Musical Beginnings

It seems likely that everyday activities, such as the movements in repetitive work and in walking, were rhythmically regular enough to invite some sort of embellishment. Related breathing rhythms, chanting, or other accompaniment, such as the tapping of a walking stick while walking or the transformation of a work tool into an instrument while working, may have been early forms of music. In fact, whether sacred Native American corn-gathering songs or melodies heard in elevators or supermarkets, music still accompanies our ceremonial and everyday activities.

Scholars can only speculate about when music began or which cultures had music first. From ancient times people have told stories of its origins. The so-called music of the spheres was thought by Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras in the 6th century bc—and by later classical and medieval philosophers of the Western world—to be a perfectly harmonious music, inaudible on Earth, produced by the movement of the stars and planets. In many non-Western cultures ancient thinkers understood music as part of a system of cosmological, philosophical, or scientific thought. For instance, the musical scale of ancient China, derived through arithmetic from a basic note, reflected the ancient Chinese conception of the organization of the universe. Each degree of the scale was closely related to the cardinal points (north, south, east, west), the elements, the seasons, the planets, the months of the year, colors, materials, numbers, parts of the human body, animals, smells, and so forth. The Chinese found in nature eight different sources of musical sound: metal, stone, silk, bamboo, calabash, terra cotta, skin, and wood.

Many of the elaborate melody patterns of India, called ragas, are believed to have magical or curative powers. Ragas are traditionally played at specific hours or during specific seasons; it is believed that to depart from this timetable would be harmful to the performer and audience. In some tribal societies, music appears to serve as a special form of communication with supernatural beings, and the prominent use of music in modern Christian and Jewish services may be a remnant of such a purpose. Music has always held an important role in religious rituals.