I’m not surprised the whole thing started with a huge bang, not just a big downbeat in bar one, but the biggest one of them all. How fitting that this initial pulse of rhythm came as part of an explosion both destructive and creative. That’s a symbol for all the later musical outbursts charted in these pages, those unruly sounds that shatter the existing order, cause turbulence and even chaos, only gradually coalescing into a new stability.
Our original downbeat took place some 13.7 billion years ago, the proverbial Big Bang in a still unfolding composition. But if matter explodes in the universe and no one is around to hear it—maybe couldn’t hear it, if it took place in a surrounding vacuum—is it really a bang? Do our histories even falsify this first beat, which really possessed no bang at all, not even an intergalactic whimper? Perhaps we should consider this opening galaxy-forming gambit as akin to the silent wave of the conductor’s baton before the concert begins. A look, a nod, a quick movement, and we are off…
That universal symphony continues even today, but as cosmic background microwave radiation, an almost silent echo, barely detectable even with the most finely tuned instruments. Yet it still makes music, even in a vacuum. I note that the scientists who discovered the faint reverberations of the Big Bang first heard it over the radio. A lot of strange things happened on the radio in 1964—from the British Invasion to Louis Armstrong topping the chart with “Hello Dolly”—but this was the strangest of them all: Tune in to the right station and you can hear the origin of the universe! These late-arriving listeners for the longest-running live musical broadcast wisely realized that a hit song needs a suitable title, and their new—but very old—discovery finally received one when they published their findings the following year: “A Measurement of Excess Antenna Temperature at 4080 Megacycles per Second.” That title, announcing the strange fact that somebody finally heard the bang a few billion years after it banged, was too long to fit on a jukebox label, but sufficient to earn a Nobel Prize for Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson.
But what modern science tells us simply repeats the Nada Brahma—that affirmation that the world is sound—of ancient Indian spirituality. In Hindu iconography, Shiva is even depicted as holding a damaru, or hourglass-shaped drum, in the moment of creation, a little bang doing the work of the big one surmised by physicists. This same vision of musical genesis is supported by countless creation myths around the world, with their tracing of ultimate origins back to cosmological compositions. More than one thousand references to music can be found in the Bible—in Judeo-Christian tradition, no physical icon or relic can come close to matching the potency of sound as a pathway to the divine and a source of transformative energy. Sometimes the power of music is brutally destructive—for example, the trumpet blasts of the Israelites sending the walls of Jericho tumbling to the ground—but more often, sound, in the Bible and in other traditions, is associated with creation and transformation. “In the Hebrew ‘Genesis’ the creating word is spoken,” explains Natalie Curtis, one of the first scholars to write about Native American songs. “In nearly every Indian myth the creator sings things into life.” In Australia, writes Bruce Chatwin in The Songlines, “Aboriginal creation myths tell of the legendary totemic beings who had wandered over the continent in the Dreamtime, singing out the name of everything that crossed their path—birds, animals, plants, rocks, waterfalls—and so singing the world into existence.” Pythagoras turned this almost universal mythology into philosophy when, holding up a stone, he told his students: “This is frozen music.”1
It’s worth noting how rarely myths describe music originating as entertainment or works of artistic expression. Those categories may describe how we view songs in the current day, but our oldest ancestors knew something we ought to remember and which should be the starting point for all histories of song: music is power. Sound is the ultimate source of genesis, broadly defined, as well as metamorphosis and annihilation. A song can contain a cataclysm.
Science tells the same story, whether we peer into the depths of the universe or study the world at hand. From the start, waves of sound came not just from a primal explosion, but from the smallest particles of matter. In the heart of the atom we find vibrations of extraordinary speed—up to one hundred trillion times per second—creating a tone some twenty octaves above the range of our hearing. Over the years, a host of serious researchers and borderline crackpots—Ernst Chladni, Fabre d’Olivet, Charles Kellogg, Hans Jenny, Robert Monroe, Alfred Tomatis, and others—have demonstrated surprising and sometimes enchanting relations between our intangible music and the surrounding physical world. And in 1934, scientists at the University of Cologne discovered that sound waves sent through fluid can create flashes of light inside bubbles, visible to the naked eye and bearing an uncanny resemblance to the stars in the heavens. This property of sound—now known as sonoluminescence—is accompanied by intense pressure and high temperature coinciding with bubble collapse and the release of energy. Here is the littlest bang of all, if you will. As with the creation myths, sound has become visible.
As matter coalesced and cooled following that inaugural Big Bang, larger sounds and rhythms were superimposed on this microscopic chorus. Just as the cosmos offers its astral soundscape, the earth below supplies a terrestrial rhythm section. This is the ultimate ground beat: the movements of terra firma are not haphazard rumblings, but follow set rhythms—even today our seismographs can detect ongoing and consistent periods of vibration lasting between 53.1 and 54.7 minutes, producing a tone twenty octaves below the capacity of the human ear to hear. Indeed, each of the four ancient elements—earth, air, fire, water—conveys its own particular musical personality, made manifest in the crack of thunder, the roar of waves, the steady drone of the waterfall, the sporadic crash of a falling boulder or tree, and other natural events large and small.
These inanimate sounds were matched by their earliest organic counterpoints, a living orchestra constructed from the rich vocalizations of animals, birds, and insects. “Each creature appears to have its own sonic niche (channel, or space) in the frequency spectrum… occupied by no others at that particular moment,” writes musical ecologist Bernie Krause, who sees this aural territoriality as the foundation for the earliest human musical compositions. The first hunting and gathering societies must have paid close attention to this ever-changing aural tapestry—shifting every few meters, every few minutes. Long before aesthetic considerations came to the fore, the Darwinian struggle for survival ensured that our progenitors were careful listeners of their ambient soundscape.2
Krause describes a memorable encounter with an elder of the Nez Perce tribe named Angus Wilson, who chided him one day: “You white people know nothing about music. But I’ll teach you something about it if you want.” The next morning, Krause found himself led to the bank of a stream in northeastern Oregon, where he was motioned to sit quietly on the ground. After a chilly wait, a breeze picked up, and suddenly his surroundings were filled with the sound of a pipe organ chord—a remarkable occurrence, since no instrument was in sight. Wilson brought him over to the water’s edge and pointed to a group of reeds, broken at different lengths by wind and ice. “He took out his knife,” Krause later recalled, “and cut one at the base, whittled some holes, brought the instrument to his lips and began to play a melody. When he stopped, he said, ‘This is how we learned our music.’”3
Lynne Kelly, an Australian researcher, encountered a similar surprise when her friend Nungarrayi of the Warlpiri tribe explained that even trees, bushes, and grasses can be identified by their songs. “I found this hard to believe,” Kelly later explained, “but was assured that if I gave it a try I would discover that it is possible.” That afternoon, when she began listening to vegetation, she found that the passing breeze imparted a distinctive aural soundscape to the trees around her. “The eucalypt to my left, the acacias in front, and the grasses to the right all made distinctly different sounds. I could not accurately convey these sounds in writing. In subsequent sessions, I’ve been able to distinguish between different species of eucalypt.… The experience convinced me that the sound of plants, animals, moving water, rock types when struck and many other aspects of the environment can be taught through song in a way that is impossible in writing.”4
Biologist David George Haskell has trained students how to hear this tree music, and as an entry point he advises them to wait until a rainstorm, when the melodies are easiest to discern. Some present the listener with “a splatter of metallic sparks,” others “a low, clean, woody thump,” or “a speed-typist’s clatter.” When teaching ornithology, he issues a challenge to the class: “Okay, now that you’ve learned the songs of 100 birds, your task is to learn the sounds of 20 trees. Can you tell an oak from a maple by ear?” Their homework is to “go out, pour their attention into their ears, and harvest sounds.” For him, “it’s an almost meditative experience. And from that, you realize that trees sound different, and they have amazing sounds coming from them.” Moreover, the music of nature guides us through life cycles and seasonal patterns. “Our unaided ears can hear how a maple tree changes its voice,” Haskell explains, especially when the soft spring leaves grow stiff and brittle with the approach of winter.5 As we shall soon see, this same cyclical process from life to death (and back again) has shaped human music-making for thousands of years.
These stories make clear that a natural history of sound preceded its social or aesthetic history. You simply can’t understand the latter without paying close attention to the former. For our earliest ancestors, this was a matter of survival, plain and simple. If they paid attention to the wrong soundscape, they might not survive another day.
I emphasize these facts because to grasp the developments ahead of us in this chronicle it is essential to understand how different music is from other art forms. Movies, novels, figurative art, comic books, dramas, and most other forms of cultural expression were invented by human beings, and they possess only the power invested in them by individuals and social institutions. But humans evolved in an ecosystem that already contained formidable sounds, melodies, and rhythms. As part of that evolution, they seized this power for themselves—at least as much of it as they could. The birth of song can almost be viewed as akin to Prometheus stealing fire from the gods in the famous Greek myth. It was a matter of usurping quasi-divine energy, an exemplary moment of empowerment. Natural sounds may have inspired the first strains of human music, as early societies imitated what they experienced in their various habitats. Or, perhaps more likely, the organization of sound into music was intended to subdue the natural world, reduce its ever-present dangers, bring it within the span of social control. In either case, sounds were weaponized.
The songs and dances of hunting societies, for example, often mimic the sounds and movements of the animals they hunt—an example of what is known as sympathetic magic, where people imitate what they hope to influence. To conquer the beast, one borrows its music. We find this in the turtle-hunting song of the Andaman Islanders, the buffalo dance of the Mandan tribe of the Dakotas, the elephant-hunting music of the Hehe people of Tanzania, the opossum dance of the Aboriginal settlers of southeastern Australia, and a host of other settings. In far-flung spots on the globe, wherever human communities lived in symbiotic relationship with their prey, hunters emulated the soundspaces of the hunted.
Experts have offered dozens of theories about the origins of music among our hunting ancestors, many of them fanciful or absurd, but the most persuasive hypotheses usually boil down to matters of sex or violence. That should hardly surprise us, if only because songs always seem to gravitate to those two subjects. Listen to the most highbrow music genre, grand opera, and you discover that sex and violence are the two dominant themes of the most popular works. Consider the populist folk ballad, and you find the same obsession. And you will also encounter a fixation with sex and violence in hip-hop and punk rock, ballads and blues, country and metal. You can feel those forces in the air, propelling the dance music at the disco and the electronic grooves at the rave. Even religious music, seemingly hostile to these fierce imperatives, cannot resist them. The oldest song in the Bible, found in the Book of Exodus, taunts the defeated Egyptian army after God has drowned the Israelites’ enemies in the Red Sea. On the other hand, the most famous song in the Bible—it’s called the Song of Songs, if you had any doubts—couches praise of God in the erotic language of a love poem. Perhaps some extraterrestrials in another galaxy possess songs that have nothing to do with these primal forces, but no human society has been able to make music without their guidance.
Charles Darwin, in fact, saw sex as the source of all music-making, claiming that the songs of human societies grew out of the mating calls of birds and other creatures. “Musical tones and rhythms,” he declared, “were used by our half-human ancestors, during the season of courtship, when animals of all kinds are excited not only by love, but by the strong passions of jealousy, rivalry, and triumph.” Darwin asserted in 1871 that “love is still the commonest theme of our songs,” and little has changed in that regard since his day. Not just our performances of music as participants, but also our preferences as consumers of recordings, reveal a linkage with procreation. In 2006, researcher Geoffrey Miller surveyed six thousand recent recordings and found that 90 percent of them were made by males, most of them during their peak years of sexual activity. That gender discrepancy may surprise current-day listeners, given the chart-topping successes of female pop singers in recent years, but the voices of men dominated airplay during most of the second half of the twentieth century—a period when rock, punk, and early hip-hop set a macho tone for commercial music. And even after the balancing out of the last decade, the ages of the most popular singers, regardless of gender, still coincide with heightened biological fertility.6
If you still have doubts about the linkage between songs and procreation, just pay attention to the lyrics. A recent study of songs that made the top ten on the Billboard chart found that 92 percent refer to sex—“with a mention [on average] of 10.49 reproductive phrases per song.” Almost every playlist tells the same story: music is not only life-changing, but actually life-creating. Just consider, many of us might not be here today if our parents had not heard one of these songs with “reproductive phrases” at the right time and place.7
But there’s just as much reason to believe that music arose (reversing the hippie dictum) to make war, not love. Strange to say, some of the most persuasive evidence for this view comes from the same songbirds that Darwin studied, but drawing on findings unavailable to him. We now know that birdsong plays a key role in asserting territorial claims. A mere recording of avian melodies, played over a loudspeaker, is sufficient to deter other birds from entering an area. In contrast, a male bird surgically deprived of his singing ability soon finds rivals intruding on his turf, but he will sometimes still mate even without the benefit of his courtship songs. In some instances, birds will even cooperate in using songs to defend their territory, providing an uncanny counterpart to human military alliances.
Our own musical traditions, many of them shaped by violence, reinforce this alternative theory of the birth of song. Sometimes these origins survive in symbolic form—for example, in the fight songs of sports teams, or the countless singing competitions on television—but in other cases they show up in actual confrontations. I am told that Inuit culture preserves a tradition of song duels to settle disputes. But you only need to observe schoolchildren for confirmation of this process at work in the modern day. Their bullying and fights are often accompanied by semi-musical chants filled with taunts, boasts, and ridicule. I’m sure it happened in Darwin’s day too.
Yet violent music isn’t always accompanied by violent behavior. A 2018 study showed that death metal fans, a mix of both men and women, extract feelings of joy and peace from listening to “Hammer Smashed Face” (by Cannibal Corpse) and “Waiting for Screams” (by Autopsy), among other songs selected by the researchers. Perhaps these aficionados have been desensitized by repeated exposure to such music, or maybe some kind of Aristotelian catharsis takes place in the listening process. There are millions of people who listen to songs of this sort without descending into the barbarism implied by the lyrics. We need to take seriously at least the possibility that violent tendencies get channeled and transformed in constructive, or at least neutral, directions through music.8
So which of these is the main impetus behind music: sex or violence? Are songs aligned with creation or destruction? In fact, we don’t need to choose, because both aspects of music seem to arise from the same biological foundations. A large and growing body of research confirms that singing in groups—or even just listening to music—causes the release of the hormone oxytocin. This change in our body chemistry makes us more trusting of those around us, more willing to cooperate with them in pairs or teams. This obviously explains why songs can lead both to sexual unions and the formation of military units. They are flip sides of the same coin. Music creates group cohesion for both creative and destructive purposes. In other words, hypotheses about both of the proposed sources for our earliest songs—sex and violence—find validation here.
The same findings lend support to other conjectures about early music, some of them so far-fetched as to defy belief. The eighteenth-century social philosopher Giambattista Vico claimed that the first legal codes were sung before they were spoken or written down. Many have laughed at this notion, but if singing actually brings about cooperation and helps settle disputes, Vico may have been onto something. Back in 1896, economist Karl Bücher theorized that music originated when communities turned to song and rhythm as a way of organizing the labor necessary for social survival and advancement—in essence, early music was a kind of management tool. Few scholars today give much credence to Bücher’s views, but he may also have captured part of the truth. The same can be said of philosopher Carl Stumpf, who argued that music was invented for the purpose of communication, since songs can be heard over greater distances than the spoken word. Songs thus served as invaluable signaling tools for early human societies. I also call attention to the work of current-day scientists Edward Hagen and Gregory Bryant, who have focused on the role of song in forming coalitions in human society. Each of these thinkers has expanded our notions of the wide-ranging power of song. Although sex and violence may be the most awe-inspiring forces it channels, they are merely at the top of a long list. Songs are repositories for many kinds of power.
Yet theory can only take us so far. Researchers have also learned a considerable amount by digging into the remains of prehistoric communities. In 1995, paleontologist Dr. Ivan Turk excavated a bear’s thighbone from a site in Slovenia. This femur was perforated with four holes in a straight alignment, which suggests conscious design rather than arbitrary markings. In appearance, the object resembles the bone flutes found at other European and Asian excavations. But there is one important difference: whereas other bone flutes had been dated as far back as thirty-five thousand years, and were remnants of human culture, the specimen retrieved by Dr. Turk came from hunting areas occupied by Neanderthals. Radiocarbon dating indicates that this artifact, allegedly the oldest known musical instrument, is between forty-three thousand and eighty-two thousand years old. Although some have tried to explain away the apparent finger holes as random teeth marks, their placement suggests an intention to create the notes of a diatonic scale. The implications are surprising, but clear: Neanderthals, who many researchers doubt even had language or any kind of articulate speech, may have soothed the anxieties and celebrated the modest successes of their arduous lives with the dulcet tones of a flute. But how fitting, given our speculations above, that the creator of the oldest surviving musical instrument had to kill a bear first before relaxing with a song.9
Popular science has intruded into these matters with enthusiasm. Many recent best-selling books have explored music as something that takes place inside the brain. Who could have imagined, back in the days of Lester Bangs and the rise of Rolling Stone, that a time would come when so many leading music writers would be neurologists and neuroscientists? Yet Dr. Daniel Levitin has given us This Is Your Brain on Music (more than one million copies sold), the late Dr. Oliver Sacks followed up with Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, another best-seller still going strong more than a decade after publication, and hardly a week passes without some team of scientists gaining mainstream press coverage for their latest research findings on music. I have some sympathy for the agendas pursued by these experts, and often learn from them, but remain troubled at the reductionist perspectives they have occasionally fostered. Biology lays the foundation for music, but it cannot comprehend the superstructure. Even the most complete mapping of brain functions or body chemistry, with every neuron and synapse found and tracked, will never fully encompass the Jupiter Symphony, a Bach fugue, or the call-and-response antiphony of a work song.
In other words, biology deals the cards, but social conditions dictate how the game is played. This is the starting point for our history of music, as it should be for all histories of music. There may be an organic imperative to music-making that is hardwired into our DNA—and we will need to grapple with biological issues many times during the course of this work. Yet the way this universal impulse gets turned into actual songs is shaped by countless other factors every bit as complex as the human genome. Technological innovations, political structures, economic conditions, cultural institutions, belief systems, and a host of other intersecting variables play their parts, helping to shape the ever-shifting soundscapes of human history. No, it’s not just sex and violence, but what we make of them. On the other hand, ignoring these powerful forces, and their recurring role as constituent elements of our songs, is hardly an option. The pages ahead are filled with case studies of those who underestimated their sway and were swept aside in the aftermath.