Musical instrument

• 1. Introduction

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  A simple flute, dated back fifty to sixty thousand years, is the oldest object scholars have ever called a musical instrument. It is bone, perforated, and silent now. A musical instrument, at its core, is a device created or adapted to make musical sounds. In principle, any object that produces sound can become one. It is purpose that turns an object into an instrument. A person playing one of those bone flutes at the start of a hunt did so without any thought of making music in the modern sense. So how did clapping hands and signal horns become violins, theremins, and synthesizers embedded in pocket-sized devices? Why can scholars not agree on when the first instrument appeared, or even what counts as one? And how did an instrument born in one corner of the world end up played thousands of miles from where it began? Those questions run from a cave in Slovenia to a royal cemetery in ancient Sumer, and on to the circuits of a Moog synthesizer.

• 2. Buried Evidence

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  The Divje Babe Flute, a perforated bone discovered in 1995 in the northwest region of Slovenia, may be the oldest known musical instrument. The archaeologist Ivan Turk found it. Its age is estimated between 43,400 and 67,000 years old, and if Turk is right, it is the only Neanderthal musical instrument ever found. Others argue the holes are simply the work of carnivores chewing the bone, and the dispute remains unsettled.

  Mammoth bone and swan bone flutes from the Swabian Alps of Germany are more widely accepted as the oldest. They date back 30,000 to 37,000 years and were made in the Upper Paleolithic age. The British music archaeologist Graeme Lawson built a replica of a complete specimen and reached a surprising conclusion. He contends they were not flutes at all. Played as end-blown lip reed instruments, similar to a cornett, they produce the first five notes of the diatonic series in a clear, strident tone. He points to microscopic wear patterns, the absence of a fipple or blowhole, and a well-rounded end aperture as evidence.

  Many early instruments left no trace at all. The majority were built from animal skins, bone, wood, and other non-durable, bio-degradable materials. Recent studies indicate early hominins made percussive instruments from perishable wood and animal hide, which time likely destroyed beyond recovery. Only objects of durable material, or built by durable methods, survived to be found. That is why scholars caution that no recovered specimen can be placed irrefutably as the earliest instrument. The chewed bone of Divje Babe is a reminder of how thin the evidence can be.

• 3. Ensembles Of Ur

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  At the Royal Cemetery in the Sumerian city of Ur, excavations uncovered one of the first ensembles of instruments yet discovered. It included nine lyres, known as the Lyres of Ur, plus two harps, a silver double flute, a sistrum, and cymbals. A set of reed-sounded silver pipes found there was the likely predecessor of modern bagpipes, with three side holes that let players produce a whole-tone scale.

  Leonard Woolley carried out these excavations in the 1920s. He recovered the non-degradable fragments and also the voids left behind where parts had rotted away, and together these were used to reconstruct the instruments. The graves themselves have been carbon dated to between 2600 and 2500 BC, fixing a point at which such instruments were used in Sumeria.

  Far to the east, archaeologists at the Jiahu site in the central Henan province of China found flutes made of bone dating back 7,000 to 9,000 years. Researchers describe them as among the earliest complete, playable, tightly-dated, multinote musical instruments ever found. Examination shows they were made with precision to generate specific notes. That precision points to Neolithic China's advanced grasp of music scales and sound engineering, a sophistication that would echo in how later Chinese thinkers approached music itself.

• 4. The Trouble With Chronology

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  Scholars agree there are no completely reliable methods for determining the exact chronology of musical instruments across cultures. The German musicologist Curt Sachs, one of the most prominent musicologists and musical ethnologists of modern times, argued that arranging instruments by workmanship is misleading. Cultures advance at different rates and have access to different raw materials.

  Comparing instruments by complexity fails for a strange reason: advancements have sometimes reduced complexity. Early slit drums required felling and hollowing out large trees. Later slit drums were made simply by opening bamboo stalks, a far easier task. A contemporary anthropologist comparing two cultures that existed at the same time, but differed in organization and handicraft, cannot say which instruments are more primitive.

  Ordering by geography has its own limits, since it cannot always be known when or how cultures contacted one another. Sachs proposed that a geographical chronology works best up to about 1400 because of its limited subjectivity. Beyond 1400, the overall development of instruments can be followed over time. To rebuild this history, researchers lean on three paths at once: archaeological artifacts, artistic depictions, and literary references. Any single path can be inconclusive, so all three together paint a fuller picture, a method that matters because the earliest accounts were not history at all but myth.

• 5. Myth And First Sounds

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  Until the 19th century AD, European-written music histories began with mythology mingled with scripture. They credited Jubal, descendant of Cain and called the father of all such as handle the harp and the organ, in Genesis 4:21. They named Pan as inventor of the pan pipes, and Mercury, said to have made a dried tortoise shell into the first lyre. Modern histories replaced these tales with anthropological speculation, sometimes informed by archaeology.

  Rattles, stampers, and various drums are among the first devices external to the human body considered instruments. They grew from the human motor impulse to add sound to emotional movements such as dancing. Some cultures then gave them ritual functions for hunting and ceremony. Drums in particular took on sacred importance among the Chukchi people of the Russian Far East, the indigenous people of Melanesia, and many cultures of Africa, where drums were pervasive throughout every culture. One East African tribe, the Wahinda, held the drum so holy that seeing one would be fatal to anyone but the sultan.

  Melody came later, by a process resembling reduplication in language: first repetition, then arrangement. An early melody came from pounding two stamping tubes of slightly different sizes, one clear and one darker in sound. Such instrument pairs, including bullroarers, slit drums, shell trumpets, and skin drums, were associated with gender. The bigger or more energetic was the father, the smaller or duller was the mother. Only after thousands of years did patterns of three or more tones appear in the earliest xylophone, which originated in mainland and archipelago Southeast Asia before spreading to Africa, the Americas, and Europe.

• 6. Crossings Of The Ancient World

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  Images of musical instruments begin appearing in Mesopotamian artifacts in 2800 BC or earlier. Around 2000 BC, Sumerian and Babylonian cultures split instruments into two classes, popular ones playable by anyone and professional ones built for skill and effectiveness. Historians have distinguished six idiophones in early Mesopotamia: concussion clubs, clappers, sistra, bells, cymbals, and rattles. Sistra appear prominently in a great relief of Amenhotep III, and similar designs turn up in places as far apart as Tbilisi, Georgia and among the Native American Yaqui tribe.

  Musical instruments in Egypt before 2700 BC bore striking similarity to those of Mesopotamia, leading historians to conclude the two civilizations were in contact. Sachs notes Egypt possessed no instrument the Sumerians lacked. By 2700 BC the contacts dissipated, and the lyre, a prominent Sumerian ceremonial instrument, did not appear in Egypt for another 800 years. When the Pharaohs conquered Southwest Asia around 1500 BC, the ties revived, and the New Kingdom adopted oboes, trumpets, lyres, lutes, castanets, and cymbals.

  The Indus Valley civilization, which emerged around 3000 BC, reveals its own crossing. Examination of the Indus script shows vertical arched harps identical in design to those in Sumerian artifacts, one of many signs the two cultures kept cultural contact. In Israel, by contrast, professional musicians did not exist between 2000 and 1000 BC, and few artistic representations survive. Scholars rely instead on the Bible and the Talmud, which mention the ugab and kinnor tied to Jubal. The introduction of a monarchy in the 11th century BC produced Israel's first professional musicians and a sharp rise in the number and variety of instruments.

  Greece, Rome, and Etruria stood in stark contrast, their instruments simple and nearly all imported. Lyres were the principal instrument, used to honor the gods. Greeks classified wind instruments as aulos or syrinx, and their writing reflects serious study of reed production and technique. Romans played reed instruments called tibia with side-holes that could be opened or closed. Beyond the Mediterranean, the Iron Age Celts had the carnyx, dated to about 300 BC, its bronze bell shaped like a screaming animal head and held high above the head to intimidate opponents on the battlefield.

• 7. Spread Of The Middle Ages

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  In 384 AD, China established an orchestra in its imperial court after a conquest in Turkestan, the first record of China integrating outside musical influence. Influences from the Middle East, Persia, India, and Mongolia followed, and Chinese tradition attributes many instruments of the period to those regions. Cymbals gained popularity alongside more advanced trumpets, clarinets, oboes, flutes, drums, and lutes. Some of the first bowed zithers appeared in China in the 9th or 10th century, influenced by Mongolian culture.

  Stringed instruments in post-classical India developed toward flexibility, suiting the slides and tremolos of Hindu music, while Chinese strings aimed for precise tones matching chimes. Persian influence brought oboes and sitars, though Persian sitars had three strings and Indian versions had from four to seven. The Alboka, whose name comes from al-buq meaning horn, survives in the Basque Country and is played using circular breathing.

  The gong was the most prominent instrument of Southeast Asia. It likely originated in the area between Tibet and Burma, yet it became part of every category of human activity in maritime Southeast Asia, including Java. Balinese and Javanese music used xylophones and bronze metallophones.

  Despite the legacy of Greece and Rome, most instruments in Medieval Europe came from Asia. The lyre may be the only instrument invented in Europe until this period. Central and northern regions used lutes, the south used lyres, and harps reached as far north as Ireland, where the harp became a national symbol. The 9th-century Persian geographer Ibn Khordadbeh recorded Byzantine instruments including the urghun, the shilyani, the salandj, and the lyra. The Byzantine lyra, a bowed string instrument, is an ancestor of most European bowed instruments, including the violin. Literary accounts of organs played in English Benedictine abbeys toward the end of the tenth century are the first references to organs connected to churches.

• 8. Machines And Electricity

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  From 1400 on, instrument development was dominated by the Occident, and the most profound changes came during the Renaissance. Performers began using instruments as solo voices rather than mere accompaniment, and composers started designing music for specific instruments. The first book about creating, playing, and cataloging instruments was Sebastian Virdung's 1511 treatise Musica getuscht und ausgezogen, which even described irregular instruments like hunters' horns and cow bells, though it was critical of them. Michael Praetorius's Syntagma musicum is now an authoritative reference of sixteenth-century instruments. In that century, builders gave instruments like the violin the classical shapes they keep today, and instruments became collectibles in homes and museums.

  Beginning in the seventeenth century, composers wrote to a higher emotional degree, and instruments incapable of large ranges, such as the shawm, fell out of favor. Around 1750 the lute disappeared in favor of the rising guitar. The hunter's horn was transformed into an art instrument with a lengthened tube and wider bell, and the modern horn, colloquially the French horn, had emerged by 1725.

  During the Classical and Romantic periods, lasting roughly from 1750 to 1900, instruments grew louder to fill larger halls and be heard over big orchestras. The clarinet, saxophone, and tuba became orchestral fixtures, and the clarinet grew into a whole family of sizes. Concert pitch drifted upward, from a low of 377 vibrations in 1762 to a high of 457 in 1880 Vienna, and even two international summits attended by composers like Hector Berlioz failed to agree on a standard.

  The evolution of traditional instruments slowed in the 20th century, yet the proliferation of electricity opened a new category, the electrophone. Sachs called the early ones electromechanical instruments, with mechanical parts whose vibrations were picked up and amplified, like Hammond organs and electric guitars. The theremin, a radioelectric instrument, produces music through the player's hand movements around two antennas. In the late 1960s, Bob Moog and others built the first commercial synthesizers, such as the Moog synthesizer. Samplers, introduced around 1980, mattered to the development of hip hop, and 1982 brought MIDI, a standardized means of synchronizing electronic instruments now embedded in countless devices.

  The Natya Shastra, an ancient Hindu system written by the sage Bharata Muni between 200 BC and 200 AD, divided instruments into four groups: vibrating strings, skin-head percussion, vibrating columns of air, and solid non-skin percussion. In 1880, Victor-Charles Mahillon adapted it and assigned Greek labels: chordophones, membranophones, aerophones, and autophones.

  Erich von Hornbostel and Curt Sachs adopted Mahillon's scheme and published an extensive new system in Zeitschrift fur Ethnologie in 1914, replacing the term autophone with idiophone. Idiophones vibrate the body of the instrument itself, like claves, xylophone, and mbira. Membranophones vibrate a stretched membrane, including drums and even kazoos. Chordophones vibrate strings and are sorted by the relation of string to sounding board, dividing zithers from lutes. Aerophones vibrate a column of air, from free aerophones like the bullroarer to reed instruments and lip-vibrated trumpets. Sachs later added a fifth category, electrophones, such as theremins. The academic study of all this is called organology, and scholars recognize Hornbostel-Sachs as the only system that applies irrespective of culture.

  The materials themselves carried meaning beyond classification. In ancient Mexico, drums might contain actual human body parts obtained from sacrificial offerings. In New Guinea, drum makers mixed human blood into the adhesive holding the membrane. The Yakuts believed drums made from trees struck by lightning gained a special connection to nature. Some builders pushed even further into the experimental, like Harry Partch, who created many instruments to play his own music based on unequal intervals in just intonation.