History of music

• 1. Introduction

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  Every known culture on Earth makes music, which is why scholars call it a cultural universal. Yet nobody agrees on where it came from. Charles Darwin thought music began as a kind of mating call, an idea he laid out in his 1871 book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. Others have argued it grew out of language, or alongside it, or that language grew out of music. There is little consensus on any of it.

  The oldest firm physical traces are stranger still. A flute carved from a young cave bear's femur, found in the Divje Babe cave in Slovenia, may have been blown by Neanderthals tens of thousands of years ago. Whether it is even a musical instrument is fiercely disputed. From that uncertain beginning, this story moves through bone flutes in German caves, tuned bronze bells in a Chinese tomb, harpists carved into Persian rock, chanting monks, and the first operas. How did sound shaped by humans travel so far, and who decided what counted as music at all?

• 2. Theories Of Origin

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  Before the mid to late 20th century, academics seldom gave the origin of music substantial attention. When the topic returned, it split into three camps. One holds that music began as a proto-language that led to language. Another treats music as a spandrel, a by-product that came after language. A third proposes that music and language both descended from a common antecedent.

  Charles Darwin's idea, perhaps the first significant theory, framed music as a form of sexual selection. Critics have noted a problem: there is no evidence that either human sex is more musical, and so no sign of the sexual dimorphism that sexual selection usually requires. Even so, later scholars including Peter J.B. Slater, Katy Payne, Björn Merker, Geoffrey Miller and Peter Todd have kept the theory alive by pointing to music in other animals' mating systems.

  The biologist Herbert Spencer and the composer Richard Wagner argued that music and language share a precursor; Wagner called it speech-music. The archaeologist Steven Mithen has supported this view in the 21st century. Other thinkers tied music to practical needs. The economist Karl Bücher linked it to organizing cohesive labor, the musicologist Carl Stumpf to long-distance communication, and the anthropologist Siegfried Nadel to contact with the divine.

  The musicologist Curt Sachs proposed two origins at once, one from speech and one from emotional expression, which he called logogenic and pathogenic. David Teie's theory of emotional origins traces music to two sources: the sounds a fetus hears in the womb, and emotionally generated vocalizations. Teie argued this explains elements found in every culture, including pulse, meter, and distinct notes.

• 3. Myths Of Invention

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  Most cultures answer the question of music's origin with a story rather than a theory. Christian mythology credits Jubal. Persian and Iranian tradition names the legendary Shah Jamshid. In Hinduism the goddess Saraswati is the source, and in Ancient Greek mythology the muses fill that role.

  Ancient Egyptian mythology spread the credit across many deities, including Amun, Hathor, Isis and Osiris, and especially Ihy. Chinese mythology offers many tales, but the most prominent involves the musician Ling Lun. On the orders of the Yellow Emperor, Huangdi, Ling Lun is said to have invented the bamboo flute by imitating the song of the mythical fenghuang birds. These figures gave each culture a divine or heroic author for a sound nobody could trace.

• 4. The Deepest Traces

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  Prehistoric music, in the broadest sense, covers all music made in preliterate cultures, reaching back at least 6 million years to the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees. Most surviving Paleolithic instruments come from Europe and date to the Upper Paleolithic. Singing may have come far earlier, but that is essentially impossible to confirm.

  The Divje Babe Flute, made from a young cave bear femur and dated to between 43,000 and 82,000 years ago, sits at the center of intense debate. If Neanderthals truly made it, it would be the oldest known musical instrument and proof of a musical culture in the Middle Paleolithic. If animals shaped the holes, it is nothing of the kind. Apart from it and three other doubtful flutes, almost no certain Middle Paleolithic musical evidence survives.

  The earliest objects widely accepted as instruments are bone flutes from the Swabian Jura in Germany, from the Geissenklösterle, Hohle Fels and Vogelherd caves. Eight examples survive, four made from bird wing bones and four from mammoth ivory, and three are nearly complete. The three from Geissenklösterle are the oldest, dated to roughly 43,150 to 39,370 years before present. Simpler instruments likely came first, made from reeds, gourds, skins and bark that rotted away. A painting in the Cave of the Trois-Frères, dated to around 15,000 BCE, is thought to show a shaman playing a musical bow.

• 5. When Writing Met Sound

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  In the Jiahu site of Wuyang, Henan Province, archaeologists found 12 gudi bone flutes dating to around 6000 BCE, the earliest instruments in prehistoric China. The Xia dynasty left almost nothing: two qing, two small bells, and a xun. The Indus Valley civilisation, mature from about 2500 to 2000 BCE, left rattles and vessel flutes, and an ideogram from before 1800 BCE holds the earliest known depiction of an arched harp.

  Ancient music, the music of literate civilizations, tended toward monophony, improvisation, and the dominance of text. The oldest surviving written music is the Hurrian songs from Ugarit in Syria, the oldest of which, the Hymn to Nikkal, dates to around 1400 BCE. The Seikilos epitaph, dated to the 2nd century CE or later, is the earliest entirely complete noted composition, perhaps written for the wife of an unknown man named Seikilos.

  In China, the Tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng, sealed after 433 BCE, held a monumental set of 65 tuned bianzhong bells spanning five octaves and requiring at least five players. Confucius, who lived from about 551 to 479, named ritual music yayue, proper music, and set it against suyue, the lively vernacular music he distrusted. During the Han dynasty, the Yuefu music bureau collected folksongs, both to understand the common people and to bend their songs toward propaganda. By 7 BCE it employed 829 musicians before Emperor Ai cut it back.

• 6. Harps, Lyres, And Courts

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  Elam depictions from around 3300 to 3100 BCE give the first affirmation of Persian music in the form of arched harps. Elamite bull lyres from about 2450 have been found at Susa, and more than 40 small Oxus trumpets survive from Bactria and Margiana. A Zoroastrian myth in which Jamshid attracts animals with the trumpet hints that the Elamites used such instruments for hunting.

  In Mesopotamia, more bull lyres survive than in Iran, including the Bull Headed Lyre of Ur, nearly identical to its Elamite counterparts. The rock reliefs of Kul-e Farah show that sophisticated Persian court ensembles emerged in the 1st century BCE, built around the arched harp. Greek historians fill many gaps: Herodotus noted that Achaemenid priests used no aulos in ceremonies, and Athenaeus recorded that 329 female singers were taken from Darius III by the Macedonian general Parmenion.

  The Sasanian period, from 226 to 651 CE, left ample evidence of a thriving musical culture. Khosrow II was its most outstanding patron, and his reign is regarded as a golden age of Persian music. Among the musicians in his service was Barbad, the most famous of them, who worked as both court poet and musician. In the Sasanian Empire there was little distinction between poetry and music. In ancient Greece, mixed-gender choruses sang for entertainment and spirituality, with the double-reed aulos as the chief wind instrument and the lyre, especially the kithara, plucked alongside it.

• 7. Chant And Polyphony

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  From before the year 800, the only surviving repertory in Western Europe is the plainsong liturgical music of the Roman Catholic Church, much of it called Gregorian chant. Pope Gregory I lent his name to it and may have composed, though the sources crediting him date from more than a century after his death, and many scholars think legend has inflated his role. Most of the chant was written anonymously between Gregory's time and Charlemagne's.

  In the Byzantine Empire, which lasted from 395 to 1453, the first major form of sacred music was the kontakion, whose foremost composer was Romanos the Melodist. The kanōn overtook it in the late 7th century, reaching its peak with John of Damascus and Cosmas of Maiuma. Kassia stands out as the only woman whose works entered the Byzantine liturgy, a prolific composer of sticheron hymns.

  During the 9th century in the West, notation was reinvented after a lapse of about five hundred years, and the earliest polyphony, a parallel singing called organum, was sung. After 1100 schools of polyphony flourished, among them the Notre Dame school with its composers Léonin and Pérotin, who produced the first music for more than two parts around 1200. A secular tradition rose alongside it through the troubadours and Minnesänger, much of whose culture was destroyed during the Albigensian Crusade in the early 13th century. In the 14th century, the ars nova favored secular forms such as the ballade and rondeau, with composers like Guillaume de Machaut and Francesco Landini.

• 8. Toward Opera And Beyond

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  The Renaissance in music did not begin in Italy but in northern Europe, in the area now covering northern France, the Netherlands, and Belgium. The Burgundian composers, the first generation of the Franco-Flemish school, included Guillaume Dufay, Gilles Binchois, and Antoine Busnois. The invention of printing spread their styles widely and helped build the first truly international style since Gregorian chant under Charlemagne. Josquin des Prez became probably the most famous composer in Europe before Palestrina.

  In Florence in the 1570s and 1580s, the Florentine Camerata set out to restore the music of the ancient Greeks. Vincenzo Galilei, father of the astronomer, and Giulio Caccini were chief among them. Their work produced monody, a declamatory singing style, and a staged dramatic form now known as opera. The first operas, written around 1600, mark the end of the Renaissance and the start of the Baroque era, which ran from 1600 to 1750 and included Johann Sebastian Bach and Antonio Vivaldi.

  The Classical period favored homophonic texture, an obvious melody with accompaniment, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart stood at its center. In the Romantic period music grew more expressive, reaching from Chopin and Berlioz to Wagner and Tchaikovsky, often charged with nationalist fervor in figures like Dvořák, Sibelius, and Grieg. The 20th century brought radio, the synthesizer, and wide experimentation, with classical music shaped by the rival schools of Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky. Popular music spread on an unprecedented scale, its roots reaching back to the American Tin Pan Alley of New York City in the 1880s, where verses and choruses built the repeating song structures still heard today.