by Michael Spitzer (Music 780.9 Spi)
When we talk about music history books, we’re usually not going particularly far back in history. Most general music histories only trace back to the earliest history we have of written music, which is to say western civilization’s written music history, and there just isn’t a lot of written music that’s survived that’s much older than the most recent millennium. Music, which is of course literally made of sound and dissipates immediately after it is played, relied on oral history before that, and although we can find the occasional ancient flute-like instrument, we know almost nothing about the music that might have been played before notation. And written music is lacking, too: the further you go back, the less we understand the notational systems that were used, and there are likely rhythms and ornamentations associated with some of the earliest plainchant music that we simply don’t know about. Yet we know that music is an important part of our society now, and that it seemed to have a similar cultural weight in previous eras, so it’s likely that it played an important role farther back than we can normally look, even if it remains invisible to us, unlike early tools and cave paintings.
If music is anything like other forms of expression, from painting to poetry to sculpture, it seems likely that it played important roles in the lives of early humans, too, but how do we look for it? Professor Michael Spitzer from the University of Liverpool has published a book that attempts to look for signs of music further back in time than other music histories have dared to tread. It’s called The Musical Human: A History of Life on Earth, and you can borrow it from Polley. There’s nothing quite like it, and the writing style keeps things engaging, too, while we search for the musical mysteries in our collective past.
The book is divided into three main parts: “Life,” History,” and “Evolution.” The first chapter, named “Voyager” after the spacecraft carrying a record of sounds from our planet deep into space, acts as somewhat of an introduction to the book and its format. We’re about to take an unusual path into history, dipping further back into time in three stages, rather than the typical history book that starts in ancient times and progresses toward the present. This is because of the problem I mentioned earlier — we simply can’t look very far into music history using our conventional methods of historical research. There is no physical remnant of music other than instruments and music notation in more recent times and mostly western parts of the world, and then the occasional instrument (or what appears to us to be an instrument or two) further into “prehistory,” or the pre-civilization part of our past. In “Voyager,” Spitzer starts by identifying what a person can discern about how our music sounds from looking at music notation, going increasingly further back in time. The further you go, our forms of notation lack descriptions of tempo, dynamics, phrasing, expression, rhythm, and harmony. It’s likely that there were performance practices in place for the music contained in these written documents that accounted for some or all of these missing nuances, but we’ll likely never know. This is going to be a challenging subject.
So Spitzer has chosen three general lines of attack. In Part One, “Life,” he explores the present-day conditions of music, and what we understand about music’s global commonalities and regional particularities. In this section, he stays mostly within the “recording era” of the last century or so to find important principles and associations that we can travel further back in time with in Part Two, “History.” So what are a few of these important principles? In terms of interrelationships between people, he finds that group creativity is generally more common than individual creativity in the creation of music: outside of the Western composer tradition, music generally seems to come from group effort, which we see in various forms of world music and within our own pop bands today. The social implications of music reach farther than composing and performing, of course: he observes the various ways which music accompanies all of us through our days in modern life, whether we are making it ourselves or not. Young folks making music with the latest digital technologies still find it to be a social activity, connecting with people in person and online. Music becomes the soundtrack in our workplaces and stores. In folk traditions of recent history, we had various kinds of songs made to lend themselves to different situations, from religious ceremonies to work songs to songs about romantic relationships or mourning that we can all identify with at different times, and contemporary music still contains these messages and impulses, even if it’s marketed under different kinds of contemporary genre names.
Other parts of Spitzer’s speculations into deeper history will require examining some biological concepts, so he introduces the present-day understanding of some of these ideas, too: Music can influence our emotions, and in doing so it also has measurable effects on things changing the collective heart rates of audiences. We perceive musical pitches as going “up” or “down,” while there isn’t really a physical correlate for the idea, but he looks for one in the development of the Organ of Corti in our ears, which he presents as a functional refinement of the lateral line found in fish. Now we can say that music relates to motion and emotion!
The writing style of the book appeals to me, but it might not be for everyone. In attempting to dive into musical prehistory, the author draws from anecdotes throughout human experience and musical traditions, and in doing so, it can feel like you’re in the narrative equivalent of a street race course. I enjoyed speeding around all of these cultural corners, but if you ever start to feel lost, he occasionally slows down to summarize where we’ve gone so far, and where we’re about to go with what we’ve learned.
Keep this in mind as you dive into the middle part of the book, “History,” where the book travels between different places and eras at breakneck speed. By music history standards, this section starts mostly in prehistory, where we’ve tried to make sense of what music might have been like by looking at remnants of musical instruments (concepts like the harp being developed out of the hunting bow, for example). Here, Spitzer looks for distinctions in the kinds of music that might have been made by different kinds of human societies like hunter-gatherers that traveled versus early agricultural areas that were settled, mostly by looking at the kinds of instruments and literary or pictorial representations of music they left behind. For readers who (like me) have mostly a background in the history of the Western musical tradition, there is a lot of material here about music from the historical record that’s totally new information. From there, we move around a lot, but gradually pull toward present time again, collecting cycles of information that show how music was used by different cultures and conquering empires over time, what changed and what remained the same.
The final section, “Evolution,” is somewhat speculative by nature, but it’s a fascinating look into the truly ancient past of music, when it might not have been “music” in the way we think of it now, but instead a spectrum of useful sounds for various animals. Spitzer attempts to find the point at which early humankind might have embraced music in a manner that would still be recognizable to us. Then he takes us into the speculative future as well, where perhaps machines or artificial intelligences will make music that transcends our current conception of its possibilities.
He ends with a kind of summary of the threads that have come through this whirlwind of a book, “eleven lessons on music’s nature.” If you’ve found yourself occasionally lost amidst the many anecdotes in this book, you’ll find Spitzer’s intended takeaways presented here in a more direct format. I found it fun that he boiled things down to eleven “lessons,” which presumably would start to repeat again at the octave if there were a 12th. Even though I felt like I was comfortably following along throughout, there are so many concepts afoot that this is an effective way to draw out some primary themes for final consideration.
Back to the beginning of the book, Spitzer lays out a “Big Idea” that he intends to argue for throughout the book. This is mostly about the idea of the “nature of music” and humankind’s relationship to — or betrayal of — that nature. And in the end, I don’t know that he successfully makes his case, at least for me. Truth be told, I don’t especially care about a fundamental “nature of music,” and to the extent that music is an extension of the human experience, I don’t think we can betray it, either. But for me, reading through the many historical twists and turns in this book is more satisfying than discovering a unified field theory of music would be, anyway.
(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try A Million Years of Music: The Emergence of Human Modernity by Gary Tomlinson or Music: A Subversive History by Ted Giola.)
( publisher’s official The Musical Human web page ) | ( Wikipedia entry for Michael Spitzer )
Recommended
by Scott S.
Polley Music Library
Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?
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