Dan Snow's History Hit - Music and Humans

Episode Date: March 31, 2021

Today we take music for granted but humans have a unique relationship with the musical form which reaches back far into our ancient past. In this episode Dan is joined by Michael Spitzer, Professor of Music at the University of Liverpool and author of The Musical Human, to discuss the history of music. From the first ancient Greek melody we have been able to recreate; to the first scraps of music notations that are yet to be deciphered and what music has meant for our evolution as a species and how we interact with each other.

Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Talking about music today. Music has got a remarkable history. We're going to talk about the first complete melody that we're able to recreate. It's an ancient Greek melody. We're going to talk about the first scraps of musical notation that we've got. We don't actually know what it means. We're going to talk about the importance of music on our evolution, on our species, on how we interact with each other. It's a great conversation, I think, with the wonderful Michael Spitzes, a professor of music

at the University of Liverpool. He's the world's leading authority on Beethoven, which is a wonderful thing to be. He lives just off Penny Lane in Liverpool. He lives music. He loves music. And he's here to tell me all about the history of music. If you wish to listen to more of these podcasts without the ads, you don't want to be bothered by the capitalism, then please go to History Hit TV. It's a subscription service. It's a perfect thing to do on an Easter weekend. You just kick back, subscribe to history.tv, back. Subscribe to history.tv, listen to unlimited podcasts, watch unlimited history documentaries. We've got our wonderful Poland at War series up there, Alex Ritchie. She takes us through the harrowing history of Poland during the Second World War. We've got more episodes of that series

coming out soon. And we've got all sorts of other wonderful documentaries on there as well. So please go and check out historyhit.tv. But in the meantime, everybody, enjoy this. And do what I did. After you've listened to it, just go and listen to like some Sibelius. It's really nice. Hello, Michael. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast.

Thanks for having me. Why are we musical humans? Is it an accident? Is it complete luck that we've worked out a way of banging and whistling and knocking on things that we find profoundly moving? We must remember that we're fundamentally animals and in the grand scheme of things we've evolved along the ape line from animals. And the bigger picture is that before apes evolved, there were birds and there were insects. And in nature, animals communicate through vocalization. So the story is that gradually animal vocalization evolves step by step into what we call music. And so when we hear music, it's like mental time

travel. It takes us back into our deep past. So to listen to music is to experience a kind of time travel, species travel. Music has gone from my life since having kids. I now have to listen to their music. And so this whole rich slice of life that I used to live has gone. What effect is that having on me? Is this affecting my mental wellness? Absolutely. Music makes you happy because it makes you healthy. And it makes you healthy because it connects you to other people. And we're fundamentally social animals. We're not designed to listen to music alone. And where the West has gone wrong, especially in the last few decades, is this culture of consuming music on your earbuds, in your armchair, not in any social context, but handed down to you on a plate. So it's already an object as a stream or a recording.

And it's a very passive culture. So this might be why, Dan, it's gone out of your life. It's not natural. No, I agree. I mean, there's nothing better than listening. I like listening to folk music when I'm in Ireland. I listen in a pub, in a bar with everyone around. Or when I'm in Texas, we listen to country.

The communality is so special. We talked about the apes. You claim in your book that music is, well, quite precise, 23 million years ago. How do we know that? We know this because apes aren't very musical. Charles Darwin, the genius, says more fundamentally, it's not natural for mammals, not just apes. Mammals do not communicate vocally. Mammals are visual communicators, whereas birdsong, it comes naturally to them. So 23 million years ago, when apes were fully evolved, they cut this cord. There's a rupture in a cord which connects them to the great scheme of music in the trees. So it's all relative to what biologists call vocal learning.

Vocal learning is a capacity for a species to hand down their ability to vocalise to the next generation. So for most birds, they have an ability to create new song, right? So you must distinguish between what we call a song and a call. Calls aren't songs. Calls are always the same and they're universal and they can't be recreated. Whereas music, what birds sing musically, they can improvise like a jazzer around patterns

and they amass an extraordinary vocabulary of new songs. So the nightingale in Keats' tree in his garden had a repertoire of 200 songs. Now, consider the poor apes. They can't do any of that, right? Ape vocalisation is quite impoverished compared to birds. What apes can do is gesture. They're a visual species.

They use their hands and their entire bodies to communicate and to bind other apes into a group. And that sociality of using gesture to bind the group together, we inherit that, which is why music for us is about sociality. And there's a theory, a very precise one, that in the evolution along the ape line, the corticoneurons in the ape's fingers gradually evolve into the corticoneurons in our voice. What begins as gesture in the fingers of an ape becomes the way we flex our larynx, which means that our voices, our music is a visual music,

which is why when we hear notes, we imagine motion up and down or in the line, which is quite counterintuitive. Why should notes move in space? They do because the sound of music for us stimulates visual imagery. We get that from apes. I am ape-like because I endlessly gesture, which you will see me do. Yeah, it's an oft-lamented fact. So from there, what other examples are there of music binding us as a species? Initially, do you think it proved evolutionarily useful

that we're able to sing and make music and create better teams? Yeah. Look, the fact is that symbolic language crystallizes only 40,000 years ago. It's a blink of an eye. Music is at least a million years earlier than that. So hang on, sorry to interrupt. So are Homo erectus and even early versions of Homo sapiens, they could make music before they could talk? They vocalise like apes do, and they use vocalisation as a kind of sonic gesture.

It's a bit like if you're watching a silent movie or even Tom and Jerry cartoons, the way that the score communicates without needing to use a single word. You can say a lot without using language, using sound. But you think that in terms of song, we might have almost sung before we spoke? That's what babies do. And if you look at how mothers, or parents rather, with our babies, do. And if you look at how mothers, or parents rather, with our babies, it's what's called infant directed speech or motherese. It's a dialogue of cooing and smiling. It's as much visual as gestural as sonic. It's the way a baby learns to acquire language. It's much closer to music than to language. It's a template for how language is acquired. and we can argue that that recapitulates, as it were, the evolution of language from proto-language.

What's called proto-language is the step before symbolic language, where apes and hominins, such as Homo erectus and Homo heidelbergensis and the undertales, they would communicate through vocal grooming. Neanderthals, they would communicate through vocal grooming. So rather than touching each other, as apes do, vocal grooming is to step back and use your voice to groom the pack, as it were. The fundamental function of communication is to hold the group together, right? It's not to say anything. It's to keep people together, to coordinate a shared intentionality or shared action. And you don't need symbolic language to do that, which is why music comes before language. Wow. We were singing before we were chatting. And is there a sexual dimension here? I mean, it's been a disaster in my life that the guys that can sing get all the girls, but presumably that's important. This is very true.

Darwin was rather reductionist because he claimed that music comes entirely out of sex. Sex is there, but it's only one of about four different functions music has. So yes, birds sing to attract a mate, but they also sing to deter a rival, to establish their territory, and to define their identity of who they are.

So at least four different functions there. It's not just sex. Sex is important. It's not all important. When do we move from the prehistory of music to the history of music? So with historians, we might talk about Sargon, the first kind of named figures in history. When are you able to start studying music that's been left behind by our ancestors? Well, when you have scripts, the Babylonians, the Sumerians, they invent language. And the first music notation is a Hurrian hymn number six,

which was written or carved on a clay tablet in 1400. It can't be deciphered, but that's where music history begins. And the Sumerians recorded the names of composers. We don't have their music, but we know there were things called composers associated with a temple or the court. And they had a lot of power and they were singers.

Singers had value because they were traded along what became the Silk Roads a lot later, but the roads between the palaces of the Near East. And you can track the story across the great civilizations from there into Egypt, into ancient Greece, into Rome, and of course, India and China is the big one. What my book does, it's very, in some ways, anti-Western. It's very much thinking of the West a thousand years ago, if not before, as on the back foot vis-a-vis China and India, and then the Islamic world.

And there's certainly music history. Tragically, there isn't any in Africa. Africa was just as great a civilization in musical terms, but it wasn't a literate one. So without the records, we can't write a history of ancient African music, very sadly. You're listening to Dan Snow's History with everyone. More from Michael Spitzer on music after this. More from Michael Spitzer on music after this. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence.

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by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. How interesting that lots of people get annoyed by how well paid and how much access to power Bono has, or Bruce Springsteen doing his new podcast with Barack Obama. And in fact, that's always been the way. Musicians have always been very close to the seat of power, apparently. They are because they legitimate power. So there's a contract between the king and the priest, of course, because the priest can show that the power is written in the stars, and they use musicians to show that, that they sing songs around God. And music was always the flip side of religion, because music is a sort of mental laboratory which allows you to access

the invisible, the far away, or the divine, because you can't see it, you can hear it, but you can't see it. It was always a mystical experience to sing and to make music, and priests latched onto that. And there's a theory that music was the motivation for Katalhöyük, the first great temple in modern-day Turkey, around 10,000 BC. So the usual story of the invention of agriculture is that agriculture came first and then things like religion came afterwards. However, in capital Lituya you've got these immense standing stones, a bit like in Stonehenge. It's like a huge xylophone and you could hit these immense 12 metre high stones and they would resound. high stones and they would resound. So the current thinking is that this was a musical temple and that is the first surviving temple in world prehistory or world history. And then you need

to create agriculture to feed the workers who construct this temple. You see where I'm going with this. Music and religion come first and that triggers the invention of agriculture. religion come first and that triggers the invention of agriculture so you can actually draw a theory that music motivates the first great event in world civilization michael i have had so many historians coming on this podcast telling me what motivates farming i love it i've had beer i've had alcohol historians now i've got music but i believe you i believe you're the most convincing are there the equivalent of rosetta stones ancient Ancient Sheep's Hieroglyphs? You mentioned that Sumerian one where we know there is music,

but we can't work out what it is because we haven't sort of cracked out the demi-quavers and the crotchets. Is that quite exciting? The amount of ink wasted on trying to decipher the Hurrian's Hymn No. 6, 1400, and the results which have been played can vary as much as Abba's Dancing Queen

from Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. There's a whole industry about it. But that said, the first completely clear surviving piece of music is a Cyclos song that's covered in Hellenistic Rome or Turkey, 200 AD. And it's a beautiful little song, and you can easily play it, and it sounds remarkably modern. It sounds in A major in four bar phrases, very tuneful. And that, for me, is so moving because I realise that there isn't much to divide us, to separate us from the Romans musically. It also shows that the church comes in, the Christian church, and it stamps it out. So in our mind, we associate medieval music with these, frankly,

quite boring Gregorian chants. And we now think that bore no relation to what music was happening in the fields or the taverns of everyday life 2,000 years ago or 1,000 years ago. What we have is the Gregorian chants notated by the church itself, and that's very misleading. But what the second lost song shows us is that there was real folk and dance music happening behind the curtain, behind the church curtain. It must have been one of the ways in which people denied interesting and exciting food, colour, the panoply of things that we now have today. It must have been a way that they were able to just access culture, something apart from the daily grind of their lives. Music must have been so important. It was, but this is the tragedy

which I discovered that until recently, I mean the last hundred years, most music was done as work songs, as people laboured in the fields, unless you were the emperor or an aristocrat. The idea of having leisure to listen to music was so strange. No one would have time to do that. Most music was work songs, work music. And we know that through cotton hollers in the deep South in America, or sea shanties are quite fashionable now, blow the man down. And even today, listening to music on your earbuds in the office, we take music with us to work. And the notion of having leisure or space, listening to music on your earbuds in the office, we take music with us to work. And the notion of having leisure or space to listen to music in a vacuum is very unnatural, actually.

After we get Sekalos, we get Gruenchanz, does music play a consistent role subsequently, or does it mean very different things at different times? You mentioned work music, obviously religious music. Does it change? It depends which continent you're at. If you compare the West with the other great civilizations, the West changes very rapidly. What marks the West apart from say India or China is almost a mania for constant invention, roughly akin to science and scientific progress. And that's due to the invention of music notation. Once you have a score, you can think about the score and you can tinker with it like in a laboratory. Now, what happens in, say, India,

the great civilizations, the great cultures of Hindustani music in the north or Carnatic music in South India, it's the oral tradition of handing down music from disciple, from guru to disciple, from pandit to disciple. And there the ethos is continuity and not change. Yeah, it allows a lot of creative reinterpretations or improvisation. But if you look at Gandhi's favourite singer, M.S. Subbulakshmi, and the way she sings a standard, say, Saga Suga by the Beethoven of India, who was called Chagaraja. So when she sang that in the 1970s, that was pretty similar to Chagaraja in the 18th century. The culture there is to valorise rather, continuity and not change. And if you compare Beethoven with Schoenberg, it's the opposite.

Every decade of the 19th century, they rip up their rule books and start again. Through market forces, you have to sell music. There's a lot to do with the market and the rise of the middle class who demand entertainment and fashion's always changing. And composers have to service that market. and that's accelerating now with popular culture with commercial pop music where every week there has to be a new thing i always wonder with you amazing musicologists are we still discovering more ways to make music or do you just go oh yeah they've just taken a bit of bach thrown in a bit of this instrument and whacked that bit on the end that i recognize from that other i mean it innovative? Are we still breaking through fresh frontiers? A look at the internet and what's happened under lockdown, and that's accelerated cultural change,

as we all know, and what's happening with the various digital stages like TikTok or YouTube or streaming, that's something very new. I think mostly because it's democratising music, as it was taking music away from musicians and admitting that everyone is potentially musical, even you, Dan, or me, actually. I'm not very musical myself. But anyone can participate in this new musical culture. And that is new. And that's potentiated by technology, by the internet. Yeah, it's astonishing what you can do on GarageBand, even with me. I agree, it's remarkable. So you're still being surprised all the time by music? I am. I would say, and this could be quite pessimistic, that genres or idioms have their

heyday. So it was film in the 20th century. It's probably gaming or the internet now. And most musicologists think somewhat pessimistically that music's heyday was the 19th century, where music filled in a kind of God-shaped hole in secular humanism. So we killed God with Nietzsche, if not before. And music steps in to fill that gap. And that was its heyday, music as religion. And that stopped. Yeah, music is still here, but it's a lot more peripheral. And frankly, who listens to Stockhausen or Pierre Boulez anymore? It's great stuff, but life has moved on to something else now. Having studied the effect of music on humans, what does it mean now that we listen to it alone? What does it mean that although it's widely used and shared it's not sort of essential to our

life anymore what's that telling you about us i think it's very dangerous and if there's something quite dark and troubling about late capitalism or neoliberalism about the atomization of society all these things i won't talk about that today, but you know what I mean. The fragmentation of society. People are using music increasingly in a self-absorbed way, and that's part and parcel of the rise of mass emotion, which has led to Brexit here and Trumpism in America. Harnessing anger, the emotion of anger. Emotion is great when it's harnessed, but emotion in itself can be very dangerous. And this individualistic consumption of music

is one of the symptoms of that. But that said, you know, music is never truly alone because music always uses patterns and conventions. Every song uses conventions. Conventions are social. It's a language of music. So even when we're sitting alone, enjoying a track or a symphony,

we're connected to society because we're hearing a common language, a language of cliches or conventions. But it gets more interesting than that because psychologically, you can argue that when you're listening to a symphony, you're mentally walking a road, right? There's a landscape of sound. And in your mind, you can argue that when you're listening to a symphony, you're mentally walking a road, right? There's a landscape of sound.

And in your mind, you're traversing that. So one of the dramatic changes in contemporary music compared to music 40,000 years ago is that in the past, we used to walk or work, actually. It was very physical and in the field. We've now internalized that, and we're working and walking in our minds it's more interiorized more intellectualized but in a way it's just as active just as social but in a very late capitalist way as it were yeah no my whatsapp groups are buzzing as we speak you know i mean it's plenty social but it's just different to good healthy work in the field having a sing song although, although backbreaking, brutal labor as well. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast to talk about this fascinating subject.

I'm going to go and listen to some music. Part of the problem is I had all my nice CDs. They all got smashed and stolen by my flatmates and university parties. So that's okay. Then I bought all these songs on Apple. And then, then of course the technology changes i like lost it all i actually just gave up trying to amass a musical collection i was defeated by late capitalism how do you listen to your music well i'm cooking with a bottle of wine i can't listen to music if i'm working or reading it distracts me because i listen to it. I can't not listen to something.

But it helped me cook better. Yeah, it might help me cook better. That's for sure. Thank you, Michael. I'm going to go and download a well-known music streaming app and just try and remember all my old songs, relive my youth. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Good luck with the book.

It's called? It's called The Musical Human and modestly titled A History of Life on Earth. Everyone's going to write one eventually. Thank you so much. Thank you, Dan. I feel we have the history

upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Hi everyone, thanks for reaching the end of this podcast.

Most of you are probably asleep, so I'm talking to your snoring forms, but anyone who's awake, it would be great if you could do me a quick favour. Head over to wherever you get your podcasts and rate it five stars, and then leave a nice glowing review. It makes a huge difference, for some reason, to how these podcasts do. Madness, I know, but them's the rules. Then we go further up the charts, more people listen to us, and everything will be awesome. So thank you so much. Now sleep well.