So How And Why Was There Music?

 

These are Greek.

 

    This is going to be one of those intentional dreams that is actually conjecture. Just me noodling because I have nothing better to do.
    I was positing to myself that if there had been a time before history back in that interesting dark period we know nothing about, but we like to think we can figure out, that maybe I could puzzle out how it started. Music. I’m thinking in terms of organized pleasant sound. What was it for, and who started it?
    I’m going to need help with this no doubt. “Help me band!”
    What if there was a time before our time, when there was no way to send a message through the trees or over the hills? Sure, you could send a runner. But what if you had a nice piece of hollow log or something like that, and what if you noticed that if you banged on it, that it made a nice carrying sound that the hunters out in the field or whoever could hear. Or maybe you needed to warn of danger or some such. I kind of think this could be a beginning point. Intentional sound for a practical reason.
    What if the early drummer took pleasure in his work and began to improve it, to create certain known messages?

    Or what if during retelling of oral histories or important adventures the drummer sat in to make it more fun or dramatic?
    One local authority tells me that people made music because it was fun. I suppose that would happen pretty quickly also.
    But then I also can’t help but compare it to the courtship behaviors of birds. I can see early music making as a kind of display to indicate a man’s prowess and desirability. I still see that in action. I may be crazy, but it seems to me that instrumental music is or maybe was a largely a masculine artform.
    I have talked only about drums but imagine when they discovered strings! Ach mein Gott! Everything becomes beauty, seduction, and worship! Then add bone flutes and such!
    I see singing as perhaps the specialty of women in the early days. It goes along with magic. Women have always tried to use magic I think.
    In any case music is pretty powerful stuff. It hits us wordlessly. Music can induce a mental state like nothing else. I suspect there was music before there was a lot of talking. I mean if we want to imagine that there was such a time. I do not claim to know, of course.
    The Bible says that Lucifer was the head musician in Heaven before he fell. Much to consider there. Did he originate pride? Another thing I find myself wondering.
    But enough. Below I have included etymonline.com’s definition of music.

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music (n.)
mid-13c., musike, "a pleasing succession of sounds or combinations of sounds; the science of combining sounds in rhythmic, melodic, and (later) harmonic order," from Old French musique (12c.) and directly from Latin musica "the art of music," also including poetry (also source of Spanish musica, Italian musica, Old High German mosica, German Musik, Dutch muziek, Danish musik), from Greek mousikē (technē) "(art) of the Muses," from fem. of mousikos "pertaining to the Muses; musical; educated," from Mousa "Muse" (see muse (n.)).

The modern spelling is from 1630s. In classical Greece, any art in which the Muses presided, but especially music and lyric poetry.

Music is the sound of the universal laws promulgated. [Thoreau]

The use of letters to denote music pitch probably is at least as old as ancient Greece, as their numbering system was ill-suited to the job. Natural scales begin at C (not A) because in ancient times the minor mode was more often used than the major one, and the natural minor scale begins at A.