This Day In History. History Vault. Recommended for you. How the Troubles Began in Northern Ireland. What is the oldest known piece of literature? Our ancestors used jewelry and other personal adornments to reflect their identity. Making music is a universal human trait that goes back to at least 35, years ago. Explore the evidence for some of the world's earliest musical instruments. Explore rock art made by modern humans from around the world using the early crayons and other art implements shown here.
Skip to main content. Modern humans created decorated objects using a variety of techniques. So much less can we have any idea what sounds and pitches were heard in the Paleolithic times. 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.
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 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.
This is not so surprising. There is little point in listing all these pipes; all the Paleolithic examples from Europe, or close by, found before 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, 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.
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, 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, BP, found in the Ukraine and published by Bibikov 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. There are from the Magdalenian period, some 12, 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, ; Rault, 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, , many more have been reported from around the world Fagg, 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. 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, 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. 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.
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, 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, 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, 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, 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. 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. 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. 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 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.
This series is, alas, incomplete, for its publication ceased with the reunification of Germany. 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.
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. 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 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 Chinese encyclopedias said that they got the gong from the West, which also suggests a Central Asian origin. 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. 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.
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 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, 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 , were established by that date Le Cerf and Labande, 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 To avoid using sharps and flats, let us take these pitches as C for 8, D for 9, and E for The major tone of 8—9 is cents; the minor tone of 9—10 is cents, and together these make up the third, C to E, of 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 cents for each.
However, adding those together produces a wildly sharp third of 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 He returned to the natural third of cents and, taking its mean or average of 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 cents and semitones of cents, these differences may seem small, but if one listens to music played in other temperaments, it really does sound different—even today a cent third still sounds quite badly out of tune. This whole subject is quite complex and Barbour, , or the article on Temperaments in the New Grove Dictionary of Music , will give fuller details. 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.
0コメント