The Story of Music: From Babylon to the Beatles: How Music Has Shaped Civilization

by Howard Goodall

  But archaeologists have had moderate success in unearthing other ancient instruments in all corners of the globe. Several lyres and two harps dating from the same period as the Mesopotamian clay tablet were found at the large excavated royal burial site at the old city of Ur (known today as Tell el-Muqayyar). One of the lyres is decorated with a golden bull’s head, complete with large horns, and it was buried alongside the sacrificial body of its (female) player. In Egypt, equally impressive examples of the kind of instruments featured in ancient art have also been unearthed, notably a semicircular five-stringed harp found in the burial tomb of King Amenhotpe’s priest Thauenany who was laid to rest in around 1350 BC.

  Around the same time in Sweden – in approximately 1000 BC – it would seem that people were playing brass instruments. Cave paintings from the King’s Grave at Kivik show a number of people playing – together – what look like curved horns. Horns of a similar shape, and of roughly the same period, survive to this day in the form of the Brudevaelte Lurs, a set of six Bronze Age lurs – curved brass horns – that were found in a field in Zealand, Denmark, in 1797. They were perfectly preserved and are still playable today. We even know how to play them, because their mouthpieces correspond almost exactly with those of later horns, and while we once again have no way of knowing what sort of music was played on them, we know that their sound is loud and penetrating. (In an unusual tribute to this intrinsically Danish instrument, one of the nation’s most famous exports was named after it. Packets of Lurpak butter still feature a pair of lurs in their design.)

  What the Brudevaelte Lurs tell us is that it is a grave error to describe the musical activity of 800 BC as ‘primitive’, since these elaborate brass instruments could only have been the handiwork of culturally sophisticated people, warlike though they may also have been. It is important to bear in mind that these artefacts were made and played five hundred years before the Romans conquered Europe. All across the continent – and beyond it – people were constantly thinking up new and ingenious ways of making music. But of all the culturally sophisticated ancient civilisations that were playing and enjoying music in this period, there is one group that emerges head and shoulders above the rest.

  No civilisation, except perhaps for our own, has valued, venerated and taken pleasure in music more than the Ancient Greeks, whose culture dominated south-eastern Europe and the Near East for nearly seven hundred years in the first millennium BC, before it was absorbed into the Roman Empire. Even the word ‘music’ comes from the Greek μουσιή – mousike, referring to the fruits of the nine muses in literature, science and the arts.

  There are three major things you need to know about the Ancient Greeks and music, and this is before we take into account that they invented one of the most influential instruments of subsequent millennia: the organ. A physicist-engineer named Ktesibios, who lived in Alexandra in the third century BC, described and possibly even invented what was known as a hydraulis organ, which used a tank of water to pressurise the air for the pipes.

  The first major thing you need to know is that the Greeks believed music to be both a science and an art, and that they developed theories and systems for music accordingly. Pythagoras was but one of a host of philosopher-scientists who tried to figure out what music was and how it might relate to the laws of the natural world, especially its relationship to the heavenly bodies of the planets and stars. Greek theorists called the orbiting motions they observed in the night sky ‘the music of the spheres’. And this curiosity about music is something the Classical-era Greeks wanted to instil in younger generations. When they more or less gave birth to the systematic education of young people, it is worth noting that their first compulsory seven subjects were grammar, rhetoric, logic, maths, geometry, astronomy and music. Much later, but nonetheless inspired by the Greeks, the world’s first universities – Al-Karaouine in Fès, Morocco (AD 859), Bologna (1088) and Oxford (c. 1096) – included music in the basic diet of subjects they taught.

  The Greeks believed that studying music would produce better, more tolerant and nobler human beings. Plato declared in The Republic that ‘musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful’. Young students were accordingly expected to learn an instrument and perform music daily, alongside gymnastics.

  Greek philosophies on the beneficial behavioural qualities of music find striking parallels with Confucius-influenced writings of the second and third centuries BC in China. Chinese belief in the potential of music (yue) to improve and refine the human condition was so pronounced that in the Zhou and early Han dynasties the control of musical activity was enshrined in a specific government department. Like their contemporaries in Greece, the Han Chinese saw virtue in the relationship between musical pitch in music – the relative distance between notes – and the arrangement of the stars and planets they observed above them. Thousands of pages of theory and instruction survive, detailing how it might be possible through careful calculation, through manipulation of the calendar, through codifying the elements of music and through study of the cosmos, to formulate good governance, based on the correct alignment of these associated forces.

  The second major thing about the Greeks and music is that they treated it as an essential part of all their significant rituals. Aristides Quintilianus, who lived some time between the first and third centuries AD, reported of Greek life that, ‘To be sure, there is no action among men that is carried out without music. Sacred hymns and offerings are adorned with music, specific feasts and the festive assemblies of cities exult in it, wars and marches are both aroused and composed through music. It makes sailing and rowing and the most difficult of the handicrafts not burdensome by providing an encouragement for the work.’ The Ancient Greeks reserved their greatest excitement in relation to music, though, for competitions, of which they had a large number.

  Everyone knows that the Ancient Greeks invented the Olympic Games; for the Greeks, though, it wasn’t just running, nude wrestling and hurling the javelin that were important. The earliest Olympic Games were religious, as well as athletic, festivals, and as such would have included some music-making. But a distinct tradition of singing competitions grew up separately, and attracted participants from all over the Greek-dominated eastern Mediterranean. Singer-songwriters would gather for festivals and sing their homespun songs for the benefit of a panel of judges and a live audience. (Yes, even The X-Factor is a three-thousand-year-old format.) The earliest recorded contest took place at Chalcis in around 700 BC, the poet Hesiod proudly penning a few lines in celebration of his winning a solo singing class there. The Spartan city of Carneia hosted a long series of knock-out talent shows for singers accompanying themselves on the kithara, a form of lyre. (In 670 BC one such competition was won by Terpander, a bardic musician and kithara expert who is said to have died from choking on a fig thrown by an admirer at a concert.) There were also choral competitions, with a festival atmosphere and plenty of group choreography – ancient versions, if you like, of the present-day carnivals in Rio de Janeiro, Trinidad and Notting Hill.

  The significance of these competitions is that they prompted the emergence of a new class of elite musicians – individuals and groups striving for musical excellence who could earn money and prizes for their endeavours. Freakishly talented children were paraded at these events, much as they have been ever since. Hitherto, music had been something anyone and everyone might participate in, a communal activity, like the singing of a tribe in the bush. The Greeks began a process that became unusually pronounced in Western music: emphasis on a VIP class of performers whose brilliance was intended to strike awe and enchantment into the hearts of the ordinary listener.

  The third thing you need to know about the Greeks and music is that, by inventing European drama, they in effect invented the musical, since their dramas were
all accompanied by music and choral singing, declaiming (close to the modern notion of rapping) or chanting. Their surviving amphitheatres, dotted around the eastern Mediterranean, are among the most vivid reminders to us of the artistic sophistication of their civilisation. Whereas we consider the roles of writer, poet, director, actor, dancer, singer and composer to be distinct professions, the lines were rather more blurred in Ancient Greece, with many leading dramatists fulfilling many or all of these functions. The extent to which drama and music were deemed inseparable by the Greeks, an ideal sought time and again in later centuries by opera composers, is suggested by the fact that the word ‘orchestra’ is the Greek term for the performing area in their theatrical amphitheatres.

  A number of noteworthy Greek dramas are even about music. The plot of Aristophanes’ satirical play The Frogs of 405 BC, for instance, like the story of Orpheus and Euridice, concerns a life-or-death poetry and singing competition in the Underworld. And it was Greek comedies such as this one (as well as Greek tragedies) that inspired the dreaming up in Italy, in around 1600, of the concept of a sung form of theatre: opera. It is fitting that the first great opera, composed by Monteverdi in 1607, features a hero faced with a life-or-death singing challenge in the Underworld, Orfeo. That said, I suspect that the scale and popularity of these amphitheatre dramas among ordinary folk in Ancient Greece and Sparta, and their origin in choral and religious festivals, puts them closer as an experience to Handel’s theatre-filling eighteenth-century oratorios, such as his Messiah, or even the twentieth-century musical, a form that more often than not created a story out of songs, in contrast to opera, which tended to create songs from a story. But in the absence of surviving notation of the music performed with the plays of Aristophanes and others, we must once again resign ourselves to frustration and speculation.

  Hellenistic culture was in due course absorbed into that of the Roman Empire, and though we can see from paintings, friezes and pottery that the Romans were surrounded by music and its trappings, they too had no compulsion to write it down.

  The one great thing we do know about the Romans and music is that they had a particular penchant for the organ, which featured as musical accompaniment for gladiatorial contests and other large-scale public entertainments. They had of course inherited the technology from Ktesibios’s hydraulis organ – and the name organum likewise comes from the Greek organon, meaning instrument or tool. The oldest surviving example of the hydraulis organ was discovered in 1931 in the Roman city of Aquincum (modern Budapest) and dates from AD 228, but it was during this same century – the third century AD – that the Greco-Roman method of using water to compress the air was replaced by a system of leather bellows, the prototypes of all subsequent bellows-fed organs.

  What the Romans played on their organs is of course a matter of conjecture. The vast body of written material left to us from the Roman era suggests to us that, if they had developed some form of notation, some fragment or mention of it would surely have survived, but it has not. Consequently their music is as deathly silent as the empty rooms of Pompeii.

  Almost. One fragile musical thread did survive the collapse of Greco-Roman civilisation, given impetus by what seemed at first to be insignificant events in a troublesome frontier territory. This was the unstable puppet kingdom of Judaea, or what we now call Palestine and Israel. In the embers of the last days of the Roman Empire we are able, out of centuries of silence, to hear the only living musical bequest of the Ancient World.

  In the year AD 70 the Roman Army, exasperated by years of rebellion in Judaea, sacked the city of Jerusalem and destroyed the Israelites’ Temple there. This succeeded in silencing a tradition that had been maintained for perhaps as long as a thousand years – that of chanting Hebrew psalms in the Temple – but the interruption was only temporary; for one thing the tradition of chanting, if not the Hebrew chants themselves, was in due course taken on by the splinter sect of Christianity. It was originally supposed that the earliest Christian gatherings must have been heavily influenced by the synagogue services they replaced, but recent scholarship has shown that Christian chant developed from hymn singing rather than from psalms, and that it was different in character – probably intentionally – from its Jewish predecessor. Caution has to be applied to these conclusions in the absence of any surviving Jewish psalmody from before the destruction of the Temple, but what is clear is that, in the seven-hundred-year period during which Jewish chant fell into neglect, Christian chant spread vigorously. It was substantially reinforced when the religion became legal and was openly practised following the Edict of Milan in AD 313.

  The gradual retreat of Roman military and administrative authority across western Europe between 300 and 400 AD left behind a chaotic, fragmented picture, but it’s an exaggeration to conclude that all culture disappeared with the Romans and that Europeans were left rummaging around in a sea of ignorance and brutality, with a few isolated monastic settlements holding civilisation together. For a start, it very much depends on which Europeans you are talking about.

  The Kingdom of Armenia, for example, established Christianity as its official religion in 301, and Armenians held on to their religious independence even when they were subsumed into the later Persian and Arabic Empires. Etchmiadzin Cathedral was completed in 303 under the supervision of Saint Gregory the Illuminator, and can claim to be the oldest purpose-built state church on earth, all earlier places of worship having been adapted from existing religious buildings, including Roman and Jewish temples. Etchmiadzin Cathedral still stands today, an impressive rebuttal to the notion that the period following the fall of Rome meant the temporary end of civilisation. An even more spectacular architectural contradiction of the phrase ‘Dark Ages’ is the Hagia Sophia basilica in modern Istanbul, then Constantinople, the construction of which began in 537 and whose breathtaking dome – mostly redesigned and shored up in the 560s – was unsurpassed in its grandeur and ingenuity for nearly a thousand years.

  Indeed, all that happened as Roman power retreated from western and northern Europe was that its civilisation relocated to Constantinople, which continued to be a place of cultural magnificence for hundreds of years. The singing of psalms and hymns, and the training up of singers to do so, may have been low down on the list of priorities in the anarchic wasteland of France or England immediately after the withdrawal of Roman Imperial administration, but the church in Rome itself set up its School of Singing (Schola Cantorum) in 350 and there was plenty of musical activity going on in the Eastern, Byzantine Empire too. Subsequent hostilities between Eastern and Western powers have blinded us to the fact that the ‘European’ civilisation we have gratefully inherited was nurtured, enriched and developed in places that now are associated with the Arabic, Islamic and Eastern Orthodox world.

  We know chanting, or religious singing of some kind, was alive and well in the Byzantine half of Europe in at least the third and fourth centuries, because something of it even survives in a written-down form. In the papyrology collection of the Sackler Library at the University of Oxford is the world’s oldest surviving Christian hymn, featuring a form of now undecipherable notation. It was excavated by Oxford archaeologists at the partially buried city of Oxyrhynchus in Egypt in the late nineteenth century. Thanks to these excavations and others, the Sackler Library contains the largest collection of ancient classical manuscripts on earth. The Oxyrhynchus hymn, written in Ancient Greek, dates from the late third century, making it nearly two thousand years old.

  Meanwhile, in northern and western Europe, the waning of Roman influence provoked a wave of local wars as tribes fought for territorial supremacy – but these tribes were not all ‘barbarian’, in the generic sense that they were illiterate, marauding hooligans. At the burial site of the early seventh-century Anglo-Saxon king Rædwald in Sutton Hoo in Suffolk, for example, along with all manner of cultural treasures, clothes, jewellery, weapons and so on, are the remains of a large six-stringed lyre, a form of handheld harp that is compara
ble to those of the Ancient World. Of course, we don’t know what the music played on this lyre sounded like, even though we can strum its strings and admire its craftsmanship. We don’t know whether it occurred to its strummers to play more than one string simultaneously, like a chord, or whether they only picked out one-note-at-a-time tunes. Likewise, even though we know that in early seventh-century China ‘orchestras’ of instruments played together, what they played is guesswork.

  It is possible, though, to reconstruct, to some extent, the chants that were being sung in churches and abbeys from around the fourth century onwards, from manuscripts of various kinds. Even where the primitive notation used was crude or unclear, the same chants continued to be sung without significant alteration into the period when reliable notation did exist. The incredible thing is that, for the first few hundred years of the first millennium AD, before a universal notation system emerged, all of the chant that monks and nuns sang was memorised. It was passed on aurally, monk by monk, nun by nun, painstakingly, patiently, for century after century. This chant, also called plainchant or plainsong, has by default often been described as ‘Gregorian’ chant, after Gregory the Great, who was Pope at the end of the sixth century. It is beautiful, ancient, mysterious and – in its incredible test of human memory – miraculous. What it is not, we now know, is anything to do with Pope Gregory.

  Indeed, plainsong developed gradually and separately all over Christian Europe according to local tastes and traditions. There was Gallican chant in France, Ambrosian chant in northern Italy, Beneventan chant in southern Italy, Mozarabic chant in Spain and Sarum chant in the British Isles (Roman Sarum becoming in the thirteenth century the modern English city of Salisbury). But what all this chant had in common was that it was one memorised, meandering tune with no accompaniment and no harmonising, the Greek term for which is monophonic: one voice.