Michael Spitzer - The Musical Human

The Musical Human

BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK

29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland

BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

First published in Great Britain 2021

This electronic edition first published in 2021

Copyright Michael Spitzer, 2021

Michael Spitzer has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this workEvery reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright holders of material reproduced in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be glad to hear from them.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: HB: 978-1-5266-0276-3; TPB: 978-1-5266-0277-0; eBook: 978-1-5266-0274-9

To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters

For Karen, Emily and Kiera

My Three Graces

Contents

Imagine that several billion years from now, possibly long after Earth has been consumed by the Sun, aliens open the Voyager 1 space probe launched forty years ago by NASA and listen to the Golden Record, packed with twenty-seven samples of Earths music, as well as greetings in fifty-one languages (see What can aliens tell us about what it is like to be a musical human?

Figure 1.1 Voyager 1 and the Golden Record

Put be pinned down to the notes. That music is essentially human, and that it makes us human.

Figure 1.2 Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan

Music is linked to our origins as a species. So it is irresistible to write a big and bold account, a big history. Such a history would go deeper than the usual story of who wrote what and when (Bach, 16851750; wrote the St Matthew Passion in 1730). It would be a party to which all are invited: King David with his lyre and the composers of the psalms; Pythagoras; Lucy the australopithecine; singing apes and dancing parrots. It would begin with the cosmic music of the spheres and how simple organisms flinch to sounds. It would take in the protomusical languages of early Homo sapiens , and ask what marks them apart from birdsong or the calls of gibbons. It would track the dissemination and parallel development of musics around the planet, and focus on how and why Western music splintered off as a law unto itself, not as an inevitable triumph, but with consequences both good and bad. One consequence, for instance, is that Western music operated within the vehicle of white supremacy.

An evolution of music is an exciting prospect. But it hits one roadblock after another. There is no recorded music before 1877, when Edison invented his phonograph. Musical works exist, at a stretch, no earlier than ad 800. The earliest Greek music notation is 500 bc . Before then, nothing and silence. Music historians can only look with envy at the archaeologists working with relics and fossils. Music doesnt have any fossils, other than the odd bone flute discovered in ancient caves. A description of the evolution of music from physical objects would be Hamlet without the Prince, times ten. The rest is silence indeed.

Some Preliminaries

Luckily, the prospect is actually a lot more promising than it seems. But first, lets consider some preliminary limitations. It feels self-evident that there has been music for as long as there have been people, so writing its evolution might seem straightforward. The elephant or woolly mammoth in the room is that, for nearly the entirety of its existence, we have no idea what music sounded like. The first ever sound Tchaikovsky is getting faster. The choirs at St Johns and Kings College in Cambridge pride themselves on having unique sounds, shaped in part by the distinctive acoustics of the two chapels. If you walk across Cambridge from one evensong to another, you will get a different experience, even when the choirs are singing the same pieces.

The situation gets more desperate once you consider how much, or how little, the musical score tells you. Lets begin our timeline in 1786, when Mozart composed a wonderful Now, lets reverse-engineer music history, going back as far as we can. Well do this by watching the signs of musical scores melt away one by one until there is nothing left.

300 years ago

Robinson Crusoe is published in 1719. Jean-Antoine Watteau paints The Pleasures of Love the same year. Bach completes book one of the Well-Tempered Clavier in 1722. The score shows us melody, harmony and rhythm. But we dont know how loudly or how fast the music was played. The C-major prelude that begins the set is nowadays performed either softly, piano, or more confidently, forte, at all manner of speeds. The signs of tempo and dynamics have fallen off the map.

500 years ago

Michelangelo begins painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling in 1508. He writes a sequence of sonnets to his lover, Tommaso dei Cavalieri, in 1509. During his sojourn in Ferrara in 1505, the great Flemish composer, Josquin des Prez, writes a mass in honour of its ruler, Duke Ercole dEste I, his Missa Hercules dux Ferrariae . Not only are there no indications of loudness or speed, Josquin doesnt notate legato or staccato expression how smoothly or sharply notes are to be sung. Expression has fallen off the map.

800 years ago

The first Gothic cathedrals. Cimabues crucifix, 1287. In 1250, Hildegard of Bingen, abbess of a nunnery at Rupertsberg, theologian, composer, poet and inventor of German botany, writes both the words and the music of her liturgical drama, the Ordo Virtutum . These chants have no harmony, no rhythm, no tempo, no dynamics, no expression, just pitches. We dont even know whether the nuns sang these chants solo or together as a group. Nearly everything has fallen off the map.

1,700 years ago

Saint melody. Pitch, the last parameter left on musics 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. It is fitting that the idea of the composer goes down with the ship of music.

2,000 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 of this music survives in a notation that can be deciphered. The contrast with the temples, statues and tragic drama of the ancient world is stark. Where is the musical equivalent of the Parthenon? Of Sophocles Theban Trilogy ? A poignant counterexample is the great Alexander Mosaic, preserved in the Naples National Archaeological Museum. A copy of an early third-century bc Hellenistic painting, this vital, vivid depiction of the battle between Alexander the Great and Darius gives the lie to the myth that realism in art had to wait until the Italian Renaissance. Painters and poets could represent the human long before that. So why not in music? Or, if the musical human was around in ancient times, why has the proof vanished? An ancient world flooded with sculptures, temples, poems and plays would presumably have resounded with music too. But from where we stand today, there is a deafening silence.