The Story of Music
From Babylon to the Beatles: How Music Has Shaped Civilization
Howard Goodall
To Val, Daisy and Millie, with love
Contents
Introduction
1. The Age of Discovery, 40,000 BC–AD 1450
2. The Age of Penitence, 1450–1650
3. The Age of Invention, 1650–1750
4. The Age of Elegance and Sentiment, 1750–1850
5. The Age of Tragedy, 1850–1890
6. The Age of Rebellion, 1890–1918
7. The Popular Age I, 1918–1945
8. The Popular Age II, 1945–2012
Image Gallery
Playlist
Further Reading
Picture Credits
Acknowledgements
Index
Introduction
PERHAPS YOUR FAVOURITE MUSIC was written by Monteverdi in 1600, Bach in 1700, Beethoven in 1800, Elgar in 1900, or Coldplay in 2000. Whichever it is, it is a sobering fact that everything that had to be discovered to produce that music – its chords, melodies and rhythms – had already been discovered by around 1450.
Of course I don’t necessarily mean the instruments people used, or the countless quirky creative decisions that make each song, concerto or opera sound distinct and characterful, but rather the raw material: the building blocks of music. In order for Mozart to thrill audiences with just three dramatic chords at the start of his opera Don Giovanni, someone had to come up with the idea of playing more than one note at a time. In order for Gershwin to give his song ‘Summertime’ its enchanting see-saw accompaniment, with the high solo voice gliding in way above it, someone had to work out the alchemy of harmony and the seductive lilt of rhythm. And in order for me to sit at a piano and play those two masterworks in the comfort of my own home – instantly and just as the composer intended – someone had to work out a way of writing the notes down, alongside performance instructions.
Indeed, it is easy to overlook how utterly spoiled for musical choice we are in the twenty-first century. We can listen to almost anything we want at the press of a button. But as recently as the late nineteenth century, even the most devoted music lover might hear his or her favourite piece just three or four times in his or her whole life. Unless you happened to be a virtuoso musician with access to both sheet music and instruments, it was almost impossible to bring large-scale forms of music into your own home. Not until the dawn of recording and radio technology did our ancestors have any great choice as to what they listened to and when. If you like, it is only since recorded music has been available to buy that music has become democratic, something that everyone can influence and participate in by showing their preference for one song, or one style of music, over another.
Inevitably, though, this democratisation brought along with it its own new problems. Once, musical fashion and taste were dictated by a few wealthy patrons and institutions who might, in prosperous times, allow composers some degree of freedom to experiment without fear of starvation. But what became known as the ‘popular’ age unexpectedly threw up a division between modernist music in the classical tradition and contemporary music of a more accessible kind. Even within the classical tradition the weight of the past bore down heavily on living composers, as the vast repository of ‘old’ music was recorded and rediscovered. Classical music might well have died out entirely had composers not turned their resentment into resourcefulness and reconnected with audiences by cross-pollinating with other genres; modern film music is just one example of classically inspired sounds being aligned with popular art forms of the present day This instinct to adapt and move with the flow has been particularly vehement – and particularly necessary – in the past hundred years or so, but it has always been a fact of musical life. If composers of all eras had been unwilling to learn, invent, borrow and even steal, we might still be listening to plainchant. Collectively, they made the mainstream sounds of contemporary Western music possible.
What we call ‘Western’ music – the medium in which nearly all music on earth is now conceived, recorded and performed, and which has in the past hundred years or so absorbed into its fold most of the ‘other’ music cultures of the world – started out as merely one localised branch of a global musical map. European-Mediterranean tribes had their particular brand of music much as African, Asian, American and Antipodean tribes did (and still do). What became the generic category ‘Western music’ was an amalgam of, among others, Egyptian, Persian, Greek, Celtic, Norse and Roman strands of music. It started, though, just like all the world’s traditional music cultures: improvised, shared, spontaneous and transient.
The other great musical cultures of the world, because they continued to be improvised, aural traditions handed down from parent to child, have carried on to the present day much as they had for millennia. Indonesian and Balinese music, for instance, can still be heard in forms that have remained unashamedly unchanged for centuries. The branch of music that thrived from Iceland to the Caspian Sea, though, did not stand still. A series of revolutions took place that gave it remarkable new capabilities. This is not to say that Western music, as we have inherited it, is better than, say, Indonesian music. Rather, it is an unavoidable historical truth that the Western branch of musical activity developed in ways that were not paralleled in other musical cultures. Gradually, but with a great spirit of determination and invention, the language and method of Western music became universal standards that could be adapted to accommodate, so it now seems, every musical idea on earth.
And yet the telling of music’s extraordinary unfolding story is – for anyone, more or less, who hasn’t taken a degree in it – a mystery. Worse, it seems to be a deliberate mystery, shrouded in arcane jargon and bewildering categorisation, the shrine and preserve of a club of privileged insiders.
We have inherited a series of inaccurate and confusing historic labels by which classical music is catalogued, almost none of which describes what was actually happening in music at the time. Take the Renaissance – ‘rebirth’ – a period between about 1450 and 1600 in which art, architecture, philosophy and social attitudes made enormous leaps forward. While it is true that music underwent its own transformation in this period, its greatest revolutions – the invention of notation, of metrical organisation, of harmony and of instrument construction – had already taken place during what was, in many other aspects of life, the long, dark, ignorant night of the Middle Ages. The chief movers and shakers of the Renaissance (none of whom, by the way, was a musician) were inspired by the example of Ancient Roman and Greek – ‘Classical’ – civilisation, although it is not until the later eighteenth century that we come to the Classical era in music, which has inconveniently lent its name to the entire branch of Western music that isn’t ‘popular’. Between the two we have the Baroque era, characterised by gaudy excess and decorative indulgence in art but by purity and economy in music.
Then there is the chaotic mislabelling of the notes themselves. Music’s longest-duration note, for instance, is called a breve, meaning ‘short’. A breve can be subdivided into 4 minims, meaning ‘shortest of all’ – even though it can be further broken down into up to eight subdivisions. The note known as a quaver in English is in French called a croche, the Anglicisation of which, crotchet, has come to mean a note of double the value of a croche. The Germans and Americans call two crotchets a half-note, while the French call half a croche a double-croche, a crotchet a noire (black) and a minim a blanche (white) �
�� even though they are not the same as the black and white notes on a keyboard. The list goes on.
Anachronisms and blind alleys blight all the road signs classical music has given itself. I will tackle them one by one as we progress and attempt to unpick the tangled knot of confusion that they have left in their wake.
More than anything, though, my story of music focuses on the changing sounds and innovations of the music itself – as it has occurred, chronologically – rather than on musicians who had a high profile simply because they had a high profile. Of course it was often the big-name composers who brought about musical revolutions, but sometimes the agents of change were obscure men and women whose names are not carved in the decorative panels of the world’s concert halls. They will all be represented as part of the vast jigsaw of Western music. There are already plenty of books out there that can tell you what Beethoven had hidden under his piano or what killed Elvis. I am only interested in either of them if they brought about musical change. (You will see in due course whether either or both of them qualify.)
While the primary focus of this book is the uniquely rapid progress of Western music, it will necessarily and freely dip into the concepts and techniques of other musical cultures, and unashamedly oscillate between ‘popular’, ‘folk’ and ‘art’ music styles. At its heart lies a mission to retell the history of music in such a way that normal music lovers can relate to it. My resolve to do so is fortified by the belief that music, when all is said and done, is a unity and that the divisions we place between periods and categories are often artificial. Musicians who play a variety of styles every day of their lives, transferring their skills across genres as a matter of course, take this as a given. It is high time this truth was shared with everyone else.
The story of music – successive waves of discoveries, breakthroughs and inventions – is an ongoing process. The next great leap forward may take place in a backstreet of Beijing or in a basement rehearsal space in Gateshead. Whatever music you adore – Monteverdi or Mantovani, Mozart or Motown, Machaut or Mash-up – the techniques it relies on did not happen by accident. Someone, somewhere, thought of them first. To tell this story we need to clear our minds of the complicated cacophony that makes up our daily soundtrack and try to imagine how revolutionary, how exhilarating, and, yes, even how utterly bewildering so many of the innovations we take for granted today were to the people who witnessed their birth.
Not that long ago, music was a rare and feeble whisper in a wilderness of silence. Now it is as ubiquitous as the air we breathe. How on earth did that miracle happen?
1
The Age of Discovery
40,000 BC–AD 1450
YOU MAY THINK THAT music is a luxury, a plug-in to make human life more enjoyable. That would be a fair supposition in the twenty-first century, but our hunter-gatherer ancestors wouldn’t have agreed. To them, music was much more than mere entertainment.
The famous rock paintings in Chauvet, France, made by cave-dwelling people of the Upper Palaeolithic period, or European Ice Age, are 32,000 years old. They are among the oldest surviving examples of human art ever found anywhere in the world, although, like other cave paintings, they mostly depict animals and the odd symbolically fertile female figures; these were, after all, people who daily diced with extinction. It is thought that the paintings were created and venerated as part of a ritual, and we now know that music of some kind played an important part in these rituals, since whistles and flutes made from bone have been found in many Palaeolithic caves.
A particularly ancient find was a flute made of bear bone, discovered in a Slovenian cave in 1995, which was dated at roughly 41,000 BC. More impressive still, in May 2012 a joint team from Oxford and Tübingen Universities unearthed flutes made from mammoth ivory and bird bones at Geiβenklöterle Cave in the Swabian Jura region of southern Germany, carbon dated at between 43,000 and 42,000 BC, making them the oldest musical instruments ever discovered. They may be simple in sound and limited in range, like tiny penny whistles, but it is nevertheless from dusty artefacts such as these that Duke Ellington’s horn section and the massed woodwind of the Berlin Philharmonic would one day grow.
Although these deceptively simple ancient flutes are almost all that survives of Palaeolithic music, acoustic scientists have recently made an extraordinary discovery about the lifesaving importance of music to cave-dwellers of this period. In 2008, researchers from the University of Paris ascertained that the Chauvet paintings – which lie within huge, inaccessible, pitch-black networks of tunnels – are located at the points of greatest resonance in the cave network. From these special points, then, human voices would carry, echoing and ricocheting, throughout the whole subterranean system. It has been suggested that people would sing not just as an adjunct to communal ritual, but more crucially as a bat-like form of sonar to provide location bearings in the vast labyrinth of the cave – rather like a musical SatNav.
Our own day-to-day survival may no longer depend on our ability to sing, but our ancient ancestors were on to something that applies to modern lives, too. Study after study around the world has shown that singing enables infants to train their brains and memories, to recognise pitch differentiation as a preparation for the full development of spatial awareness. In the Palaeolithic Age this was an absolutely crucial skill, if survival depended on knowing from which direction a wild animal’s cry was coming, what size it was and what mood it might be in, but even now, singing and the mastery of pitch play a large part in a child’s development of language. For an infant in China, for example, pitch recognition is an essential building block of language – but in all languages it is certain that sound modulations enable us to enhance the sophistication, tone and meaning of our words.
Even though we now know that early music played an important part in ritual, communication and language development, piecing together a coherent picture of our early musical past is a notoriously difficult task because musical notation was not a common practice until much later. Fortunately, we do have evidence of music’s perennial importance to public and private life. The considerable body of art left to posterity by the Ancient Egyptians, for instance, shows us that by their time (3100–670 BC), the playing of music was closely associated with the exercise of power and homage, with religious and secular rituals, and with state ceremony, dancing, love and death. These pieces of art depict a variety of instruments, from the simple sistrum or sekhem – a hand-held, U-shaped shaken percussion instrument – to harps, ceremonial horns, flutes and wind instruments whose sound is made by blowing across strips of reed, the same technique that produces the sound of the modern oboe, bassoon and clarinet families. They also depict expert performers of high status, including members of royal dynasties and deities. The prevalence of music in Ancient Egyptian life is demonstrated by the fact that over a quarter of all the tombs at the necropolis found at the site of the city of Thebes are decorated with iconography of music-making of one sort or another.
The Egyptians were not alone in their reverence for the power of music. Psalms sung by the priests of King David, who united the kingdoms of Israel and Judaea in 1003 BC, are riven through with references to instruments and to singing. (The Greek word ‘psalm’ itself, strictly speaking, refers to a religious song with accompaniment by plucked stringed instrument.) In one psalm alone, number 150, tof (timbrel or tambourine), hasoserah, shofar (horn), kinnor (triangular-frame harp or lyre), nebel (psaltery), ‘uġav (possibly a type of organ or alternatively a flute), mesiltayim (cymbals) and minnim (an unspecified group of stringed instruments) are invoked in praise of God.
The Psalms of David, Sefer tehillim (book of praises) in Hebrew, are still sung today, to more recent melodies; as such they can claim to be the oldest continually performed tradition of religious singing in human history. David’s successor, Solomon, set up a music school attached to the temple at Jerusalem for the training of musicians.
And yet we have absolutely no idea what this music sounded like.
Nor do we know what the music of the earlier Sumerian civilisation sounded like (c. 4500–1940 BC), nor that of the Egyptians, nor – save for a few tiny fragments of tunes – that of the (more recent) Ancient Greeks (c. 800–146 BC). The informative paintings and impressive pyramids of the Ancient Egyptians have survived remarkably well, but their music has disappeared completely. They simply had no way of writing it down for us.
The Ancient Greeks, to be fair to them, did at least leave a few tantalisingly scattered remains of a form of musical notation, the most complete example being some lines engraved on a first-century burial tomb. This ‘Epitaph of Seikilos’ has an accompanying decipherable tune that lasts about ten seconds in all. But in general, it just would not have occurred to them that having musical notation mattered. This is because the Greek musical tradition, like all the musical traditions of the Ancient World, was one of improvisation. Setting music in stone, as it were, so that it stayed the same for each performance, year in and year out, would have struck them as a contradiction of music’s function and enjoyment. They did not need a musical notation. All of which is particularly frustrating for us, since we have so much evidence of the wonderful-looking instruments of the Ancient World, but no way of bringing them to life.
The oldest list of musical instruments ever discovered, including a few instructions on how to play them, was found on a clay tablet in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq), and dated to 2600 BC. The columns on the tablet are made up of cuneiform script detailing various instruments, including the kinnor, the hand-held harp-like instrument that is alternatively known as a lyre. A slightly younger Old Babylonian clay tablet, dating from 2000–1700 BC, gives basic details on how to learn and tune a four-stringed fretted lute, including instructions for the notes to play. As such it is the oldest form of decipherable notation – albeit very simple notation – in existence. Sadly none of these lutes survives.
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