Brief history of music 554 words
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Man-made music has been shaping our world for tens of thousands of years, long before the advent of writing, perhaps its more tangible relative. And for thousands of years people have been trying to decipher our response to this kind of created sound.
The earliest attempts to explain the power of music involved the overlapping ideas of religion and magic. Just like the earliest songs. It is now that we can simply download music to our device, and the first fans had nothing left but to be personally present when it was performed by live musicians. The oldest surviving piece of music is the hymn to the Mesopotamian goddess of fertility, Nikkal, written in cuneiform on a clay tablet dating from around 1400 BC.
In ancient Egypt, India, China, Greece, and Mesopotamia, songs that served important ceremonial functions were similarly preserved on clay tablets, papyrus, and eventually on paper. Like much of modern music, these ancient songs praised the gods, invoked supernatural powers, and deified those in power.
Although the very first purposes of music were probably appeasement and celebration, ideas about the place of music in the culture of a civilization varied greatly.
In ancient Greece, a mathematician of the 6th century BC. Pythagoras claimed that music is a reflection of cosmic harmony. In its tendency towards symmetry and unity, he argued, it is not so different from mathematics.
A century later, Plato, and then his student Aristotle, rejected this idea of cosmic harmony and argued that the true purposes of music were social, educational, and personal. Plato argued that music is an excellent pedagogical tool and necessary for the "correct" functioning of society.
By the way, the idea of music as a corrupting influence can be traced even then. Plato argued that "wrong" music can become a gateway to moral decay. He even wrote that the cultural influence of the new music that became popular in Greece during the Persian Wars was to blame for the rising of the younger generation against authority and the social unrest in Athens. (Isn’t it amazing how ideas echo through the millennia?)
In China, Confucius and other thinkers divided music into forms, some of which were considered vernacular and less valuable. In India, the Natya Shastra, compiled by the sage Bharata Muni between about 200 B.C. and 200 AD, it is said that great music can induce a state of divine ecstasy in the listener, thus laying the foundation for a tradition of devotional music that continues to this day.
The idea of satanic music can be traced back to the era of the Crusades. An increasingly violent form of Christianity took root in Europe and the Levant as wars were fought between the warriors of Christ and the warriors of Islam in the 11th and 13th centuries. On both sides, music created and listened to for sensual pleasure was declared "vulgar" (in fact, this practice never disappeared, in different eras and in different regions).
It was believed that certain chord progressions were associated with evil and Satan (another echo that has survived to this day). Some of these arrangements, including the infamous "Diabolus in Musica" or "Devil in Music", are still used today in horror and heavy metal, and in other ways, aided by this unsettling combination of chords and intervals.
Meanwhile, in the Islamic world, the Sufis challenged explicit and implicit prohibitions on music and developed a musical philosophy of body and soul that still thrives today in the Indian subcontinent, the Levant and Africa. Through songs about peace, love and coexistence, these mystics encourage people to use music to connect with God.
However, all this time, high art was divided roughly into two categories: piety or imitation of nature.
Everything changed in the Renaissance, when artists and philosophers of the 15th century began to argue that high art could also have a personal goal: to be a means of self-expression of the artist and a resonant reflection of everyday life. After that, the locks were opened. Each generation created its own riffs. The elders complained about the noise.
“Too heavily seasoned; impassable labyrinths; bizarre flights of the soul”: these were the verdicts of some modern Austrian critics about the compositions of the young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (born in 1756).
“Deplorable… a rancid smelling aphrodisiac. Promotes…negative and destructive reactions in young people”: This is what Frank Sinatra (born 1915) said about Elvis Presley (born 1935).