From gospel, to metalcore.

When we take a look at music’s history, we’re really taking a look at humanity’s history, since it is fair to assume that the first instrument to have ever been played was our voice. Through sounds and groans at first, to then evolve into humming and eventually singing. Maybe birds inspired us, how could we forever resist the urge to imitate their beautiful chants ?

Archaeologists found primitive flutes made out of bones in the Hohle Fels cave near Ulm, Germany, presumed to be as ancient as 40 000 years old. Most of the searches done on ancient civilizations point toward the fact that they too enjoyed music. Where man is, music is.

One could argue that where there is life, there is music. Everything, from the smallest cell to the biggest entity, gets affected by sound in different and distinct ways. If you put a glass of water close enough to a steady and constant frequency, the molecules of the water will form shapes, and through a microscope you could see what that sound actually looks like.

Some songs are said to allow plants to grow faster and better. Still, we can’t say that we understand yet all of sound’s powers. What we know is that we love music and crave for it. But how did it go from enjoying flutes, to enjoying ‘’violent’’ music ?

Africa’s Heritage

Instruments such as the animal-skinned tambourine, the mbira (hand piano), flutes and group chants were a part of spiritual rites and practices in parts of Africa for thousands of year. String-wise, we also know that Africans came up with what would be a huge worldwide influence , the Arabic rebab. First made from the half of a coconut shell, the more sophisticated versions were made of metal, and it was played either plucked or with a bow.

Most likely the oldest stringed instrument, the rebab spread through the Islamic trading routes in North Africa, the Middle East, parts of Europe and Asia. Known as the ‘’spike fiddle’’, the instrument became very popular and is still used in Arabic songs but mostly in its modern non-spiked guitar-shaped form. Africans of the B.C. era already had a very rich musical culture and many innovations toward art.

Picture of a rebab Source : http://rebab.name/rebab/

The Middle East

Asia, with instruments such as the xylophone or the thousands year old stringed Guqin, brought much to music. Nonetheless, in between both continents, the Middle East revolutionized our world. The Sumerian, Egyptian and Persian civilizations were incredibly powerful at the time and were each a possessor of much knowledge. Making many historical scientific and cultural breakthroughs, the Sumerians , for example, were responsible for what we consider as the oldest notation of music known to man, lyrics written on clay tablets from 3,400 years ago.

Many other traces of music were discovered in ancient civilizations, such as the Tutankhamun’s trumpet in Egypt. One of the earliest versions of a metal-made wind instrument and without keys, it probably only was used to announce the pharaoh’s entry, henceforth its name. More technical, the tall harp was found in Sumer and depicted in Egyptians hieroglyphs.

It is also interesting to note that Egyptians did group chanting. According to Hans Hickmann's work on Ancient Egypt, cheironomy was a genre of music performed in their civilization. It was typically orchestrated by a leader indicating pitches and signals to a choir through complex choreographs from his hands and fingers. Cheironomy is in some way one of the very first parents of classical music, along with the harp.

The harp is a remarkable instrument, capable of a wide range of pitches and notes. A direct father of the lyre, it is undeniable how much Middle East’s culture influenced European culture. Small, portable and with a good resonance through its sound table, the ergonomic mini-harp quickly gained in popularity.

Ancient lyre Source : https://www.smith.edu/hsc/museum/ancient_inventions/hsc12b.htm

Greece

Invented by the Greeks, this musical innovation influenced a lot the stringed instruments world. Other inventions came up in Greece such as the development of individual tones and scales, worked on by savants like Aristoxenus and Pythagoras. First steps of the chromatic scale, it was the beginning of the standardization of written compositions with notes.

Greek civilization is really where the basis of the composed music that bands use today started. Adepts of poetry and of chants to their gods, music was taught in schools, some genres even including singing along instruments such as the flute. More and more people were being introduced to arts, even if it was still mostly for the upper class.

In 146 B.C, Greece fell under the hands of the Roman Republic, and during the reign of the roman emperor Constantine The Great (306–337 A.D), Rome became Christian. Greatly influenced by their population, but also by all of the territories that they conquered, Rome grew a very rich culture under its bloody reign

Statue of Constantine The Great Source : https://about-history.com/constantine-the-great-and-his-rule/

The Rise of Christianity

On the third of September in 590 a man was anointed to the powerful position of Pope Gregory 1. Instigating the first ever recorded large-scale mission from Rome, he had for goal to convert the pagan Anglo-Saxons from England into Christians. It is also to his reign that legends attribute the invention of the religious Gregorian music, a genre most likely influenced by Roman and Gallic chants.

It was the beginning of a new era of Christianity, religious music and merciless crusades. But not to forget, in the medieval era came the birth of modern schools, relating to instruments and notation becoming better and with a wider reach to the population,as there were more musicians. Still, everything was mostly poetic and/or religious. Though classical was getting more popular, christian music was still the main genre all throughout Europe.

Monophonic Gregorian chants were performed without any accompaniments ,and were the dominant genre in the beginning of the beginning of the medieval era. Evolving into polyphonic chants by adding more voices to the songs in the early 13th century, it was performed at masses, sometimes along an organ. At an era where Christianity was very strong and imposed on others, pretty much all of Europe’s population got influenced by its sound.

The Americas

We’ve now taken a quick glance at the Pre-Renaissance history of music, but as we know, the New World was discovered at the end of the Renaissance. Spain, France and England, three super powers of Europe, got into a race after Christopher Columbus's discovery. Entering a colonization war, battling each other for territories and resources, a lot of man power was required to shape this new territory.

After losing many of their men on the new continent, the super powers, now on a colonization frenzy, decided on a place where they could gather low-cost workers. It was the start of the infamous triangular trade, in which slaves and goods were shipped from West Africa to the Caribbean, Portugal or the Americas. It kept going all the way from the late 16th century to the early 19th.

Completely unwillingly, in 1619 the first Afro-Americans stepped on the New World’s ground in Jamestown, Virginia. From free men to slaves, they didn’t know it yet, but they would be the start of what most probably is the biggest musical influence that North America ever had. With their unique, very rich culture and after many pitiless obstacles they brought to us the earliest form of music we attribute to North America : spiritual music.

The first known metal band was 1960’s Ozzy Osbourne’s Black Sabbath, but where did they get influenced, why and how did later metal singers started aggressively growling in their mics ?

When did drummers started blasting their double pedals, bass players throwing fat in your face and guitarists doing heavy riffs with crazy solos ? We will know very soon, in the next article of The Expression of Violence.