Today we take for granted the connection between singer and song. It’s a kind of cause-and-effect. The singer creates the song, and the music is an expression of the emotions and inner life that went into its making. We are so fascinated by this process that the performer gets more attention than the music. I’ll even wager that more people can identify world-famous singers from photographs than from recordings. In the parlance of modern commerce, the artist’s image is a kind of brand or embodied logo for the music.
We can hardly imagine a world in which the opposite was true. Yet for most of human history, the song was more powerful than the singer—performers and composers were so unimportant that their names weren’t preserved. This anonymity of the singer went beyond hiding a work’s origins. The songs themselves did not express personal emotions. From a sociocultural standpoint, we might say the composer didn’t exist. The music articulated communal priorities and demands, and if we want to find a source for these works we do well to forget about our mythos of the individual artist and focus instead on the power structures of society. Even in those explicitly sexual songs attributed to the Sumerian high priestess Enheduanna, her inner life is strangely absent from the proceedings—despite the apparent intimacy of the lyrics. We never forget that her actions are embedded in ritual and driven by higher priorities than her own desires. She is playing a role, and self-expression is not part of the script.
Musical practices eventually changed, and song turned into a platform for the inner life, almost a kind of musical autobiography. Songs might actually deserve credit as the point of origin for psychology, a door into the psyche for societies that didn’t have access to Freud or Jung or pay-by-the-hour therapists. Music not only expressed the inner life, but legitimized it as something worthy of expression and consideration. In the context of civilizations that lacked democratic ideals and protections of individual rights, the importance of this shift in the nature of art should not be minimized. Song could now serve not only the deities and rulers, but also the lowly performer, who even begins to achieve a kind of glamorous allure in the process.
Sappho, the Greek poet of Lesbos, is often given credit for inventing the lyric, the song form that serves as the main conduit for this music of emotional expression—although even here the ritualistic quality of her surviving texts is as pronounced as the confessional aspects. We need to dig back even earlier, however, to find that magical moment when singers first stood out as individuals against the institutional and social framework and began to express their souls in song. More than five hundred years before Sappho, we discover the first stirrings of this more personal approach in the surviving songs of the Egyptian New Kingdom, which date back to the thirteenth century BC. If we want to trace the history of the modern concept of the singer-songwriter, the creative spirit who turns private emotions into music, this is our proper starting point, the birthplace for much of what we cherish in songs today.
This is an unlikely setting for the singer to emerge as an individual. Egyptian culture saw artists as anonymous, interchangeable figures. We don’t know the name of a single ancient Egyptian writer who can be linked with certainty to a body of literary work. No painter is identified with a painting, and few sculptors are known by name. Even when a sage is mentioned, such as the esteemed polymath Imhotep, no book of writings survives to document the personal expressions of the supposed genius. And songs are never connected by name with their performers or composers.
Yet a marked change can be detected in Egyptian attitudes toward music around the same time the first love lyrics appear. Surviving art shows Egyptian musicians performing in many contexts, ranging from temple rituals to military endeavors, but the most frequently depicted setting is now the banquet. Here we find string and wind instruments, percussion and singers, as well as people clapping and dancing. During the course of the New Kingdom, which extended from the sixteenth to the eleventh centuries BC, a markedly sensual quality becomes more prominent in these scenes. We see flowers, jewelry, and other evidences of luxury. An image from the tomb of Kynebu in Thebes, for example, shows female performers wearing flimsy, transparent gowns, and two of them are engaged in a provocative dance. This is obviously no ritualized funeral banquet, but a festive occasion for carnality and self-indulgence.
This kind of eroticism takes on even more prominence in images of musicians found in the Turin Papyrus, which dates from approximately 1150 BC. Some have even labeled this artifact as ancient pornography, or, in the words of one pundit, the “world’s first men’s mag.” This striking collection of images shows attractive women trying to play musical instruments and perform sex acts at the same time. The men are balding and overweight, hardly candidates for the pantheon of gods, so it’s clear we are witnessing something very different from the ritualized sexuality of the fertility cults. Indeed, it’s hard to describe the scene as depicting anything less than a full-scale orgy.1
Is it mere coincidence that this scandalous papyrus was found in Deir el-Medina, the same locale that gave us the most extraordinary love songs of antiquity? I don’t think so. These are the same lyrics scholar Peter Dronke called in as evidence when seeking to prove that the different musical traditions of the world testified to universal human attributes.
Her name is that which lifts me up.…
When I see her I am well again,
When she opens her eyes, my body is young again,
When she speaks, I grow strong again,
When I embrace her, she banishes evil from me.2
This song, and others like it, did not come from the pharaohs or nobles of the New Kingdom, but instead from the artisans who played a key role in the construction of their tombs in the Valley of the Kings on the West Bank of the Nile opposite Thebes. When these extraordinary documents first came to light, some described them as songs of the common people and the poor lower classes of ancient Egypt. But that’s hardly an accurate description of the inhabitants of Deir el-Medina, where these workers lived with their families. By the standards of the day, they were well paid. They enjoyed leisure time, and owned cattle and other valuable property. They were also more highly educated than the typical Egyptian. A large percentage of the inhabitants of Deir el-Medina could read and write, perhaps even a majority of them. By contrast, literacy among the wider population was rare—probably less than 10 percent. If your work involved inscribing hieroglyphs on a tomb wall, or keeping administrative records, or following plans on a complex construction project, literacy was a great asset, and often a necessity. No, these weren’t the poor, but neither were they rulers and elites. Here, for the first time in human history, we get a clear sense of how songs could express the inner lives of individuals who weren’t at the top of the institutional power structure.
If you were writing a history of personal autonomy and human rights, this small village would demand your attention. A labor dispute during the reign of Ramesses III, ignited by a reduction in grain distributions to the workers, may have been the first recorded strike in human history. The disgruntled workers even staged what we would now call a ‘sit-in’ at a temple site, and ‘management’ eventually met their demands. Again, this can hardly be a coincidence—we see here, as elsewhere, that innovations in the music of personal expression are linked to an expansion in human rights. This same village also gave us many of the best-known literary works of ancient Egypt, including satire and narrative fiction. This conjunction of circumstances offers invaluable insights into the kinds of societies that foster creative expression.
Perhaps we need to reevaluate how we define a political song. When most people hear that term, they conjure up images of antiwar chants at student protests, or defiant workers singing “The Internationale.” Most music fans know that these protest songs exist, but don’t pay much attention to them, assuming they represent only the tiniest portion of our cultural soundscapes. The idea that traditional love songs might serve as radical political statements is a strange one, almost a paradoxical one. The lyrical expression of intimate emotion is the exact opposite of the political song, according to conventional wisdom. Yet the history of music tells a very different story. Few things are more threatening to power brokers than the signs of individualism and self-directed behavior embedded in a new kind of love song, whether in ancient Egypt or during our own lifetimes.
Just ask the protesters who took part in the Stonewall uprising in 1969. Stonewall sounds like the name of a battlefield fortification or a Civil War general, and might even seem out of place as the identity of a dance hall—in this case, a nightclub on Christopher Street in Manhattan that allowed gay couples to dance in the face of constant harassment from cops. But those overtones of combat were fulfilled when club patrons and their allies decided to confront the police, and after a series of defiant and sometimes violent responses forced authorities to back down. These six days of protests and resistance are today recognized as “the motivating force in the transformation of the gay political movement,” according to historian David Carter. In the aftermath, gay rights organizations sprang up in New York and other cities, mobilizing support and political intervention. There’s now a monument at the site of the Stonewall riots, and those who lived through the turmoil know from firsthand experience how threatening romantic music can be to the ruling elite.3
Yet the same thing had happened five years earlier with the British Invasion—here we find a war metaphor deliberately used to describe the introduction of a new kind of love song into American life. When the Beatles performed for seventy-three million television viewers on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964, every number they performed was a love song, yet that persistent focus on romance only alarmed parents and other authority figures all the more. And the same thing happened with Elvis in the 1950s, Sinatra in the 1940s, swing in the 1930s, jazz and blues in the 1920s, and on and on, all the way to the troubadours, or even further to Sappho, or the Eighteenth Dynasty in Egypt. They were all just singing love songs, but they were also, in their own way, protest songs, because they aimed to change society and its norms. When dealing with music, the personal is the political, and always has been.
Deir el-Medina offers us still other clues to how musical innovations take place. I have argued elsewhere that new approaches to art spread like diseases—indeed, the use of the term viral to describe this process could hardly be more apt. Even today, the mathematical formulas applied by businesses to forecast the dissemination of a new product or technology are drawn from the medical field. This entire field of analysis originated in the attempt to predict the course of plagues and contagions. The arts are no different, and the same conditions that help spread a disease also lead to artistic revolutions. The most significant causal factor, in both instances, is the close intermingling of people who come from previously separated population groups. This is why port cities and melting pots—New York, New Orleans, Liverpool, Venice, Havana, and others—exert so much influence on music history, and why some of the unhealthiest places on earth change the course of cultural history. The high point of ancient Greek tragedy coincides with the Great Athenian Plague of 430 BC. The Black Death killed much of Florence’s population in 1348, but the birth of the Renaissance is dated, by many scholars, to that same city in 1350. Shakespeare’s artistic achievements took place amidst recurring deadly plagues in England. New Orleans gave birth to jazz at a time when it was also the most unhealthy major city in the United States, with an average lifespan for an African American resident a mere thirty-six years. The very factors that made these communities cosmopolitan and open-minded, by the standards of their day, turned them into sources of virality from both an artistic and epidemiological standpoint.4
The same must have been true at Deir el-Medina. Although it was a small community, more than thirty different foreign names have been found in the materials unearthed by archaeologists—an extraordinary diversity in the context of the time. Skilled artisans must have come from great distances to live there. This was the melting pot of ancient Egypt, and the findings there testify to the connection between multiculturalism and artistic innovation. When so many diverse people bring conflicting practices and attitudes to a new locale, a creative flux results that challenges old-fashioned ways and creates new ones. Yet here, too, we see signs of the associated public health issues that are characteristic of these same creative communities. Stanford archaeologist Anne Austin has even suggested that the birth of public health policy originated in this same Egyptian village. As infection and other medical problems spread among the inhabitants, overseers responded by implementing ‘state-subsidized’ policies and programs. We will see this connection between musical innovation, diversity, and disease at many junctures in the pages ahead.5
The appearance of this new kind of song is a milestone moment in the history of music, yet we can merely guess at how it was disseminated from Egypt—or perhaps the love lyric wasn’t disseminated, but sprang up independently in different places, spurred on by some quasi-universal drive toward self-expression and personal autonomy. Could the lyric have traveled from Egypt to Greece, where it later flourished under the influence of the most famous ancient singer of intimate songs, Sappho? Hundreds of years and kilometers separate the two settings. Yet I note that even today the island of Lesbos, home to Sappho, is the most frequent entry point for refugees from the Middle East seeking a new home in Europe. At the height of the Syrian crisis in 2016, new arrivals would show up on Lesbos almost every day, making their treacherous journey on small boats, rafts, and inflatable crafts. Even as I write, thousands of refugees still reside on this island. Certainly Lesbos must have served as a meeting point between cultures even in ancient times. We can state with some confidence, from observing comparable situations in other parts of the world, that songs are the possessions most likely to survive long journeys, remaining the property of the newcomer even when everything else has been taken away. We can’t prove that the confessional song of love arrived in the Western world by this path of transmission, but it stands out as a persuasive hypothesis.
We have even better reason to believe that the love lyrics of Egypt influenced the Song of Songs, that strange and powerful work of Judeo-Christian scripture that mixes religious belief and eroticism in a poetic text unlike anything else in the Bible. Commentators have long struggled to reconcile this overt sensuality with the expectations we bring to holy scripture, and have resorted to elaborate symbolic interpretations—viewing the invitations to sexual intimacy in the Song of Songs as references to the relationship between God and the people of Israel, or between Christ and his bride, the Church. Many mystics have been drawn to this text, finding in its poetic passages a call to passionate union with the divine. Martin Luther constructed a political interpretation of the text—reading it as Solomon’s words of thanks and praise for God’s confirmation of his kingship. More recently, feminist theologians have been drawn to this section of the Bible, which seems to express a woman’s sentiments, embracing it as a platform for defusing the patriarchal ethos of the Old Testament.
Yet those familiar with the sacred marriage ritual of ancient Mesopotamia and the love songs unearthed in Deir el-Medina cannot help but see the Song of Songs as an extension of these earlier traditions. The apparent paradoxes in the text merely reflect the clash of different musical paradigms. The prevailing tension in the work is the same one that recurs again and again in ancient music, namely, the unresolved question of whether song should serve the religious sphere, the political sphere, or the personal sphere. All three vie for control of the scriptural text. As a result, we have three corresponding ways of defining the narrative voice of the poem: it can be interpreted as the song of a king, or a prophet, or a lover. To the modern mind, those are three different stances, but in the sacred marriage ritual they coexisted.
Solomon, by tradition the author of the Song of Songs, can be described in all three ways. But even his ability to take on each of these roles leaves much unexplained. A female voice also emerges almost at the very beginning of the work: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine.… The king hath brought me into his chambers.… I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem.” If we take the text at face value, this is not the voice of Solomon, but of his black lover. Needless to say, there is firm resistance to the surface meanings here.
Rabbi and scholar Michael V. Fox believes that “Egyptian love poetry was sung in Palestine.” The sacred text thus must be seen as “a late offshoot of an ancient and continuous literary tradition.” But such obviously secular—and sensual—lyrics seem mismatched with the context. How did they end up in the Bible? The idea that ancient Israelites couldn’t tell the difference between love songs and religious songs simply defies belief. The same is true of those who think the inclusion of the Song of Songs in scripture was some sort of mistake. In fact, a surviving account tells of Rabbi Aqiba complaining, almost two thousand years ago, about people singing this sacred text in taverns for entertainment. Religious authorities were well aware of the potential misuse of the Song of Songs; nonetheless, they must have felt they needed this particular song. Why? First of all, we don’t need to embrace implausible theories based on grand misunderstandings of a fairly straightforward text. We can find a far more likely explanation by looking at other examples from music history—when, for example, St. Francis borrowed from the techniques of the troubadours for his religious canticle, or when the Vatican tried to take over the opera and turn its scandalous music into the service of the pope, as happened in Rome during the 1630s, or when Elvis Presley was invited to the White House by Richard Nixon. The dynamic is easy to understand: power brokers want to take advantage of the allure of sinful, sensual music, so they attempt an odd balancing act: borrowing it and trying to put it to the service of the prevailing institutions. The result is often awkward—go look at a photo of Ronald Reagan’s meeting with Michael Jackson, if you doubt it—but both parties gain from the transaction. King Solomon was no different. Even ancient prophets knew they could strengthen their divinely inspired messages if they mixed them up with popular lyrics. The apparent difficulty of deciphering the Song of Songs disappears when approached from this perspective.6
We also know how this story ends. The authorities try to control these passionate songs, but music resists this kind of imposed respectability and subservience to ruling institutions. Over the long run, songs defy the ruling class and create an expanded space for individual freedom and personal autonomy. Commentators may try to pretend that the women expressing their sexual desire in the songs of the “Airs of the States” from the Shijing were actually offering Confucian precepts on government, but the surviving texts do more to celebrate private life than to promote public virtue. Sappho’s intimate expressions were supplanted by Pindar’s praise of worthy men, but nowadays, Sappho speaks to us more profoundly, even in fragmented form, than those successors of hers who courted official favor. As a matter of fact, you don’t even need to read any of these texts to figure out which paradigm prevailed in the long run: instead, just turn on the radio or watch the latest hit music videos. Songs of personal expression are everywhere, while hymns expressing official dogmas are nowhere to be found, except in those rare dictatorships that force people to sing the officially sanctioned lyrics of the powers-that-be. In North Korea, you can hear pop songs entitled “We Shall Hold Bayonets More Firmly,” “The Joy of Bumper Harvest Overflows Amidst the Song of Mechanization,” “Potato Pride,” and “I Also Raise Chickens.” But inside these authoritarian settings, songs of personal autonomy and self-assertion no doubt flourish in hiding, despite the hostility of authorities. And even North Korean propagandists try to borrow from elements of K-pop from across the border, craving its mass-market appeal. Ancient rulers would have recognized this gambit, because they practiced it themselves.
We ought to keep this latter example in mind as we study the different epochs of music history. The past was, in comparison with our own times, more like North Korea, and less like a hyper-individualist capitalist economy. In many instances, the songs that have survived aren’t the ones that had the most significance in their time, and on those rare occasions when the music of the masses was preserved, it probably had to be purified and co-opted by institutional forces before gaining sufficient respectability to get set down on papyrus or parchment, or embedded in stone or on cuneiform tablets. This process continues in our day: consider the process of ‘purification’ a rap song undergoes before showing up on network television—the jarring, disruptive words that almost define the ethos of hip-hop are the first ones to get bleeped out by censors, or voluntarily removed by the performers themselves, who know they can’t be too edgy on mass media. If this kind of winnowing and window-dressing goes on in our tolerant times, in societies that promise musicians the full protections of freedom of expression, imagine how much more often they happened under the authoritarian rulers of the past. So don’t be surprised if a woman’s erotic love song gets turned into a scriptural utterance by a king. That’s how the history of music unfolds, especially for anything innovative or transgressive.