Music
The singing ape: how music made us human
What our deep history tells us about the origins of music — and its role in the success of Homo sapiens
A year ago, if Covid hadn’t happened, I would have been listening to Beethoven’s Ninth at one of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra’s Sunday afternoon concerts. I’m lucky to live in a Unesco City of Music, a place where music is at the heart of everyday life. When I get my hair cut it’s at the barbershop on Penny Lane, with tourists taking snaps as I sit beneath photos of The Beatles on the wall.
And then, last March, live music stopped. No more gigs, concerts or festivals. The heartbeat of the city was suddenly silenced.
But there are longer silences than the one we’ve just endured. The deep record of world history has little to tell us about our musical lives. The apparent reason is that, with the exception of instrumental relics, music lacks material evidence comparable with the pigment on the walls of caves. There are no sound recordings before Edison’s phonograph in 1877, and the earliest decipherable music notation is about 500BC. Our situation gets more desperate once we consider how much, or how little, musical scores tell us. Let’s follow western classical music back in time, watching the evidence melt away until there is nothing left.
300 years ago
Bach completes book one of The Well-Tempered Clavier in 1722. The score shows us melody, harmony and rhythm. But we don’t know how loudly or how fast the music was played. The C major prelude that begins the set is nowadays performed softly — piano — or more confidently — forte — and at all manner of speeds. The signs of tempo and dynamics have fallen off the map.
500 years ago
During his sojourn in Ferrara in 1504, the great Flemish composer Josquin des Prez writes a mass in honour of the duchy’s ruler, Duke Ercole I d’Este, his Missa Hercules dux Ferrariae. Not only are there no indications of loudness or speed, Josquin doesn’t notate legato or staccato expression — how smoothly or sharply notes are to be sung. Expression has fallen off the map.
900 years ago
In 1151, Hildegard of Bingen, abbess of a nunnery at Rupertsberg, theologian, composer, poet and botanist, writes both the words and the music of her liturgical drama, the Ordo Virtutum. Hildegard’s chants have no harmony, no rhythm, no tempo, no dynamics, no expression, just pitches. Nearly everything has fallen off the map.
1700 years ago
Saint Augustine completes his Confessionsin 400AD. A champion of music, Augustine writes: “Do not seek for words, as though you could explain what God delights in. Sing in jubilation.” We have no idea what music Augustine heard, and need to wait until the ninth century AD for the earliest chant notation. Written as wavy lines above the text, this “neumatic” notation indicates the contour of a note, not the exact pitch. It is a descendant of the Masoretic accents (ta’amim) of Jewish biblical cantillation in the reciting of the Torah. It is really a mnemonic, jogging the memory of readers who would already have known the melody. Pitch, the last parameter left on music’s map, is gone. Also dead is the idea of individual authorship. We are used to crediting music to human beings with a name. But this music is an orphan.
2000 years ago
We are not finished yet, for music has a ghostly proto-life. The ancient Greeks devised an elaborate theory of music, and invented types of musical scale we still use today, such as the Dorian, Aeolian, and Lydian modes. We can be sure that their world was full of music. Yet very little survives in a notation that can be deciphered. The contrast with the temples, statues and tragic drama of the ancient world is stark. Where are the musical equivalents of the Parthenon? Of Sophocles’ Theban plays? Of the “Venus de Milo”? The rest simply cannot be silence.
It is unthinkable that the ancient world really lacked music. And there is actually plenty of evidence if we know where to look: the archaeology of musical instruments; images of music and dance in prehistoric rock art and ceramics; the living fossils of contemporary hunter-gatherer and sedentary (farming) music cultures; and the psychology of the modern musical brain, because our cognitive abilities really haven’t changed that much since the Palaeolithic era. Let’s begin with bone flutes.
2008, a team of archaeologists exploring the Hohle Fels cave in the Swabian Alps discovered a voluptuously proportioned figurine of a woman, 40,000 years old. The so-called “Venus of Hohle Fels” is the oldest undisputed representation of a human. In the same cave, the team also found a flute, made from the radius bone of a vulture, and dated to a similar age.
The archaeologist Wulf Hein reconstructed a similar flute, found at an earlier expedition at a cave at nearby Geissenklösterle. It has five finger holes, with a V-shaped notch for the mouthpiece. You can hear Hein playing pentatonic melodies (based on five-note scales) on this flute on YouTube, including “The Star-Spangled Banner” — a delicate, simple rendition that sounds not at all archaic.
The point is not simply that we can play these flutes (or reconstructions of them). It is what they signify. These earliest examples of music technology coincided with the earliest evidence of Homo sapiens’ capacity for figural representation and, by implication, language and conceptual reason. That is, instrumental music, together with symbolism, language and thought, was an expression of humankind’s cognitive revolution 40,000 years ago. When humans, essentially, became modern.
Bone flutes represent an astonishing achievement, beyond the reach of our Neanderthal cousins. While Neanderthals could produce sophisticated tools, such as the finely hafted spears excavated at Schöningen in the 1990s, dated to 400,000 years ago, they didn’t evolve symbolic artefacts. To imagine a flute required the mental flexibility to make connections between brain modules responsible for tools and for music. For what is a flute other than a tool for making music?
The flutes we have found evidence an ability to standardise finger-holes and, by association, the types of scales and melodies they played. And similarities of instrument design between flutes dated 10,000 to 15,000 years apart suggest a continuity of musical tradition vastly longer than the time separating us from Bach. We should never forget that 90 per cent of Homo sapiens’ history was Palaeolithic. We are a footnote.
Despite all this evidence, there is a reason for the dearth of evolutionary “big histories” of music. We just haven’t taken music that seriously. Yet, outlandish as this might seem, I would contend that music is perhaps the most important thing we ever did, if primarily for the simple reason that music evolved before language — in fact, a million years earlier.
Our music is simply not normal, the norm historically and prehistorically being to actively make music with other people, not passively consume it on our own
It is not a metaphor to claim that life was rhythmic. The “rhythms of life” were played as Homo ergaster (1.5m years ago) moved backwards and forwards through his environment along paths and tracks, greeting acquaintances or fleeing strangers, foraging for plants, killing and carrying animals, finding appropriate stones, conveying them, carving them. In this world of routines, the rhythms of life were most concentrated in the chain of technical gestures it took to make a stone tool, such as a flint axe. From this encompassing sense of rhythm crystallised the co-ordinated tapping of rocks and the ritual dances that celebrated kills.
A similar story can be told about the origin of song. Once hominins’ larynxes descended and their hyoid bone had evolved, anchoring their tongues, Homo heidelbergensis (700,000 years ago) would have been able to create a much greater variety of sounds than non-human primates. Assuming that syntax emerged at the same time as symbolism and conceptual reason, 40,000 years ago, these earlier sounds would have resembled music more than language.
The miracle of such musical gestures is that they can express thoughts and feelings, even a theory of mind, without language. And music, being abstract and unmoored from reference, was a laboratory for imagining the invisible, the faraway or the new — in due course, religion and science.
One might even infer that human music’s most distinctive trait, rhythmic movement, originates 4.4m years ago, when Ardi the australopithecine got up on her feet and walked upright. This isn’t as much of a leap as it seems. Footsteps make sounds, forging crucial links in the hominin’s brain between sound, motion and muscular exertion. The two-beat regularity of footfalls (left-right, left-right) would go on to underpin the rhythms of all human music. And walking would have taught Ardi a sense of pattern predictability and an emerging feeling for time.
By contrast, ape consciousness is locked into the present moment, without the faculty that primatologists call mental time travel. Chimps might be very good at short-term memory games, but they can't recall and think about mental representations at will away from the time and place of their original occurrence. For all these many reasons, music was there at every stage of our evolution, driving us on.
This long view of music history teaches us that, in some ways, we haven’t changed that much. Nevertheless, there is one huge contrast between music then and now, and one not favourable to us. Forty millennia ago, music was participatory. Everyone was musical, and everyone joined in, with no meaningful difference between makers, performers and listeners.
We can make educated inferences from hunter-gatherer cultures today. The commonalities between cultures as geographically diverse as the Inuit, the Bayaka of Cameroon, the Australian Aboriginal peoples, and the Native American Choctaw suggest the survival of an ancient historical core. They share a predominance of group singing and dancing, percussive instruments, shamanistic spirit-travel, and the entanglement of human music with animals and landscape.
On the other hand, music in the west today is largely a passive culture, because we are mostly listeners, not makers or performers, apart from occasional stints at church, karaoke bars and football stadiums. Our music is a division of labour between composers, performers and audiences, and it is a peculiarly western tragedy. Where did we go wrong?
A thousand years ago, the west invented staff notation, whereas most of the world transmits its music through oral tradition, from parent to child, from guru to disciple or, as in the Venda people of Limpopo, South Africa, between children who have their own song genres. Yet writing music on paper led us in the west to think of music as an object, rather than as something we do socially. And the mystique of scores blinded us to the reality that music is a universal birthright, rather than the preserve of the talented few.
The surprise is that participatory music is making a comeback in all sorts of ways, thanks largely to the internet. It’s back due to the spaces of online media, whose digital stages are open to both amateurs and professionals. TikTok allows users to create lip-synced music videos. A more sophisticated digital space is Reason, a software studio that enables musicians anywhere in the world to upload ideas or drafts of songs to a dedicated website. Other musicians then take up these unfinished songs and add, edit, mix and re-post them in a spectacular example of musical crowdsourcing. Now, you can cavil that so-called YouTube “creators” (influencers who curate playlists) aren’t “creative” by Mozart’s standard. But these are baby steps in the new musical revolution.
What’s more, crises such as the one we are currently living through tend to accelerate cultural change. At the beginning of lockdown, technology was swiftly mobilised by pop artists live-streaming discos from their kitchens, classical violinists performing Bach partitas in their living rooms, families singing parodies on YouTube. Musicians from the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra took to the Chinese social media hub WeChat to share videos of them practising or teaching from home. Music comforts, it helps, and it heals.
The weekly clap and opera singing from balconies in Spain and Italy refuted the fallacy that music was a luxury rather than a necessity
And it takes many forms. At the beginning of the Covid crisis, people in the UK took to their doorsteps every Thursday at 8pm. They clapped or banged on a pan for the NHS. This weekly ritual was participatory music-making in the raw, and variants of it were seen all around the world.
For many, it was a way of self-medicating. Making sound together really makes you feel better, partly because sound is a natural means of sharing emotion and assuaging loneliness. The physical activity of clapping engages the upper, dorsal, part of the striatum responsible for action and prediction, flooding our brains with dopamine, giving us intense pleasure. And, in evolutionary terms, clapping echoes the social roots of music in the synchronous chorusing of hominins in the Miocene period; and, even earlier, the pulse-based chorusing of insects, frogs and fiddler crabs.
The weekly clap also showed that technology wasn’t actually necessary, as did the opera singing from balconies in Spain and Italy. But, most importantly, it refuted the fallacy that music was a luxury rather than a necessity; the slur that music — in the words of evolutionary linguist Steven Pinker — was no more than “auditory cheesecake”, delicious to be sure, but conferring no adaptive evolutionary advantage. Music allowed us a triumphal gesture of survival against the virus, and reminds us of our place in the great dance of life.
‘The Musical Human: A History of Life on Earth’ by Michael Spitzer is published by Bloomsbury on April 1
“Bangladesh , Bangladesh / Such a great disaster, I don’t understand / But it sure looks like a mess,” chanted George Harrison on a languid summer evening in 1971. The occasion was his Concert for Bangladesh — the first rock’n’roll benefit concert — held to raise funds for the victims of a bloody civil war.
As the conflict unfolded, Harrison’s friend, sitar master Ravi Shankar, expressed concern. Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) had been subject to years of discriminatory policy under the central government (located in West Pakistan), which was pushing the Urdu language and a strong Islamic identity, to unify the ethnically diverse country. East Pakistan’s Bengali-speaking population had long been unhappy with their position, and calls for autonomy were at an all-time high when “Operation Searchlight” was launched on May 26 1971. The military was drafted in an attempt to suppress Bengali nationalist sentiment, and thus began a brutal nine-month war.
Estimates for the number of Bengalis killed in the conflict range between 300,000 and 3m. Upwards of 200,000 women were subject to a vicious campaign of genocidal rape. Roughly 30m people, members of Shankar’s family among them, were displaced, with millions fleeing to neighbouring India for safety. Add to this the effects of the Bhola cyclone, which had devastated the region months before, and Harrison’s use of the word “mess” seems an understatement.
Shankar asked for help organising a small concert to raise money and awareness. With Harrison’s star power, he said, they might raise $25,000. In response, the ex-Beatle set about organising two sold-out shows, held at Madison Square Garden in New York on August 1 1971.
It was a starry affair: Harrison called in favours from Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan and his former bandmate Ringo Starr among others. The two remaining Beatles, however, were no-shows. Paul McCartney was embroiled in a dispute with the others over management, and John Lennon refused to perform without Yoko Ono.
“From George’s point of view, that was fine,” says Jonathan Taplin, who worked as production manager at the two concerts. “He didn't want it to be about The Beatles, he wanted it to be about Bangladesh.” In press conferences, Harrison diverted journalists away from rumours of a Beatles reunion and towards the escalating conflict. On top of this, he insisted that Shankar open the concert.
“George did a very bold thing, which was to say, this is going to start with an Indian classical piece, to an audience which was clearly just waiting for the rock’n’roll to start,” says Taplin.
Shankar knew as much. When he took to the stage, he asked for the audience’s patience, and that they refrain from smoking. He was joined by the sarod virtuoso Ali Akbar Khan, the tabla player Alla Rakha and Kamala Chakravarty — the concert’s only female performer, bar backing singers — who played the tamboura. Shankar reminded the audience why they were there before easing into the transcendent “Bangla Dhun”, an instrumental piece inspired by Bengali folk music. It was all the more poignant as, at the time, Pakistan was cracking down on Bengali music, labelling it as “subversive” and banning radio stations in the process. “Bangla Dhun” gave way to a pacy gat in teental (16 beats comprising four sections of four beats each), the tempo lifting musicians and spectators to an almost meditative state. The 35-minute set imbued the concert with a sense of the spiritual.
Next up was Harrison himself, who raised the mood from devotional to positively Pentecostal. Dressed in a white suit with the “Om” symbol embroidered on the lapels, he was joined by a 15-piece band and horn section, plus six backing vocalists. He performed three songs from his Phil Spector-produced album All Things Must Pass. First up was the jubilant “Wah Wah”, followed by his number one single “My Sweet Lord” and finally “Awaiting on You All”. This, the applause made clear, was what the audience had come for.
George assumed that the record labels, the IRS, everybody would waive their fees too, and that wasn’t the case
Keyboard player Billy Preston took the audience to church with a high-energy rendition of his 1969 gospel track “That’s the Way God Planned It” — widely regarded as one of the show’s highlights. But there were many more besides this. For “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”, Clapton, still in the throes of heroin addiction, picked up the wrong guitar. “He managed to just grit it through, which shows what a great player he was,” says Taplin. And Leon Russell’s “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” plunged the audience into a rapturous ocean of noise.
But it was Dylan, inevitably, who stole the show. “Bob was very nervous, up until the last minute,” says Taplin. “The last time he had played in New York, in 1966, he had been booed.”
In fact, Harrison wasn’t sure Dylan would show until the moment he shuffled on stage, head bowed and guitar in hand. Accompanied by Leon Russell on bass, Harrison on guitar and Starr on the tambourine, Dylan launched straight into his four-song set. Opening with “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and closing with “Just Like a Woman”, it provided pause for reflection amid the clamorous ecstasy of the other acts.
The concert ended with Harrison’s stirring call to action, “Bangla Desh”, now acknowledged as the first charity single. By the time the war had ended in December 1971, Bangladesh was an independent nation. At least partly thanks to Harrison, most people in the west knew its name.
Some 40,000 people attended the two concerts and roughly $250,000 was raised on the day, 10 times the amount Shankar was originally aiming for. The concert album went on to win a Grammy for Album of the Year in 1973. But proceeds from this, and the concert documentary, were tied up in disputes with the Internal Revenue Service in the US, the British Treasury and record executives, all of whom were eager to take their cut. “The musicians waived their fees, everybody was glad to help,” says Harrison’s second wife, Olivia Harrison, who looks after the concert’s legacy. “George assumed that the record labels, the IRS, everybody would waive their fees too, and that wasn’t the case.”
Beatles manager Allen Klein had failed to set up a 501(3)(c) tax-exempt organisation. As a result, early proceeds from the album and film didn’t reach Bangladesh until years after the war had ended. The funds were used to develop an oral rehydration solution that, when given to children, increases their absorptive capabilities, meaning they are less likely to die from dehydration. These are still used today. And to this day the IRS still taxes the charity’s income.
Nonetheless, Harrison’s efforts provided a template for benefit concerts to come — from Rock Against Racism gigs to One Love Manchester — and organisers learnt from his mistakes. “When Bob Geldof started working [on Live Aid], he and George had many conversations,” says Olivia Harrison.
Since then, the concert and its various tributaries have raised almost $20m, all of which goes to the George Harrison Fund for Unicef, benefiting causes beyond Bangladesh. “George always said: ‘A pebble in the ocean will cause a stir. You have to throw that pebble and hope it’s for the good,’” recalls Olivia Harrison. “Those ripples are still going on now.”
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