When Was Music Born?
In the crevice of a rocky hillside, prehistoric humans find shelter from the storm. It’s cold, and it’s snowing. After a few sparks, a roaring fire glows in an otherwise dark forest. Fire is not only warmth and protection; it’s an opportunity for our attention to drift beyond survival. The family is warm and sheltered; the flames will keep predators at bay; the tribe can lower their guard and enjoy a moment of tranquility. Without danger lurking in the dark, the nomads gaze up at the stars and have the opportunity to wonder. They think. They look into each others faces in the orange glow and contemplate each other and themselves.
Moments like this allowed for the development of art, culture, and no doubt — music. We painted the animals we saw; we told stories of great hunts, but where did our concept of music originate? When the first human hand made the first stroke of the drum, what inspired the rhythm? When we crafted the first flutes, how did we decide where to bore the holes that would give us scale degrees? Maybe the stomping of bison hooves gave us our concept of rhythm. Perhaps bird songs generated our idea of pitch and melody. Maybe learning to mimic the shriek of an elk was crucial to a successful hunt, but we will never know. What we do know is that at some point rhythm and pitch were decided, and those decisions are still with us today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHy9FOblt7Y&t=4s
The Divje Babe Flute is believed to be the oldest musical instrument in human history. It’s 60,000 years old and made from the bones of a cave bear. In this video, Ljuben Dimkaroski is playing is a replica, while the original is safe in the National Museum of Slovenia. Dimkaroski is a Slovenian trumpeter and a modern man who has heard modern music, but he did not create the flute with its pitches and scale degrees. He is playing modern phrases and articulations with flute holes calculated and carved on purpose 60,000 years ago. We must wonder, how different might the Neandrethal song have been from what we hear now? Did the elements of our natuaral world instill within us the notion of a musical scale thousands of years before we ever taught music? Perhaps our concept of a scale is not Western nor Eastern, but something natural that has been with us all along. Watch this video, and let your mind drift to that snowy night 60,000 years ago, when the dangers of prehistoric life were distant enough to discover something more than animal within us; something eerily beautiful, something human.
