I’ll admit it. I cringe when I hear the term music history. The phrase summons up images of long-dead composers, smug men in wigs and waistcoats. I hear the refrain of a stately dance in waltz meter performed for some decrepit king and his court. People are dancing without touching, merely making stiff bows and curtsies in each other’s direction. Even the musicians struggle to stifle their yawns.
You may have similar notions about music history. But why? In all fairness, the institutions that preserve and propagate the inherited traditions of our musical culture don’t intend to be boring. But they do crave respectability, and this zeal to present an image of stiff decorum imparts a palpable sense of tedium to almost everything they touch. Music is drained of its vitality, and at times even becomes a chore. Just as you go to the dentist to take care of your teeth, you show up dutifully at the symphony to burnish your cultural street cred. But look around you at your next visit to the concert hall, and count how many people appear to be sleeping in their high-priced seats.
This pervasive ennui is a symptom of a deeper problem with music history. Boredom, in itself, is no crime. Many subjects are inherently boring, and their exponents even pride themselves on their monotonous routines. I once took a class in cost accounting, and Shakespeare himself, brought back to life and given a CPA certificate, couldn’t have made that textbook enjoyable. My statistics class was worse, situating itself more than two standard deviations outside the realm of the mildly interesting. Even in the arts and humanities—spheres of human endeavor whose very destiny is to delight and astonish—many academic journals will kill any submission in peer review if it fails to achieve a mandated level of obstinate dreariness. These fields cultivate boredom the same way a farmer grows tobacco—who cares if the crop is deadening, so long as it sells? No one expects otherwise.
So I don’t object to the boredom of conventional music history because I demand excitement. I object, rather, to the false notions that undergird the tedium. When we celebrate the songs of previous eras, the respectable music of cultural elites gets almost all the attention, while the subversive efforts of outsiders and rebels fall from view. The history books downplay or hide essential elements of music that are considered disreputable or irrational—for example, its deep connections to sexuality, magic, trance and alternative mind states, healing, social control, generational conflict, political unrest, even violence and murder. They whitewash key elements of a four-thousand-year history of disruptors and insurgents creating musical revolutions, instead celebrating assimilators within the mainstream power structure who borrowed these innovations while diluting their impact and disguising their sources. More than historical accuracy is lost in the process. The very sources from which creativity and new techniques arise are distorted and misrepresented. A key theme of this book is that the shameful elements of songs—their links to sex, violence, magic, ecstatic trance, and other disreputable matters—are actually sources of power, serving as the engines of innovation in human music-making. When we cleanse the historical record of their presence, we lose our grasp on how our most cherished songs arose in the first place.
The real history of music is not respectable. Far from it. Neither is it boring. Breakthroughs almost always come from provocateurs and insurgents, and they don’t just change the songs we sing, but often shake up the foundations of society. When something genuinely new and different arrives on the music scene, those in positions of authority fear it and work to repress it. We all know this because it has happened in our own lifetimes. We have seen firsthand how music can challenge social norms and alarm upholders of the status quo, whether political bosses, religious leaders, or just anxious parents fretting about some song bellowing ominously from behind a teenager’s bedroom door. Yet this same thing has been happening since the dawn of human history, and maybe even longer—although you won’t get told that side of the story in Music 101, or from the numerous well-funded music institutions devoted to protecting their respectability and the highbrow pretensions of their mission statements.
Those fretting parents are delighted with this kind of sanitized approach to music appreciation, as are those within the cultural ecosystem who see their own status rising in tandem with the prestige and authority of the traditions they uphold. They gain a kind of secondhand luster from the cleansed, purified vision of music-making they promote. Even rude and vulgar songs are made dignified as part of this process. But the whole endeavor is a distortion, no less a lie for the pleasing patina of respectability it imparts to the dangerous soundtracks of the past. At every stage in human history, music has been a catalyst for change, challenging conventions and conveying coded messages—or, not infrequently, delivering blunt, unambiguous ones. It has given voice to individuals and groups denied access to other platforms for expression, so much so that, in many times and places, freedom of song has been as important as freedom of speech, and far more controversial.
Yet there’s a second stage to this process, and it is just as interesting and deserving of study. This is the mechanism by which these disruptive musical intrusions into the social order enter the mainstream. The dangerous rebel gets turned, after a few years or decades, into a respected tribal elder. We have lived through this process, too, but even those of us who have seen it firsthand may struggle to explain how it happened. When Elvis Presley appeared on TV in 1956, CBS was reluctant to show what he was doing with his hips—those gyrating movements were too dangerous for mainstream audiences to see. Yet just a few years later, in 1970, Elvis not only got invited to the White House, but even received a badge from the hand of President Richard Nixon making him an unofficial agent for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. (Adding to the bizarre tenor of the event, Presley may have been stoned when he received this dubious honor.) Parents were shocked by their first encounters with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, but those bad boys would eventually get knighted and turn into Sir Paul McCartney and Sir Mick Jagger. Bob Dylan was a leader of the counterculture in 1966, but honored as the Nobel laureate in literature in 2016. Straight Outta Compton, by hip-hoppers N.W.A., got banned by many retailers and radio stations in 1988, and was even denounced by the FBI, but that same album was chosen by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry for its cultural merit in 2017. What strange social evolution allows a radical outsider to turn into an official hero of the mainstream? Yet this process has been repeated throughout history. In fact, this very insistence on mainstreaming and assimilating radical music is the single biggest reason why the historical accounts are so misleading. The officially ‘cleansed’ public image is promulgated—whether we are dealing with the Beatles, or back in a previous day, Sappho or the troubadours or Bach—while the disreputable past is shuffled offstage and out of view.
Musical innovation happens from the bottom up and the outside in, rather than vice versa; those with power and authority usually oppose these musical innovations, but with time, whether through co-optation or transformation, the innovations become mainstream, and then the cycle begins again. The authority figures who impose their preferred meanings on our messy music have changed over the centuries. In the past, they might have been kings or prophets or esteemed philosophers. In the current day, they can often seem nameless and faceless, at least from the perspective of most music fans—for example, the marketing department for the local symphony, designers of school curricula, or judges at music competitions. But in every case, the tools they employ to prevent the incursion of disruptive new ways of music-making follow a predictable path, starting with exclusion, if not outright censorship, and when that fails—as it so often does—shifting to more devious methods of containment and repurposing. Upholders of the status quo really have no choice except to push back. The songs of outsiders and the underclass have always posed a threat, and thus must be purified or reinterpreted. The power of music, whether to put listeners into a trance or rouse them to action, has always been feared, and thus must be controlled. The close connection of songs to sex and violence has always shocked, and thus must be regulated. And the narratives that chronicle and define our musical lives are inevitably written and rewritten in recognition of these imperatives.
The scope of this book is the full history of music, even beginning in the pre-human natural soundscapes, whose danger and power prefigure so much to come, all the way to the reality show singing contests and viral videos of the current day. In this kind of history, there’s room for both Mozart and Sid Vicious, and everything in between—along with minstrels, rappers, holy rollers, shamans, troubadours, courtesans, singing cowboys, Homeric bards, chanting street vendors, and many others outside the concert hall tradition. I’m not trying to be flashy or fashionably eclectic: we need to cast our net wide in order to grasp the forces at work. My approach is roughly chronological, but the connections across eras will become increasingly clear as we proceed. The early chapters will provide opportunities for me to share conceptual tools and insights that will be pressure-tested in subsequent sections of the book, and will, I hope, prove their value in resolving long-standing debates about key figures in music history as different as Ludwig van Beethoven and Robert Johnson. If I am correct, these methodologies can also assist us in the present day, both in predicting how songs might evolve in the future and in creating a healthy musical ecosystem in a digital age that often seems intent on devaluing artists and their works.
As these comments might suggest, the subversive forces remain largely the same over time, despite shifting tastes and technologies. They are both shameful and powerful, as well as ever present in human society, if sometimes unspoken or pushed out to the fringes. They can’t be halted, nor can they really be exiled permanently from the mainstream. Yet misleading narratives can be constructed around them, and again and again those deceptions enter into the official accounts. In this book I attempt to cut through these sanctioned interpretations and recover the fractious reality too often excluded from our view.
These inquiries will bring us into the heart of a profound mystery: Where do these changes in music come from? Why are the sources of innovation so closely linked to shame and secrecy? Why do power brokers need to turn, again and again, to outsiders and excluded groups for the songs that eventually define norms and behavior for the broader society? What is it about music that makes its historical evolution and pedigree so different from what we find in other modes of cultural expression? And why does the cycle repeat with such brutal persistence over such broad expanses of time and geography? These are vital questions, and I hope to answer them before bringing this expansive study to a conclusion.
What we learn will also force us to revise our notions of the aesthetics of music, its capacities and consequences. Old-fashioned concepts of the role of song in our lives, emphasizing its transcendence or purposeless beauty, will be tested and found wanting. In fact, we will learn that many of the most influential philosophical systems about music came about as part of persistent attempts by elites to halt the spread of innovation and enervate the inherent power of song. As we uncover the actual course of causes and effects, our grasp of what music really does and means will be permanently altered.
More than ever, we need a subversive history of music. We need it both to subvert the staid accounts that misrepresent the past as well as to grasp the subversive quality inherent in these catalytic sounds in our own time. This book aims to provide that alternative narrative. But the goal isn’t to be iconoclastic or controversial. I have no interest in adopting a provocative revisionist pose so I can stand out from the crowd. I simply want to do justice to the subject. I want to tell the real story of music as a change agent, as a source of disruption and enchantment in human life.
I started work on an alternative approach to music history more than twenty-five years ago, but back then I didn’t realize the scope of what I would uncover. My starting point was much simpler than where I ended up. My core belief back then—unchanged today, so many years later—was that music is a force of transformation and empowerment, a catalyst in human life. My curiosity was piqued by the many ways songs had enhanced and altered the lives of individuals throughout history, and especially the great masses of people who don’t get much visibility in surviving accounts. I didn’t exclude kings and lords, or popes and patrons, from my purview. But I was perhaps even more interested in peasants and plebeians, slaves and bohemians, renegades and outcasts. What did their music sound like? Even better, what did it do?
To answer these questions, I had to uncover a whole range of different sources outside the realm of academic music history. During the first decade of my research, I floundered in my attempts to circumscribe these issues. To answer even simple questions, I found I had to immerse myself, at a surprisingly deep level, in primary documents and academic literature from folklore, mythology, classics, philosophy, theology and scriptural exegesis, social history, anthropology, archaeology, sociology, psychology, neuroscience, Egyptology, Sinology, Assyriology, medieval studies, travel literature, and various other fields and topics, as well as a formidable amount of literature produced by music historians and musicologists. As a result, more than fifteen years elapsed from the start of my research until I published the first fruits—my two books Work Songs and Healing Songs, both released in 2006. Another decade elapsed before I completed the third book in my trilogy on the music of everyday life, Love Songs.
But by this time I saw that a general history of music needed to be written that encompassed the full range of surprising findings I had uncovered during this twenty-five-year endeavor. I won’t try to summarize here the unexpected and sometimes disturbing things I learned on my long, strange trip. But my goals are simple ones and ought to be shared here at the outset. My aim is to celebrate music as a source of creation, destruction, and transformation. I affirm songs as a source of artistry, but will also insist on taking them seriously as a social force and conduit of power, even as a kind of technology for societies that lack microchips and spaceships. I want to cast light on the neglected spheres of music that survive outside the realms of power brokers, religious institutions, and social elites, and explore how songs enrich the day-to-day lives of small communities, families, and individuals. Above all, I hope to show how music can topple established hierarchies and rules, subverting tired old conventions and asserting bold new ones.
Put another way, music is not just a soundtrack in the background of life, but has repeatedly entered the foreground, even altering social and cultural currents that would seem resistant to something as elusive and intangible as a song. It almost seems like magic, and maybe it really is.
All these things have happened repeatedly in the past, as well as in our own lifetimes, and will recur again in the future. This is their story.