How Music Began

by James Francis Cooke

So far as our records go all of the people who lived long, long ago before the time of the birth of Christ showed a love for music. We are told that even among the savages of today there is always found some attempt to sing or to make some manner of musical sounds. Music seems to be a part of man's nature, by which he expresses thoughts he would be unable to express through words, gestures or by means of writing, and the arts of painting, sculpture, etc. The Chinese claim that music commenced in their country 3000 years before the birth of Christ. Unfortunately many records of the music of the older nations in the Far East have been lost, and out knowledge comes, for the most part, from carvings on monuments, which show that in India, Arabia, Babylonia, Assyria, Egypt, Persia and among the Hebrews both instrumental and vocal music was known. These carvings show wonderful pictures of the first musical instruments, which are particularly remarkable because our modern instruments of the harp, violin, guitar and drum families are much the same in principle. Here are pictures of some of the instruments used. Note how they resemble modern instruments:

Ancient Greek Forms of the Harp, Drum, Flute and Castanets

Some very old forms of the Harp of Ancient Egypt

Performing on the Harp, from a carving on the tomb of an Egyptian King

An old form of the drum, Ancient Hebrew Zither

Very old form of the Egyptian Harp, resembling our modern violin

The first music of a nation or people was probably vocal music and then the natural desire to tap time regularly (rhythm) led to the making of instruments of wood, stone, metal, skin, or clay for that purpose. Then, in order to have a system, scales were discovered, and from these foundations the musical systems of all nations have sprung. The scales differed greatly. The Chinese, for instance, had a scale known to us as the "pent-a-tonic", or five-toned scale, which sounded very much like this:

To each of these notes they gave an odd name, thus: "emperor", "prime minister", "subject people", "state affairs", and "picture of the universe". Very strangely the five-toned scale was used by the olden time musicians of Ireland and Scotland.

The Hindus divided the octave into very small parts, and had, it is said, 36 scales, although in their writings they speak of as many as 1600 scales. What if one had to practice as many scales as that instead of the 24 of which our own musical system is composed?

It was, however, among the wonderful Greeks, who lived before the birth of Christ, that the foundations of our own kind of music were really laid. With them poetry, art and culture were looked upon as real necessities, and then union of poetry with music made the study of the art of music one of great importance. At the performance of the famous Greek dramas, which were given in enormous open air theatres, and attended by thousands, music was continually used and thus the people became familiar with it. One famous philosopher, Ter-pan-der (born about B.C. 676) is said to have added three strings to the "lyre" or Grecian harp, and another philosopher, Pyth-a-go-ras (born about B.C. 582) is said to have added the eighth string.

The Greek Lyre

Pyth-a-go-ras also invented a system of four tones known as the tet-ra-chord (or series of four notes), which led to the first scale of one octave. The following are tet-ra-chords:

You will readily see how, when two tet-ra-chords are arranded thus, an octave scale results.

They also had a chromatic scale, which was similar to our chromatic scale, and in time they built up a system of scales which was similar in many respects to a form of our modern minor scales, called the "normal" or the "pure". The Greek system as a whole was very hard to understand, but an idea of one part of it may be gained from the following:

Note that the normal minor scale is the same as the major scale of the same name, with the third, sixth and seventh steps of the scale lowered one half tone, both going up and coming down the scale. The Greeks gave their scales odd names, such as "dorian", "phrygian", etc., as shown in the following:

I. Dorian scale, resembling the scale of D minor

II. Phrygian scale, resembling the scale of E minor

III. Lydian scale, resembling the scale of F sharp minor

IV. Mixo-lydian scale, resembling the G minor scale

V. Hypo-dorian scale, resembling the A minor scale

VI. Hypo-phrygian scale, resembling the B minor scale

VII. Hypo-lydian scale, resembling the C sharp minor scale

The Greek's scales were also called "modes".

You may see from the foregoing how important scales were considered thousands of years ago. It is not known that Greeks practiced harmony, or the art of combining sounds and chords to produce beautiful effects. We must, however, be grateful to them for many of the terms used in modern music, as in modern medicine.

During the next ten hundred years very little advance was made in musical art, except for the part played by the famous music workers of the early Roman Catholic Church, and for the invention of a system of musical notation, without which future musical developments would not have been possible.

Sappho Singing to Phaon
Showing the manner in which the Great Lyre was played.

The Etude Magazine October 1909