Music

• 1. Introduction

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  Music is, at its simplest, the arrangement of sound to create some combination of form, harmony, melody, rhythm, or other expressive content. The word itself only entered English in the 1630s, arriving through Middle English musike and Old French musique from the Latin musica, which traces back to the Ancient Greek phrase mousike techne, the art of the Muses. In Greek mythology, the Muses were nine deities who presided over the arts and sciences, first named in the tales of Homer and Hesiod before becoming linked to music specifically. Over time, one of them, Polyhymnia, came to preside over music more than the rest. Music is considered a cultural universal, present in every human society, yet scholars still cannot agree on which small number of elements actually defines it. What they do agree on is its versatility: music is created through composition, improvisation, and performance, played on instruments ranging from the human voice to a digital audio workstation on a computer. It threads through religious ceremonies, festivals, film soundtracks, and private listening alike, and it has spawned an entire industry of songwriters, sound engineers, and instrument makers. If no one can settle on what music actually is, how did humans ever start making it in the first place?

• 2. Origins And Prehistory

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  Charles Darwin offered the first influential theory of music's origin in 1871, arguing that it arose as a form of sexual selection, perhaps growing out of mating calls. Scholars have since criticized Darwin's idea for its inconsistencies with how sexual selection works elsewhere in nature, even as many researchers in the 21st century have picked the theory back up and developed it further. Competing explanations abound: music may have helped organize labor, improved communication across long distances, served communication with the divine, strengthened community cohesion, or scared off predators. Much of the debate turns on whether music grew out of language, developed alongside it, or emerged only afterward, and whether it was itself selected for or arose as a byproduct of other evolutionary pressures. Because no one can travel back to hear it, prehistoric music can only be theorized from what survives at paleolithic archaeology sites. The Divje Babe flute, a perforated cave bear femur at least 40,000 years old, remains disputed. Researchers still debate whether it was shaped by human hands or simply gnawed by animals. Firmer evidence comes from the Swabian Jura region of Germany, where the Geissenklösterle, Hohle Fels, and Vogelherd caves have together yielded eight bone flutes used by Early European modern humans during the Aurignacian. Four were carved from the wing bones of birds and four from mammoth ivory, and three survive nearly complete. The three flutes recovered from Geissenklösterle are the oldest of the group, dated to roughly 43,150 to 39,370 years before the present.

• 3. Ancient And Asian Traditions

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  In ancient Egypt, the clearest evidence of musical instruments appears only in the Old Kingdom, when harps, flutes, and double clarinets accompanied court and religious life, with percussion, lyres, and lutes added to orchestras by the Middle Kingdom. Cymbals accompanied music and dance then just as they still do in Egypt today. Further east, in the Syrian city of Ugarit, clay tablets preserve the Hurrian Hymn to Nikkal, the oldest surviving notated work of music, dating back roughly to 1400 BCE. In ancient Greece, music was one of the principal subjects taught to children, considered essential to the development of the soul, and musicians and singers held a prominent place in Greek theater. Plato's Republic describes the musically educated as living in perfect harmony, and boys began their musical training around age six on instruments such as the double-reed aulos and the lyre, particularly the kithara. Greek musical modes, developed through this widespread literacy, later became the foundation of Western religious and classical music, though contact with the Roman Empire, Eastern Europe, and the Byzantine Empire reshaped Greek music further.The Seikilos epitaph survives as the oldest complete musical composition with notation found anywhere in the world, while Aristoxenus wrote Harmonika Stoicheia, the oldest surviving work of music theory. Indian classical music ranks among the oldest continuous musical traditions on Earth. Sculptures from the Indus Valley civilization depict dance and instruments such as a seven-holed flute, and excavations at Harappa and Mohenjo Daro, led by Mortimer Wheeler, recovered stringed instruments and drums. Indian classical music, or marga, is monophonic, built from a single melody line called a raga and organized rhythmically through talas, while the poem Cilappatikaram explains how new scales could be built by shifting an existing scale's tonic note. Carnatic music, popular across the southern Indian states, remains largely devotional, its songs addressed mostly to Hindu deities alongside others about love and social issues. Indonesian music has developed since Bronze Age culture reached the Indonesian archipelago in the 2nd or 3rd century BCE, built around percussion instruments such as the kendang drum and gongs. Distinctive instruments followed, including the sasando string instrument of Rote island and the Sundanese angklung, culminating in the elaborate Javanese and Balinese gamelan orchestras. Gamelan, the country's most popular musical form, combines metallophones, drums, gongs, spike fiddles, and the bamboo suling flute. Chinese classical music has its own history stretching back some 3,000 years, complete with its own notation, tuning systems, and instruments. It is built on a pentatonic-diatonic scale of twelve notes to the octave, the same 5-plus-7 structure found in European-influenced music.

• 4. The Classical Tradition

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  Before the year 800, the only European medieval repertory to survive in written form is a single tradition: the monophonic Gregorian chant of the Catholic Church. The Church introduced notation in the Middle Ages so chant melodies could travel unchanged across its empire. Alongside that sacred repertoire, a vibrant tradition of secular song flourished too, carried by composers such as Léonin, Pérotin, Guillaume de Machaut, and Walther von der Vogelweide. Around 1450, the printing press made sheet music far cheaper than hand-copied scores, spreading musical styles faster and further than ever. By the middle of the 15th century, composers including Guillaume Du Fay, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, and Josquin des Prez were writing richly polyphonic sacred music for church choirs, while kings, queens, and princes across Europe competed to hire the finest talent for their courts. The Baroque era, running from 1600 to 1750, opened with the first operas and kept polyphonic, contrapuntal writing at its center, while German composers wrote for strings, brass, woodwinds, choirs, and keyboard instruments such as the harpsichord. This period produced the fugue, the sonata, and the concerto as major musical forms, and its leading figures include Johann Sebastian Bach, composer of the Cello suites, George Frideric Handel, composer of Messiah, Georg Philipp Telemann, and Antonio Vivaldi, composer of The Four Seasons. Classicism, spanning 1730 to 1820, looked back to the balance and proportion of ancient Greece and Rome, favoring a clearer, homophonic texture built from one prominent melody over a subordinate chordal accompaniment. The fortepiano, ancestor of the modern piano, replaced the harpsichord as the primary keyboard instrument, and the sonata became the era's most fully developed form, underpinning everything from string quartets to full symphonies. Public concerts also became possible for the first time, freeing composers such as Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven from needing permanent employment under a prince or queen. Romantic music, from around 1820 to 1900, broke away from the Classical era's rigid forms toward more passionate and dramatic writing. Beethoven's short, organically developed motifs, such as the four-note figure that opens his Fifth Symphony, came to replace melody as music's core building block, while composers such as Wagner and Brahms pushed emotional expression further still. Symphonic tone poems let composers tell stories and paint landscapes purely through instrumental sound, and later figures such as Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Antonín Dvořák, and Gustav Mahler reached for unusual chords and dissonance to build dramatic tension. The Industrial Revolution helped manufacture louder, more powerful instruments just as orchestras themselves grew larger, and public concerts became a fixture of well-to-do urban life.

• 5. The Twentieth Century Explosion

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  Before the 20th century, sheet music sales were the main way new compositions reached the public, performed at home by amateur musicians on piano or violin, an arrangement that limited access to middle and upper-class households that could read notation and afford an instrument. Radio broadcasting and mass-produced gramophone records changed that entirely, letting anyone with a radio or record player hear operas, symphonies, and big bands from their own living room, regardless of income or location. The horrors of the First World War pushed composers toward darker, harsher sounds, while figures such as Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, and John Cage drew on traditional styles like jazz and folk music as raw material for new art music. The ability to record and edit sound gave rise to entirely new classical subgenres, including the acousmatic and musique concrete schools of electronic composition, and it also let popular recordings be distributed far beyond where a band could ever tour. Jazz emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in African American communities across the Southern United States, blending African and European traditions; its West African roots still show in its use of blue notes, improvisation, polyrhythms, syncopation, and the swung note. Rock music followed in the 1950s, growing out of rock and roll, rockabilly, blues, and country, typically built around electric or acoustic guitar and a strong back beat from the rhythm section, sometimes joined by saxophone or blues-style harmonica as soloing instruments. In its purest form, one description holds, rock "has three chords, a strong, insistent back beat, and a catchy melody." The standard popular-music rhythm section settled into rhythm guitar, electric bass, and drums, later joined by organ or piano and, from the 1970s onward, analog synthesizers. The 1980s brought digital synthesizers such as the DX-7 and drum machines such as the TR-808, while the 1990s added a growing range of computerized instruments and software. By the 2020s, soft synths and computer music apps let bedroom producers build entire tracks, including electronic dance music, at home using sampled and digital instruments. That same decade of the 1990s also saw genres such as nu metal start folding DJs, who build music by manipulating recordings on a DJ mixer, directly into their lineups.

• 6. Composition, Performance And Improvisation

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  A lead sheet, no more than a melody line, lyrics, and a chord progression jotted down, is often as far as notation goes when songwriters outside the classical tradition compose a song. Classical composers typically orchestrate their own work in full, while songwriters in musical theatre or pop music often hire a separate arranger for that task, and some songwriters compose entirely in their heads before ever writing anything down. Even a precisely notated classical piece leaves many choices to the performer, since notation cannot specify every element; the process of making those choices is called interpretation, distinct from performance practice, the shared body of conventions typical of a given time and place. A composition does not always have a single author. Bands can collaborate on a song together, and a musical might split the work three ways, one person writing melodies, another lyrics, a third orchestration. Some composers, working in genres such as the blues, create and record songs without ever notating them. Music built from heavy randomness is called aleatoric music, associated with 20th-century composers such as John Cage, Morton Feldman, and Witold Lutosławski; wind chimes jingling in a breeze are a familiar example of chance-based sound. Though the study of composition has traditionally centered on Western classical practice, the term is broad enough to cover popular and traditional songwriting as well as the spontaneous improvisation of free jazz performers and African percussionists such as Ewe drummers. Performance itself, the act of singing or playing a piece aloud, evolves even after a composer is satisfied with a finished work; classical performers and conductors gradually shift phrasing and tempo over time, while popular and traditional musicians take more liberties still, adding a guitar solo or a new introduction even to a cover song. Some performances are planned and rehearsed, the norm in classical music and jazz big bands, while others are improvised over a chord progression, the norm in small jazz and blues groups; orchestras, concert bands, and choirs rehearse under a conductor, while rock, blues, and jazz bands follow a bandleader instead. Improvisation itself draws on a chord's notes, its associated scales, and passing chromatic tones outside those scales, and it was a core skill during the Baroque era, when performers ornamented freely and continuo players improvised chord voicings from figured bass, and during the Classical era, when soloists improvised entire virtuoso cadenzas mid-concert. As Western art music became institutionalized in symphony orchestras, opera houses, and ballets through the 20th century, improvisation receded from most notated performance, even as some contemporary composers folded it back into their work deliberately. In Indian classical music, by contrast, improvisation remains a core, essential part of every performance.

• 7. The Elements Of Music

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  Pitch describes whether one musical sound registers as higher or lower than another, whether that is the piercing note of a piccolo against the deep thump of a bass drum or the precise pitch of a single melody note. Precise pitch only exists in sounds whose frequency is clear and stable enough to separate from noise, which is why a single piano note is far easier to place than the clang of a struck crash cymbal. A melody, or tune, is a series of pitches sounding one after another, usually drawn from a single scale tied to a song's key; a folk song in the key of C, for instance, might use only the notes C, D, E, F, G, A, and B, the white keys on a piano. Bebop jazz from the 1940s reaches for chromatic notes beyond the major scale, or unusual scales such as the whole tone scale. Harmony refers to pitches sounding together as a chord, and in music built on major-minor tonality, the kind behind most classical music written between 1600 and 1900 and most Western pop, rock, and traditional music, a piece's key sets the home note, or tonic, that the music keeps resolving back toward. Simple pieces stay in one key throughout, but Romantic-era classical music from 1820 to 1900 often shifts between multiple keys, and Bebop jazz can change its home note every four bars, or even every two. Rhythm is the arrangement of sound and silence in time, organized into regular pulse groupings called measures, most often in sets of two, three, or four beats. Texture describes how a piece's melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic layers combine, ranging from monophony, a single unaccompanied melody such as a mother's lullaby, to heterophony, where performers such as two bluegrass fiddlers play the same tune with individually varied ornaments, to polyphony, where independent melody lines interweave, as in Renaissance choral music or a round like Row, Row, Row Your Boat, to homophony, a clear melody over chordal accompaniment that has defined most Western popular music since the 19th century. Timbre, sometimes called tone color, is what makes the same pitch sound different on an oboe, a piano, a violin, or an electric guitar, shaped by a mouthpiece, a reed, or even whether a string is made of gut or steel. For instruments such as the electric guitar or the Hammond organ, a performer can reshape that timbre directly, adjusting equalizer controls, effects pedals, or drawbars.

• 8. Women In Music

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  In the Concise Oxford History of Music, only a handful of women composers get a mention at all, and Clara Schumann is one of the few named outright. That gap sits oddly alongside a long, continuous line of women composers stretching back to the medieval period, women who have also shaped music as songwriters, performers, conductors, scholars, and critics throughout its history. Women make up a growing share of instrumental soloists in classical music, but a 2015 study of concerto soloists at major Canadian orchestras found that 84 percent of those performing with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra were men, and in 2012 women held just 6 percent of seats in the top-ranked Vienna Philharmonic. Describing the 1960s pop scene, one account put it bluntly: songwriting was a male-dominated field, and while plenty of female singers appeared on the radio, women were primarily seen as consumers. Singing was an acceptable pastime for a girl, the same account noted, but playing an instrument, writing songs, or producing records simply was not done, because young women were not socialized to see themselves as people who create music. That gap persists today in orchestral conducting, music criticism, production, and sound engineering. Music education became an exception. Women were discouraged from composing throughout the 19th century, yet came to dominate music education during its second half and on into the 20th century. Jessica Duchen, a music writer for London's The Independent, has argued that women musicians in classical music are too often judged for their appearance rather than their talent, facing pressure to look sexy onstage and in photographs, and that those willing to play on their looks tend to be more materially successful. Edwina Wolstencroft, an editor at the UK's Radio 3, has said the music industry has long welcomed women into performance and entertainment roles, but rarely into positions of real authority, such as conducting an orchestra. Even in popular music, where many women record as singers, very few sit behind the console as producers, the people who direct and manage the recording process itself. One of the most recorded artists in the world defies nearly all of these patterns: Asha Bhosle, an Indian singer best known as a playback voice in Hindi cinema.