotions is through the audience. According to arousalism, the expressiveness of a passage of music amounts to its tendency to arouse that emotion in a competent listener. Arousalism faces several objections. First, some competent listeners seem emotionally unmoved by music (or are at least not moved to the specific emotions expressed by it). But perhaps the arousalist can simply restrict the class of listener to which his theory appeals to those who are so moved. Second, some emotions, such as fear, require a particular kind of intentional object (something threatening), yet there is no such object at hand when we hear fearful music. Thus it seems implausible to claim the music’s fearfulness resides in its arousal of fear in us. But perhaps the arousalist can broaden the class of aroused emotions to include appropriate responses to the expressed emotion, such as pity. Third, in many cases it seems that listeners respond emotionally to the expressiveness of the music. It is not clear that the arousalist can handle such cases non-circularly. (A sophisticated defense of the arousal theory is to be found in Matravers 1998: 145–224, though see the second thoughts in Matravers 2011. For an extended critique, see S. Davies 1994: 104–200.)

Despite the problems of the arousal theory as the whole story of musical expressiveness, there is a growing consensus, thanks largely to the work of Jenefer Robinson (1994, 2005), that our lower-level, less cognitive responses to music must play some role in the emotional expressiveness we attribute to it. However, this role is likely to be a causal one, rather than part of an analysis of what it is for music to be emotionally expressive.

Several theorists have defended accounts of musical expressiveness known variously as resemblance, contour, or appearance theories (e.g., Kivy 1989, though see Kivy 2002: 31–48 for recent qualms; Budd 1995: 133–54; S. Davies 1994: 221–67). The central idea is that music’s expressiveness consists in the resemblance between its dynamic character and that of various typical aspects of people experiencing emotions. The aspects appealed to include the phenomenology of the experience of the emotion, the emotion’s facial expression, the contour of vocal expression or bodily behavior of a person experiencing the emotion. Stephen Davies argues that such theories hold music to be expressive in a literal albeit secondary sense of the term. We say that a piece of music is sad in the same sense in which we say that a weeping willow is sad (S. Davies 2006: 183). Such uses are no more metaphorical than a claim that a chair has arms.

Jerrold Levinson agrees that there is an important resemblance between the contour of music expressive of an emotion and the contour of typical behavioral expressions of that emotion. He objects, however, that such an account cannot be the whole, or even the most fundamental part of the story (Levinson 1996a, 2006b). He drives in a wedge precisely at the point where an appeal is made to the resemblance between the music and typical behavioral expressions. He asks what the manner and extent of the resemblance between the two must be, precisely, in order for the music to count as expressive of some emotion. After all, everything resembles everything else in all sorts of ways, and so one could point out many resemblances between a funeral march and an expression of joy, or for that matter a cup of coffee and sadness. The resemblance theorist must give some account of why the funeral march, and not the cup of coffee, is expressive of sadness and not joy. Levinson claims that the obvious answer here is that the funeral march is “readily hearable as” an expression of sadness. If this is correct, then the resemblance the music bears to emotional behavior is logically secondary—a cause or ground of its expressiveness. The expressiveness itself resides in the music’s disposition to elicit the imaginative response in us of hearing the music as a literal expression of emotion. As a logical consequence, the imaginative experience prompted must include some agent whose expression the music literally is.

In reply to this kind of objection, Stephen Davies has emphasized the role of the listener’s response in resemblance theories. Such responses have always been appealed to by such theories, as evidenced by Malcolm Budd’s talk of “hearing as” (1995: 135–7), and Peter Kivy’s discussion of our tendency to “animate” that which we perceive (1980: 57–9). But Davies now makes the appeal quite explicit and central, devoting as much space to explication of the response-dependent nature of expressiveness as to the role of resemblance (2006). For Davies, the response of the competent listener upon which the expressiveness of the music depends is one of an experience of resemblance rather than imagined expression (2006: 181–2). Matteo Ravasio (2019b) argues that this leads to further problems.

Since Davies’s theory posits at base a contour-recognition experience while Levinson’s posits an imaginative experience of expression, the link between literal expression and musical expressiveness looks closer in Levinson’s theory than in Davies’s. An empirical consequence seems to be that Davies’s theory will predict weaker emotional responses to music than Levinson’s. Whether or not this is an advantage or disadvantage of the theory depends on the empirical facts about how we respond emotionally to music.

There are three main questions asked about our emotional responses to pure music, apart from what role they play in expressiveness. The first is analogous to the “paradox of fiction.” It is not clear why we should respond emotionally to music’s expressiveness when we know that no one is undergoing the emotions expressed. The second is a variant of the “paradox of tragedy.” If some music arouses “negative” emotional responses in us, such as sadness, why do we seek out the experience of such music? This leads to the more general question of the value of our emotional responses to music. The first two questions are addressed in this section, and the third in section 5.1.

Peter Kivy (1999) argues that those who report emotional reactions to music are confusing the pleasure they take in the beauty of the music, in all its expressive individuality, with the feeling of the emotion expressed. Though most philosophers appeal to ordinary experience and empirical data to reject the plausibility of Kivy’s position, they admit the problem that motivates it, namely, the conceptual tension between the nature of music and the nature of the emotions we feel in response to it. There is some consensus that emotions are cognitive, in the sense that they take intentional objects—they are about things—of certain kinds. For instance, in order to feel fear , one must believe that something is threatening (the “intentional object” of the emotion). When one listens to a sad piece of music, however, one knows there is nothing literally feeling sad, and thus it is puzzling that one should be made sad by the experience.

Part of the solution is that not all emotional responses (broadly construed) are cognitive (Robinson 1994; 2005: 387–400). For instance, it is no more puzzling that one could be startled by a fortissimo blow to a bass drum than that one could so respond to a thunderclap. Another part of the solution is that the music can be the object of our emotions, as when we are delighted by an effective ending to a long and complex piece.

As for emotional responses to music’s expressiveness, there are at least two possible explanations. One appeals to the phenomenon of “emotional contagion” or “mirroring responses” (S. Davies 1994: 279–307; 2006: 186–8). When surrounded by moping people, one tends to become sad. Moreover, such a “mood” is not about some intentional object. One is not necessarily sad for the mopers, nor whatever they are sad about, if anything. Similarly, when “surrounded” by music that presents an appearance of sadness, one might become sad, but not sad about the music, or anything else (Radford 1991). For critical discussion, see Robinson 2005: 379–412 and S. Davies 2011b.

If our experience of music’s expressiveness necessarily involves imagining that the music is a literal expression of emotion, then our emotional responses to that expressiveness are no more puzzling than emotional responses to other imagined expressive agents, such as fictional characters in novels. The advantage is only slight because the question of how and why we respond emotionally to fictions is itself a philosophical problem of some magnitude. Nonetheless, there are several theories available (see the supplement to the entry on imagination, §2 ). One difficulty with appealing to a solution to the paradox of fiction is that it is not clear that our emotional responses to the expressiveness of music are the same as those to emotionally expressive characters. For instance, the standard example of an emotional response to music is being made sad by a dirge, while the standard example of emotional response to fiction is (something like) to feel pity for a sad character. If the former is to be explained in the same way as the latter, we would expect listeners to feel pity in response to the funeral march (pity for the persona imagined to be expressing her sadness through it). However, we surely do feel sad (in some sense) in response to tragedy, and it is not obvious that we do not feel pity (or imagined pity, or whatever one’s preferred theory of emotional response to fiction posits) in response to sad music.

Leaving behind the topic of how and why we respond emotionally to music, we turn to the question of why we seek out music that arouses “negative” emotions in us, such as sadness, assuming henceforth that we are in fact aroused to such emotions. (Since this problem is a close analog of the “paradox of tragedy,” some of the references below are to literature not explicitly about music, but the transposition of the arguments to music is not difficult to imagine. (See also the supplement to the entry on imagination, §3 .) Most solutions assume that our negative emotional response is a price we are willing to pay for the benefits of engaging with the piece in question. The benefits appealed to include understanding and appreciating the music, including the expressiveness responsible for the negative response (Goodman 1968: 247–51; S. Davies 1994: 311–20; Goldman 1995: 68; Robinson 2005: 348–78).

A different benefit is Aristotelian catharsis , in which our negative emotional response to expressive art results in a psychological purgation of the negative emotions (Aristotle 1987: 6, 1449b21–1450b20). A less therapeutic approach is the suggestion that, since these emotions are without “life implications” (that is, as discussed above, we are not sad about any actual tragic events), we are able to take advantage of our responses to savor these emotions, gain an understanding of them, and be reassured that we have the capacity to feel them (Levinson 1982). Two things that must be explained by any defender of this kind of response are, first, our persistence in seeking out music that elicits negative emotional experiences after we have received the resulting benefit and, second, the enjoyment we seem to take in these negative responses, as opposed to putting up with them for their related benefits.

A different kind of solution to the problem argues that responses such as sadness that are evoked by expressive music are not really negative. Hume (1757) argues, with respect to tragedy, that the pleasure we take in the mode of presentation of the content of an artwork does not simply counterbalance the negative emotion evoked, but rather subsumes and transforms it into a pleasurable feeling. Kendall Walton argues (also with respect to tragedy) that sadness is not in itself negative. Rather, it is the situation to which sadness is the response that is negative. Thus, though we would not seek out the death of a loved one, given the death we “welcome” the sorrow (K. Walton 1990: 255–9). Similarly, we cannot affect the sadness of a musical work by not listening to it, and so we welcome our sorrowful response to it as appropriate. Berys Gaut (2007: 203–26) argues that though sadness is typically aroused by situations we would prefer to avoid, sadness in response to artistic expressiveness is an exception and thus not negative in any paradoxical way. A difficulty for all three solutions is the extent to which they accord with our emotional experience in rejecting the characterization of our sadness as negative.

4. Understanding Music

A central topic in the understanding of narrative art forms, such as literature and film, is what constitutes an acceptable interpretation of a work. One debate concerns whether there is a single correct interpretation of any work or multiple acceptable interpretations. Another concerns the constraints on acceptable interpretations, e.g., the extent to which the artist’s intentions may or should be taken into account.

Though these questions seem equally applicable to musical works (S. Davies 2002a; Dubiel 2011), most of the literature on understanding music has focused on two more specifically musical topics: first, our understanding of basic musical features, such as pitch and rhythm and, second, interpretations of works of the sort given by music theorists. (For more detailed introductions to these and other topics in musical understanding, see S. Davies 2011c and Huovinen 2011.)

Before we turn to those topics, it is worth noting that two distinct activities go by the name of “interpretation” in music (and other performance arts): what might be called performative and critical interpretation (Levinson 1993). While a critical interpretation of a musical work (often called an analysis) is roughly equivalent to an interpretation of a novel—typically expressed linguistically—a performative interpretation is a way of playing or singing the work, typically expressed in a performance of it. It is not easy to clarify the relationship between these two kinds of musical interpretation, but see Levinson 1993, Maus 1999, Thom 2007, Neufeld 2012, and Dodd 2020a.

Animals can hear music in a sense—your dog might be frightened by the loud noise emitted by your stereo. People, by contrast, can understand the music they hear. What constitutes this experience of understanding music? To use an analogy, while the mere sound of a piece of music might be represented by a sonogram, our experience of it as music is better represented by something like a marked-up score. We hear individual notes that make up distinct melodies, harmonies, rhythms, sections, and so on, and the interaction between these elements. Such musical understanding comes in degrees along a number of dimensions. Your understanding of a given piece or style may be deeper than mine, while the reverse is true for another piece or style. My general musical understanding may be narrow, in the sense that I only understand one kind of music, while you understand many different kinds (Budd 1985b: 233–5; S. Davies 2011c: 88–95). Moreover, different pieces or kinds of pieces may call on different abilities, since some music has no harmony to speak of, some no melody, and so on. Many argue that, in addition to purely musical features, understanding the emotions expressed in a piece is essential to adequately understanding it (e.g., Ridley 1993; S. Davies 1994; Levinson 1990d: 30; Scruton 1997; Robinson 2005: 348–78).

At the base of the musical experience seem to be (i) the experience of tones , as opposed to mere sounds of various frequencies, where a tone is heard as being in “musical space,” that is, as bearing relations to other tones such as being higher or lower, or of the same kind (at the octave), and (ii) the experience of movement , as when we hear a melody as leaping up or wandering far afield and then coming to rest where it began. Roger Scruton (1983; 1997: 1–96) argues that these experiences are irreducibly metaphorical, since they involve the application of spatial concepts to that which is not literally spatial. (There is no identifiable individual that moves from place to place in a melody (S. Davies 1994: 229–34).) Malcolm Budd (1985b) argues that to appeal to metaphor in this context is unilluminating since, first, it is unclear what it means for an experience to be metaphorical and, second, a metaphor is only given meaning through its interpretation, which Scruton not only fails to give, but argues is unavailable. Budd suggests that the metaphor is reducible, and thus eliminable, apparently in terms of purely musical (i.e., non-spatial) concepts or vocabulary. Stephen Davies (1994: 234–40) doubts that the spatial vocabulary can be eliminated, but he is sympathetic to Budd’s rejection of the centrality of metaphor. Instead, he argues that our use of spatial and motion terms to describe music is a secondary, but literal, use of those terms that is widely used to describe temporal processes, such as the ups and downs of the stock market, the theoretical position one occupies, one’s spirits plunging, and so on. The debate continues in Budd 2003, Scruton 2004, and S. Davies 2011d.

Davies is surely right about the ubiquity of the application of the language of space and motion to processes that lack individuals located in space. The appeal to secondary literal meanings, however, can seem as unsatisfying as the appeal to irreducible metaphor. We do not hear music simply as a temporal process, it might be objected, but as moving in the primary sense of the word, though we know that it does not literally so move. Andrew Kania (2015) develops a position out of this intuition by emphasizing Scruton’s appeal to imagination while dropping the appeal to metaphor, arguing that hearing the music as moving is a matter of imagining that its constituent sounds move. (See also de Clercq 2007 and Trivedi 2011: 116–18.) Kania explicitly models his theory on the popular Waltonian theory of fiction (K. Walton 1990), though Walton seems to resist the application of his theory to basic musical understanding because of the differences between music and more paradigmatically representational arts (K. Walton 1988: 358–9, 1994: 53–4).

Apart from pitch space and melodic movement, there has been little philosophical discussion of either the nature and understanding of basic musical features such as melody, rhythm, meter, and harmony or how these elements work together in complex musical wholes. But see Roger Scruton 1997: 19–79, 2007; Stephen Davies 2001: 47–71; Hamilton 2007: 119–52; and Cheyne, Hamilton, and Paddison 2020.

It is widely acknowledged that explicit music-theoretical knowledge can aid deeper musical understanding and is essential for the adequate description and understanding of musical experiences—including one’s own (Kivy 1990). However, several philosophers have argued that one need not possess these concepts explicitly (nor the correlative vocabulary) in order to listen with understanding (Budd 1985b; 245–8; S. Davies 1994: 346–9; Levinson 1990d: 35–41). Mark DeBellis (1995: 117–31) argues that understanding fairly basic features of music, such as different kinds of cadences, requires a fused experience in which one applies a concept such as dominant seventh in one’s perception of the musical sounds. Stephen Davies (2011c: 88–94) responds that the serious but untutored listener should be able to develop such concepts, and thus have such experiences. Erkki Huovinen (2008) provides an example intended to cast doubt on this. Suppose that a melody is transposed from C major to D-flat major, but in a lower octave. One listener might hear the melody as reappearing higher, since D-flat is a half-step above C, while another might hear it as lower, since the constituent pitches of the second appearance are all lower than those of the first. Only a listener who understands the sense in which both these claims are true—that the melody has been transposed down a major seventh—truly understands what is going on musically. Yet such concepts of pitch organization … are not usually learned without some tuition (Huovinen 2008: 325).

For various art-historical reasons, formalism was the dominant approach to music-theoretic analysis, that is, the critical interpretation of musical works, throughout the twentieth century. (Hamilton 2007: 66–94 & 153–91 provides a useful discussion of the history from a philosophical perspective.) In short, the value of works of music was held to reside primarily in their large-scale harmonic structure.

Jerrold Levinson (1997) makes a case against such “architectonicism” in favor of “concatenationism,” the view that basic musical understanding consists in following the musical and emotional qualities of passages of music, and transitions between them, that are short enough to be apprehended as a single experience (“quasi-hearing”). He qualifies this basic idea considerably, allowing for the experience of previous parts of the piece, and anticipation of future parts, to modify one’s experience of the music in the moment. He also allows that architectonic awareness may play a role in enhancing one’s moment-to-moment experience, and may even play an ineliminable part in the understanding of some pieces. Nonetheless, Levinson maintains that the part played by architectonic knowledge in basic musical understanding is minimal, and that the cases where architectonic knowledge is necessary are very much the exception.

Peter Kivy has taken up the gauntlet on behalf of architectonicism (2001; see also S. Davies 2011c: 95–9). While Kivy acknowledges that the kinds of experiences Levinson champions are necessary to basic musical understanding, he defends the idea that grasping the large-scale form of most pieces of Western classical music, at least, is necessary for an adequate understanding of them. He does not deny that the experience of the form of a piece in listening to it is more intellectual than quasi-hearing, but he rejects Levinson’s argument that it is non-perceptual, and thus marginal to an adequate experience of it as music. Rather, Kivy argues, such experience is a matter of bringing one’s perceptions under sophisticated concepts. (A tactic Kivy does not consider is an attempt to hoist Levinson with his own contextualist petard, arguing that even if architectonic listening is non-perceptual it is a well-established mode of understanding pieces of music in the Western classical music world, and thus that to argue music must be understood primarily perceptually is to beg the question.)

The extent of the disagreement between the architectonicist and the concatenationist is unclear. They agree that the aspect of musical understanding the other emphasizes is a non-negligible component in the full understanding of a musical work. Levinson has been explicit since the first publication of his view that he intends it more as a polemic against and corrective to architectonicism, rather than as a replacement for it (1997: ix–xi; 1999: 485; 2006a). Perhaps that purpose has now been fulfilled, but see Huovinen 2013 for a revival of the debate and an attempted synthesis.

5. Music and Value

Most philosophical discussions of the value of music are implicitly restricted to the artistic value of purely instrumental musical works. To the extent that such discussions are motivated by the abstract nature of such music (see below), it is not clear to what extent they can be extended to musical hybrids such as song. Moreover, as we saw in section 1.2, it is not obvious that all music is art. Perhaps non-art music can be artistically valuable, but it presumably has other values; a complete theory of the value of music would apparently have to account for those values. (Presumably, art music can also have non-artistic value.)

Following the literature, however, the remainder of this subsection considers the artistic value of purely musical works. This is not the place to go into the many disputes about the nature of aesthetic and artistic value. (For an excellent introduction, see Stecker 2003b.) For our purposes, we can note there are two central points about artistic value on which there is some consensus. First, most philosophers take the value of artworks to be intrinsic (or inherent ) to them, in the sense that the value of a work is tied essentially to the experience that the work affords. Thus, artworks are not (properly) valued merely instrumentally, as means to some end, but “for” or “in” themselves (Budd 1995: 1–16; S. Davies 1987: 198–200; Scruton 1997: 374–6; Levinson 1992: 15–17).

The question that naturally arises next is what it is about the experience an artwork affords that makes it valuable. That pleasure is a non-negligible part of the answer to this question is the second point upon which there is some consensus (S. Davies 1987: 198–205; Levinson 1992; Kivy 1997b: 212–17). However, concomitant with this consensus is an acknowledgment that simple pleasure taken, say, in the sensuousness of the musical sounds is too trivial to ground the great value widely attributed to music. In looking for other sources, the puzzle that arises is that music is supposed to be an abstract art, par excellence . If this means that music is divorced from everything else that concerns us in the “real world” (that is, extra-musical life), it is puzzling why we should find so valuable the experiences musical works afford.

There are a couple of dimensions to most solutions of the puzzle of pure music’s value. One is the extent to which it is agreed that music really is abstract. To the extent that one thinks that music is not divorced from the real world, one will be able to argue that music’s value is at least no more puzzling than the value of arts more obviously related to the real world, such as literature and representational painting and sculpture. The other dimension to most solutions of the puzzle of pure music’s value is the extent to which one thinks the abstractness of music is the source of its value. Thus, two theorists might agree on the extent to which music is related to the real world (by being expressive, say), yet one locate its primary value in that expressiveness while the other locates it in its abstract, purely formal features.

Unsurprisingly, those who take the experience of music’s expressiveness to be a more intimately emotional one (through being predicated on imaginative engagement with the music, say), tend to emphasize that experience as more central to musical understanding, and thus attribute a larger part of music’s value to its expressiveness. Those, on the other hand, whose theory of the experience of musical expressiveness is more distanced (a matter of noticed resemblance, say), tend to place less weight on this element in their theories of musical value. At one extreme of this spectrum is the position that denies music to be expressive at all, and thus cannot attribute any of music’s value to its expressiveness (most notably Hanslick 1854; see also Zangwill 2004). Most theorists agree, however, that music’s value is to be located in different kinds of experience, including the experience of formal and expressive features; their disagreements are mostly about the relative weight of these different kinds of experiences in a complete account of musical value.

The extent of the disagreement between various parties to this dispute is not clear. Those defending the value of music’s expressiveness tend to claim that its contribution to overall musical value is significant, but many stop short even of according it primary value, and do not argue against the value of formal elements of musical works (Ridley 1995: 192–6; Levinson 1982, 1992: 20–2, 1996a: 124–5; Robinson 2005: 413; Young 2014: 150–4). They content themselves rather with pointing out the ways in which expressiveness can be valuable, focusing largely on the value of the emotional responses such expressiveness elicits in us. These include many of the features discussed above with respect to our interest in listening to music that arouses negative affective states in the listener. To recap, our emotional responses to music’s expressiveness can enable us to savor, understand, and even (to some extent) experience emotions in a “safe” way. They can provide us with a cathartic release, and enable us to participate in a kind of communication with the composer or communion with other members of our musical culture (Levinson 1982, 1996a; Higgins 1991, 2012; S. Davies 1994: 271). Emphasizing this last point, Roger Scruton argues that music’s value is quasi-moral, in that the kinds of music one responds to, or those valued in a particular culture, reflect the state of that individual’s or culture’s “soul” (1997: 380–91; see also S. Davies 1994: 275–6.) Stephen Davies (1987: 207–12) has argued that there are beneficial consequences of an interest in music in general , such as heightened emotional and aural sensitivity, which are not properly valued as consequences of listening to individual pieces, but which lead us to value musical culture as a whole (just as we value kindness for its consequences in general, while rejecting instrumental motivations for kind acts as inappropriate).

By contrast, those who defend the value of formal features tend to argue that the value of those features is primary, and that the value of music’s expressiveness is overrated. Peter Kivy, for instance, argues that expressive properties serve merely to highlight musical structure, as color might be used by the painter to emphasize contour or mass. Other expressive properties serve as structural properties in their own right (1990: 196). (See also Sharpe 2000: 1–83, and Zangwill 2004.)

Alan Goldman (1992) argues against the idea that music is particularly suited to the expression of emotion, claiming that representational arts such as painting and literature are better at this. Moreover, he disputes the grounds of the value of expressiveness given above. For example, he denies that music can teach us much about the emotions, and that we can savor our negative emotional responses to expressive music. Similarly, after an extensive discussion of the nature of musical expressiveness, Malcolm Budd argues that such expressiveness cannot come close to explaining music’s value (1995: 155–7). He points to the facts that much valuable music is not expressive and that the equal expressiveness of different pieces would be outweighed in a comparative evaluation by the differences between them in terms of formal value.

Both Goldman and Budd locate the value of pure music precisely in the abstractness that to some seems the greatest obstacle to explaining that value. Budd (1995: 164–71) points out that we have an extensive interest in abstract forms outside the realm of music, such as those of natural formations and in the decorative arts, and that such forms are capable of possessing valued aesthetic properties, such as beauty, elegance, and so on. Thus, it is no surprise that we value highly the works of an art of abstract forms. Goldman (1992), by contrast, emphasizes the detachment from the world of practical affairs implied by music’s abstractness. The complexity of great musical works demands the active engagement of our cognitive faculties, which we find rewarding, yet not in the pursuit of some practical goal that could be frustrated.

These issues are thrown into sharp relief in the debate over how instrumental musical works could be “profound.” See Kivy 1990: 202–18, 1997b: 140–78, 2003; Levinson 1992; White 1992; Ridley 1995, 2004: 132–65; S. Davies 2002b; Dodd 2014b.

There is no space here to discuss the evaluation of musical works and performances. See S. Davies 1987, Levinson 1990e, and Gracyk 2011.

There are musical aspects or elements of many uncontroversially representational art forms, such as song. Jeanette Bicknell (2015: 81–91) and Aaron Smuts (2013) discusses the ethics of song performance. But there has been little discussion, in the analytic tradition, of the relationship between musical and ethical values (as opposed to musical examples of more general ethical concerns, such as cultural appropriation). Kathleen Higgins (1991, 2012) and Roger Scruton (1997: 457–508) argue in very different ways that music is – or should be – central to our thinking about ethics. Garry Hagberg has explored many connections between improvisatory jazz practice, ethics, and politics (2002, 2006, 2008, 2021; see also Higgins 1991: 177). Peter Kivy (2008) argues against music’s capacity to affect our moral knowledge, behavior, or character. Jerrold Levinson (2013: 51–5), Philip Alperson (2014), and James Harold (2016) defend music’s moral efficacy.

The debate over whether an artwork’s moral flaws are artistic flaws has focused almost exclusively on representational (especially narrative) art forms. (Gaut (2007) offers an excellent overview.) Music has largely been ignored because it has been assumed to lack sufficient representational capacity to embody an attitude toward some object. Maria José Alcaraz León (2012), however, argues that music’s emotional expressiveness is enough to apply arguments about whether moral flaws are artistic flaws to pure instrumental music. (For critical discussion, see Kania 2020: 254–5.) Musicologist Susan McClary argues that canonical works of instrumental classical music oppress women by expressing a positive attitude toward narratives of the subjection of feminine elements (e.g., certain musical themes) by masculine ones. (See, for example, McClary 1991: 19–23, 53–79; for critical discussion, see Maus (2011).)

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Brief History of Music: An Introduction

In all probability, music has played an important role in the lifecycle of humans perhaps even before we could speak. Significant evidence has been discovered that very early man developed primitive flutes from animal bones and used stones and wood as percussion.

Voice would have been the first and most natural means of expression in our distant ancestors, used to bond socially or comfort a sleepless child. It is from these humble beginnings that the music we enjoy today evolved.

As we move further through the history of music we find increasing evidence of its key role in sacred and secular settings, although the division into these categories was not defined in this way until many years later.

History of Music

Influences from the west to the east merged into the pre-Christian music of the Greeks and later the Romans. Musical practices and conventions perhaps conveyed by travelling musicians brought a wealth of diversity and invention.

Surviving Greek notation from this period of musical history has given scientists and musicologists alike a vital clue to the way that the music of the time might have sounded. It certainly indicates remarkable links to the music that would follow, perhaps most notably through the use of modality in Greek music.

In the frescoes and in some written accounts, including the Bible, we have learned about the instruments that featured in the Roman and Greek times and their significance to the cultures. The trumpet as an instrument of announcement and splendid ceremony, or the lyre as an integral player in the songs of poets.

Across Europe from the early part of the first century, the monasteries and abbeys became the places where music became embedded into the lives of those devoted to God and their followers.

Christianity had established itself and with it came a new liturgy that demanded a new music. Although early Christian music had its roots in the practices and beliefs of the Hebrew people, what emerged from this was to become the basis for sacred music for centuries to come. The chants that were composed devoutly followed the sacred Latin texts in a fashion that was tightly controlled and given only to the glory of God. Music was very much subservient to the words, without flourish or frivolity.

It was Pope Gregory (540-604 AD), who is credited with moving the progress of sacred music forward and developing what is now called Gregorian Chant, characterises by the haunting sound of the open, perfect fifth.

Some controversy surrounds this claim, but the name has stuck and the music remains distinct and vitally important as it moves away from plainchant towards polyphony. This, in turn, looked back to earlier times and customs, particularly in the music of the Jewish people where the idea of a static drone commonly underpinned a second vocal line.

Medieval Period

As we move forward in musical time, we begin to enter the Medieval Period of music which can be generally agreed to span the period from around 500AD up until the mid-fifteenth century. By this time music was a dominant art in taverns to cathedrals, practised by kings to paupers alike. It was during this extended period of music that the sound of music becomes increasingly familiar. This is partly due to the development of musical notation, much of which has survived, that allows us a window back into this fascinating time.

From the written music that survives from the monasteries and other important accounts of musical practices, it’s possible to assemble an image of a vibrant culture that ranges from the sacred to the secular. Throughout the Medieval period, the music slowly began to adopt ever more elaborate structures and devices that produced works of immense beauty and devotion.

Hildegard von Bingen and Perotin pioneered many of the musical forms we still recognise today including the motet and the sacred Mass. Alongside these important forms came the madrigal that often reflects the moods and feelings of the people of the time. It’s wonderfully polyphonic form is both mesmerising and delightful.

Renaissance Period

Instruments developed in accordance with the composer’s imaginations. A full gamut of wind, brass and percussion instruments accompanied the Medieval music, although it is still the human voice that dominates many of the compositions. Towards the close of the high medieval period, we find the emergence of instrumental pieces in their own right which in turn paves the way for many musical forms in the following period: The Renaissance .

Before leaving this period of music it is important to mention the Troubadours and the Trouveres. These travelling storytellers and musicians covered vast distances on their journeys across Europe and further afield into Asia. They told stories, sung ballads and perhaps most importantly, brought with them influences from far and wide that seamlessly blended with the western musical cultures.

The Renaissance (1450 – 1600) was a golden period in music history. Freed from the constraints of Medieval musical conventions the composers of the Renaissance forged a new way forward. Josquin des Prez is considered to be one of the early Renaissance composers to be a great master of the polyphonic style, often combining many voices to create elaborate musical textures.

Later Palestrina, Thomas Tallis and William Byrd build on the ideas of des Pres composing some of the most stunning motets, masses, chansons and instrumental works in their own right. Modality was firmly established as a basis for all harmony, and although strict rules governing the use of dissonance, the expressive qualities of Renaissance music is virtually unparalleled.

As instrumental pieces became accepted into the repertoire, we find the development of instruments like the bassoon and the trombone giving rise to larger and more elaborate instrumental groupings.

This gave composers far more scope to explore and express their creative ideas than before. The viol family developed to provide a very particular, haunted quality to much of the music of the time alongside the establishment of each recognisable family of instruments comprising, percussion, strings, woodwind and brass.

Keyboard instruments also became increasingly common and the advent of the sonata followed in due course. Other popular forms for instrumental music included the toccata, canzona and ricercar to name but a few, emanating from the Courtly dance.

Towards the end of the Renaissance, what was called the Church Modes began to dissolve in favour of what is now considered to be functional harmony or tonality based on a system of keys rather than modes.

Baroque Period

The Baroque Period (1600-1760), houses some of the most famous composers and pieces that we have in Western Classical Music. It also sees some of the most important musical and instrumental developments. Italy, Germany, England and France continue from the Renaissance to dominate the musical landscape, each influencing the other with conventions and style.

Amongst the many celebrated composers of the time, G F Handel, Bach, Vivaldi and Purcell provide a substantial introduction to the music of this era. It is during this glittering span of time that Handel composes his oratorio “The Messiah”, Vivaldi the “Four Seasons”, Bach his six “Brandenburg Concertos” and the “48 Preludes and Fugues”, together with Purcell’s opera “Dido and Aeneas”.

Instrumental music was composed and performed in tandem with vocal works, each of equal importance in the Baroque. The virtuosity that began amongst the elite Renaissance performers flourished in the Baroque. Consider the keyboard Sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti or the Concertos that Vivaldi composed for his student performers. This, in turn, leads to significant instrumental developments, and thanks to the aristocratic support of Catherine Medici, the birth of the Violin.

Common musical forms were established founded on the Renaissance composers principles but extended and developed in ways that they would have probably found unimaginable. The Suite became a Baroque favourite, comprising contrasting fast slow movements like the Prelude; Allemande, Gigue, Courante and the Sarabande. Concertos became ever more popular, giving instrumentalists the opportunity to display their technical and expressive powers.

Vocal music continued to include the Mass but now also the Oratorio and Cantata alongside anthems and chorales. Opera appears in earnest in the Baroque period and becomes an established musical form and vehicle for astonishing expression and diversity.

Increasingly, the preferred harmony is tonal and the system of keys (major and minor), is accepted in favour of modality. This lifts the limitations of modes and offers composers the chance to create ever more complex and expressive pieces that combine exciting polyphonic textures and dynamics.

Notation accompanies these developments and steadily we find that the accuracy of composers works becomes more precise and detailed giving us a better possibility of realising their intentions in performances of today.

Classical Period

From the Baroque, we step into the Classical Period (1730-1820). Here Haydn and Mozart dominate the musical landscape and Germany and Austria sit at the creative heart of the period. From the ornate Baroque composers of the Classical period moved away from the polyphonic towards the homophonic, writing music that was, on the surface of it at least, simple, sleek and measured.

One key development is that of the Piano. The Baroque harpsichord is replaced by the early piano which was a more reliable and expressive instrument. Mozart and Haydn each wrote a large number of works for the Piano which allowed for this instrument to develop significantly during this period.

Chamber music alongside orchestral music was a feature of the Classical Era with particular attention drawn towards the String Quartet. The orchestra itself was firmly established and towards the latter end of the period began to include clarinets, trombones, and timpani.

The rise of the virtuoso performer continued throughout this period of music as demonstrated by the many of the concertos and sonatas composed during this time. Opera flourished in these decades and became a fully-fledged musical form of entertainment that extended way beyond the dreams of the Baroque composers.

Romantic Period

As the Classical era closed Beethoven is the most notable composer who made such a huge contribution to the change into the Romantic Era (1780 – 1880). Beethoven’s immense genius shaped the next few decades with his substantial redefining of many of the established musical conventions of the Classical era. His work on Sonata form in his concertos, symphonies, string quartets and sonatas, goes almost unmatched by any other composer.

The Romantic era saw huge developments in the quality and range of many instruments that naturally encouraged ever more expressive and diverse music from the composers. Musical forms like the Romantic orchestra became expansive landscapes where composers gave full and unbridled reign to their deepest emotions and dreams.

Berlioz in his “Symphonie Fantastique” is a fine example of this, or later Wagner in his immense operas. The symphonies of Gustav Mahler stand like stone pillars of achievement at the end of the Romantic period alongside the tone poems of Richard Strauss. The Romantic period presents us with a vast array of rich music that only towards the end of the 19 th Century began to fade.

It is hard to conceive of what could follow such a triumphant, heroic time in musical history but as we push forward into the 20 th Century the musical landscape takes a dramatic turn. Echoes of the Romantic Era still thread through the next century in the works of Elgar, Shostakovich and Arthur Bliss, but it is the music from France we have title impressionism that sparkles its way into our musical consciences.

Debussy and Ravel are key exponents of this colourful movement that parallels the artwork of Monet and Manet.  What we hear in the music of the impressionists harks back to many of the popular forms of the Baroque but in ways that Bach is unlikely to have foreseen. The tonal system transforms to include a wider range of scales and influences from the Orient allowing composers to write some of the most stunning works ever heard.

Both Ravel and Debussy composed extensively for the piano using poetry for inspiration. Their orchestral works are amongst some of the most beautiful and evocative pieces ever written.

In parallel, the Teutonic world began to undergo its own revolution in the form of the second Viennese school, led by Arnold Schoenberg. Disillusioned with the confines of tonality Schoenberg threw out the tonal system in favour of a new twelve-tone serial system giving each step of the chromatic scale equal musical validity. The result was serial music that was completely atonal and transformed the musical landscape almost beyond anything that had happened before.

Read: Brief History of Classical Music Periods

4 thoughts on “Brief History of Music: An Introduction”

This is great piece. What I wonder the Greek Scholars who invented the G clef and C Clef with tone of Letters A-G and 5 lines. They say it happened in late BC

I adored this text. Thank you for the informations. The music is the better art humankind ever did. It is a pleasure to know people don’t yet let the classics die.

Isn’t this more of a history of western art music then Music

There are mainly six periods of music and each period has a particular style. Music is an expression of feelings, emotions through specific sounds. We listen to music everywhere like in the singing of birds, whistling of a person and impressive sounds by a live band. All these are the simplest form of music. Thanks for sharing the information.

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music , art concerned with combining vocal or instrumental sounds for beauty of form or emotional expression, usually according to cultural standards of rhythm , melody , and, in most Western music, harmony . Both the simple folk song and the complex electronic composition belong to the same activity, music. Both are humanly engineered; both are conceptual and auditory, and these factors have been present in music of all styles and in all periods of history, throughout the world.

Music is an art that, in one guise or another, permeates every human society. Modern music is heard in a bewildering profusion of styles, many of them contemporary, others engendered in past eras. Music is a protean art; it lends itself easily to alliances with words, as in song , and with physical movement, as in dance . Throughout history, music has been an important adjunct to ritual and drama and has been credited with the capacity to reflect and influence human emotion . Popular culture has consistently exploited these possibilities, most conspicuously today by means of radio , film , television , musical theatre , and the Internet . The implications of the uses of music in psychotherapy , geriatrics , and advertising testify to a faith in its power to affect human behaviour . Publications and recordings have effectively internationalized music in its most significant, as well as its most trivial, manifestations . Beyond all this, the teaching of music in primary and secondary schools has now attained virtually worldwide acceptance.

But the prevalence of music is nothing new, and its human importance has often been acknowledged. What seems curious is that, despite the universality of the art, no one until recent times has argued for its necessity. The ancient Greek philosopher Democritus explicitly denied any fundamental need for music: “For it was not necessity that separated it off, but it arose from the existing superfluity.” The view that music and the other arts are mere graces is still widespread, although the growth of psychological understanding of play and other symbolic activities has begun to weaken this tenacious belief.

Music is treated in a number of articles. For the history of music in different regions, see African music ; Oceanic music and dance ; Western music ; Central Asian arts: Music ; Chinese music ; Japanese music ; Korean music ; Islamic arts ; Native American music ; South Asian arts: Music ; and Southeast Asian arts: Music . See also folk music . Aspects of music are treated in counterpoint , harmony , instrumentation , mode , music criticism , music composition , music performance , music recording , musical sound , music notation , rhythm , scale , and tuning and temperament . See also such articles as blues , chamber music , choral music , concerto , electronic music , fugue , jazz , opera , rhythm and blues , rock , symphony , sonata , theatre music , and vocal music . Musical instruments are treated in electronic instrument , keyboard instrument , percussion instrument , stringed instrument , and wind instrument , as well as in separate articles on individual instruments, such as clarinet , drum , guitar , kayagŭm , piano , tabla , and theremin .

Historical conceptions

Music is everywhere to be heard. But what is music? Commentators have spoken of “the relationship of music to the human senses and intellect,” thus affirming a world of human discourse as the necessary setting for the art. A definition of music itself will take longer. As Aristotle said, “It is not easy to determine the nature of music or why anyone should have a knowledge of it.”

Early in the 20th century, it was regarded as a commonplace that a musical tone was characterized by the regularity of its vibrations; this uniformity gave it a fixed pitch and distinguished its sounds from “noise.” Although that view may have been supported by traditional music, by the latter half of the 20th century it was recognized as an unacceptable yardstick. Indeed, “noise” itself and silence became elements in composition , and random sounds were used (without prior knowledge of what they would be) by composers, such as the American John Cage , and others in works having aleatory (chance) or impromptu features. Tone , moreover, is only one component in music, others being rhythm , timbre (tone colour), and texture . Electronic machinery enabled some composers to create works in which the traditional role of the interpreter is abolished and to record, directly on tape or into a digital file, sounds that were formerly beyond human ability to produce, if not to imagine.

From historical accounts it is clear that the power to move people has always been attributed to music; its ecstatic possibilities have been recognized in all cultures and have usually been admitted in practice under particular conditions, sometimes stringent ones. In India, music has been put into the service of religion from earliest times; Vedic hymns stand at the beginning of the record. As the art developed over many centuries into a music of profound melodic and rhythmic intricacy, the discipline of a religious text or the guideline of a story determined the structure. In the 21st century the narrator remains central to the performance of much Indian traditional music, and the virtuosity of a skillful singer rivals that of the instrumentalists. There is very little concept of vocal or instrumental idiom in the Western sense. The vertical dimension of chord structure—that is, the effects created by sounding tones simultaneously—is not a part of South Asian classical music; the divisions of an octave (intervals) are more numerous than in Western music, and the melodic complexity of the music goes far beyond that of its Western counterpart. Moreover, an element of improvisation is retained that is vital to the success of a performance. The spontaneous imitation carried on between an instrumentalist and narrator, against the insistent rhythmic subtleties of the drums, can be a source of the greatest excitement, which in large measure is because of the faithful adherence to the rigid rules that govern the rendition of ragas —the ancient melodic patterns of Indian music.

Chinese music , like the music of India, has traditionally been an adjunct to ceremony or narrative. Confucius (551–479 bce ) assigned an important place to music in the service of a well-ordered moral universe. He saw music and government as reflecting one another and believed that only the superior man who can understand music is equipped to govern. Music, he thought, reveals character through the six emotions that it can portray: sorrow, satisfaction, joy, anger, piety, love. According to Confucius, great music is in harmony with the universe, restoring order to the physical world through that harmony. Music, as a true mirror of character, makes pretense or deception impossible.

Although music was important in the life of ancient Greece, it is not now known how that music actually sounded. Only a few notated fragments have survived, and no key exists for restoring even these. The Greeks were given to theoretical speculation about music; they had a system of notation, and they “practiced music,” as Socrates himself, in a vision, had been enjoined to do. But the Greek term from which the word music is derived was a generic one, referring to any art or science practiced under the aegis of the Muses . Music, therefore, as distinct from gymnastics , was all-encompassing. (Much speculation, however, was clearly directed toward that more-restricted meaning with which we are familiar.) Music was virtually a department of mathematics for the philosopher Pythagoras ( c. 550 bce ), who was the first musical numerologist and who laid the foundations for acoustics . In acoustics, the Greeks discovered the correspondence between the pitch of a note and the length of a string. But they did not progress to a calculation of pitch on the basis of vibrations , though an attempt was made to connect sounds with underlying motions.

Plato (428–348/347 bce ), like Confucius, looked on music as a department of ethics . And like Confucius he was anxious to regulate the use of particular modes (i.e., arrangements of notes, like scales) because of their supposed effects on people. Plato was a stern musical disciplinarian; he saw a correspondence between the character of a person and the music that represented him or her. Straightforward simplicity was best. In the Laws , Plato declared that rhythmic and melodic complexities were to be avoided because they led to depression and disorder. Music echoes divine harmony; rhythm and melody imitate the movements of heavenly bodies, thus delineating the music of the spheres and reflecting the moral order of the universe. Earthly music, however, is suspect; Plato distrusted its emotional power. Music must therefore be of the right sort; the sensuous qualities of certain modes are dangerous, and a strong censorship must be imposed. Music and gymnastics in the correct balance would constitute the desirable curriculum in education. Plato valued music in its ethically approved forms; his concern was primarily with the effects of music, and he therefore regarded it as a psychosociological phenomenon.

Yet Plato, in treating earthly music as a shadow of the ideal, saw a symbolic significance in the art. Aristotle carried forward the concept of the art as imitation, but music could express the universal as well. His idea that works of art could contain a measure of truth in themselves—an idea voiced more explicitly by Plotinus in the 3rd century ce —gave added strength to the symbolic view. Aristotle, following Plato, thought that music has power to mold human character, but he would admit all the modes, recognizing happiness and pleasure as values to both the individual and the state. He advocated a rich musical diet. Aristotle made a distinction between those who have only theoretical knowledge and those who produce music, maintaining that persons who do not perform cannot be good judges of the performances of others.

Aristoxenus , a pupil of Aristotle, gave considerable credit to human listeners, their importance, and their powers of perception. He denigrated the dominance of mathematical and acoustical considerations. For Aristoxenus, music was emotional and fulfilled a functional role, for which both the hearing and the intellect of the listener were essential. Individual tones were to be understood in their relations to one another and in the context of larger formal units. The Epicureans and Stoics adopted a more naturalistic view of music and its function, which they accepted as an adjunct to the good life. They gave more emphasis to sensation than did Plato, but they nevertheless placed music in the service of moderation and virtue. A dissenting 3rd-century voice was that of Sextus Empiricus , who said that music was an art of tones and rhythms only that meant nothing outside itself.

The Platonic influence in musical thought was to be dominant for at least a millennium. Following that period of unquestioned philosophical allegiance , there were times of rededication to Greek concepts, accompanied by reverent and insistent homage (e.g., the group of late 16th-century Florentines, known as the Camerata , who were instrumental in the development of opera ). Such returns to simplicity, directness, and the primacy of the word have been made periodically, out of loyalty to Platonic imperatives , however much these “neo” practices may have differed from those of the Greeks themselves.

In the 21st century the effects of Greek thought are still strongly evident in the belief that music influences the ethical life; in the idea that music can be explained in terms of some component such as number (that may itself be only a reflection of another, higher source); in the view that music has specific effects and functions that can be appropriately labelled; and in the recurrent observation that music is connected with human emotion. In every historical period there have been defectors from one or more of these views, and there are, of course, differences of emphasis.

Much of the Platonic-Aristotelian teaching, as restated by the Roman philosopher Boethius ( c. 480–524), was well suited to the needs of the church; the conservative aspects of that philosophy , with its fear of innovation , were conducive to the maintenance of order. The role of music as accessory to words is nowhere more clearly illustrated than in the history of Christianity , where the primacy of the text has always been emphasized and sometimes, as in Roman Catholic doctrine , made an article of faith. In the varieties of plainchant , melody was used for textual illumination; the configurations of sound took their cue from the words. St. Augustine (354–430 ce ), who was attracted by music and valued its utility to religion, was fearful of its sensuous element and anxious that the melody never take precedence over the words. These had been Plato’s concerns also. Still echoing the Greeks, Augustine, whose beliefs were reiterated by St. Thomas Aquinas ( c. 1225–74), held the basis of music to be mathematical; music reflects celestial movement and order.

Martin Luther (1483–1546) was a musical liberal and reformer. But the uses he envisioned for music, despite his innovations , were in the mainstream of tradition; Luther insisted that music must be simple, direct, accessible, an aid to piety. His assignment of particular qualities to a given mode is reminiscent of Plato and Confucius. John Calvin (1509–64) took a more cautious and fearful view of music than did Luther, warning against voluptuous, effeminate, or disorderly music and insisting upon the supremacy of the text.

In reviewing the accounts of music that have characterized musical and intellectual history , it is clear that the Pythagoreans are reborn from age to age. The German astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) perpetuated, in effect, the idea of the harmony of the spheres, attempting to relate music to planetary movement. René Descartes (1596–1650), too, saw the basis of music as mathematical. He was a faithful Platonist in his prescription of temperate rhythms and simple melodies so that music would not produce imaginative, exciting, and hence immoral, effects. For another philosopher-mathematician, the German Gottfried von Leibniz (1646–1716), music reflected a universal rhythm and mirrored a reality that was fundamentally mathematical, to be experienced in the mind as a subconscious apprehension of numerical relationships.

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) ranked music as lowest in his hierarchy of the arts. What he distrusted most about music was its wordlessness; he considered it useful for enjoyment but negligible in the service of culture. Allied with poetry , however, it may acquire conceptual value. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) also extolled the discursive faculties, saying that art, though it expresses the divine, must yield to philosophy. He acknowledged the peculiar power of music to express many nuances of the emotions. Like Kant, Hegel preferred vocal music to instrumental, deprecating wordless music as subjective and indefinite. The essence of music he held to be rhythm, which finds its counterpart in the innermost self. What is original in Hegel’s view is his claim that music, unlike the other arts, has no independent existence in space, is not “objective” in that sense; the fundamental rhythm of music (again an aspect of number) is experienced within the hearer.

After the 18th century, speculations upon the intrinsic nature of music became more numerous and profound. The elements necessary for a more comprehensive theory of its function and meaning became discernible. But philosophers whose views have been summarized thus far were not speaking as philosophers of music. Music interested them in terms extrinsic to itself, in its observable effects; in its connections with dance, religious ritual, or festive rites; because of its alliance with words; or for some other extramusical consideration. The only common denominator to be found, aside from the recognition of different types of music, is the acknowledgment of its connection with the emotional life, and here, to be sure, is that problematic power of the art to move. Various extramusical preoccupations are the raison d’être of “contextualist” explanations of music, which are concerned with its relation to the human environment . The history of music itself is largely an account of its adjunctive function in rituals and ceremonies of all kinds—religious, military, courtly—and in musical theatre. The protean character of music that enables it to form such easy alliances with literature and drama (as in folk song, art song, opera, “background” music) and with the dance (ritual, popular entertainment, “social,” ballet ) appears to confirm the wide range and influence that the Greeks assigned to it.

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The Evolution of Music: 40,000 Years of Music History Covered in 8 Minutes

in History , Music | August 3rd, 2022 3 Comments

“We’re drown­ing in music,” says Michael Spitzer , pro­fes­sor of music at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Liv­er­pool. “If you were born in Beethoven’s time, you’d be lucky if you heard a sym­pho­ny twice in your life­time, where­as today, it’s as acces­si­ble as run­ning water.” We should­n’t take music, or run­ning water, for grant­ed, and the com­par­i­son should give us pause: do we need music –- for exam­ple, near­ly any record­ing of any Beethoven sym­pho­ny we can think of -– to flow out of the tap on demand? What does it cost us? Might there be a mid­dle way between hear­ing Beethoven when­ev­er and hear­ing Beethoven almost nev­er?

The sto­ry of how human­i­ty arrived at its cur­rent rela­tion­ship with music is the sub­ject of the Big Think inter­view with Spitzer above, in which he cov­ers 40,000 years in 8 min­utes: “from bone flutes to Bey­on­cé.” We begin with his the­sis that “we in the West” think of music his­to­ry as the his­to­ry of great works and great com­posers. This mis­con­cep­tion “tends to reduce music into an object,” and a com­mod­i­ty. Fur­ther­more, we “over­val­ue the role of the com­pos­er,” plac­ing the pro­fes­sion­al over “most peo­ple who are innate­ly musi­cal.” Spitzer wants to recov­er the uni­ver­sal­i­ty music once had, before radios, record play­ers, and stream­ing media.

For near­ly all of human his­to­ry, until Edi­son invents the phono­graph in 1877, we had no way of pre­serv­ing sound. If peo­ple want­ed music, they had to make it them­selves. And before humans made instru­ments, we had the human voice, a unique devel­op­ment among pri­mates that allowed us to vocal­ize our emo­tions. Spitzer’s book  The Musi­cal Human: A His­to­ry of Life on Earth tells the sto­ry of human­i­ty through the devel­op­ment of music, which, as Matthew Lyons points out in a review , came before every oth­er met­ric of mod­ern human civ­i­liza­tion:

The ear­li­est known pur­pose-built musi­cal instru­ment is some forty thou­sand years old. Found at Geis­senklöster­le in what is now south­east­ern Ger­many, it is a flute made from the radi­al bone of a vul­ture. Remark­ably, the five holes bored into the bone cre­ate a five-note, or pen­ta­ton­ic, scale. Which is to say, before agri­cul­ture, reli­gion, set­tle­ment – all the things we might think of as ear­ly signs of civil­i­sa­tion – palae­olith­ic men and women were already famil­iar with the con­cept of pitch.

If music is so crit­i­cal to our social devel­op­ment as a species, we should learn to treat it with the respect it deserves. We should also, Spitzer argues, learn to play and sing for our­selves again, and think of music not only as a thing that oth­er, more tal­ent­ed peo­ple pro­duce for our con­sump­tion, but as our own evo­lu­tion­ary inher­i­tance, passed down over tens of thou­sands of years.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Watch an Archae­ol­o­gist Play the “Litho­phone,” a Pre­his­toric Instru­ment That Let Ancient Musi­cians Play Real Clas­sic Rock

Lis­ten to the Old­est Song in the World: A Sumer­ian Hymn Writ­ten 3,400 Years Ago

See Ancient Greek Music Accu­rate­ly Recon­struct­ed for the First Time

Josh Jones  is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at  @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Comments (3) |

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Comments (3), 3 comments so far.

Wow, this is such a nice account. Very insoir­ing and makes me want to read up on the social func­tions of music with dev­olep­ment of soci­ety.

Agr­reed, very insoir­ing.

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• Published: 12 February 2019

Cultural evolution of music

• Patrick E. Savage   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6996-7496 1  

Palgrave Communications volume  5 , Article number:  16 ( 2019 ) Cite this article

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• Social anthropology

The concept of cultural evolution was fundamental to the foundation of academic musicology and the subfield of comparative musicology, but largely disappeared from discussion after World War II despite a recent resurgence of interest in cultural evolution in other fields. I draw on recent advances in the scientific understanding of cultural evolution to clarify persistent misconceptions about the roles of genes and progress in musical evolution, and review literature relevant to musical evolution ranging from macroevolution of global song-style to microevolution of tune families. I also address criticisms regarding issues of musical agency, meaning, and reductionism, and highlight potential applications including music education and copyright. While cultural evolution will never explain all aspects of music, it offers a useful theoretical framework for understanding diversity and change in the world’s music.

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Introduction.

The concept of evolution played a central role during the formation of academic musicology in the late nineteenth century (Adler, 1885 / 1981 ; Rehding, 2000 ). During the twentieth century, theoretical and political implications of evolution were heavily debated, leading evolution to go out of favor in musicology and cultural anthropology (Carneiro, 2003 ). In the twenty first century, refined concepts of biological evolution were reintroduced to musicology through the work of psychologists of music to the extent that the biological evolution of the capacity to make and experience music ("evolution of musicality") has returned as an important topic of contemporary musicological research (Wallin et al., 2000 ; Huron, 2006 ; Patel, 2008 ; Lawson, 2012 ; Tomlinson, 2013 , 2015 ; Honing, 2018 ). Yet the concept of cultural evolution of music itself ("musical evolution") remains largely undeveloped by musicologists, despite an explosion of recent research on cultural evolution in related fields such as linguistics. This absence has been especially prominent in ethnomusicology, but is also observable in historical musicology and other subfields of musicology Footnote 1 .

One major exception was the two-volume special edition of The World of Music devoted to critical analysis of Victor Grauer's ( 2006 ) essay entitled "Echoes of Our Forgotten Ancestors" (later expanded into book form in Grauer, 2011 ). Grauer proposed that the evolution and global dispersal of human song-style parallels the evolution and dispersal of anatomically modern humans out of Africa, and that certain groups of contemporary African hunter-gatherers retain the ancestral singing style shared by all humans tens of thousands of years ago. The two evolutionary biologists contributing to this publication found the concept of musical evolution self-evident enough that they simply opened their contribution by stating: "Songs, like genes and languages, evolve" (Leroi and Swire, 2006 , p. 43). However, the musicologists displayed concern and some confusion over the concept of cultural evolution.

My goal in this article is to clarify some of these issues in terms of the definitions, assumptions, and implications involved in studying the cultural evolution of music to show how cultural evolutionary theory can benefit musicology in a variety of ways. I will begin with a brief overview of cultural evolution in general, move to cultural evolution of music in particular, and then end by addressing some potential applications and criticisms. Because this article is aimed both at musicologists with limited knowledge of cultural evolution and at cultural evolutionists with limited knowledge of music, I have included some discussion that may seem obvious to some readers but not others.

What is “evolution”?

Although the term “evolution” is often assumed to refer to directional progress and/or to require a genetic basis, neither genes nor progress are included in some contemporary general definitions of evolution. Furthermore, while it is true that the discovery of genes and the precise molecular mechanisms by which they change revolutionized evolutionary biology, Darwin formulated his theory of evolution without the concept of genes.

Instead of genes, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection contained three key requirements: (1) there must be variation among individuals; (2) variation must be inherited via intergenerational transmission; (3) certain variants must be more likely to be inherited than others due to competitive selection (Darwin, 1859 ). These principles apply equally to biological and cultural evolution (Mesoudi, 2011 ).

Evolution did often come to be defined in purely genetic terms during the twentieth century. However, recent advances in our understanding of areas such as cultural evolution, epigenetics, and ecology (Bonduriansky and Day, 2018 ) have led to new inclusive definitions of evolution such as:

'the process by which the frequencies of variants in a population change over time', where the word ‘variants’ replaces the word ‘genes’ in order to include any inherited information….In particular, this…should include cultural inheritance. (Danchin et al., 2011 , p. 483–484)

While there remains some debate about how central a role genes should play in evolutionary theory (Laland et al., 2014 ), few scientists today would insist that the term evolution applies only to genes. Note also that there is nothing about progress or direction contained in the above definition: evolution simply refers to changes in the frequencies of heritable variants. These changes can be in the direction of simple to complex—and it is possible that there may be a general trend towards complexity (McShea and Brandon, 2010 ; Currie and Mace, 2011 )—but the reverse is also possible (Allen et al., 2018 ), as are non-directional changes with little or no functional consequences (Nei et al., 2010 ).

Does culture “evolve”?

From the time Darwin ( 1859 ) first proposed that his theory of evolution explained “The Origin of Species”, scholars immediately tried to apply it to explain the origin of culture. Indeed, Darwin himself explicitly argued that language and species evolution were "curiously parallel…the survival or preservation of certain favored words in the struggle for existence is natural selection" (Darwin, 1871 , p. 89–90). Scholars of cultural evolution have tabulated a number of such “curious parallels”, to which I have added musical examples (Table 1 ).

Theories about cultural evolution quickly adopted assumptions about progress (e.g., Spencer, 1875 ) linked with attempts to legitimize ideologies of Western superiority and justify the oppression of the weak by the powerful as survival of the fittest (Hofstadter, 1955 ; Laland and Brown, 2011 ; Stocking, 1982 ) Footnote 2 . It is no accident that Zallinger's iconic “March of Progress” illustration (Fig. 1 ) showed a gradual lightening of the skin from dark-skinned, ape-like ancestors to light-skinned humans: evolution was used to justify scientific racism by eugenicists (Gould, 1989 ). Although both the lightening of skin and the linear progression from ape to man are inaccurate (Gould, 1989 ), this image unfortunately remains extremely enduring and is commonly adapted to represent all kinds of evolution, including musical evolution (e.g., http://www.mandolincafe.com/archives/spoof.html ).

The classic example of an inaccurate but widespread representation of evolution as a linear “march of progress” (from Howell, 1965 )

Ideas of linear progress through a series of fixed stages continued to dominate cultural evolution for over a century (see Carneiro, 2003 for an in-depth review). It was not until late in the 20th century that several teams of scholars including Charles Lumsden and Edward O. Wilson ( 1981 ), L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Marcus Feldman ( 1981 ), and Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson ( 1985 ) began making attempts to model and measure changing frequencies of cultural variants (aka “memes”; Dawkins, 1976 ), as scientists such as Sewall Wright and Ronald Fisher had done for gene frequencies since the 1930s.

The theoretical and empirical work of cultural evolutionary scholars that emerged from this tradition has been crucial in demonstrating that evolution occurs "Not by Genes Alone" (Richerson and Boyd, 2005 ). Scholars have applied theory and methods from evolutionary biology to help understand complex cultural evolutionary processes in a variety of domains including languages, folklore, archeology, religion, social structure, and politics (Mesoudi, 2011 ; Levinson and Gray, 2012 ; Whiten et al., 2012 ; Fuentes and Wiessner, 2016 ; Henrich, 2016 ; Bortolini et al., 2017 ; Turchin et al., 2018 ; Whitehouse et al., In press ). The field has now blossomed to the extent that researchers founded a dedicated academic society: the Cultural Evolution Society (Brewer et al., 2017 ; Youngblood and Lahti, 2018 ). Its inaugural conference in September 2017 at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History was attended by 300 researchers from 40 countries (Savage, 2017 ) Footnote 3 .

Language has proven to be particularly amenable to evolutionary analysis. For example, applying phylogenetic methods from evolutionary biology to standardized lists of 200 of the most universal and slowest-changing words (e.g., numbers, body parts, kinship terminology) from hundreds of existing and ancient languages has allowed researchers to reconstruct the timing, geography, and specific mechanisms of change by which the descendants of proto-languages such as Proto-Indo-European or Proto-Austronesian evolved to become languages such as English, Hindi, Javanese, and Maori that are spoken today (Levinson and Gray, 2012 ). These evolutionary relationships can be represented as phylogenetic trees or networks (with some caveats, c.f. Doolittle, 1999 ; Gray et al., 2010 ; Le Bomin et al., 2016 ; Tëmkin and Eldredge, 2007 ). Such phylogenies can in turn be useful for exploring more complicated evolutionary questions, such as regarding the existence of cross-cultural universals (including universal aspects of music, cf. Savage et al., 2015 ]) or gene-culture coevolution (e.g., the coevolution of lactose tolerance and dairy farming, Mace and Holden, 2005 ).

Although modern cultural evolutionary theories have made many of the earlier criticisms about cultural evolution obsolete (e.g., assumptions of progress or of memetic replicators directly analogous to genes; cf. Henrich et al., 2008 ), there is still an active debate about the value of cultural evolution, with critics coming from both the sciences and the humanities. For example, evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker ( 2012 ) still maintains that cultural evolution is simply a “loose metaphor” that “adds little to what we have always called ‘history’", echoing similar criticisms made by historian Joseph Fracchia and geneticist Richard Lewontin ( 1999 , 2005 ). Biological anthropologist Jonathan Marks has also strongly criticized cultural evolution as being based on “false premises” (Marks, 2012 , p. 40) and adding little value beyond traditional explanations from cultural anthropology. It seems fair to say that, while cultural evolution is making a comeback and the basic idea that culture changes over time is beyond dispute, the idea that evolutionary theory and its methods can enhance our understanding of cultural change and diversity has yet to unambiguously prove its value. Perhaps music might be one area that could help?

Musical evolution and early comparative musicology

I have previously outlined some modern cultural evolutionary theory as part of one of five major themes in a "new comparative musicology" (Savage and Brown, 2013 ), including the relationships between cultural evolution and the other four themes (classification, human history, universals, and biological evolution) Footnote 4 . Early comparative musicologists, however, relied on Spencer's notion of progressive evolution rather than Darwin's of phylogenetic diversification (Rehding, 2000 ) Footnote 5 . Two assumptions were fundamental to much of the work of the founding figures of comparative musicology:

1. Cultures evolved from simple to complex, and as they do so they move from primitive to civilized.

2. Music evolves from simple to complex within societies as they progress. (Stone, 2008 , p. 25)

For example, in The Origins of Music , Carl Stumpf wrote of "the most primitive songs, e.g., those of the Vedda of Ceylon…. One may label them as mere preliminary stages or even as the origins of music." (Stumpf, 1911/ 2012 , p. 49). As late as 1943, Curt Sachs wrote of "the plain truth that the singsong of Pygmies and Pygmoids stands infinitely closer to the beginnings of music than Beethoven’s symphonies and Schubert’s lieder…the only working hypothesis admissible is that the earliest music must be found among the most primitive peoples" (Sachs, 1943 , p. 20–21). Scholars from the “Berlin school” of comparative musicology such as Stumpf, Sachs, and Erich von Hornbostel created the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv, the first archive of traditional music recordings from around the world, motivated in part by the belief that they could use these recordings to reconstruct the cultural evolution of complex Western art music from the simpler music of hunter-gatherers (Nettl and Bohlman, 1991 ; Nettl, 2006 ).

As the previous section made clear, old assumptions about the roles of progress and genes in evolution have been discarded by modern cultural evolutionary scholars. Nevertheless, ethnomusicologists still often equate ideas about the cultural evolution of music with those of the early comparative musicologists. Rahaim opens his response to Grauer by noting that his use of “the unfashionable language of human genetics and evolutionary biology” would lead many ethnomusicologists to be suspicious:

Would the "echoes of forgotten ancestors" turn out to be echoes of Social Darwinism? Was this to be a retelling of the story of modern Europe's heroic musical ascent above the rest of the world? (Rahaim, 2006 , p. 29)

Similarly, Mundy’s response to Grauer states that "the conception of progress inherent in evolution creates its own hierarchies" (Mundy, 2006 , p. 22). Elsewhere, Kartomi ( 2001 , p. 306) rejected the application of evolutionary theory in classifying musical instruments because "the concepts of evolution and lineage are not applicable to anything but animate beings, which are able to inherit genes from their forebears" Footnote 6 . Overall, since changing its name from comparative musicology to ethnomusicology during the middle of the 20th century, the field has largely avoided discussion of musical evolution, and recent advances in our understanding of cultural evolution have yet to make a substantial impact on musicology.

Macroevolution and Cantometrics

One striking exception to the general tendency to avoid theories of musical evolution in the second half of the twentieth century was Alan Lomax's Cantometrics Project (Lomax, 1968 , 1989 ; Lomax and Berkowitz, 1972 ). Although mostly (in)famous for its claims for a functional relationship between song style and social structure, another controversial aspect was Lomax's evolutionary interpretation of the global distribution of song style itself (for detailed critical review of the Cantometrics Project, see Savage, 2018 and Wood, 2018 a, 2018 b).

Through standardized classification and statistical analysis of 36 stylistic features from approximately 1800 traditional songs from 148 societies Footnote 7 , Lomax classified the world's musical diversity into 10 regional styles. Although this classification was not itself based on any evolutionary assumptions, Lomax proceeded to organize and interpret these 10 styles in the form of a crude phylogenetic tree:

This tree of performance style appears to have two roots: (1) in Siberia and (2) among African Gatherers. The Siberian root has two branches: one into the Circum-Pacific and Nuclear America, thence into Oceania through Melanesia and into East Africa, the second branch to Central Asia and thence into Europe and Asian High Culture... the main facts of style evolution may be accounted for by the elaboration of two contrastive traditions…. As their cultural base became more complex, these two root traditions became more specialized: the Siberian producing the virtuosic solo, highly articulated, elaborated, and alienated style of Eurasian high culture, the Early Agriculture tradition developing more and more cohesive and complexly integrated choruses and orchestras. West Europe and Oceania, flowering late on the borders of these two ancient specializations, show kinship to both. (Lomax, 1980 , p. 39–40)

Although this tree retains some aspects of progressivism (e.g., contemporary African gatherers occupying the "roots" while other traditions "became more complex", West Europe "flowering late"), it also shows more sophisticated concepts such as the possibility of multiple ancestors (polygenesis) and of borrowing/merging between lineages (horizontal transmission). With some modifications, it can be converted into a phylogenetic model as a working hypothesis for future testing/refinement (see Fig. 2 ) Footnote 8 .

A simplified phylogenetic model of global macroevolution of 10 song-style regions. Adapted from Fig. 2 of Lomax ( 1980 , p. 39), which is based on an analysis of ~1800 songs from 148 cultural groups using 36 Cantometric features. Lomax originally placed cultures at different stages along the vertical axis, but here all cultures are represented at the present time and the distance along the phylogenetic branches instead represents approximate time since diverging from a shared ancestral musical style. Dashed arrows represent horizontal transmission (borrowing/fusion) between lineages. Lomax's song-style region names varied—here I chose the most geographically descriptive names from Lomax's 1980 and 1989 publications (e.g., "Eurasian High Culture" instead of "Old High Culture")

Cantometrics provided the major point of departure both for Grauer's essay Footnote 9 and for a series of recent scientific studies exploring parallels in musical and genetic evolution. Some of these studies have directly compared patterns of musical and genetic diversity among populations of certain regions (e.g., Sub-Saharan Africa [Callaway, 2007 ], Eurasia [Pamjav et al., 2012 ], Taiwan [Brown et al., 2014 ], Northeast Asia [Savage et al., 2015 ]). All of these studies found that musical similarities between populations tend to be moderately correlated with genetic similarities, suggesting that both music and genes preserve histories of human migration and cultural contact.

Others have analyzed musical change using theories and methods from evolutionary biology. For example, Zivic et al. ( 2013 ) linked traditional periodization boundaries in Western classical music (Baroque, Classical, Romantic, 20 th century) to changes in pitch distribution patterns, while Serrà et al. ( 2012 ) and Mauch et al. ( 2015 ) both quantified the evolution of diversity in Western popular music, with the former concluding that musical diversity was decreasing while the latter rejected this conclusion in favor of a more complex “punctuated evolution” model (see further discussion below in the section on “Reductionism”). Although the details differ greatly, these studies share a common thread in arguing that musical evolution follows patterns and processes that can be usefully understood using theories and methods adapted from the study of biological evolution (see also Bentley et al., 2007 ; Interiano et al., 2018 ; Brand et al., 2019 ).

Like Cantometrics, most of these studies are more interested in the macroevolutionary relationships between cultures/genres than in microevolutionary relationships among songs within cultures/genres Footnote 10 . This makes them more amenable to broad cross-cultural comparison with domains such as population genetics and linguistics, as focusing on ethnolinguistically defined populations has proved useful in other fields of cultural and biological evolution. However, one drawback to such studies is that it is difficult to reconstruct the precise sequence of small microevolutionary changes that may have given rise to these large cross-cultural musical differences (Stock, 2006 ).

Microevolution and tune family research

One area of research strikingly absent from the discussion of musical evolution surrounding Grauer's essay was the extensive research on microevolution of tune families (groups of melodies sharing descent from a common ancestor or ancestors). Tune family research was particularly influenced by the realization in the early twentieth century that many traditional ballads that had become moribund or extinct in England were flourishing in modified forms far away in the US Appalachian mountains (Sharp, 1932 ). Cecil Sharp's folk song collecting led him to formulate a theory of musical evolution incorporating essentially the same three key mechanisms recognized by modern evolutionary theory: (1) continuity, (2) variation, and (3) selection (Sharp, 1907 ; note that Sharp used the term “continuity” rather than the modern term “inheritance” discussed above). These three principles were later developed by Sharp’s disciple, Maud Karpeles, who helped draft an official definition of folk music adopted in 1955 by the International Folk Music Council (the ancestor of today's International Council for Traditional Music Footnote 11 ) that explicitly invoked evolutionary theory:

Folk music is the product of a musical tradition that has been evolved through the process of oral transmission. The factors that shape the tradition are: (i) continuity which links the present with the past; (ii) variation which springs from the creative impulse of the individual or the group; and (iii) selection by the community, which determines the form or forms in which the music survives. (International Folk Music Council, 1955 , p. 23, emphasis added)

The general mechanisms proposed by Sharp and Karpeles for British-American tune family evolution were explored more thoroughly by scholars such as Bertrand Bronson ( 1959 –72, 1969 , 1976 ), Samuel Bayard ( 1950 , 1954 ), Charles Seeger ( 1966 ), Anne Shapiro ( 1975 ) Footnote 12 , Jeff Titon ( 1977 ), and James Cowdery ( 1984 ; 2009 ). In some cases, the melodic parallels were made explicit by aligning notes thought to share descent from a common ancestor and by verbally reconstructing the historical process of evolutionary changes. For example, Bayard used a series of melodic alignments to illustrate the "process, often conceived but seldom actually observed... of a tune's having material added onto its end and also losing material from its beginning", giving "evolution of one air out of another by variation, deletion, and addition" (Bayard, 1954 , p. 25). Charles Boilès ( 1973 ) even proposed a formal method for reconstructing ancestral proto-melodies, based on the linguistic comparative method for reconstructing proto-languages. Bronson attempted to automate such attempts on a vast scale. His attempts to use punch-cards to mechanically sort thousands of melodic variants of Child ballads and other traditional British-American folk melodies into tune families (Bronson, 1959– 72 , 1969 ) represented one of the first uses of computers in musicology, even preceding Lomax’s Cantometrics Project Footnote 13 .

During my own studies in Japan, I learned that scholars of Japanese music had developed similar approaches based on alignment of related melodies to understand musical evolution, although without explicit reference to tune family research. For example, Kashō Machida and Tsutomu Takeuchi ( 1965 ) traced the evolution of the famous folk songs Esashi Oiwake and Sado Okesa from their simpler, unaccompanied beginnings in the work songs of distant prefectures, and Atsumi Kaneshiro ( 1990 ) developed a quantitative method that he used to test proposed relationships within Esashi Oiwake 's tune family. Meanwhile, Laurence Picken and colleagues traced the evolution of modern Japanese gagaku melodies for flute and reed-pipe back over a thousand years to the simpler and faster ancient melodies of China's Tang court (Picken et al., 1981 –2000; Marett, 1985 ).

Tune family scholarship has not been limited to British-American and Japanese music—those just happen to be the two traditions I am most familiar with. Elsewhere, scholars such as Béla Bartók ( 1931 ) and Walter Wiora ( 1953 ) studied tune family evolution in European folk songs, Steven Jan ( 2007 ) studied the evolution of melodic motives in Western classical music, and Joep Bor ( 1975 ) and Wim van der Meer ( 1975 ) made detailed arguments for treating North Indian ragas as evolving "melodic species" (Bor, 1975 , p. 17).

Recently, scientists have attempted to apply microevolutionary methods to a variety of Western and non-Western genres in the form of sequence alignment techniques adapted from molecular biology (Mongeau and Sankoff, 1990 ; van Kranenburg et al. 2009 ; Toussaint, 2013 ; Windram et al., 2014 ; Savage and Atkinson, 2015 ). Such techniques make it possible to automate things like quantifying melodic similarities and identifying boundaries between tune families (Savage and Atkinson 2015 ; Jan, 2018 ), making analysis possible on vast scales that would be impossible to perform manually.

In addition, some scientists have explored musical microevolution in the laboratory, using techniques originally designed to explore controlled evolution of organisms and languages. Thus, one group mimicked sexual reproduction by having short audio loops recombine and mutate, then used an online survey to allow listeners to mimic the process of natural selection on the resulting music, finding that esthetically pleasing music evolved from nearly random noise over the course of several thousand generations solely under the influence of listener selection (MacCallum et al., 2012 ) Footnote 14 . Using a different experimental paradigm similar to the children's game Telephone, other groups found that melodies and rhythms became simpler and more structured in the course of transmission, paralleling findings from experimental language evolution (Ravignani et al., 2016 ; Jacoby and McDermott, 2017 ; Lumaca and Baggio, 2017 ). Like biological evolution and language evolution, our knowledge of musical evolution can be enhanced by combining ecologically valid studies of musical evolution in the wild (i.e., in its cultural context) with controlled laboratory experiments.

So far, the microevolution of tune families has been investigated largely independently in a variety of cultures and genres, without much attempt at comparing them to explore general patterns of musical evolution. One reason for this is that a broader cross-cultural comparison would require standardized methods for analyzing and measuring musical evolution in different contexts. I proposed such a method and applied it to several of the cases studies discussed above (Savage and Atkinson, 2015 ; Savage, 2017 ). Figure 3 shows an example of this method using an example of melodic microevolution in a well-known folk song: Scarborough Fair .

An example of analyzing tune family microevolution through melodic sequence alignment. The opening two phrases of Simon and Garfunkel's phenomenally successful 1966 version of Scarborough Fair (bottom melody) and its immediate ancestor, Martin Carthy's 1965 version (top melody) are shown, transposed to the common tonic of C (cf. Kloss, 2012 for a detailed discussion of the historical evolution of this ballad). In b , the melodies are shown using standard staff notation, while in c they are shown as aligned note sequences, with letters corresponding to notes as shown in a (following Savage and Atkinson, 2015 ). See Savage ( 2017 ) for a detailed explanation of how this evolution can be quantified (percent melodic identity = 81%; mutation rate = 0.25 per note per year) and discussion of the mechanisms of note substitutions (red arrows) and deletions (blue arrows) shown here

By demonstrating consistent cross-cultural and cross-genre trends in the rates and mechanisms of melodic evolution, I showed that musical evolution, like biological evolution, follows some general rules (Savage, 2017 ). For example, notes with stronger structural function are more resistant to change (e.g., rhythmically accented notes more stable than ornamental notes), and notes are more likely to change to melodically neighboring notes (e.g., 2nds) than to distant ones (e.g., 7ths; cf. Fig. 3 ). This suggests that a general theory of evolution may prove a helpful unifying theory in musicology, as it has in biology.

Musical evolution applications: education and copyright

All musicology is in some sense applied through our research, teaching, and outreach, but some is more explicitly applied for the benefit of those outside of academia (Titon, 1992 ). In this article, I argue that cultural evolutionary theory can provide a useful unifying theoretical framework to apply to research on understanding and reconstructing musical change at multiple levels (both macro and micro) across cultures, genres, and time periods. I now briefly discuss two other ways it can be more directly applied: education and copyright.

The world's musical diversity is woefully underrepresented at all levels of education. Often the job of correcting this falls to ethnomusicologists teaching survey courses on "World Music". As Rahaim ( 2006 , p. 32) notes, "as teachers, we often find ourselves in situations that require us to say something in short-hand about [musical] origins, and have few models at hand apart from evolution". Evolutionary models like Lomax's world phylogenetic tree of regional song style (Fig. 2 ) provide a simple and convenient starting point for teaching about similarities and differences in the world's music, and are flexible enough to adapt to diverse contexts such as conservatory classrooms, instrument museums, or pop music recommendation websites. Such coarse models can be further improved and/or nuanced by following them with microevolutionary case studies of musical change in specific cultures. An evolutionary approach further provides the chance to teach about connections beyond music to other domains in order to understand the ways in which the global distribution of music may be related to the distributions of the people who make it and to other aspects of their culture such as language or social structure (Lomax, 1968 ; Savage and Brown, 2013 ; Grauer, 2006 ).

Since almost all music is influenced by the past in at least some way, whether such influence is within norms of creativity and tradition or amounts to plagiarism is connected to an understanding of processes of musical evolution. US copyright law resembles concepts of tune family evolution in that the core copyrightable essence of a song consists of its representation in musical notation, and that the degree of overall melodic correspondence at structurally significant places between two tunes is a primary criterion for deciding whether the level of similarity constitutes plagiarism (Cronin, 2015 ; Fruehwald, 1992 ; Müllensiefen and Pendzich, 2009 ; Fishman, 2018 ) Footnote 15 . Thus, one famous case concluded that the melody of George Harrison's My Sweet Lord (1970) was similar enough to the Chiffons' He's So Fine (1962) as to constitute subconscious plagiarism (Judge Owen, 1976 ). I used new evolutionary methods involving sequence alignment of melodies to confirm that not only do the two tunes share over 50% identical notes, but the differences that do exist are consistent with the most common types of melodic change (e.g., insertion/deletion of ornamental notes, substitution to melodically neighboring notes; Savage, 2017 , cf. Fig. 3 ). Using a sample of 20 court cases, including He’s So Fine , I showed that this melodic sequence alignment method is a strong predictor of copyright infringement decisions, accurately predicting 16 out of the 20 cases (Savage et al., 2018 ).

However, the concept of individual ownership by composers in copyright law differs from concepts of folk song tune families, where traditional tunes are usually considered to be general property of the community. They are also different from conceptions in many non-Western cultures in which the essence of song ownership may be considered to lie not in its notated melody but in the performance style, performance context, or other extra-melodic features (A. Seeger, 1992 ). Even within US copyright law the question of what types and degrees of copying should be regarded as legitimate borrowing versus copyright infringement is hotly debated and dynamically interpreted, with musicians and lawyers commonly invoking evolutionary principles of continuity and variation to argue for the legitimacy of certain degrees of borrowing, as well as the principle of selection to argue against the deleterious effects on musical creativity if certain types of inspiration are overly restricted (Fishman, 2018 ).

The interpretation of copyright law can dramatically affect the livelihoods of musicians and communities around the world. Thus, a holistic understanding of general dynamics of musical evolution (including the many aspects beyond melodic evolution) and their specific manifestations in various musical cultures and genres may prove crucial to a more cross-culturally principled interpretation of concepts of creativity and ownership.

Objections to musical evolution: agency, meaning, and reductionism

Musical evolution has been and continues to be of interest to musicologists and non-musicologists alike. In fact, many of the processes I discuss are immediately recognizable to many under the terminology of musical change, for which musicologists have long sought a rigorous theory. Merriam ( 1964 , p. 307) argued that ethnomusicology "needs a theory of change". Over a half century later, Nettl ( 2015 , p. 292) summarizes that "there have been many attempts to generalize about change but no generally accepted theory". Why have musicologists interested in general theories of change not adopted the framework of evolution (which is, simply put, a formal theory of change)?

I have presented versions of this argument at international musicology conferences in the USA and Japan, receiving a variety of responses. Most objections to the use of evolutionary theory focused on three issues: implications of progress, individual agency, and reductionism. Since I have already clarified misconceptions about progress at length above Footnote 16 , I will focus here on agency and reductionism.

Building on arguments against cultural evolution by the evolutionary biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, Rahaim ( 2006 , p. 36) argues: "Perhaps most importantly for ethnomusicologists, metaphors of both situated and progressive evolution turn attention away from the agency of individuals". But does the concept of musical evolution negate the agency of individuals to create their own music any more than the concept of biological evolution negates individual free will? In each case, our cultural/genetic inheritances are the product of long evolutionary processes shaped by historical factors, but cannot be simply reduced to or wholly explained by such factors.

Musicians are often free to compose their own music or modify the existing repertoire in whatever ways they see fit (within the physical limits imposed by acoustics, neurobiology, etc.). But whether their creations will appeal to others and be passed on through the generations depends on a variety of factors beyond their control, including the sociopolitical context and the perceptual capacities of the audience. Thus, the role of the individual musicians in this process and their relationships with other actors (audiences, composers, accompanists, producers, judges, etc.) are in fact central to understanding the cultural evolution of music. As Seeger put it:

musical traditions depend on transmission, continuity, change, and interested audiences, but…these take place in a context of emerging mass media, the involvement of outsiders, and the often unpredictable actions of local and national governments. (Anthony Seeger, foreword to Grant, 2014 , p. 9)

Seeger's summary succinctly captures the three key evolutionary mechanisms of "continuity [inheritance], change [variation], and interested audiences [selection]", as well as their dynamic relationships with individual agency and cultural context.

My research has focused on identifying general constraints that apply across many individuals, but this does not mean that other studies must do so. For example, one potentially productive area for exploring the role of individual agency in musical evolution might involve comparing different performers attempting to create their own signature versions of music originally composed and/or performed by others. This could easily apply to a variety of cultures and genres, including art (e.g., the same symphony performed by different orchestras), popular (e.g., cover songs, hip-hop sampling; Youngblood, 2018 ), and folk (e.g., folk song variants; cf. the Scarborough Fair example in Fig. 3 ).

In fact, the presence of human agency and the intentional innovation that comes with it is one of the most interesting aspects about studying cultural evolution. In genetic evolution, natural selection provides the major explanatory mechanism due to the fact that genetic variation is arbitrary (i.e., genetic mutations are not directed towards particular evolutionary goals). However, in cultural evolution, both selection and variation can be directed consciously and unconsciously through a much broader range of mechanisms than typically found in genetic evolution. To accommodate this complexity, cultural evolutionary theorists have proposed a dizzying array of mechanisms to expand the terminological framework of evolutionary biology to cultural evolution (e.g., transmission biases based on prestige, aesthetics, or conformity/anti-conformity; guided variation driven by cognition and/or emotion; cultural attraction through processes of reconstructive rather than replicative transmission; Richerson and Boyd, 2005 ; Mesoudi, 2011 ; Claidière et al., 2014 ; Fogarty et al., 2015 ). The relative strengths of these different types of evolutionary mechanisms and their implications for musical evolution in particular and cultural evolution in general are hotly debated (Claidière et al., 2012 ; Leroi et al., 2012 ). Thus, this is an area where musicologists and cultural evolutionary theorists could both learn much from one another.

An anonymous reviewer of an earlier iteration of this article flatly stated that my cultural evolutionary approach “is not compatible with an anthropological understanding of culture, and seems instead to describe changes in the surface structures of music (tune families and the like)…”. This criticism seems to echo Rahaim’s concerns about agency discussed above, but also goes even further into the longstanding debate regarding the roles of sound vs. behavior, process vs. product, etc. in musicology (Merriam, 1964 ; Rice, 1987 ; Solis, 2012 ). In particular, it follows criticisms by Blacking ( 1977 ) and Feld ( 1984 ) of Lomax’s attempts to use Cantometrics to understand cultural evolution. As Blacking ( 1977 , p. 10) puts it: “Lomax compares the surface structures of music without questioning whether the same musical sounds always have the same "deep structure" and the same meaning”.

Unlike language, music generally lacks clear referential semantic meaning (Meyer, 1956 ; Patel, 2008 ), and this crucial difference is one reason we must be cautious about uncritically borrowing linguistic concepts wholesale to apply to music (Feld, 1974 ). While I agree that a full understanding of the cultural evolution of music will require integrating understanding of both sound structures and their meanings, I can not accept the implication that the study of musical structures such as tune families are not an appropriate subject of musicological inquiry. Here I can only respond by quoting the final sentence published by Alan Merriam ( 1982 ): “ethnomusicology for me is the study of music as culture, and that does not preclude the study of form; indeed we cannot proceed without it.".

Reductionism

Another critique I would like to mention is a broader but related one regarding reductionism and science. This criticism was levelled at cultural evolution in general by Fracchia and Lewontin ( 1999 , p. 507): "the demand for a theory of cultural evolution is really a demand that cultural anthropology be included in the grand twentieth-century movement to scientize all aspects of the study of society, to become validated as a part of ‘social science'".

One version of this criticism appeared in response to one of the studies cited in this review entitled “Measuring the Evolution of Contemporary Western Popular Music” (Serrà et al., 2012 ). In response, Fink ( 2013 ) made a persuasive refutation of the paper’s central finding of decreasing musical diversity and the newspaper headlines touting it (“Modern Music too Loud, All Sounds the Same”), pointing out that the analyses failed to detect increasing rhythmic diversity because the methods ignored rhythm. Or, as Fink put it: "Music isn’t getting stupider, it’s getting funkier.”

Nevertheless, Fink argues that the same reductionistic science that made the study’s conclusion misleading was also a reason it made headlines:

as reporters rush to assure us, they are newsworthy because, for the first time, the conclusions are backed with hard data, not squishy aesthetic theorizing. The numbers do not lie. But research can only be as good as the encoded data it’s based on; look under the surface of recently reported computer-enabled analyses of pop music and you’ll find that the old programmer’s dictum—“garbage in, garbage out”—is still the last word. (Fink, 2013 )

Not long after Serrà et al. published their study, Mauch et al. ( 2015 ) also measured the evolution of Western popular music over a similar time period, but using less reductionistic methods that importantly included rhythmic features. Mauch et al. came to the opposite conclusion: musical diversity actually increased after a brief decline during the 1980s. This provides quantitative support for Fink’s criticism above. Overall, this case highlights both the value of quantifying the cultural evolution of music and the importance of critical thinking in interpreting the reductionism inherent in such studies. Although science does generally require some level of reductionism, the goal is to be “as simple as possible, but not simpler” Footnote 17 .

Charges of reductionism were also leveled directly at my own (Savage and Brown, 2013 ) proposal that included cultural evolution as one of five major themes in a new comparative musicology. In a thorough and nuanced review entitled "On Not Losing Heart", David Clarke approved of the call for more cross-cultural comparison, but worried about its "strongly empiricist paradigm":

Lomax's particular mode of integration "between the humanistic and the scientific" [was] fueled by a politics that had an emancipatory motive. In the metrics and technics of the new comparative musicology proposed by Savage and Brown, traces of any such informing polity melt into air….A political neutrality that is the correlate of an unalloyed empiricism is problematic….My own predilections here are perhaps more attuned to ethnomusicologists who are interested in the particularities of a culture and the actual experience of encounter in the field. By contrast, Savage, Brown, et al. advocate different epistemological values with a different ethos, based on the abstraction of music and people into data. To characterize that ethos as a recapitulation of Lomax, only without the heart, might be an unfair caricature. For the various statistical representations and correlations emerging from their research may well be sublimating a lot of passion, and Savage and Brown’s own day-to-day dealings with musicians and musicking may be no less affective than anyone else’s (it’s just that they exclude this from their research) Footnote 18 . (Clarke, 2014 , 6, pp. 11–12)

While Clarke argues that a "political neutrality that is the correlate of an unalloyed empiricism is problematic", I believe it may be valuable to maintain a relatively neutral political stance, in large part to avoid the problems of confirmation bias that were leveled at Lomax. With Cantometrics, Lomax sought to scientifically validate his strong political views regarding "cultural equity" (Lomax, 1977 ). One of the concerns that doomed Cantometrics was that Lomax's analyses were viewed as being too strongly biased by his political views (Savage, 2018 ; Szwed, 2010 ; Wood, 2018a , 2018b ). Personally, I strongly share Lomax's views about the value of cultural equity, and I, too, see quantitative data as a helpful tool in arguing for the value of all of the world's music. However, I believe it is legitimate to try to limit political aspects in one's published work, and it may well be a more effective long-term strategy for the types of applications described in the previous section Footnote 19 .

Certainly, neither a purely qualitative, ethnographic approach nor a purely quantitative, scientific approach alone will succeed in advancing our knowledge of how and why music evolves. But by combining the two approaches through cross-cultural comparative study, we can achieve a better understanding of the forces governing the world's musical diversity and their real-world implications (Savage and Brown, 2013 ). For instance, the My Sweet Lord plagiarism case mentioned above gives a clear example where quantitative measurements of the degree of melodic similarity (56%) between two tunes and its qualitative interpretation in the context of copyright law has major practical implications in which millions of dollars are at stake. Although perhaps less easily quantified in terms of dollar values, an understanding of the mechanisms of evolution of traditional folk songs may be just as valuable to traditional musicians struggling to protect their intangible cultural heritage.

Music evolves, through mechanisms that are both similar to and distinct from biological evolution. Cultural evolutionary theory has been developed to the point that it shows promise for providing explanatory power from the broad levels of macroevolution of global musical styles to the minute microevolutionary details of individual performers and performances. Musical evolution shows potential for applications beyond research to such disparate domains as education and copyright.

However, I am aware that my review is inevitably incomplete and I have only been able to highlight a tiny fraction of the types of situations and methodologies through which the evolutionary framework can be fruitfully applied to music. To me, that incompleteness highlights the broad explanatory power of evolutionary theory, and broad explanatory theory is something that musicologists such as Timothy Rice ( 2010 ) have argued is sorely needed.

Scientific interest in musical evolution is already growing rapidly, and will continue with or without the involvement of musicologists. Here again, we can learn from language evolution. Several high-profile articles on language evolution were published by teams of scientists without close collaboration with linguists, resulting in bitter disputes and accusations of "naïve arrogance" (Campbell, 2013 , p. 472) that have limited what could have been mutually beneficial collaboration (Marris, 2008 ). A similar pattern seems to be playing out in the recent controversy regarding a team of Harvard scientists analyzing ethnographic recordings around the world to construct a “Natural History of Song” (Mehr et al. 2018 a, 2018 b; Marshall, 2018 ; Yong, 2018 ). I share concerns about scientists studying music and evolution without collaborating with musicologists, but I believe that ultimately both musicology and cultural evolution stand to benefit from productive interdisciplinary collaboration. I have chosen to try to avoid such pitfalls by being proactive in initiating collaborations on musical evolution with cultural evolutionary scientists to combine our knowledge and skills (e.g., Savage et al. 2015 ; Savage and Atkinson, 2015 ).

I do not intend by any means to imply that the predominantly quantitative approach I have presented here—strongly informed by my collaborations with scientists studying cultural and biological evolution, as well as my own earlier training in psychology and biochemistry - is the only way to study musical evolution. One reason I focused in my dissertation on a rigorously quantitative approach modeled on molecular genetics is that such quantitative approaches have shown success in rehabilitating cultural evolutionary theory after much criticism of earlier incarnations such as memetics as lacking in empirical rigor (Laland and Brown, 2011 ; Mesoudi, 2011 ). But I believe that one of the strengths of evolutionary theory is that it is flexible enough to be usefully adapted to a variety of scientific and humanistic methodologies, with plenty of room to coexist productively with non-evolutionary theories. As Ruth Stone ( 2008 , p. 225) has noted, "there is no such thing as a best theory. Some theories are simply more suited for answering certain kinds of questions than others" (emphasis in original). Even if the concept of cultural evolution cannot provide all the answers, I believe it helps to answer enough musical questions of abiding interest that it should be ignored no more.

Data availability

Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analyzed during the current study.

For reasons of space and expertise, I will focus here primarily on the ethnomusicological literature, but the concept of cultural evolution of music should also be applicable to other sub-fields, not least the evolution of contemporary Western classical music from medieval Gregorian chant over the course of the second millennium AD.

Although this movement came to be known as “Social Darwinism”, it was in fact not very reflective of Darwin′s ideas, but rather the ideas of Herbert Spencer ( 1875 ), who coined the term "survival of the fittest". While the historical relationship between evolutionary theory and Social Darwinism is debated, today′s scholars of cultural evolution unequivocally reject such political misappropriation of evolutionary theory (Laland and Brown, 2011 ; Mesoudi, 2011 ; Richerson and Boyd, 2005 ; Wilson and Johnson, 2015 ).

Two of these presentations were about music: my own about the evolution of British-American and Japanese folk song melodies and one by Aurélie Helmlinger

about the evolution of steelpan instrumental layouts in Trinidad and Tobago. The 2018 Cultural Evolution Society conference featured an entire panel with four presentations devoted to music.

Due to space limitations this article will not delve into the areas of biological evolution and gene-culture evolution of musicality (Honing, 2018 ; Tomlinson, 2013 , 2015 ; Patel, 2018 ; Savage et al., In prep.).

Of the musicologists responding to Grauer′s essay, only Rahaim ( 2006 , p. 29) carefully distinguished between these two, using the terms "progressive" and "situated" evolution, respectively.

Kartomi has since changed her views, writing "I now think that music has evolved in a measurable way, as long as ′evolved′ is not defined as ′improved′" (personal communication, June 10th 2016 email to the author).

Discrepancies in published numbers and further details are explained by Savage ( 2018 ).

Although not shown here, finer-scale relationships within and among groups can also be modeled using evolutionary methods (cf. Fig. 3 of Lomax, 1980 , p. 41; Rzeszutek et al., 2012 ; Savage and Brown, 2014 ).

Grauer was heavily involved in the Cantometrics Project as both the co-inventor of the Cantometric classification scheme and primary coder of the Cantometric data.

Macroevolution generally refers to changes among populations (e.g., species, cultural groups), while microevolution generally refers to changes within populations.

Lineages of organizations, composers, performers, etc. are a potentially productive area of studying musical evolution, but I will not discuss them in detail here due to limitations of space and expertise.

Unfortunately, Shapiro′s dissertation was never published and is not available for interlibrary loan.

The research leading to the articles republished in book form in Bronson ( 1969 ) was begun several decades earlier, with one article laying out the basic idea of “Mechanical Help in the Study of Folk Song” published as early as 1949.

Note that this finding is conceptually distinct from the “sound-to-music illusion” (Simchy-Gross and Margulis, 2018 ). The sound-to-music illusion involves the same sound being perceived as more musical after repeated listening by a single listener, whereas MacCallum et al.′s study experimentally evolved new and more pleasing music over time.

Note, however, that Fishman ( 2018 ) in particular has argued that the traditional emphasis on melody may be changing, as evidenced by recent high-profile cases such as the dispute over Blurred Lines .

Unfortunately, the association of evolution with progress is particularly entrenched where I live in Japan, where the characters used to translate evolution (進化 [ shinka ]) literally mean "progressive change" (the English word evolution itself evolved from the Latin evolutio , meaning "unfolding"). In my opinion, those avoiding the term "evolution" because of misconceptions about its meaning are contributing to this popular misconception. Instead I believe concerted effort to correct this misconception for future generations is in order.

Anonymous quote attributed to Einstein (cf. Anonymous, 2011 ).

Personally, I do feel a lot of passion for the world′s musicians and see one of my life′s goals as being advocating for their value. My interest in folk song evolution was motivated not only by theoretical concerns about mechanisms of cultural microevolution, but on my own experiences learning and performing British-American and Japanese folk songs and my hopes that my (Japanese-New Zealand-American) children will be able to sing these songs that have been handed down to them over the course of hundreds of years from their ancestors on opposite sides of the world. I have won trophies in a number of Japanese folk song competitions, so questions about agency in performance and what types of musical (and extra-musical) variation are selected for or against are not merely academic but affect me personally. Do I think that all of these factors can be perfectly quantified? Absolutely not. But I do believe that theories of musical evolution informed by quantitative data could have a positive influence on musicology and beyond. As Clarke ( 2014 , p. 12) later admits: “in fairness, the empirical and the metric have as much potential as any other paradigm to work to humanistic ends”.

Language evolution provides another good analogy. Much work in language evolution focuses on the evolution of basic vocabulary due to its resistance to change and amenability to evolutionary analysis (Pagel, 2017 ). However, broader theories of language evolution incorporate many complex cognitive and social factors, including race, gender and class (Labov, 1994 –2010).

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Acknowledgements

I thank my PhD supervisory committee (Yukio Uemura, Yasuko Tsukahara, Atsushi Marui, and Hugh de Ferranti) for guidance and feedback on this article and my dissertation, and thank Steven Brown, Victor Grauer, Thomas Currie, Quentin Atkinson, Andrea Ravignani, and Jamshid Tehrani for comments on earlier versions of this article. This research was supported by a Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) scholarship, a Keio Research Institute at SFC Startup Grant, and a Keio Gijuku Academic Development Fund Individual Grant.

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Universality, domain-specificity and development of psychological responses to music.

• Manvir Singh
• Samuel A. Mehr

Nature Reviews Psychology (2023)

HYPOTHESIS AND THEORY article

How music and instruments began: a brief overview of the origin and entire development of music, from its earliest stages.

• University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom

Music must first be defined and distinguished from speech, and from animal and bird cries. We discuss the stages of hominid anatomy that permit music to be perceived and created, with the likelihood of both Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens both being capable. The earlier hominid ability to emit sounds of variable pitch with some meaning shows that music at its simplest level must have predated speech. The possibilities of anthropoid motor impulse suggest that rhythm may have preceded melody, though full control of rhythm may well not have come any earlier than the perception of music above. There are four evident purposes for music: dance, ritual, entertainment personal, and communal, and above all social cohesion, again on both personal and communal levels. We then proceed to how instruments began, with a brief survey of the surviving examples from the Mousterian period onward, including the possible Neanderthal evidence and the extent to which they showed “artistic” potential in other fields. We warn that our performance on replicas of surviving instruments may bear little or no resemblance to that of the original players. We continue with how later instruments, strings, and skin-drums began and developed into instruments we know in worldwide cultures today. The sound of music is then discussed, scales and intervals, and the lack of any consistency of consonant tonality around the world. This is followed by iconographic evidence of the instruments of later antiquity into the European Middle Ages, and finally, the history of public performance, again from the possibilities of early humanity into more modern times. This paper draws the ethnomusicological perspective on the entire development of music, instruments, and performance, from the times of H. neanderthalensis and H. sapiens into those of modern musical history, and it is written with the deliberate intention of informing readers who are without special education in music, and providing necessary information for inquiries into the origin of music by cognitive scientists.

How Did Music Begin? Was it via Vocalization or was it through Motor Impulse?

But even those elementary questions are a step too far, because first we have to ask “What is music?” and this is a question that is almost impossible to answer. Your idea of music may be very different from mine, and our next-door neighbor’s will almost certainly be different again. Each of us can only answer for ourselves.

Mine is that it is “Sound that conveys emotion.”

We can probably most of us agree that it is sound; yes, silence is a part of that sound, but can there be any music without sound of some sort? For me, that sound has to do something—it cannot just be random noises meaning nothing. There must be some purpose to it, so I use the phrase “that conveys emotion.” What that emotion may be is largely irrelevant to the definition; there is an infinite range of possibilities. An obvious one is pleasure. But equally another could be fear or revulsion.

How do we distinguish that sound from speech, for speech can also convey emotion? It would seem that musical sound must have some sort of controlled variation of pitch, controlled because speech can also vary in pitch, especially when under overt emotion. So music should also have some element of rhythm, at least of pattern. But so has the recital of a sonnet, and this is why I said above that the question of “What is music?” is impossible to answer. Perhaps the answer is that each of us in our own way can say “Yes, this is music,” and “No, that is speech.”

Must the sound be organized? I have thought that it must be, and yet an unorganized series of sounds can create a sense of fear or of warning. Here, again, I must insert a personal explanation: I am what is called an ethno-organologist; my work is the study of musical instruments (organology) and worldwide (hence the ethno-, as in ethnomusicology, the study of music worldwide). So to take just one example of an instrument, the ratchet or rattle, a blade, usually of wood, striking against the teeth of a cogwheel as the blade rotates round the handle that holds the cogwheel. This instrument is used by crowds at sporting matches of all sorts; it is used by farmers to scare the birds from the crops; it was and still is used by the Roman Catholic church in Holy Week when the bells “go to Rome to be blessed” (they do not of course actually go but they are silenced for that week); it was scored by Beethoven to represent musketry in his so-called Battle Symphony, a work more formally called Wellingtons Sieg oder die Schlacht bei Vittoria , Op.91, that was written originally for Maelzel’s giant musical box, the Panharmonicon. Beethoven also scored it out for live performance by orchestras and it is now often heard in our concert halls “with cannon and mortar effects” to attract people to popular concerts. And it was also, during the Second World War, used in Britain by Air-Raid Precaution wardens to warn of a gas attack, thus producing an emotion of fear. If it was scored by Beethoven, it must be regarded as a musical instrument, and there are many other noise-makers that, like it, which must be regarded as musical instruments.

And so, to return to our definition of music, organization may be regarded as desirable for musical sound, but that it cannot be deemed essential, and thus my definition remains “Sound that conveys emotion.”

So Now We Can Ask Again, “How Did Music Begin?”

But then another question arises: is music only ours? We can, I think, now agree that two elements of music are melody, i.e., variation of pitch, plus rhythmic impulse. But almost all animals can produce sounds that vary in pitch, and every animal has a heart beat. Can we regard bird song as music? It certainly conveys musical pleasure for us, it is copied musically (Beethoven again, in his Pastoral Symphony , no.6, op. 68, and in many works by other composers), and it conveys distinct signals for that bird and for other birds and, as a warning, for other animals also. Animal cries also convey signals, and both birds and animals have been observed moving apparently rhythmically. But here, we, as musicologists and ethnomusicologists alike, are generally agreed to ignore bird song, animal cries, and rhythmic movement as music even if, later, we may regard it as important when we are discussing origins below. We ignore these sounds, partly because they seem only to be signals, for example alarms etc, or “this is my territory,” and partly, although they are frequently parts of a mating display, this does not seem to impinge on society as a whole, a feature that, as we shall see, can be of prime importance in human music. Perhaps, too, we should admit to a prejudice: that we are human and animals are not…

So now, we can turn to the questions of vocalization versus motor impulse: which came first, singing or percussive rhythms? At least we can have no doubt whatsoever that for melody, singing must long have preceded instrumental performance, but did physical movement have the accompaniment of hand- or body-clapping and perhaps its amplification with clappers of sticks or stones, and which of them came first?

Here, we turn first to the study of the potentials of the human body. There is a large literature on this, but it has recently been summarized by Iain Morley in his The Prehistory of Music ( Morley, 2013 ). So far as vocalization is concerned, at what point in our evolution was the vocal tract able to control the production of a range of musical pitch? For although my initial definition of music did not include the question of pitch, nor of rhythm, once we begin to discuss and amplify our ideas of music, one or other of these, does seem to be an essential—a single sound with no variation of pitch nor with any variation in time can hardly be described as musical.

Studies based on fossil remains of the cranium and jaw formation of the early species of homo suggest that while Homo ergaster from between two million and a million and a half years ago could produce some variation of pitch but perhaps without much breath control, Homo erectus may have had greater ability, and Homo heidelbergensis , and certainly its later development from around a million years ago into the common ancestor of Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens , could certainly “sing” as well as we can, though of course we can have no evidence of whether they could control such ability, whether they used it, and if so to what extent. So we can say that vocalization, while absent from the capability of our cousins the great apes and of the early forms of Homo , could be as old as at least a million years. It would seem that Homo heidelbergensis had the muscular abilities, but perhaps not the full mental capacities and that it was not until H. sapiens arrived that all the requirements for vocalization were in place, both exported and imported, and possibly not even in the earliest stages of the evolution of H. sapiens . It is here that there is controversy over the relative musical abilities of H. neanderthalensis and H. sapiens , to which in due course we shall return.

Much of this work also discusses the origins of speech as well as that of music. The two processes seem to have much the same physiological requirements, the ability to produce the various consonants and vowels that enable speech, and the ability to control discrete musical pitches. But this capacity goes far beyond the ability to produce sounds.

All animals have the ability to produce sounds, and most of these sounds have meanings, at least to their ears. Surely, this is true also of the earliest hominims. If a mother emits sounds to soothe a baby, and if such sound inflects somewhat in pitch, however vaguely, is this song? An ethnomusicologist, those who study the music of exotic peoples, would probably say “yes,” while trying to analyze and record the pitches concerned. A biologist would also regard mother–infant vocalizations as prototypical of music ( Fitch, 2006 ). There are peoples (or have been before the ever-contaminating influence of the electronic profusion of musical reproduction) whose music has consisted only of two or three pitches, and those pitches not always consistent, and these have always been accepted as music by ethnomusicologists. So we have to admit that vocal music of some sort may have existed from the earliest traces of humanity, long before the proper anatomical and physiological developments enabled the use of both speech and what we might call “music proper,” with control and appreciation of pitch.

In this context, it is clear also that “music” in this earliest form must surely have preceded speech. The ability to produce something melodic, a murmuration of sound, something between humming and crooning to a baby, must have long preceded the ability to form the consonants and vowels that are the essential constituents of speech. A meaning, yes: “Mama looks after you, darling,” “Oy, look out!” and other non-verbal signals convey meaning, but they are not speech.

The possibilities of motor impulse are also complex. Here, again, we need to look at the animal kingdom. Both animals and birds have been observed making movements that, if they were humans, would certainly be described as dance, especially for courtship, but also, with the higher apes in groups. Accompaniment for the latter can include foot-slapping, making more sound than is necessary just for locomotion, and also body-slapping ( Williams, 1967 ). Can we regard such sounds as music? If they were humans, yes without doubt. So how far back in the evolutionary tree can we suggest that motor impulse and its sonorous accompaniment might go? I have already postulated in my Origins and Development of Musical Instruments ( Montagu, 2007 , p. 1) that this could go back as far as the earliest flint tools, that striking two stones together as a rhythmic accompaniment to movement might have produced the first flakes that were used as tools, or alternatively that interaction between two or more flint-knappers may have led to rhythms and counter-rhythms, such as we still hear between smiths and mortar-and-pestle millers of grains and coffee beans. This, of course, was kite-flying rather than a wholly serious suggestion, but the possibilities remain. At what stage did a hominim realize that it could make more sound, or could alleviate painful palms, by striking two sticks or stones together, rather than by simple clapping? Again we turn to Morley and to the capability of the physiological and neurological expression of rhythm.

The physiological must be presumed from the above animal observations. The neurological would again, at its simplest, seem to be pre-human. There is plenty of evidence for gorillas drumming their chests and for chimpanzees to move rhythmically in groups. However, apes’ capacity for keeping steady rhythm is very limited ( Geissmann, 2000 ), suggesting that it constitutes a later evolutionary development in hominins. Perceptions of more detailed appreciation of rhythm, particularly of rhythmic variation, can only be hypothesized by studies of modern humans, especially of course of infantile behavior and perception.

From all this, it would seem that motor impulse, leading to rhythmic music and to dance could be at least as early as the simplest vocal inflection of sounds. Indeed, it could be earlier. We said above that animals have hearts, and certainly, all anthropoids have a heartbeat slow enough, and perceptible enough, to form some basis for rhythmic movement at a reasonable speed. Could this have been a basis for rhythmic movement such as we have just mentioned? This can only be a hypothesis, for there is no way to check it, but it does seem to me that almost all creatures seem to have an innate tendency to move together in the same rhythm when moving in groups, and this without any audible signal, so that some form of rhythmic movement may have preceded vocalization.

But Why Does Music Develop from Such Beginnings? What is the Purpose of Music?

There are four obvious purposes: dance, personal or communal entertainment, communication, and ritual.

Dance we have already mentioned, though we can never know whether rhythmic motion led to the use of accompaniment, or whether the use of rhythm for any work led to people moving rhythmically in a way that became dance. It is well accepted in anthropology that when people are working, or moving together, their movements fall into a rhythm, that people may grunt and make other noises into that rhythm. The grunts may move into something that verges on or morphs into song; the other noises may be claps or beating pairs of objects together (concussive) or beating one object on another (percussive). Such objects can only be idiophonic, such as sticks, stones, and other solid objects that require no additional features to help them make a sound, in the classificatory system for instruments ( Hornbostel and Sachs, 1914 ). This is simply because to create a drum with a skin (membranophones) is a complex process, because a skin will not produce sound unless it is under tension.

There is no doubt whatsoever that rhythmic sound without any melodic input must be regarded as music. It appears in many cultures, even if rarely, and we have Varèse’s Ionization to take as an example from our modern orchestral repertoire.

Our second purpose was personal or communal entertainment. Communal entertainment, to some extent, overlaps with dance and with rhythmic work; personal entertainment overlaps for the mother and baby, mentioned above, with communication, as does the traveler using an instrument to indicate to people or villages that he passes that his purpose is peaceful and that he is not a robber intent on purloining their property, a well-known practice anthropologically but one that we can have no way to measure its antiquity.

Our third purpose, communication by musical means is again widespread. We have the “bush telegraph” in Africa and other parts of the world with slit drums and other instruments, the alphorn in Switzerland and in other mountainous or marshy regions, the conch in Papua New Guinea, as random examples of the use of an instrument to pass messages. We have the whistling language of the Canary Islands ( silbo ) and many other parts of the world, and the high vocal calls of other peoples as examples of non-instrumental music for the same purpose.

Our fourth purpose, ritual, is a well-known trap in archeology and anthropology. Any object, any practice that cannot otherwise be explained, is assigned as “ritual.” But there seems to be no form of religion, to use that word in its widest sense, that does not attract music to its practices. And here, we have another conflict, again that between music and speech. Schönberg’s “invention” of Sprechgesang , an interface between speech and music, was nothing new. Many forms of ritual chants would be difficult to notate precisely in pitch; the words are spoken but they are inflected up and down quasi-melodically. Some bardic narrative is also an example of this, while often breaking intermittently into song. In both cases, the musical inflection renders the text less boring and helps the speaker with his or her memory of the text. It is undoubtedly speech, for the meaning of the words is the essential part, but there is also the element of pitch variation that would make an ethnomusicologist claim it to be music even while the practitioner would often vehemently deny any such claim, especially within the stricter forms of Islam, those in which music is forbidden.

Seemingly more important than these fairly obvious reasons for why music developed is one for why music began in the first place. This is something that Steven Mithen mentions again and again in his book, The Singing Neanderthals ( Mithen, 2005 ): that music is not only cohesive on society but almost adhesive. Music leads to bonding, bonding between mother and child, bonding between groups who are working together or who are together for any other purpose. Work songs are a cohesive element in most pre-industrial societies, for they mean that everyone of the group moves together and thus increases the force of their work. Even today “Music while you Work” has a strong element of keeping workers happy when doing repetitive and otherwise boring work. Dancing or singing together before a hunt or warfare binds the participants into a cohesive group, and we all know how walking or marching in step helps to keep one going. It is even suggested that it was music, in causing such bonding, that created not only the family but society itself, bringing individuals together who might otherwise have led solitary lives, scattered at random over the landscape.

Thus, it may be that the whole purpose of music was cohesion, cohesion between parent and child, cohesion between father and mother, cohesion between one family and the next, and thus the creation of the whole organization of society.

Much of this above can only be theoretical—we know of much of its existence in our own time but we have no way of estimating its antiquity other than by the often-derided “evidence” of the anthropological records of isolated, pre-literate peoples. So let us now turn to the hard evidence of early musical practice, that of the surviving musical instruments. 1

This can only be comparatively late in time, for it would seem to be obvious that sound makers of soft vegetal origin should have preceded those of harder materials that are more difficult to work, whereas it is only the hard materials that can survive through the millennia. Surely natural materials such as grasses, reeds, and wood preceded bone? That this is so is strongly supported by the advanced state of many early bone pipes—the makers clearly knew exactly what they were doing in making musical instruments, with years or generations of experiment behind them on the softer materials. For example, some end-blown and notch-blown flutes, the earliest undoubted ones that we have, from Geissenklösterle and Hohle Fels in Swabia, Germany, made from swan, vulture wing (radius) bones, and ivory in the earliest Aurignacian period (between 43,000 and 39,000 years BP), have their fingerholes recessed by thinning an area around the hole to ensure an airtight seal when the finger closes them. This can only be the result of long experience of flute making.

So how did musical instruments begin? First a warning: with archeological material, we have what has been found; we do not have what has not been found. A site can be found and excavated, but if another site has not been found, then it will not have been excavated. Thus, absence of material does not mean that it did not exist, only that it has not been found yet. Geography is relevant too. Archeology has been a much older science in Europe than elsewhere, so that most of our evidence is European, whereas in Africa, where all species of Homo seem to have originated, site archeology is in its infancy. Also, we have much evidence of bone pipes simply because a piece of bone with a number of holes along its length is fairly obviously a probable musical instrument, whereas how can we tell whether some bone tubes without fingerholes might have been held together as panpipes? Or whether a number of pieces of bone found together might or might not have been struck together as idiophones? We shall find one complex of these later on here which certainly were instruments. And what about bullroarers, those blades of bone, with a hole or a constriction at one end for a cord, which were whirled around the player’s head to create a noise-like thunder or the bellowing of a bull, or if small and whirled faster sounded like the scream of a devil? We have many such bones, but how many were bullroarers, how many were used for some other purpose?

So how did pipes begin? Did someone hear the wind whistle over the top of a broken reed and then try to emulate that sound with his own breath? Did he or his successors eventually realize that a shorter piece of reed produced a higher pitch and a longer segment a lower one? Did he ever combine these into a group of tubes, either disjunctly, each played by a separate player, as among the Venda of South Africa and in Lithuania, or conjointly lashed together to form a panpipe for a single player? Did, over the generations, someone find that these grouped pipes could be replaced with a single tube by boring holes in it, with each hole representing the length of one of that group? All this is speculation, of course, but something like it must have happened.

Or were instruments first made to imitate cries? The idea of the hunting lure, the device to imitate an animal’s cry and so lure it within reach, is of unknown age. Or were they first made to imitate the animal in a ritual to call for the success of tomorrow’s hunt? Some cries can be imitated by the mouth; others need a tool, a short piece of cane, bits of reed or grass or bone blown across the end like a key or a pen-top. Others are made from a piece of bark held between the tongue and the lip (I have heard a credit card used in this way!). The piece of cane or bone would only produce a single sound, but the bark, or in Romania a carp scale, can produce the most beautiful music as well as being used as a hunting call. The softer materials will not have survived and with the many small segments of bone that we have, there is no way to tell whether they might have been used in this way or whether they are merely the detritus from the dining table.

We have many whistles made from an animal phalange or toe bone, blown between a pair of protrusions at one end, across a sound hole near the center. Two of them come from the Mousterian period of the Middle Paleolithic, over 50,000 years ago, and there are many from the Aurignacian down to the Magdalenian and later; most, but not all, are reindeer phalanges. D’Errico has warned us, though, that the “sound hole” on many of these look as though they were made from a carnivore bite ( D’Errico et al., 2003 ). It was in the Mousterian period that the Neanderthals co-existed with Homo Sapiens ; the latter arrived in Europe between fifty and forty thousand years ago (though far earlier in the Near East), whereas Neanderthals had long been established in Europe, perhaps as long as 200,000 years before. Whether any that were blown by humans were used for signaling, or whether they were also used for music we cannot know, but whistles are certainly regarded as musical instruments.

More controversially in this Mousterian period, and certainly associated with other Neanderthal remains, is the young cave bear femur from the Divje Babe cave in Slovenia, dated to around 60,000 years Before the Present (BP). This has two holes in it and what might be three others at the broken-off ends, two on one side and one on the other. The fragment of bone is just over 10 cm long and while many people have claimed it as a flute, for it can certainly produce several pitches when reproductions of it are blown, many others have claimed that the holes are the result of other carnivores gnawing it, especially at the ends. As for the two complete holes, some writers have claimed that they are just the right size, shape, and spacing to have been produced by bears, for whose presence in the cave there is ample evidence, nor does there seem to be any trace of any possible human work on the bone. There is a very considerable literature on this possible instrument, well summed up and cited by Morley and by D’Errico et al., and the general consensus had been that it was not a musical instrument but simply the result of animal action. Nevertheless, the original discoverers have returned to the attack with a recent publication ( Turk, 2014 ) which goes to show that human agency not only could have but did pierce those holes. For now, we can only leave this question open, with all the problems of an unicum; there are convincing conclusions on both sides of the argument, with at present rather greater weight on the “yes” side, partly due to this recent publication, and partly to the evidence in the following paragraph. What we really need are more examples from the Mousterian period.

This bone does raise the whole question of whether H. neanderthalensis knew of or practised music in any form. For rhythm, we can only say surely, as above—if earlier hominids could have, so could H. neanderthalensis . Could they have sung? A critical anatomical feature is the position of the larynx ( Morley, 2013 , 135ff); the lower the larynx in the throat the longer the vocal cords and thus the greater flexibility of pitch variation and of vowel sounds (to put it at its simplest). It would seem to have been that with H. heidelbergensis and its successors that the larynx was lower and thus that singing, as distinct from humming, could have been possible, but “seems to have been” is necessary because, as is so often, this is still the subject of controversy. However, it does seem fairly clear that H. neanderthalensis could indeed have sung. It follows, too, that while the Divje Babe “pipe” may or may not have been an instrument, others may yet be found that were instruments. There is evidence that the Neanderthals had at least artistic sensibilities, for there are bones with scratch marks on them that may have been some form of art, and certainly there is a number of small pierced objects, pieces of shell, animal teeth, and so forth, found in various excavations that can only have served as beads for a necklace or other ornamentation – or just possibly as rattles. There have also been found pieces of pigments of various colors, some of them showing wear marks and thus that they had been used to color something, and at least one that had been shaped into the form of a crayon, indicating that some reasonably delicate pigmentation had been desired. Burials have been found, with some small deposits of grave goods, though whether these reveal sensibilities or forms of ritual or belief, we cannot know ( D’Errico et al., 2003 , 19ff). There have also been found many bone awls, including some very delicate ones which, we may presume, had been used to pierce skins so that they could be sewn together. All this leads us to the conclusion that the Neanderthals had at least some artistic and other feelings, were capable of some musical practices, even if only vocal, and were clothed, rather than being the grunting, naked savages that have been assumed in the past.

It is in the Middle and Upper Paleolithic, from the Aurignacian period, which starts around 43,000 BP in eastern Europe and around 40,000 in the west, to the Magdalenian and later, ending around 10,000 BP, which we have a very considerable number of instruments, plus a few representations. Many of them, like those from Geissenklösterle above, are end-blown flutes made of bone, most commonly of large birds such as vultures and swans. Some of them are blown via a notch; some appear to be duct flutes, similar to our recorders, though of course the block made of wood, pith, or fiber has not survived—more probably, they are likely to have been tongue-duct flutes, using the tongue in the end instead of a block, and some are listed as such in Morley’s tables—and others may have been plain-end blown, diagonally across the top, like the Arab nay . With these last, though, it is possible that a reed was used as the sound generator, either a double reed like that of our oboe or a split-cane single reed like that of many Arab instruments, or possibly even lip-blown (trumpeted), though the narrowness of the bore makes this seem less likely. It is, therefore, probably better to refer to this last group as pipes, rather than as flutes.

Reproductions of many can be and have been played, but there is little to be learnt from this practice. We know what pitches and sounds we can get out of them, but unless we know their playing techniques, which of course we do not know, we cannot tell what sort of pitches and tone qualities they would have obtained in antiquity. Every recorder and tin-whistle player knows of a number of ways to inflect the pitch and the tone; every Arab nay player knows even more, and ethnomusicologists have produced evidence for even more, and our experimental musicians have shown that quite extraordinary pitches and sounds can be obtained from many of our orchestral instruments, sounds that their makers or normal players never conceived. Thus the archeologists (who are seldom trained musicians), who publish the scales and pitches of the pipes that they have found, can give us no more than conjecture and the experience of their own musicality. I have a collection of musical instruments from all over the world; I know the sounds that I can get out of them, but without the presence of the original player, or a field recording of the original player on that very instrument, I have no way to tell what sounds or pitches he or she produced. So much less can we have any idea what sounds and pitches were heard in the Paleolithic times.

However, there is one salient point, emphasized by D’Errico: a significant number of these pipes has varied spacing of finger holes. While, it would seem that the majority have the finger holes evenly spaced along the tube, there are certainly some that have a wider gap between the second and third holes. There are two fairly obvious possible reasons for this: one is that their “scale” of pitches had intervals similar to wholetones and minor thirds; the other that it was convenient or comfortable to have a wider gap between the two hands. This latter suggestion is raised because it was a standard feature of our flutes from the later Middle Ages right through into the early nineteenth century, and this was not only because from around 1700 the middle joint of the Baroque flute was divided into an upper and lower joint at this point – the earlier one-piece flutes also showed this gap. There are also some Aurignacian flutes or pipes that have one hole closer to another, showing that a semitone or a small wholetone was desired. Thus, these details emphasize that not only were these well-developed instruments, with the bodies well-scraped and smoothed, the finger holes with secure seating for the fingers, a certain amount of incised decoration, but that also there was a desire for precise tuning, and that they were not just made to produce fairly random pitches.

In addition, there is the point that many of these features appear both in Geissenklösterle in Germany, in Isturitz in France, in Spain, and also elsewhere, and over long periods of time, strongly suggesting that populations were not isolated but that there were links between them. This is not so surprising. If H. sapiens had traveled across Africa and into Europe, surely they could also travel between these areas and elsewhere.

There is little point in listing all these pipes; all the Paleolithic examples from Europe, or close by, found before 2013 are listed by Morley in his Appendices.

Were there other instruments? There is at least one conch trumpet, found in the Marsoulas cave, in the Haute-Garonne area of southern France, dating from around 20,000 years BP. Shell is a hard material that survives the ages, and although we have so far only this one example from the Upper Paleolithic, we have a very considerable number from the Neolithic times, some of them much further from the sea, so it is fair to assume a continuous use (Montagu, in press). 2 So what about animal horns? Here the material is soft, and only in very dry conditions such as desert sands do any survive; none of those that I have heard of or seen were blowing horns, but it seems likely that they existed. For blowing, the horn must be naturally hollow, such as those of the cow family, sheep and goats, antelopes, elephant tusks, hollow wood, gourds, and wide-bore bamboo, with the tip broken or cut off, or a hole bored in the side; such were surely blown in high antiquity ( Montagu, 2014 ). There are several bullroarers from the Magdalenian period that we can be certain were instruments. There are many phalange whistles later than the Mousterian ones noted above. There are rasps, usually bones notched along their length, which would have been scraped with another bone or a stone for rhythmic music.

There is the complex of mammoth bones dating from around 20,000 BP, found in the Ukraine and published by Bibikov (1981) . Many of the bones show signs of wear, almost certainly from repeated striking, and others, though this is not mentioned in the English summary, have striations similar to those of rasps, suggesting that some were scraped whereas others were struck. It is claimed that this was an ensemble, and although it would be difficult to prove that this was so, it would be even more difficult to show that each of these bones was struck only singly as an individual solo instrument. So here perhaps we have the first evidence of an “orchestra.”

There are from the Magdalenian period, some 12,000 years BP, the caves themselves, where not only were stalactites struck but the caves themselves were used as resonators for sounds; both Lucie Rault and Lya Dams have brought together a number of convincing reports of this ( Dams, 1985 ; Rault, 2000 ). Resonant stones must also have been struck outside the caves, the so-called rock gongs, boulders struck on resonant points, and these are of unknown antiquity but many bear well-worn cup marks on their surfaces. Rock gongs were first reported by Bernard Fagg in Nigeria, and following his article ( Fagg, 1956 ), many more have been reported from around the world ( Fagg, 1997 ).

There is no evidence in the Paleolithic period for stringed instruments nor for skin drums.

At what point in history did someone discover that by cupping the hands together and blowing between the knuckles of the thumbs produced a sound? This is a vessel flute or ocarina whose pitch is varied by moving the fingers to alter the area of open hole. Many peoples have long used gourds and other hollow vegetal objects, and today pottery, to play music in this way, also with the hands as hunting lures, but since there are no animal bones of such a shape, we can have no evidence of vessel flutes earlier than the Neolithic, in which period pottery first came into use.

Did voice changers precede instruments? Did someone sing into a hollow object to change his voice from that of a human into that of a spirit or a deity? Was a shell sung into before ever a shell was blown? This precedence is something that has at times been suggested, but it can never be more than a hypothesis for we have no evidence to prove it. We do know that certain Greek statues had voice changers built in, usually a tube with a skin over one end, our kazoo, and there are many African masks with such a device.

Stringed instruments probably originated by the Mesolithic period, and certainly by the Neolithic, for it is in those periods that we begin to find flint arrow-heads, and the archer’s bow and the musical bow are symbiotic as we shall see below ( Balfour, 1899 ).

Skin drums (membranophones), as we said above, need the skin to be under tension to function. At what stage could there have been frames to which a skin could have been fastened securely enough to be tight enough to play? One can only say as early as skins were dressed, wetted, and dried on a frame, but since neither skins nor wooden frames, nor hollow logs, can ever have survived, this is simply an unknown; ceramic bodies rigid enough to support the skins can only have been available in or shortly before the Neolithic period.

So far, we have been discussing instruments only from Europe or its immediate environment. Simply, this is because where the evidence is. Archeology has been going on longer in Europe than elsewhere, as we have said. Much is being found now in China, but since most of it has been published in Chinese, much of this information is inaccessible, at least to me.

All the instruments that we have discussed above continued through the Neolithic and, with archery and pottery available, many others have joined them.

The earliest stringed instrument is undoubtedly the musical bow ( Balfour, 1899 ). The one string instrument that might possibly be earlier is one that is identical with an animal trap—a noosed cord, presumably gut or sinew, running from a bent stick or branch to a peg in the ground. When an animal puts its head or leg into the noose, the cord is jerked from the peg and the stick or branch springs up and traps the animal. It has been suggested by Sachs, Balfour, and others that the hunter may also have plucked the string, so creating the ground bow, varying the tension of the cord, and thus the pitch, by bending the stick or branch. The ground harp is of unknown antiquity—our only evidence for the existence of the instrument is nineteenth-century reports from anthropologists.

Bows themselves, of course, never survive, but the presence of arrowheads in the lithic evidence proves their existence. Whether the archer’s bow preceded the musician’s or vice versa is arguable, but man’s addiction to warfare, and even more to hunting, makes the archer’s the more likely. We have ethnographic evidence for the use of the same bow for both purposes by the same person, but each developed in different ways, the archer’s for strength and the musician’s for producing musical sounds in different ways. The string of the musical bow is most commonly tapped by a light stick, initially presumably by an arrow, and is held to the player’s mouth where, by changing the shape of the mouth, different overtones are sounded as with the jews harp (better and less prejudiciously called trump, which is the earlier English name). By dividing the string with a loop of cord linking the string to the stave, or by shortening the string at one end by the thumb of the holding hand, two fundamentals, each with their own overtones, makes a much greater range of pitches available. Attaching a gourd resonator to the stave creates greater volume, and opening or closing the mouth of the gourd against the player’s chest will again elicit overtones. Both these forms survive to the present day in various modifications and many parts of the world, especially in Africa south of the Sahara ( Kirby, 1934 ). A third form consists of attaching several bows to one resonator to form a pluriarc, as is still found in Central Africa.

One can postulate developments from both the gourd bow and the pluriarc. The gourd, eventually of wood, can be built on to one end of the stave to create both the category of instruments called lutes, with a straight stave as the neck, and of harps, with a curved stave. If the two outermost bows of the pluriarc become rigid, with a cross bar running between them to hold the distal ends of the strings of the inner bows, which then become redundant, the instrument is then much more stable and is called a lyre. Whether such developments took place, or whether lutes, harps, and lyres were independently invented, we can never know, but my own guess, based partly on various intermediate forms in various cultures, is for this process of development.

As for drums, frame drums are still ubiquitous around the world today, not only with our own tambourine, but a wooden or pottery body of manifold shapes exists almost everywhere. One possible early source for another type of drum is created by fixing the skin of the animal just eaten, over the top of the pot in which it had been cooked, so creating the instrument very appropriately called the kettledrum, using the word kettle in the sense of a caldron.

Another very common use of pottery is to create a rattle, a vessel containing seeds, pebbles, or nodules of pottery. Such vessel rattles must have been long preceded by gourds or woven leaves or baskets, all of which are still common today.

Once humanity entered the metal ages, the potentialities of instruments becomes infinite.

We can never know to what extent any groups of instruments or voices played together in high antiquity, though the existence of the group of mammoth bones above, does strongly suggest an ensemble. Not until the days of representational iconography, as in Mesopotamia and Egypt, or with the introduction of literacy, such as our Bible, do we have any real evidence. We have plenty of information from these sources.

What then did music sound like? We have early notations from Sumeria ( Galpin, 1936 ) and Ancient Greece, the well-known hymn to Apollo, covering a wide range of pitches; Hickmann tried to derive a notation from hand-signals, called cheironomy, portrayed in Egyptian paintings and carvings ( Hickmann, 1961 ). It has been thought by ethnomusicologists that less-advanced cultures than those, used pentatonic scales (five steps to the octave) such as we can still hear today in some areas, and perhaps even fewer steps with or without knowledge of the octave. But for these, naturally there is no evidence. Even with Sumerian, Greek, and Egyptian systems, the various transcriptions of which are all controversial, we cannot know the actual sounds, for not until the later classical Greek period do we have written evidence of the sizes of scalar steps.

We do know, from the transcription of cuneiform tablets, that it was the Babylonians, and very possibly the Sumerians before them, who cataloged the skies and their constellations, establishing thus the basics of the calendar and of time that we use today, and who invented the hexadecimal system of mathematics. They turned their attention to sound also, and the Sumerians developed a system of diatonic scales based on alternating fourths and fifths. The Greeks, who took such knowledge from them, devised a diatonic scale based on the ratios of the harmonic series, starting from the eighth partial, a scale today called Just Temperament, one that is still used today by unaccompanied voices and sometimes by bowed string players or wind instruments playing without keyboards. For other instruments, such as lyres and harps, Just Temperament could also serve well, but only and until the players wished to change key; as soon as they did so, for reasons more complex than are needed here but are discussed below, chaos would ensue. Nevertheless, despite the purity of such a scale, we know that even the Greeks used other and more complex scales ( Barbour, 1951 ) as, from the anthropological record, did many other peoples. Therefore, despite such transcriptions as we have of the ancient texts above, we can have no certain knowledge of what the music sounded like, for we do not know the exact sizes of the steps of the scales.

Even within Europe the 13th partial, the so-called alphorn fa, halfway between F and F-sharp appears in vocal music and on bagpipes as well as on natural horns and trumpets; the neutral third, between E and E-flat also appears, and as we shall see, the third is the most mutable interval in our classical music. In the Balkans, people sing in close seconds rather than wider intervals or unisons.

One thing that the ethnomusicologists can tell us is that either humanity has no inbuilt sense of consonant tonality, or that other people’s sense of consonance is different from ours. The musical bow will by its nature produce the pitches of Just Temperament, for all its pitches are the overtones of the harmonic series, but despite this some peoples, who use the bow, will sing in seven equal steps to the octave. The one interval that does seem to be common to almost all peoples is the octave; this most probably originates with men and women singing in “unison” together, for women’s voices tend to be an octave higher than men’s. It is also a natural step to recognize when any piece of music extends beyond the range of one octave, and this repetition of scalar steps beyond the octave is built into many woodwind fingering systems.

We have many other examples of other scales that do not use what we, in our culture, may consider to be pure tuning. Let us take just one example that may be familiar to many of us today, the Javanese gamelan. This uses two different scales, slendro and pelog . Both employ the octave, but neither uses a pure fifth or third, the notes that make up our “common chord.” Slendro has five almost equal steps to the octave; pelog has seven rather less equal steps. Not one of the steps of slendro is the same as those of pelog . Nor were the slendro or pelog in Java exactly the same between one gamelan and another, though similar, before the recent days when almost all gamelans are tuned to the pitches used by Radio Yogyakarta.

Nor are the scales of the Near and Middle East compatible with ours ( Wizārat al-Tarbiyah wa-al-Ta‘līm, 1934 ). Nor even, save for the octave, are the pitches of Just Intonation the same as those of the Equal Temperament that we use on our pianos today. Each culture develops the tuning system that best suits its ideas of musicality. It is up to the cognitive scientists to determine why this should be so, but they have to admit, if they are willing to listen to the exotic musics of the world, that these differences exist.

Let us now return to the history of music and of the instruments on which it was played.

At least we do know what instruments some peoples used in the later millennia BCE, for not only do we have a few survivals in our museums from the Sumerian, Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, Etruscan, and Roman periods, and also from the Orient, but we also have a wealth of iconography, much of it published in the Musikgeschichte in Bildern series by the Deutsche Verlag für Musik in Leipzig from the 1960s onward. This series is, alas, incomplete, for its publication ceased with the reunification of Germany.

We see among the Sumerians and Babylonians lyres and harps of various kinds, the latter quite small, a horizontal or vertical sound box with, at the distal end, a forepillar standing up at 90°, whereas in Egypt harps were normally curved, some of them as tall as the player, others, called the bow harp, were small enough to be held on the shoulder, and these last gradually passed into Central Africa where they are still found today. We see also lutes, a hollowed sound box like a small trough, with the open top covered with a skin to form the belly. A rod acts as the neck and passes through slits in the skin to hold it in place. These also still appear in Africa today. All these instruments were plucked, either with the fingers or a plectrum—the bow, such as we use on our fiddles, was as yet far in the future. There were pipes, usually double, held one in each hand, though sometimes, especially later in Egypt, lashed together so that the fingers of each hand could reach across both pipes. There were occasional drums, some very large, and many forms of rattles. We also see many of these instruments combined into what appear to be ensembles. This use of bands of instruments is confirmed in literature, for example in chapter 3 of the book of Daniel in our Bible where, when all the instruments play together, all those present bow down to the deity. Again in the Bible (II Samuel 6), a band of instruments escorts the Ark of the Covenant to David’s city, with David dancing before them to the scorn of his queen. 3 Beware, however, of the huge choirs and groups of instruments in the two books of Chronicles; this is a late account, written long after any of the events it records, and smacks strongly of a child’s playground exaggeration: “my brother is bigger and better than yours.”

In ancient Greece, the lyre and the double pipe, the aulos , predominated. Lyres came in three forms. The simplest, the chelys or lyra , had a tortoise-shell body with two vertical curved wooden rods or horns, set in the shell with a third rod running horizontally as the cross bar. The strings were attached at one end to the bottom of the shell and at the other were twisted with kollopes , strips of skin, and wound round the horizontal bar. These kollopes set firmly enough on the bar to hold a tuning, but could be turned on the bar to retune. This type of lyre was taught to, and used for after-dinner symposia, by all educated people. It traveled up the Nile to the Meroitic people, probably in the Hellenistic period, and eventually throughout East Africa, where it is still used today, with the skin kollopes replaced with strips of cloth and the tortoise-shell with a gourd or wooden body as the resonator, and a skin belly. A more elegant form of Greek lyre, with longer curved arms, was called the barbiton . The professional musician’s version, the kithara , was much more elaborate, with a wooden box-body and with what appears to be some form of semi-mechanized tuning devices. All three had gut strings that were normally plucked with a plectrum of wood, bone, or ivory, and all three are seen on many Greek vases and statues.

The aulos was a reed-pipe, shorter and somewhat stouter than the Sumerian and Egyptian; whether with a double reed like that of the oboe or a single reed like that of early folk clarinets as in the Near East today, is much argued, but Schlesinger’s illustrations clearly show both types, though probably more often with the double reed ( Schlesinger, 1939 ). The aulos passed on to Rome, where it was known as the tibia , to which quite elaborate tuning mechanisms were applied, with rings that could be turned to close off one hole and open another slightly differently placed, so as to play in a different key or mode. There was also a single pipe, the monaulos , and that is still found today, with a large double reed, all down the Silk Road, from Turkey, Kurdistan, and Armenia to China, Korea, and Japan. Whether it traveled east from Greece, or whether it originated in Central Asia like a number of other instruments and then traveled both east and west, is debatable.

That several instruments originated in Central Asia, probably somewhere between Persia and the Caspian Sea, is undoubted. The gong started there and was known in the Near East by St Paul (I Corinthians 13:1) as chalkos ēchon ( Montagu, 2001 , 123). The Chinese encyclopedias said that they got the gong from the West, which also suggests a Central Asian origin. The long trumpet seems to have started there also and it spread across the whole of Asia and to Greece, Etruria, and Rome, and in the Middle Ages through to North Africa as alnafir and, with the Moors, up into Spain as the añafil , and thence into the rest of Europe, and with the Hausa down into Ghana and Nigeria as the kakaki .

According to Al Farabi the Arab ’ud , that became the lute in medieval Europe, also originated there, and so, around the eighth century CE, did the fiddle bow ( Bachmann, 1969 ). Initially, this was a rough stick or reed scraping the string, but it was not long before it was modified with the strands of horsehair that we still use today.

This at last allowed stringed instruments to produce a sustained sound, something that could emulate the human voice, as all wind instruments had been able to do ever since their introduction.

In the early thirteenth century, and probably a little earlier, there came a revolution of the instruments we used in Europe. This seems to have been due to the often-interrupted symbiosis of Moorish, Jewish, and Christian cultures in Spain, and possibly also with some effect from returning Crusaders from the Holy Land. A flood of new instruments appeared, as can be seen in the many miniatures of the Cántigas de Santa Maria , a series of poems written by Alfonso X, called El Sabio, the wise. 4 We see there the Arab ’ud which became our lute, the small bowed fiddle, the rebab , which became our rebec, the reed-blown pipe the zamr , which became our shawm, the ancestor of our oboe, several types of bagpipe, harps with a forepillar, various zithers such as the qanun that became our canon and then the psaltery, the transverse flute, other types of lute that became our gitterns and eventually citterns and guitars, alnafir that became the Spanish añafil and our long trumpet, pipe and tabor, the pipe played with one hand and the tabor struck with the other, which became a standard one-man band from the Middle Ages into the sixteenth century, the timbre, a frame drum that became our tambourine, and the naqqere , two small kettledrums, our nakers, that hung low from the belt in front of the player, and eventually became our timpani. Within the ensuing century, these spread all over western Europe and can be seen in a great many medieval manuscripts, church carvings, and other sources.

We know little of the extent that these played together. There are some group scenes in the Cántigas , but mostly, the miniatures show either one instrument or two of the same sort tuning or playing to each other. We do see large groups of instruments in manuscripts of the following centuries, but these are mostly portrayals of biblical scenes or of texts such as psalm 150 and may not represent anything that actually happened in the Middle Ages.

Then, in the fourteenth century, came another revolution, this time an industrial one ( Gimpel, 1988 ). All over Europe, there had been windmills and watermills, primarily for grinding grain, but often also for minor industrial purposes. Now came the idea of siting watermills under the arches of bridges on major rivers, where the flow of water, restricted by the pillars of the bridge, thus produced far greater force. This powered mills for working metals and, for our purposes, of drawing brass and iron wire to standard quality and in much finer gages than had been available earlier except in softer, and more costly, metals such as silver and gold. The result was strings for harps, psalteries, and dulcimers and thence to keyboard instruments, first the clavichord, which was a keyed development of the monochord, and then the harpsichord. All, as can be seen in the manuscript of Arnault de Zwolle from around 1440, were established by that date ( Le Cerf and Labande, 1932 ).

The use of keyboards led to a revision of musical pitch and tuning. Just Temperament had served well for unaccompanied voices and some solo instruments, but its inadequacies had now become more apparent. If one depends on the partials of the harmonic series, their ratios makes it obvious that the step from 8 to 9 is greater than that of 9 to 10. To avoid using sharps and flats, let us take these pitches as C for 8, D for 9, and E for 10. And for clarity let us use the musicologist’s interval-measuring system of cents, analogous to the general use of millimeters for linear measurement. The major tone of 8–9 is 204 cents; the minor tone of 9–10 is 182 cents, and together these make up the third, C to E, of 386 cents. Now if we want to play in C major, all is well, but if instead, we want to start a scale on D, we are in trouble, for where we need a major tone we have only a minor tone. Voices have no trouble with this for they simply shift the D and the E, but for any instrument with strings such as those of a lyre, a harp, or keyboards, the player has to stop and retune all his strings. The problem was already recognized by the ancient Greeks, and it was allegedly Pythagoras who solved the problem and who decided to make all the wholetones the same size, with 204 cents for each. However, adding those together produces a wildly sharp third of 408 cents from C to E, which when used in a common chord with C and G was so intolerable that in the Middle Ages it was regarded as a dissonance. Thus the Pythagorean Temperament was intolerable on the new keyboard instruments, and the music theorist Pietro Aron devised a new temperament in 1523. He returned to the natural third of 386 cents and, taking its mean or average of 193 cents for each whole tone, created the Quarter-comma Meantone Temperament. To the modern ear, accustomed to the Equal Temperament of our piano, with its wholetones of 200 cents and semitones of 100 cents, these differences may seem small, but if one listens to music played in other temperaments, it really does sound different—even today a 400-cent third still sounds quite badly out of tune. This whole subject is quite complex and Barbour, 1951 , or the article on Temperaments in the New Grove Dictionary of Music , will give fuller details. 5 The basic problem is that the natural fifth of 702 cents is incompatible with the octave of 1200 cents; if one piles up a sequence of fifths, C to G, G to D, D to A and so on, the series will never return to C, only to a B-sharp 22 cents higher than C. Somehow those 22 cents, called a comma, have to be brought back into the octave, and this is done, with greater or lesser success, by using one of the various so-called irregular temperaments.

We have been neglecting vocal music. This has continued unchecked through the ages. When and how choral music, in our modern sense of song, evolved we do not know, but it had certainly appeared by biblical times and by that of the Greek dramatists. While we have mentioned some early suggested musical notations, music was normally taught by rote or simply by listening to others and joining in. What, if any, types of harmony were used, other than singing in octaves, we cannot know for we have no notation system, other than those early ones mentioned above for a basic melody, until we reach the early church chants. Here, we meet Gregorian and other church chants. These appear initially to have been purely monophonic, with everyone singing in unison. The earliest notation, called neumes, shows musical movement rather than precise pitches, and can only have served as a reminder of how music, already learned by rote, was to proceed. What pitch the music started on would depend on the preferred vocal range of the singers. Not until the thirteenth century do we start to see music written on a staff, then usually on only four lines rather than our present five-line stave, and with a symbol to tell us which line is C, similarly to our own alto or tenor clefs.

By the end of the twelfth century, we have composers such as Perotin writing organum, two or more parallel lines a fifth, fourth, or octave apart, with some slight freedom for each line to ornament a little. Organum probably derives from the organ itself, for while the first organs, which appeared in Alexandria in the second century BCE, were purely monophonic, though with the ability to play a chord, the larger church organs of the ninth or tenth centuries CE, used a system called Blockwerk . This meant that each key, when depressed, sounded a chord, a group of fourths or fifths and octaves. We have vivid descriptions of the tenth-century organ of Winchester Cathedral in Britain ( Perrot, 1971 ), and we have surviving pipes from the organ of Bethlehem from the eleventh century of the Latin Kingdom of the Crusaders; the groups of lengths of these pipes show that this organ must also have used Blockwerk ( Montagu, 2005 ).

What about secular music? Here, our earliest manuscripts seem to be from the thirteenth century with Adam de la Halle and his contemporaries writing motets for singers, and with anonymous, usually monophonic, dance music. Early polyphony, music in more than one part, was normally based on a cantus firmus, or tenor, often derived from a church chant, around which other, more elaborate parts, were woven. Polyphony of this sort seems to have been a purely European development; other cultures then, and in many cases still, prefer a single line or monophony, or if singing in groups or a single line with accompaniment, using heterophony, people all singing much, but by no means exactly, the same. Later motets might have three or four independent lines, sometimes each with their own text, woven together. These, in the early Renaissance, led to the madrigals and thence to our various styles of choral music today.

How do we define public performance, and how far back does it go? If one defines it as making music where other people can hear you, it must be as early as music ever existed. Any dance, whether Australian corroborees, war or hunting dances, people dancing on the village green, or any other similar occasions, must have involved music of some sort—how else could people keep their movement together? Here, we return to the use of rhythm, and surely to that of concussion or percussion of some sort, whether just body or hand clapping or that of instruments.

The shaman has always used music of some sort, often to help to throw him- or herself into the necessary trance. The bard has always been a valued member of society—and has always chanted and sung his lays, and always to self-accompaniment on an instrument. All these were “public” performances, either deliberately or at the very least where other people could hear them. At what stage was music deliberately performed to a public? Dance again, of course, and in religious ceremonies. The Christian church could be considered to be the first concert hall, with all free to enter and to hear the chant and, as time went on, listening to the deliberately composed music for the Mass. The medieval mystery plays were enacted in front of or within the church, and these always included music and were designed deliberately to draw in the public and to show them aspects of their religion.

When did people pay to hear music? Surely, this is part of our definition of public performance. Bards were certainly paid, domestic ones with board and lodging and presumably some cash, and itinerant ones certainly with cash or its portable equivalent, and shamans and medicine-men or -women always with cash or its equivalent, for that was the only way to be sure of a cure rather than a curse.

Formal concerts are said to have begun in Italy with the Accademia , meetings of intellectuals and musicians, in the fifteenth century, and private groups of musicians and musically interested people proliferated in many places, coming together to hear their own members playing and/or singing, for example the German Collegia . Aristocratic courts had their own orchestras, often merely for prestige, but sometimes, because the prince was himself a composer and musician. All these were private occasions, with admission confined to their members, their friends, and their guests.

Public concerts, with people paying for admission, began first in England perhaps as extensions of the Elizabethan theaters, where again people paid for admission, and which had often included musical performances along with the plays. England had no princely courts such as were common in continental Europe, and it was the first country to grow a middle class educated enough at the many grammar schools to appreciate musical culture and wealthy enough to pay for its pleasures. John Banister, himself a musician, was the first to invite the public to come, pay, and hear his concerts in 1673, and he was famously followed by Thomas Britton, “the small coal man,” who opened a room above his shop to paying customers in 1678 and continued to provide weekly concerts for 36 years. Very shortly afterward, the first hall designed for musical performance was opened in London. It seems that in other countries such public performances did not take place until into the eighteenth century, and then in theaters and other improvised places, or out of doors. It was not until 1781 that the Leipzig Gewandhaus was built, the first public concert hall on the Continent.

A more elaborate form of music, the opera, began also as a court entertainment, but it rapidly became a public entertainment for which people paid for admission, probably because the costs of mounting an opera are far greater than chamber or orchestral concerts, and the first public opera house opened in Venice in 1637.

This is as far as we need to go for Europe, but what of the rest of the world? We have historical records and encyclopedias of music for the high cultures of China and India. We have, through archeology, surviving instruments such as the great assembly of Marquis Yi of Zeng in Suizhou, Hubei Province of China ( Falkenhausen, 1993 ; So, 2000 ). 6 This was found in his tomb of around 433 BCE and elsewhere a Chinese set of Neolithic period bone flutes was found and published widely. Through the treasures of the great Depository of the Shōsōin in Nara ( Shōsōin Office, 1967 ), we know how the instruments of the Chinese Tang court passed to Japan, and through the work of Laurence Picken and his successors how the music of that court changed in Japan ( Picken et al., 1981 ff). All this tells us nothing further of how music began, but it does tell us that music progressed and developed, analogously with our own, in the high cultures of the world.

But, we have little knowledge of how, or even whether, music developed and changed in the rest of the world. We have glimpses, patchily, through the ages due to the iconographical records of some areas that we have mentioned above. We know much that goes on today, thanks to those ethnomusicologists who have been working around the world since the latter part of the nineteenth century, and we are dependent on their work for evidence of any possible sort simply because much of the music and the performances they recorded or described has vanished within our own lifetimes due to the globalized transmission of music. But even with that evidence, to what extent can we project any of it back in time? We could suggest that before the days of European exploration of the rest of the world, from the fifteenth century onward, peoples in sub-Saharan Africa were so isolated within their individual areas that their musics never changed from one generation to another. But that is a nineteenth-century attitude, of the time when Europeans refused to believe that sites such as Great Zimbabwe could ever have been built by African peoples, before the recognition of the great metal workers of West Africa and the high artistic levels of the Nok people or of Benin. I believe that any form of back-projection would be dangerous, whether in Africa or anywhere else in the world. I think that we simply have to say that we do not know and to admit that if H. sapiens could progress to such an extent as we know that it did in Europe and the Middle and Far East, so it could have done elsewhere.

We do have to say that much traditional music is dying out around the world, driven out by the perceived “superiority” of so-called “Western” music. Throughout the world now, there are symphony orchestras, even more widely there are all the manifestations of pop and other such musics. Yes, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Stravinsky, and others produced great works of music, but so did those of other cultures, and those musics are vanishing and their cultural contexts are dying out and treasures are being lost. And yet tradition manages to cling on, especially in the areas of pop music. West African versions of all the manifold varieties of popular musics do not sound the same as the New York versions. What we hear as “World Music,” although heavily influenced by Western instruments and practices, still retains its local connotations and styles. The Soviet idea was that the individual solo performer from the eastern provinces should be replaced with groups on a concert platform with orchestras of alto, tenor, and bass versions of his or her instrument, still played their own musics in modified versions of their own styles. Music is and always has been created by people. It changes with time, and the ease of travel from the days of trains and steamships, and especially now globalization, has accelerated the rate of change from the nineteenth century onward. But travel, even on foot and in log canoes, has been with us since the Paleolithic and so has inventiveness. Change in music and change in instruments will always be with us, but traditions, however changed, will always survive.

Author Contributions

The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and approved it for publication.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to the reviewers for their insightful comments.

Supplementary Material

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fsoc.2017.00008/full#supplementary-material .

• ^ All the known archaeological instruments that we have, up to the end of the Neolithic period, are listed in tables by Morley (2013) , and many are illustrated and described in his text.
• ^ Montagu, J. (in press). The Conch Horn .
• ^ For descriptions of all the instruments, see Montagu (2001) .
• ^ Escorial Library, Madrid, Ms. T I 1 (sometimes T. J. 1).
• ^ There is also a comparatively simple explanation available on my website, jeremymontagu.co.uk , as a download: Montagu (1990) .
• ^ This was published fairly briefly as So (2000) , and in much greater detail as Falkenhausen (1993) .

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Keywords: music, rhythm, dance, instruments, development, social cohesion, performance, tonality

Citation: Montagu J (2017) How Music and Instruments Began: A Brief Overview of the Origin and Entire Development of Music, from Its Earliest Stages. Front. Sociol. 2:8. doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2017.00008

Received: 01 March 2017; Accepted: 23 May 2017; Published: 20 June 2017

Reviewed by:

Copyright: © 2017 Montagu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Jeremy Montagu, jeremymontagu@gmail.com

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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Music’s Historical Influence: From Ancient Greece to Modern Times

Oct 25, 2023 | In The Know

Music has played an important role in human history since the earliest civilizations. It has been used for a variety of purposes, including entertainment, religious rituals, communication, and social cohesion. Music can also be a powerful tool for social change and protest.

Music’s Influence During Historical Periods

• Ancient Greece: Music was considered to be an important part of a well-rounded education in ancient Greece. It was believed that music could help to develop the mind and soul. Music was also used in religious ceremonies, theater productions, and other public events.
• Medieval Europe: Music played an important role in the Christian church during the Middle Ages. Gregorian chant was the most common type of music used in church services. Gregorian chant is a type of plainchant that is sung in unison and without accompaniment. Music was also used in secular contexts during the Middle Ages. Minstrels and troubadours traveled from place to place, performing songs and stories for audiences of all social classes.
• Renaissance and Baroque Periods: During the Renaissance and Baroque periods, music became increasingly complex and sophisticated. Composers such as Bach, Handel, and Vivaldi wrote music for a variety of instruments and ensembles. Music was also used in opera and ballet, two new forms of entertainment that emerged during this time.
• Classical Period: The Classical period of music began in the mid-18th century and lasted until the early 19th century. During this time, composers such as Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven wrote music that was characterized by its balance, clarity, and elegance. Classical music was performed in concert halls and salons, and it was also used in opera and ballet.
• Romantic Period: The Romantic period of music began in the early 19th century and lasted until the late 19th century. During this time, composers such as Chopin, Liszt, and Tchaikovsky wrote music that was more expressive and emotional than Classical music. Romantic music was often inspired by literature, art, and nature.
• 20th and 21st Centuries: Music in the 20th and 21st centuries has been characterized by a great deal of diversity and innovation. Composers have experimented with new sounds, rhythms, and instruments. Popular music genres such as jazz, rock, and hip hop have emerged. Music continues to play an important role in our society today, and it is used in a variety of ways, including entertainment, education, and social change.

Music’s Influence on Historical Events

Music has also had a significant influence on various historical events. For example:

• Civil rights movement in the United States: Songs such as “We Shall Overcome” and “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” became anthems for the movement, and they helped to inspire people to fight for equality.
• Anti-apartheid movement in South Africa: Songs such as “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika” and “Asimbonanga” became symbols of the struggle for freedom and equality.
• World War I: Music was used to boost morale and patriotism among soldiers and civilians alike. Songs such as “Over There” and “Keep the Home Fires Burning” became popular during this time.
• World War II: Music was again used to boost morale and patriotism during World War II. Songs such as “White Cliffs of Dover” and “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” were popular during this time.

Music Education at Musicians Institute

Musicians Institute (MI) is a leading music school that offers a variety of programs in music performance, recording engineering, and music business. MI’s programs are designed to prepare students for successful careers in the music industry.

MI’s music performance programs teach students the skills they need to be successful musicians. The programs cover a variety of topics, including music theory, ear training, improvisation, and performance techniques. MI also offers a variety of ensembles for students to participate in, including jazz bands, rock bands, and orchestras.

MI’s recording engineering programs teach students the skills they need to be successful recording engineers. The programs cover a variety of topics, including acoustics, signal processing, and mixing and mastering. MI also has state-of-the-art recording studios that students can use to gain hands-on experience.

MI’s music business programs teach students the skills they need to be successful in the music industry. The programs cover a variety of topics, including artist management, music publishing, and record label operations. MI also has a strong network of alumni who are working in the music industry, and students have the opportunity to network with these professionals and learn from their experiences.

MI is a great place to study music, and its programs can help students to achieve their musical goals and learn about the history of music!

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Home — Essay Samples — Entertainment — Music Industry — Music Through the Ages: A Music History Timeline

Music Through The Ages: a Music History Timeline

• Categories: Human Nature Music Industry Stereotypes

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Published: Jul 17, 2018

Words: 1010 | Pages: 2 | 6 min read

Table of contents

Introduction, the history of music, works cited.

• Boethius, A. M. (1995). The Consolation of Music, Logic, Theology, and Philosophy. Oxford University Press.
• Cook, N. (2000). Music: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.
• DeNora, T. (2000). Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge University Press.
• Levitin, D. J. (2006). This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. Dutton.
• Middleton, R. (2002). Studying Popular Music. Open University Press.
• Tagg, P. (1982). Analysing Popular Music: Theory, Method and Practice. Popular Press.
• Taruskin, R. (2010). Music in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: The Oxford History of Western Music. Oxford University Press.
• Thompson, W. F. (2009). Music, Thought, and Feeling: Understanding the Psychology of Music. Oxford University Press.
• Wallis, G., & Malm, K. (1984). Big Sounds from Small Peoples: The Music Industry in Small Countries. Pendragon Press.
• Zbikowski, L. M. (2002). Conceptualizing Music: Cognitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis. Oxford University Press.

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• > The Cambridge History of the American Essay
• > The Essay in American Music

Book contents

• The Cambridge History of the American Essay
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I The Emergence of the American Essay (1710–1865)
• Part II Voicing the American Experiment (1865–1945)
• 9 Writing Freedom before and after Emancipation
• 10 Social Justice and the American Essay
• 11 “Zones of Contention” in the Genteel Essay
• 12 The American Comic Essay
• 13 Nineteenth-Century American Travel Essays: Aesthetics, Modernity, and National Identity
• 14 American Pragmatism: An Essayistic Conception of Truth
• 15 The Essay in the Harlem Renaissance
• 16 The Southern Agrarians and the New Criticism
• 17 Subjective and Objective: Newspaper Columns
• 18 The Experience of Art: The Essay in Visual Culture
• 19 The Essay in American Music
• Part III Postwar Essays and Essayism (1945–2000)
• Part IV Toward the Contemporary American Essay (2000–2020)
• Recommendations for Further Reading

19 - The Essay in American Music

from Part II - Voicing the American Experiment (1865–1945)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2024

The history of American music writing – essays on music, criticism, reviews, pamphlets – is told in this chapter, beginning in the nineteenth century, when an identifiably American music still had not fully coalesced. The early twentieth century saw the arrival of strong music advocates and composer-writers who sought to create innovative music and write prolifically about these new sounds, for which they had become de facto evangelists. Early American music writers underscored the differences between American and European music. Essays on music took on an increasingly pedagogical function, teaching their readers about the intricacies and sometimes hidden features of new compositions. The earliest American music writing focused on classical music, but as jazz entered the scene, with its complex rules and unfamiliar rhythms and chord structures, a new cohort of essayists developed a language for writing about this American artform. Throughout the century, a more personal tone emerged in the music essay as composers, musicians, and music connoisseurs began to articulate their feelings, impressions, memories, and individual experiences.

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• The Essay in American Music
• By Kyle Gann
• Edited by Christy Wampole , Princeton University, New Jersey , Jason Childs
• Book: The Cambridge History of the American Essay
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Essay on Music for Students and Children

500+ words essay on music.

Music is a vital part of different moments of human life. It spreads happiness and joy in a person’s life. Music is the soul of life and gives immense peace to us. In the words of William Shakespeare, “If music is the food of love, play on, Give me excess of it; that surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die.” Thus, Music helps us in connecting with our souls or real self.

What is Music?

Music is a pleasant sound which is a combination of melodies and harmony and which soothes you. Music may also refer to the art of composing such pleasant sounds with the help of the various musical instruments. A person who knows music is a Musician.

The music consists of Sargam, Ragas, Taals, etc. Music is not only what is composed of men but also which exists in nature. Have you ever heard the sound of a waterfall or a flowing river ? Could you hear music there? Thus, everything in harmony has music. Here, I would like to quote a line by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, one of the greatest musicians, “The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between.”

Importance of Music:

Music has great qualities of healing a person emotionally and mentally. Music is a form of meditation. While composing or listening music ones tends to forget all his worries, sorrows and pains. But, in order to appreciate good music, we need to cultivate our musical taste. It can be cited that in the Dwapar Yug, the Gopis would get mesmerized with the music that flowed from Lord Krishna’s flute. They would surrender themselves to Him. Also, the research has proved that the plants which hear the Music grow at a faster rate in comparison to the others.

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Magical Powers of Music:

It has the power to cure diseases such as anxiety, depression, insomnia, etc. The power of Music can be testified by the legends about Tansen of his bringing the rains by singing Raag Megh Malhar and lighting lamps by Raga Deepak. It also helps in improving the concentration and is thus of great help to the students.

Conclusion:

Music is the essence of life. Everything that has rhythm has music. Our breathing also has a rhythm. Thus, we can say that there is music in every human being or a living creature. Music has the ability to convey all sorts of emotions to people. Music is also a very powerful means to connect with God. We can conclude that Music is the purest form of worship of God and to connect with our soul.

FAQs on Essay on Music:

Q.1. Why is Music known as the Universal Language?

Ans.1. Music is known as the Universal language because it knows no boundaries. It flows freely beyond the barriers of language, religion, country, etc. Anybody can enjoy music irrespective of his age.

Q.2. What are the various styles of Music in India?

Ans.2. India is a country of diversities. Thus, it has numerous styles of music. Some of them are Classical, Pop, Ghazals, Bhajans, Carnatic, Folk, Khyal, Thumri, Qawwali, Bhangra, Drupad, Dadra, Dhamar, Bandish, Baithak Gana, Sufi, Indo Jazz, Odissi, Tarana, Sugama Sangeet, Bhavageet, etc.

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Essay on Music

List of essays on music, essay on music – short essay for kids and children (essay 1 – 150 words), essay on music (essay 2 – 250 words), essay on music – types, importance and usage (essay 3 – 300 words), essay on music – for school students (class 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 standard) (essay 4 – 400 words), essay on music (essay 5 – 500 words), essay on music – written in english (essay 6 – 600 words), essay on music (essay 7 – 750 words), essay on music – long essay for college students (essay 8 – 1000 words).

Music is an art form which triggers our feelings in different ways. The soul of music comprises of rhythm, pitch, texture, timbre and dynamics. Music is used in different forms and in varied sectors and the results are beyond one’s own understanding.

Audience: The below given essays are especially written for kids, children, school students (class 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 standard) and college students.

Introduction:

Music is the sound produced that is pleasing to the ears. It is also a form of Art. Music can be produced through many activities, such as singing, using musical instruments or any other objects.

More about Music:

Music is an instant mood lifter. It touches the soul and helps you connect with people. It heals one’s mind. Music takes care of mental needs. It helps in overcoming disabilities of any form.

There are many genres of music like classical, blues, rock, jazz, folk, etc. Every culture has its own music. The classical music in Indian culture is Carnatic and Hindustani. Whatever be the genre, it is all equally soothing.

Conclusion:

Music is a beautiful form of expression. It is that form of art that evolves continuously. Everyone has some form of passion towards music within them, either in the form of a desire to learn or listening for relaxation. To me music is life, and I have a strong desire to learn music in the future.

It has already been proven that music can do much more than just lifting the spirits. There are different genres of music used for calming and relaxing our mind and senses. Music has become a major part in Chemotherapy centers and even in the Pregnancy wards. When slow and melodious music is played, it lowers the blood pressure thus slowing down the heartbeat allowing us to breathe normally and to calm the nerves.

It has been proven that music can reduce the music tension that builds up around the different parts of our body including the back, neck, stomach and shoulders. More importantly, music drastically works on lowering psychological tension from our mind. Listening to music helps to reduce mental and physical stress and is highly employed in the health industry to relax and keep the patients calm.

Music is the complete package for improving our soul and mind equally. This is the reason why a long drive with slow and melodious music can change one’s mood to a happy and merry going one. It has the God gifted power to erase all the negative thoughts from our mind and to make it more positive and happy. This indeed improves our concentration and works to enhance our overall skills.

Until now, the world has not seen anything better than music to heal the inner soul and the body alike.

Music is loved and enjoyed by all people around the world in different ways. Its pleasant sound makes it an important element in a person’s life.

Hearing music makes you feel peaceful and happier in life. Without the harmony and melody of music, life becomes very frustrating.

Types of Music:

There are numerous types of music all over the world.

Below you can find the important and most popular categories of music:

1. Jazz Music

2. Hip hop Music

3. Rock and Roll Music

4. Rock Music

5. Blues Music

6. Country Music

7. Pop Music

8. R&B (Rhythm and Blues) Music

9. Folk Music

10. Fusion Music

Importance of Music:

Music is a vital part of every person’s life. It is essential in the different moments of life. In fact, during the sorrow, we hear the music.

Music not only brings happiness in our life and but also sometimes shows us the way to overcome the problem.

Unlimited Power of Music:

There is unlimited power of music like healing and relaxing. After listening to the music, people feel relaxed and forget all their worries for a certain period.

Music eases the stressed muscles of the human body. It provides calmness to the mind of a tired person too.

Usage of Music in Treatment:

Music possesses the miracle power of curing few mental disorders like rare enthusiasm, nervousness or depression. It is also helpful in curing the insomnia patients.

Music act like a mother’s love that makes us forget all our worries and only make us enjoy life.

It is right to say that music helps in washing away all the stress of our daily hectic and busy life from within. Once you hear the magical sound of music, you instantly feel harmony inside your heart. These types of experiences are exceptional. Music has no religion, caste or colour. It makes us feel connected inside our soul.

Music is a form of art. India has always had a rich history of great musicians. Good music is always a treat to the ears. In fact, it allows us to connect to our inner self.

There are different styles of this art depending on different factors. Different countries have different styles of music of their own. Depending on the sounds, we have different forms of music such as pop, jazz, folk, Latin, classical, rock and many more.

Music has that control, which can treat certain psychological sicknesses, for example, tension, not so ordinary energy or wretchedness. It is also the most amazing and supportive ways to treat the patient of a sleeping disorder. Additionally, it is the magnificent and invigorating force. We can contrast it with the mother’s affection. As the kid reliably needs the lap of his mother for overlooking everything and feels bliss. In a similar way, music serves to us as a mother to overlook each stress and tension in a melodic way.

It has the unwinding and recuperating power as well. Moreover, it encourages us to unwind, quiet our indignation down and furthermore to mend our stresses. We like to listen to different types of music, band or the vocalist and it changes from person to person. It encourages us to ruminate while doing Yoga and locate our more profound self by associating us to the otherworldly world.

It has No Barriers:

Or more every one of these things, it knows no limits. Music does not differentiate between the general population, religion, station and belief. The conventional one is altogether different than the advanced, worldwide one. Today the universe of music has completely changed. We have such a large number of specialists, vocalists, artists, writers in the entire world making wonderful music. Today there are unique establishments, schools, and universities to learn this art expertly. Today students are seeking music as a profession, as a leisure activity and a vocation as well.

Music is the essence of life. It has the power to heal people and can relieve you of your tensions. Moreover, it is always enjoyable to hear the type of music you love. People love listening to it whenever they find the time. It is an important subject in schools and a strong tool to promote culture as well. That is why perhaps music is so loved by one and all.

Music Every Day:

The world is full of beautiful music and every culture and time in history has its special tune. The fact that we can listen to music every day is something I am grateful for deeply because it makes my life more beautiful. My favorite thing about music is the fact that you can find a tune that will suit almost any event or state of mind. Thankfully we are living in an age when this is becoming a fact, we can experience every day in various situations.

Music Makes you Happy:

Listening to music is not just pleasing esthetically but it also has many benefits for our mental well-being. Scientists have been talking about the positive influence music has on our brain and on the production of neural- transmitters like dopamine that gives us the feeling of satisfaction. The fact is that music is even used as part of some psychotherapy treatments and there is even evidence that it helps plants grow.

Making music can be considered one of our distinctive characteristics although singing is common in many animal species. That is why music has such a profound influence on our brain leading some to conclude that it is even part of our evolution and the reason we are humans. Music can be inspiring and it can comfort us in time of need, it is present when we celebrate something and also when we just want to make the dullness of everyday life go away. Music is one of our best friends and sometimes we do not give it the proper gratification, especially in the present age when it is so widespread and common.

Music as Identity:

The other major feature of the music is the fact that it is a strong marker of identity. Every ethnic group and nation have their own set of instruments and tunes they are well known for. When you think about Scotland you imagine the back pipes and the music they make, when you think about Germany there is the trumpet.

The wonderful thing about music and the instruments used to make it is the fact that it can be played by anyone and in many different locations. This has created so many variations of sound and styles that we can talk about an ocean of music or several oceans.

The 20 th century has thought us many lessons about music and about the power world-renowned music artist can have over the public. Once this characteristic of music was discovered an army of producers sprung up to take control of that power and to divert it toward more materialistic goals. That has not changed the influence music tunes will have on our identity and the profound influence it has on our daily lives. Stopping and thinking about the influence it has on us makes my spine shiver as does the idea of a world without music. That is why I think we should support every person who wants to create music and make our lives more beautiful.

Music could be defined as a collection of sounds and melodies. This would be a simplistic idea of what music is and would not fully describe the place that music occupies in our lives. Music is more than a collection of sounds and melodies. Music is life, love and that place we go to find solace.

From time immemorial, music has formed part of our history as human beings. From the old romantic empire to the reign of the Greeks, people have depended on music as a source of solace and comfort.

History of Music:

Historians do not agree on the origin of music. Some claim that music predates the existence of humans themselves. However, historians agree that there are certain periods in history that has contributed immensely to the growth of music in the world. These periods introduced distinct sounds which are still prominent today.

The first period is the medieval era which dates from the 6th to the 16th century. During this era, only monophonic and polyphonic sounds existed. Then we moved to the renaissance which was marked by experimental sounds and rhythms. Other periods such as the baroque, classics and romantic periods also brought about several innovations in sound.

The final period, which is the 20th century, is where we are currently. Technology has taken over how we make and perform music. Thus, we produce sounds through the use of electronic component and perform in the same way. This period is also notable for introducing jazz and electronic music.

Genre of Music:

There are countless genres of music and new ones keep emerging on a daily basis. While some are a combination of already existing sounds others are a total break from the norm.

Below are the few popular music genres:

1. Pop – Also known as popular music is a combination of several sounds produced for a large audience.

2. Rhythm and Blues – Just as the name implies, this is a combination of two prominent styles. It has an infusion of soul music delivered through rhymes.

3. Electronic music – As opposed to the use of natural instruments, electronic music employs the use of technology to develop unique sounds.

4. Rock – This music form has its root in America. It is notable for its combination of string instruments and heavy sounds.

Music in its basic form is a combination of sounds and melody. Why then is it so important to us? The following are some of the reasons:

Music is Universal:

Citizens of the world are divided by language, race, and a host of other things. However, one instance when the world is in unity is when we connect to the same melodies. Music has the capacity to remove all of our bias and prejudices. In this sense, it can be regarded as a social tool. People who have no business speaking to each other instantly connect when they listen to music they both love.

Music Makes Learning Easy:

This has been validated throughout history. You probably remember the nursery rhymes you learned when you were a kid. Somehow, the music stays with us for longer periods of time. Even when we forget the words of a song, the melody never leaves. In addition to the above, music helps retain our mental focus.

Music Relaxes:

The importance of music would not be complete if we do not mention its therapeutic nature. Though some form of music can make us tense and anxious others help us reduce stress and anxiety. This is especially important due to the nature of the world we live in.

Music is an important part of our lives. It dictates our mood, controls our thought and affects our relationship with others. Man’s history cannot be fully written without the impact of music on our lives.

Music as we know it is a form of art and a cultural activity with its medium being sound that is organised with respect to time. Definitions of the term music should generally include some common elements like rhythm (with its associated concepts like articulation, meter and tempo), pitch (it governs harmony and melody), the qualities of sonic of texture and timbre (we sometimes refer to these as the colour of musical sound). All of the different and various types or styles of music might tend to omit, de-emphasize or emphasize a few of the listed elements of music.

Music can be performed with a wide variety of vocal techniques and instruments, the vocal techniques can range from rapping to singing and there are some pieces that are solely instrumental while some others are solely vocal (examples are songs that have no instrumental accompaniment) also pieces that put together instruments and singing.

When we want to address the term in a general form, the different activities that describe music as being a form of art or a cultural activity are the examination of aesthetic music, the study and knowledge of music and its history, music criticism and the creation and making of music works (symphonies, tunes, songs and so many more).

Elements of Music:

There are a lot of different elements or fundamentals of music. Based on the description of the element of music that is being used, the different elements of music can include structure, form, articulation, expression, dynamics, colour or timber, voice allocation, style, texture, harmony, melody, rhythm, tempo, pulse or beat and pitch. We can differentiate the elements of music by describing the elements of music as “rudimentary elements of music” and “perpetual elements of music”.

1. Rudimentary Elements:

Around the 1800s, we used the words “rudiments of music” and “elements of music” interchangeably. All of the elements that were described in manuscripts talked about the parts of music needed to become a successful musician. Writers like Estrella in recent years use the words “elements of music” in a very much similar way. A definition that almost accurately describes the usage is: “the rudimentary principles of an art, science, etc.: the elements of grammar”. The curriculum of the UK changes to “interrelated dimensions of music” poses a shift back to the use of rudimentary music elements.

2. Perpetual Elements:

The emergence and the start of study into psychoacoustics around the 1930s. There came the discovery that there are four attributes that are psychological and belong to music. They are timbre, time, loudness and pitch. While rudimentary elements can vary based on the personal preference of the writer, perpetual elements on the other hand always consist of a list of proven or established discrete elements that can be manipulated independently to get the desired musical effect.

The curriculum of music of US, UK and Australia feature the music elements prominently. Each one of the curriculums identifies texture, timbre, dynamics and pitch as elements, which makes all of the above listed elements agreed universally.

A list of the official three versions of music elements are listed below:

1. USA – articulation/style, harmony, form, rhythm, dynamics, texture, timbre and pitch.

2. UK – structure, tempo, duration, dynamics, texture, timbre, pitch.

3. Australia – structure, form, rhythm, expression, dynamics, texture, timbre, pitch.

Music has contributed a lot to our society. In the world we live in today, music has become a major business. Music industry describes all of the businesses connected and related with the sale and creation of music. The industry of music is made of composers and songwriters that create different new songs with musical pieces. The sale of music is a very lucrative business and we now have online music stores like Apple’s iTunes, Spotify, tidal and so many more. Musicians also get paid a lot of money to perform at concerts and make special appearances. The industry employs a lot of other people and is a source of livelihood to millions of people worldwide.

Music therapy helps in a lot of way. It is a highly interpersonal process where a therapist that is trained employs the use of music and its various facets- spiritual, aesthetic, social, mental, emotional and physical to assist clients in improving or maintaining their health. It is safe to assume that music cuts across every area of our lives and it has had a positive impact on a lot of things. It is also important to note that there have also been negative effects of music on our society.

People love music because it is a form of entertainment but do they really understand music for what it is and not just the sound? What is music? Is it just the melody, the lyrics, the art of performance or the people doing it? Music is basically an art and a cultural activity that is in form of organized sound. Music is appreciated all over the world and it is different for everyone.

My perception on music may be focused on the rhythm and another person’s perception may be focused on the message being delivered. Music has been in existence since the beginning of time. Transformations have occurred with modernization and civilization. However, some music is still deep-rooted into culture and has not been influenced by the changing times. Music is of great importance in humanity. Although music is appreciated worldwide, it is faced with challenges.

Genres of Music:

Music is a whole world in itself that is full of diversity. Music is classified into different genres and the genre defines the aspects of music like rhythm, instruments, art of performance among others. There are many general genres of music in the world. Blues, classical music, jazz and reggae are the most common genres that are listened to across the globe. Other genres include rock, pop, folk, electronic, country and hip hop music. All these genres difference in terms of the sound they produce. Genres like rock, electronic and jazz use a lot of sound combination.

Folk music is basically about culture and tradition and they always remain unchanged and uninfluenced by the changes that take place in the world. Blues, classical and reggae music are almost similar in term of sound use instrument use. It is important to consider genres of music when selecting the type of music to listen to. For educational purposes, the genres of music are not commonly used because they teach on the technical aspects of music at school. Artists can be defined by the genre of music that they sing for example hip hop musicians are known to praise money, cars and fancy fashions like chains.

The reason why music is appreciated widely is because of the impact it has on the lives of individuals. Man’s interaction with sound is unavoidable because music is everywhere. Music is listened to by people for different reasons. Music is significant in our lives as entertainment, emotional response, and a way of creating income and in education.

In entertainment, music dominated the entertainment industry because it has the ability to reach everyone. Music is widely spread as it is found on the internet, in media platforms like radios and televisions, in live performance concerts, in churches and schools. Countries have also adopted music in legalities like the national anthems. Music is significant to both the culture and the economy.

Music in emotional response is widely used and that is why psychologists and psychiatrists have invented the use of music in therapy. Music triggers emotional responses. In normal life situations, when a person is sad, listening to sad music makes them even sadder but listening to happy music helps to rejuvenate the mood. Spiritual music is also important in emotional response. When worshiping God, people have learnt to use music in praise and to create a worship environment by triggering remorseful and humbling emotions in people through worship songs.

Music is a source of income for majority of people in the music industry. Although some people just do it for the passion and as a hobby, most of them gain income that is substantial t sustain their lives. Despite from wealth creation, people gain fame from music. People who have created music hits are famous and wealthy and some young musicians look up to them for inspiration and as role models.

Music is important in education as it is an art that is taught is school. In all levels of education, music is significant and is appreciated in schools. Taking music as a subject is different from what we know from the outside because it involves the technical and theoretic aspects of music that we cannot gain from just listening to music. Music can also be pursued as a career at colleges and universities.it is a career path that required hard work, determination and commitment just like any other career.

Challenges Facing Music:

Music is faced with challenges which affect both the artists and the music industry. Artists are faced by challenges such as financial insufficiency to fund their music production. Producing music is expensive because you need to go through a recording studio, which are usually costly and most people cannot afford.

The music industry is a bit biased in terms of finances because there are some people who can be very talented but yet lack money to produce their music while there are rich people who are not as talented but they can afford to produce their music. The line of poverty will never be eradicated because in most situations, those with financial abilities will always have an upper hand.

Drugs and substance abuse is another major challenges that is faced by artists. Most artists especially those in the secular music industry abuse drugs which could end badly for them some die of drug overdoses and some spend most of their time in rehabilitation facilities. The music industry has been highly condemned for advocating for drugs especially hip hop artists who always sing about drugs and money. Drugs and substance abuse is a major problem that is rooted in music.

The music industry faces a marketing challenge. Music is produced and then each artist is supposed to market their song for them to gain sales. In marketing, activities such as tours, concerts and media marketing are expensive. The marketing is therefore challenged and the music industry may incur financial loses during marketing.

In conclusion, music is a wide field and it is beneficial to the society. Music is to be respected and adored for its goodness.

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Collection The Library of Congress Celebrates the Songs of America

Musical styles.

In its history, America's songs have been performed in many musical styles. Learn more about how these musical styles developed and listen to examples.

• Ritual and Worship Sacred music has been a vibrant part of American culture from the earliest sacred oral traditions of indigenous peoples through the written traditions of the first European colonists. With the settlement of the Plymouth, Massachusetts colony in 1620, sacred music played an important role in helping to define the cultural identity of the region of the New World that would become the United States.

Institute for Bioethics & Health Humanities committed to moral inquiry, research, teaching, and professional service in healthcare

Call for abstracts: reproductive ethics conference.

The Ninth Annual Reproductive Ethics Conference will take place in Galveston Jan. 9 and 10, 2025. The goal of this conference is to explore the range of topics addressed in reproductive ethics. We welcome individuals from all professional fields to create a rich and robust discussion. We are seeking abstracts for individual presentations, 3-4 person panels, and posters. View the flier linked below for more information.

The Department of Bioethics and Health Humanities Seminar Series Presents: "Concepts of Race in the History of Reproductive Medicine"

By Dr. Miriam Rich Assistant Professor, Department of Bioethics and Health Humanities

Thursday, August 8, 2024 12 - 1 p.m. Health Education Center 3.206 Click HERE to register

50th Anniversary of the Institute for Bioethics and Health Humanities Timeline

In April of 1970, both The University of Texas Graduate School of Biomedical Science at Houston and The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston sponsored the symposium "Humanism in Medicine" that would help shape and give impetus to the new institute that would emerge at UTMB in 1973. This new institute would be dedicated to medicine and the humanities.

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Dr. Moses publishes essay in STAT on the history of stigma amid rising rates of syphilis

Aug 14, 2024, 10:14 AM by Cortney Martin

On May 30, 2024, IBBH Assistant Professor Dr. Jacob D. Moses and Dr. Allan Brandt (Harvard University) published an essay, “ Stigma and the Return of Syphilis, ” in the health news outlet STAT. Syphilis, one of the oldest infections known to humans, has returned to the U.S. at epidemic rates that have been climbing since 2001. In 2022, the last year with complete data, the highest number of infections were recorded in more than 70 years. Stemming the return of syphilis will take more than manufacturing more penicillin. It will require counteracting stigma, a longstanding problem that has resulted in critical failures in health care access and delivery. 

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Producer Killah B on making history with his first country song, Beyoncé's 'Texas Hold 'Em'

Music producer Brian “Killah B” Bates had already made a name for himself in the music industry, but after producing a single for Beyoncé's latest album, "Cowboy Carter," he was able to make history with his first country record. And he says it won't be his last.

The three-time Grammy nominated producer has collaborated with some of the biggest names in music, including Ariana Grande, Usher, Chris Brown, Summer Walker, Jason Derulo and more. However, it wasn't until he co-wrote and produced Beyoncé's hit single "Texas Hold 'Em" that he made his first country song — one that would go on to break many records.

"I feel amazing. I just feel like I could take over the world," Bates tells USA TODAY. "And that's the type of energy that us young Black creators and young creators, in general, we need. To make my mark on our history ... I'm so honored. And there's a responsibility that comes with that, that I'm going to continue to uphold."

Earlier this year, Beyoncé made history as the first Black woman to top Billboard's Hot Country Songs chart after "Texas Hold 'Em"  debuted at No. 1. And Bates also became the first Black producer, along with Raphael Saadiq , to top the country chart for the hit.

A Chicago native, the songwriter and producer recalls growing up with both his parents struggling with addiction. Bates credits his grandparents for raising him and his brother and saving them from becoming a product of their environment.

"My grandfather was a jazz musician in Chicago," Bates said. "He had a family, and he couldn't focus on his music career. So he saw that I had musical abilities, and he invested into me and poured into me."

Bates says his grandfather put him in piano lessons and he became a classically trained musician at a young age. Eventually, he taught himself how to play drums and asked to play drums in church, which he did.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Killah B (@illestproducer)

"My father would play country, classic rock and old school '70s R&B Dusties all day," he says. "Outside of them playing music, I would go search and study myself. So I would study Luke Bryan, the Dixie Chicks and more. And I studied so many genres, and it was something I loved."

Eventually he moved to Atlanta, then Los Angeles, to follow his dreams and began to make his mark in the industry. As far as working on "Texas Hold 'Em" with Queen Bey, nearly two years before the single was released, Killah says a friend connected him with the singer's representatives, who listened to the record.

"She was instantly blown away, and so she asked for the files," he says. After Beyoncé put her own spin on it, he got to hear it and was "blown away."

While "Texas Hold 'Em" was his first time producing a country record, he was more than ready.

"I studied so many country songs in the past that when it was time to make this song, I had it in my DNA," Bates says. "I had the ingredients ready, even though I hadn't made it before. The way that I study music, I'm able to capture the essence and authenticity, and the instruments and the style that's used to create each genre. So that's a gift of mine that God gave me."

And the "Texas Hold 'Em" producer emphasized the notion that Black artists have a rightful place in the genre.

"Black people created the instruments that created country music, and we created the styling of country music," Bates says. "Black people don't just have a place in country music, we are the forefront of country music, and it was taken away from us at some point."

Put simply, he says, "This is part of our culture."

Back in February, Beyoncé sent shock waves around the world when she released her first two singles — "16 Carriages" and "Texas Hold 'Em" — and announced a country album during a Super Bowl commercial.

Within a week, her hit "Texas Hold 'Em" debuted at No. 54 on Billboard's Country Airplay chart. On the streaming front, her songs began topping country music playlists and charts on Apple Music and Spotify almost instantly.

"When 'Texas Hold 'Em' dropped, my whole world dropped," Bates says. "It was the craziest marketing strategy ever."

The "Ya Ya" singer followed up by releasing her full country album "Cowboy Carter" on March 29. She continued making history  and breaking records thereafter.

Bates says he's honored to be a part of history. Going forward, fans can expect more hits from him from all genres.

"I have more country records that are coming out," he says. "I've been working on more country stuff, definitely going to go and sweep through Nashville. But I also have a lot of dance, pop and rock 'n' roll coming. Expect me to do genres of music that people wouldn't expect me to do. Expect me to dominate."

Follow Caché McClay, the USA TODAY Network's Beyoncé Knowles-Carter reporter, on  Instagram ,  TikTok  and  X  as @cachemcclay .

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Britain’s Violent Riots: What We Know

Officials had braced for more unrest on Wednesday, but the night’s anti-immigration protests were smaller, with counterprotesters dominating the streets instead.

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By Lynsey Chutel

After days of violent rioting set off by disinformation around a deadly stabbing rampage, the authorities in Britain had been bracing for more unrest on Wednesday. But by nightfall, large-scale anti-immigration demonstrations had not materialized, and only a few arrests had been made nationwide.

Instead, streets in cities across the country were filled with thousands of antiracism protesters, including in Liverpool, where by late evening, the counterdemonstration had taken on an almost celebratory tone.

Over the weekend, the anti-immigration protests, organized by far-right groups, had devolved into violence in more than a dozen towns and cities. And with messages on social media calling for wider protests and counterprotests on Wednesday, the British authorities were on high alert.

With tensions running high, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s cabinet held emergency meetings to discuss what has become the first crisis of his recently elected government. Some 6,000 specialist public-order police officers were mobilized nationwide to respond to any disorder, and the authorities in several cities and towns stepped up patrols.

Wednesday was not trouble-free, however.

In Bristol, the police said there was one arrest after a brick was thrown at a police vehicle and a bottle was thrown. In the southern city of Portsmouth, police officers dispersed a small group of anti-immigration protesters who had blocked a roadway. And in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where there have been at least four nights of unrest, disorder continued, and the police service said it would bring in additional officers.

But overall, many expressed relief that the fears of wide-scale violence had not been realized.

Here’s what we know about the turmoil in Britain.

Where arrests have been reported

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