CHAPTER I
Music is Born—How, When and Where

There was once a time when children did not have to go to school, for there were no schools; they did not have to take music lessons because there was no music; there was not even a language by which people could talk to each other, and there were no books and no pencils. There were no churches then, no homes nor cities, no railroads, no roads in fact, and the oldest and wisest man knew less than a little child of today.

Step by step men fought their way to find means of speaking to each other, to make roads to travel on, houses to live in, fire to cook with, clothes to wear, and ways to amuse themselves.

During this time, over one hundred thousand years ago, called “prehistoric” because it was before events were recorded, men had to struggle with things that no longer bother us.

Picture to yourselves this era when people lived out-of-doors, in mounds and caves surrounded by wild beasts which though dangerous, were not much more so than their human neighbors. Remember, too, that these people did not know that light followed darkness as the day the night; summer followed winter as the seasons come and go; that trees lost their leaves only to bear new ones in the spring, and that lightning and thunder were natural happenings; and so on through the long list of things that we think today perfectly simple, and not in the least frightening.

Because they did not understand these natural things, they thought that trees, sun, rain, animals, birds, fire, birth, death, marriage, the hunt, caves and everything else had good and bad gods in them. In order to please these gods they made prayers to them quite different from our prayers, as they danced, sang and acted the things they wanted to have happen. When a savage wanted sun or wind or rain, he called his tribe together and danced a sun dance, or a wind dance, or a rain dance. When he wanted food, he did not pray for it, but he acted out the hunt in a bear dance. As the centuries went by they continued to use these dances as prayers, and later they became what we call religious rites and festivals. So here you see actually the beginning of what we know as Easter festivals, Christmas with its Christmas tree and mistletoe, spring festivals and Maypole dances with the Queen of the May, Hallowe’en and many other holiday celebrations.

This is how music, dancing, poetry, painting and drama were born. They were the means by which primitive men talked to their gods. This they did, to be sure, very simply, by hand-clapping and foot-stamping, by swaying their bodies to and fro, by shouting, shrieking, grunting, crying and sobbing, and as soon as they knew enough, used language, and repeated the same word over and over again. These movements and sounds were the two roots from which music grew.

If you can call these queer grunts and yells singing, the men of those far-off days must have sung even before they had a language, in fact, it must have been difficult to know whether they were singing or talking. In these cries of joy, sorrow, pain, rage, fear, or revenge, we find another very important reason for the growth of music. These exclamations, however barbaric and rough, were man’s first attempt at expressing his feelings.

We still look upon music as one of the most satisfying ways to show our emotions, and the whole story of music from prehistoric times to the present day is a record of human feelings expressed in rhythm and melody.

Gradually these early men learned to make not only musical instruments, but also the knife for hunting and utensils for cooking. The first step towards a musical instrument was doubtless the striking together of two pieces of wood or stone in repeated beats. The next step was the stretching of the skin of an animal over a hollowed-out stone or tree trunk forming the first drum. Another simple and very useful instrument was made of a gourd (the dried hollow rind of a melon-like fruit) filled with pebbles and shaken like a baby’s rattle.

As early in the story of mankind as this, the love of decoration and need of beauty were so natural that they decorated their bodies, the walls of their caves, and their everyday tools with designs in carving, and in colors made from earth and plants. You can see some of these utensils and knives, even bits of wall pictures, in many of the museums in collections made by men who dig up old cities and sections of the countries where prehistoric peoples lived. These men are called archaeologists, and devote their lives to this work so that we may know what happened before history began.

A few years ago tools of flint, utensils made of bone, and skeletons of huge animals, that no longer exist, were found in a sulphur spring in Oklahoma; pottery and tools of stone, wood, and shell were dug up in Arizona; carvings, spear heads, arrow points, polished stone hatchets and articles of stone and ivory in Georgia, Pennsylvania and the Potomac Valley. This shows that this continent also had been inhabited by prehistoric people.

Even as we see prehistoric man using the things of nature for his tools, such as elephant tusks, flint, and wood; and as we see him making paint from earth and plants, we also see him getting music from nature. It would have been impossible for these early men and children to have lived out-of-doors and not to have listened to the songs of the birds, the sound of wind through the trees, the waves against the rocks, the trickling water of brooks, the beat of the rain, the crashing of thunder and the cries and roars of animals. All of these sounds of nature they imitated in their songs and also the motions and play of animals in their dances.

In Kamchatka, the peninsula across the Behring Strait from Alaska, there still live natives who sing songs named for and mimicking the cries of their wild ducks.

The natives of Australia, which is the home of the amusing-looking kangaroo, have a dance in which they imitate the peculiar leaps and motions of this animal. When you recall its funny long hind legs and short forelegs, you can imagine how entertaining it would be to imitate its motions. The natives also try to make the same sounds with their voices, as the kangaroo. The women accompany these dances by singing a simple tune of four tones over and over, knocking two pieces of wood together to keep time. If ever you go to the Australian bush (woods or forests) you will see this kangaroo dance. This is different, isn’t it, from sitting in a concert hall and listening to some great musician who has spent his life in hard work and study so that he may play or sing for you?

We can learn much about the beginnings of music from tribes of men who, although living today, are very near the birthday of the world, so far as their knowledge and habits are concerned.

Primitive men love play; they love to jump, to yell, to fling their arms and legs about, and to make up stories which they act out, as children do who “make believe.”

This love of mankind for make believe, and his desire to be amused, along with his natural instinct to express what he feels, are the roots from which music has grown. But, of course, in prehistoric times, men did not know that they were making an art, for they were only uttering in sound and movement their wants, their needs, in fact, only expressing their daily life and their belief in God.

Fortunately for our story there live groups of people today still in the early stages of civilization who show us the manners and customs of primitive man, because they are primitive men themselves.

We are going to learn how music grew from the American Indian and the African. We are using these two as examples for two reasons: because they are close enough to us to have influenced our own American music, and because all savage music has similar traits. The American Indian and the African show us the steps from the primitive state of music to the beginning of music as an art. In other words, these people are a bridge between prehistoric music and that of the civilized world.

In Chapter I about prehistoric man, we spoke of the two roots of music—movement and sound. Hereafter when we speak of rhythm it will mean movement either in tones or in gestures. Rhythm expressed in tones makes music; rhythm expressed in gestures makes the dance. The reason we like dance music and marches is that we feel the rhythm, the thing that makes us want to mark the beat of the music with our feet, or hands, or with head bobbings. This love of the beat is strong in the savage, and upon this he builds his music.

Our American Jazz is the result of our desire for strong rhythms and shows that we, for all our culture, have something in us of the savage’s feeling for movement.

We have a name for everything, but the American Indian has a name and a song for everything. He has a song for his moccasins, for his head-gear, for his teepee, the fire in it, the forest around him, the lakes and rivers in which he fishes and paddles, for his canoe, for the fish he catches, for his gods, his friends, his family, his enemies, the animal he hunts, the maiden he woos, the stars, the sun, and the moon, in fact for everything imaginable. The following little story will explain the Indians’ idea of the use of their songs:

An American visitor who was making a collection of Indian songs, asked an old Ojibway song-leader to sing a hunting song. The old Indian looked at him in surprise and left him. A little later the son-in-law of the Indian appeared and with apologies told the American that “the old gentleman” could not sing a hunting song because it was not the hunting season.

The next time the old Indian came, the American asked him for a love song, but he politely refused, saying that it was not dignified for a man of his age to sing love songs. However, the old warrior suddenly decided that as he was making a call, it was quite proper for him to sing Visiting Songs, which he did, to his host’s delight.

This old man had been taught to sing when he was a very little boy, as the Indian boy learns the history of his tribe through the songs. He is carefully trained by the old men and women so that no song of the tribe or family should be forgotten. These songs are handed down from one family to another, and no one knows how many hundreds of years old they may be. So, you see, these songs become history and the young Indians learn their history this way, not as we do, from text books.

“What new songs did you learn?” is the question that one Indian will ask of another who has been away on a visit, and like the announcer at the radio broadcasting station, the Indian answers:

“My friends, I will now sing you a song of—” and he fully describes the song. Then he sings it. After he finishes, he says, “My friends, I have sung you the song of—” and repeats the name of the song!

So great a part of an Indian’s life is music, that he has no word meaning poetry in his language. Poetry to the Indian is always song. In fact an Indian puts new words to an old tune and thinks he has invented a new song.

What Is Indian Music?

When the Indian sings, he starts on the highest tone he can reach and gradually drops to the lowest, so that many of his songs cover almost two octaves. He does not know that he sings in a scale of five tones. For some reason which we cannot explain, most primitive races have used this same scale. It is like our five black keys on the piano, starting with F sharp. This is called the pentatonic scale, (penta, Greek word for five, tonic meaning tones). This scale is a most amazing traveler, for we meet it in our musical journeys in China, Japan, Arabia, Scotland, Africa, Ireland, ancient Peru and Mexico, Greece and many other places. The reason we find these five tones popular must be because they are natural for the human throat. At any rate we know that it is difficult for the Indian to sing our scale. He does not seem to want the two notes that we use between the two groups of black keys which make our familiar major scale.

It is very difficult to put down an Indian song in our musical writing, because, the Indians sing in a natural scale that has not been changed by centuries of musical learning. They sing in a rhythm that seems complicated to our ears in spite of all our musical knowledge, and this, too, is difficult to write down. Another thing which makes it hard to set down and to imitate Indian music, is that they beat the drum in different time from the song which they sing. They seldom strike the drum and sing a tone at the same time. In fact, the drum and the voice seem to race with each other. At the beginning of a song, for example, the drum beat is slower than the voice. Gradually the drum catches up with the voice and for a few measures they run along together. The drum gains and wins the race, because it is played faster than the voice sings. The curious part of it is, that this is not an accident, but every time they sing the same song, the race is run the same way. We are trained to count the beats and sing beat for beat, measure for measure with the drum. Try to beat on a drum and sing, and see how hard it is not to keep time with it.

The Indian slides from tone to tone; he scoops with his voice, somewhat like the jazz trombone player.

Indian Instruments

The Indian’s orchestra is made up of the rattle and the drum. The white man cannot understand the Indian’s love of his drum. However, when he lives among them he also learns to love it. When Indians travel, they carry with them a drum which is hidden from the eyes of the strange white man. When night comes, they have song contests accompanied by the drum which is taken out of its hiding place.

These contests are very real to the Indians and they are similar to the tournaments held in Germany in the Middle Ages.

The drummer, who is also the singer, is called the leading voice and is so important that he ranks next to the chief. His rank is high, because through knowing the songs he is the historian of his tribe.

The drum is made of a wooden frame across which is stretched the skin of an animal, usually a deer. Sometimes it is only a few inches across, and sometimes it is two feet in diameter. When it has two surfaces of skins, they are separated four to six inches from each other. It is held in the left hand by a leather strap attached to the drum frame, and beaten with a short stick. (Figure 1.)

The Sioux Indian sets his drum on the ground; it is about the size of a wash tub and has only one surface. Two or more players pound this drum at the same time and the noise is often deafening. The Ojibway drum always has two surfaces and is usually decorated with gay designs in color. (Sioux drum, Figure 2.)

The drum makes a good weather bureau! The Indian often forecasts the weather by the way his drum answers to his pounding. If the sound is dull, he knows there is rain in the air, if it is clear and sharp and the skin is tight, he can have out-door dances without fear of a wetting. You could almost become a weather prophet yourself by watching the strings of your tennis racket, which act very much like the drum skin.

Another instrument beloved of all Indians is the rattle. There are many different sizes and shapes of rattles made of gourds, horns of animals and tiny drums filled with pebbles and shot. Some of them are carved out of wood in the shape of birds and animal heads. (Figure 3.)

The Indians also have the flute, and although there is no special music for it, it is of great importance in their lives. No two flutes are made to play exactly the same tones, that is, they are not drawn to scale. They are like home-whittled whistles made of wood in which holes are burned. (Figure 4.)

The flute is never used in the festivals or in the dance but it is the lover’s instrument. A young man who is too bashful to ask his sweetheart to marry him, hides among the bushes near her teepee, close to the spring where she goes every morning for water. When he sees her, he plays a little tune that he makes up just for her. Being a well brought up little Indian maid, she pretends not to notice it, but very soon tries to find out who played to her. If she likes him, she gives him a sign and he comes out of his hiding place, but if she does not wish to marry him, she lets him go on playing every morning until he gets tired and discouraged and returns no more to the loved spring near her teepee in the early morning.

And this is the reason the Indian love songs so often refer to sunrise, spring and fountains, and why we use the melancholy flute when we write Indian love songs.

Because of the ceaseless beating of the drum, the constant repetition of their scale of five tones, and the rambling effect of the music like unpunctuated sentences, we find the Indian music very monotonous. But they return the compliment and find our music monotonous, probably, because it is too well punctuated. Mr. Frederick Burton in his book on Primitive American Music, tells of having given to two Indian friends tickets for a recital in Carnegie Hall, in New York City, where they heard songs by Schubert and Schumann. When he asked them how they enjoyed the music they politely said, “It is undoubtedly very fine, it was a beautiful hall and the man had a great voice, but it seemed to us as though he sang the song over, over and over again, only sometimes he made it long and sometimes short.”

Indian Societies

The Indian is a great club man; every Indian belongs to some society. The society which he joins is decided by what he dreams. If he dreams of a bear, he joins the Bear Society; if he dreams of a Buffalo, he joins the Buffalo Society. Other names of clubs are: Thunder-bird, Elks and Wolves.

Dreams play a great part in the Indian’s life. If he dreams of a small round stone, a sacred thing to him, he is supposed to have the power to cure sickness, to foretell future events, to tell where objects are which cannot be seen.

Every one of the societies or clubs has its own special songs. The Indians also have songs of games, dances, songs of war and of the hunt, songs celebrating the deeds of chiefs, conquering warriors, war-path and council songs.

In the first chapter we spoke of primitive man imitating animals and here we find that the Indians, in their societies named for animals, imitate the acts of the clubs’ namesakes.

They have a dance called the grass dance, in which they decorate their belts with long tufts of grass, a reminder of the days when they wore scalps on their belts after they had been on the “war-path.” In this dance they imitate the motions of the eagle and other birds. Even the feathers used in their head-dress is a part of their custom of imitating animals and birds. Some of these head-dresses are like the comb, and the Indian who wears this will imitate the cries of the bird to which the comb belongs. His actions always correspond with his costume.

The Indians have lullabies and children’s game-songs,—the moccasin game, in which they search for sticks hidden in a moccasin. Then too, there is the Rain Dance of the Junis and the Snake Dance of the Hopis, in which they carry rattlesnakes, sometimes holding them between the teeth.

Dance often means a ceremony lasting several days. The Indians are worshippers of the Sun, and have a festival, which lasts several days, called the Sun Dance. This festival took place particularly among the Indians of the plains: the Cheyennes, the Chippewas and others. The last Sun Dance took place in 1882. In this the Indian offered to the “Great Spirit” what was strongest in his nature and training,—the ability to stand pain. Self inflicted pain was a part of the ceremony and seemed noble to the Indian, but to the white man it was barbarous and heathenish and he put a stop to it.

The Medicine Man

Have you ever heard of the medicine man? He is doctor, lawyer, priest, philosopher, botanist, and musician all in one. The society of “Grand Medicine” is the religion of the Chippewas. It teaches that one must be good to live long. The chief aims of the society are to bring good health and long life to its followers, and music is as important in the healing as medicine.

Every member of the society carries a bag of herbs, the use of which he has learned, and if called upon to heal the sick, he works the cure by singing the right song before giving the medicine. The medicine is not usually swallowed in proper fashion as a child takes a dose, but it is carried by the sick person, or is placed among his belongings, or a little wooden figure is carved roughly by the Medicine Man and must be carried around with the herbs to heal the patient. But the song, and it must be the right song for the occasion, counts as much as the medicine. Wouldn’t you like to be an Indian?

Often the Medicine Man is called upon for a love-charm, for which there is a song. There are also songs of cursing which are supposed to work an evil charm when used with a certain kind of cursing herbs.

Both men and women may become members of the Great Medicine Society, and they must go through eight degrees or stages in which they are taught the use of the medicines and the songs. Each member of the society has his own set of songs, some of which he has composed himself and others he has had to buy for large sums of money or goods. No man is allowed to sing another man’s song unless he has bought the right to it. With the sale of a song goes the herb to be used with that particular song. The ceremony is very elaborate. It lasts for several days, and sounds very much like a story book.

The Chippewa Indians have had a written picture language by means of which they read the different songs. These pictures were usually drawn on white birch-bark. Here are a few samples:

When we tell you about American music we will speak again of the Indian and how we have used in our own music what he has given us.

The Negro and His Music

The place of the negro in the world of music has been the cause of many questions:

Is his music that of a primitive man?

Is it American?

Is it American Folk Music?

As we tell you the story of music we shall have to speak of the negro music from all these different sides. But, for you to understand why there is a question about it, we must tell you where the negro came from and what he brought from his primitive home.

When the English first came to Virginia and founded Jamestown in 1607 they started to grow tobacco on great plantations, and for this they needed cheap labor. They tried to use Indians, but as the work killed so many of them, they had negroes sent over from Africa to do it. A year before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620, negroes were already being sold as slaves in Virginia. Until 1808 these negroes were brought over from Africa; they were not all of one tribe, nor were they of one race. There were Malays from Madagascar, Movis from northern Africa, red skins and yellow skins as well as black.

These people were primitive and they all used song and dance in their religion, their work and their games. They brought from Africa a great love for music and ears that heard and remembered more than many a trained musician. A well-known writer has said that wherever the African negro has gone, he has left traces in the music of that country. The Spanish Habanera, which we have danced by the name of Tango came from Africa; even the name is African, “tangara,” and was a vulgar dance unfit for civilized people. The rhythm of the African dance and of our tango is the same.

Like other savages, the African negro loved rhythm better than melody. His songs were monotonous and were made up of a few tones and short repeated phrases. They used the scale, of five tones (called pentatonic), the same as the Indian’s.

The African negro was a master at drumming. The Indian drumming was regular like the clock or pulse, but the negro played most difficult and complicated rhythms, almost impossible for a trained musician, to imitate. He had drums of all sizes and kinds.

These savages sang groups of tones which we call chords, which were not used by any of the ancient civilized people. By means of different rhythms they had hundreds of ways of combining the three tones of a chord as C-E-G. It is curious that these primitive people should have used methods more like our own than many of the races that had reached a much higher degree of civilization.

The Africans had an original telegraph system in which they did not use the Morse code, but sent their messages by means of drums that were heard many miles away. They had a special drum language which the natives understood; and the American Indians flashed their messages over long distances by means of the reflection of the sun on metal.

It is only a little more than a hundred years ago since we stopped bringing these primitive people into America and making slaves of them. Their children have become thoroughly Americanized now, from having lived alongside of the white people all this time and some have forgotten their African forefathers. But in the same way that the children of Italian, German, French or Russian parents remember the songs of their forefathers and often show traces of these songs in the music they make, so the negro without knowing it has kept some of the primitive traits of African music.

Later, we will tell you how this grew into two kinds of music, the beautiful religious song called the Negro Spiritual, and the dance which has grown into our popular ragtime and jazz.

If we were to study in detail the music of many savage tribes of different periods from prehistoric day to the uncivilized people living today, we should find certain points in common. They all have festival songs, songs for religious ceremonials, for games, work songs, war songs, hunting songs and love songs. In fact it is a beautiful habit for primitive people to put into song everything they do and everything they wish to remember. With them music has not been a frill or a luxury, but a daily need and a natural means for expressing themselves.

Another thing alike among these early peoples, is that all of them had drums and rattles of some kind and a roughly made instrument that resembles our pipes. But they had no stringed instruments and for their beginnings you will have to journey on with us in this,—your book.

Since giving this book to the public, we have come in direct contact with some remarkable songs of the Nootka (Canadian) Indians and of the Eskimos. Juliette Gaultier de la Verendry, a young French Canadian, has sung them in New York in the original dialect. They have been given to her by D. Jenness, an anthropologist who lived among the Eskimos for several years, studying their traits and at the same time he took the opportunity of writing down their songs. They are truly savage music and have the characteristics of which we have spoken in the use of intervals, drums, and in the type of songs, such as weather and healing incantations (medicine songs), work songs, and dances.

Three thousand years before Jesus was born, a corner of southwestern Asia and northeastern Africa was the home of people who had reached a very high degree of civilization. They were the first to pass the stage of primitive man, and to make for themselves beautiful buildings, beautiful cities, monuments, decorations and music. Among these ancient, civilized people were the Egyptians, the Assyrians and the Hebrews. We will talk first about the Egyptians because they had the greatest influence not only on the Assyrian and Hebrew music, but also on the Greeks who went to Egypt. So, in European music we can trace the Egyptian influence through the Greeks.

The Egyptians were very fond of building and they decorated what they built with pictures in vivid colorings called hieroglyphics (heiro—sacred, glyphics—writings). As they had neither newspapers nor radio sets, they carved or painted the records of their daily lives, their festivals, battles, entertainments, and even marketing journeys on the walls and on the columns of the temples, on the obelisks, and in the tombs, some of which were the pyramids.

The climate saved these records from destruction, and the archaeologists re-discovered them for us in the tombs full of Egyptian treasure and the temples and lost cities, buried for thousands of years.

The Egyptians built to inspire feelings of awe, mystery and grandeur. You probably remember pictures of obelisks, temples, pyramids, tombs and sphinxes, alongside of which a man looks but a few inches high.

They were very young as the world goes, and built huge structures because they were still filled with wonder at the immensity and power of the things they saw in Nature,—the Nile; the great desert which seemed vaster to them because they had only slow-moving camels, elephants and horses to take them about; they saw very long rainy seasons and the Nile overflowing its banks yearly, long dry seasons and the terrible wind and sand storms; the great heat of the sun, and the glory of their huge flowers, such as the lotus.

Just as primitive people did, they personified Nature in the gods. They had Osiris—god of Light, Health and Agriculture; Isis—goddess of the Arts and Agriculture; Horus (hawk-headed), the Sun god; Phtah, first divine King of Memphis, and many others. Again like primitive people, they had music for their gods, for their temple services, for their state ceremonies, festivals, martial celebrations and amusements.

Primitive music, we saw, had no laws to bind it, but was guided by the savage’s natural feeling and he could make up anything he wished. In Egypt, because of state law which prevented it from changing, music was held down to the same system for three thousand years. New music was forbidden, and much of the old was considered sacred and so closely connected with religious ceremonies that it was allowed to be used only in the temples.

The priests lived in these magnificent temples and were the philosophers, artists and musicians, very like the medicine men of the Indians, but much more advanced in learning.

Like the American Indians, too, the profession of music was handed down from father to son, and only the children of singers, whether they had good voices or not, could sing in the temples.

On the monuments we see these singers followed by players of instruments. The singers were of the highest caste, or Priest caste; the players were usually of the lower classes, or the Slave caste, although as pictured on the tombs of Rameses, one of Egypt’s greatest rulers and builders, we see the priests dressed in splendid robes and playing large harps.

The temples of Egypt were so huge that the music had to be on a large scale. They thought nothing of an orchestra of six hundred players of harps, lyres, lutes, flutes and sistrums (bell rattles), whereas we today advertise in large type the fact of one hundred men in one orchestra! We see no trumpets in the picture writings of the Egyptian orchestra, for these were only used in war, and we find them only in their pictures of war and triumphal marches; nor do we see large drums, because the Egyptians clapped their hands to mark rhythm. However, the military instruments in the hands of players pictured on the monuments, show that they used trumpets and tambourines in the army.

From the names we find in the tombs—“Singers of the King” and “Singers of the Master of the World,” we know that the Kings had musicians of high rank in their courts. The paintings on the walls and columns of the ruins of the temple Karnak, show funeral services with kneeling singers, playing harps of seven strings and other instruments.

Ptolemy Soter II, another famous Egyptian ruler, gave a fête in which were heard a chorus of twelve hundred voices, accompanied by three hundred Greek kitharas and many flutes.

It seems like a fairy tale that we can bring back the manners and customs of three thousand years ago through studying the writings in stone called hieroglyphics, and by examining the things used every day, that were found in the excavations. For a long time the hieroglyphics were unsolved riddles until the discovery in 1799 A.D. of the Rosetta stone, on which was an inscription in hieroglyphics with its Greek translation. Although ancient Greek is called a dead language, it still has enough life in it to bring back the history and records of antiquity. Through this knowledge of Greek, the Egyptian inscriptions speak to us and tell us marvelous stories of ancient Egypt.

In one of the tombs at Thebes, was a harp with strings of catgut, which when plucked, still gave out sounds although the harp had probably not been played upon in three thousand years!

Going once more to our ancient stone library—or collections of monuments in our museums or in Egypt—we see many pictures of dancers. The Egyptians danced in religious ceremonies as well as in private entertainments. They loved lively dances, and the men did all sorts of acrobatic steps and even toe-dancing like our Pavlowa, while the women did the slow, languorous dances.

Egyptian music was greatest as far back as 3000 B.C.! After that it grew poorer until 525 B.C. when Egypt was conquered by Persia.

The Egyptian Scale

The Egyptians must have used a musical scale of whole steps and half steps, covering several octaves, not unlike ours. Think of the piano keyboard with its black and its white keys and you will get an idea of the Egyptian scale. We learned this through the discovery of a flute that played a scale of half steps from a below middle c to d above the staff with only a few tones missing.

In the British Museum in London and in the Louvre in Paris, you can see ancient records which archaeologists unearthed from three mounds near the River Tigris in Asiatic Turkey. These mounds were the remains of the Assyrian cities of Nimroud (Babylon), Khorsabad, and probably the famous Nineveh, and date from 3000 to 1300 B.C.

Did Assyria influence Egypt or was it the other way around? The Egyptians excelled in making mechanical things such as instruments, utensils, tools, and in building temples and pyramids; while the Assyrians were sculptors, workers in metals and enamel, and knew the secret of dyeing and weaving stuffs, and of making beautiful pottery. But whose music was the better, the Egyptians or the Assyrians, is impossible to say. We do know, however, that the Assyrians, as well as the Egyptians and Hebrews, had perfected music far beyond the standard reached by many nations of our own time.

The Assyrians had the same families of instruments that we have,—the percussion (or drums), wind, and strings; and they used different combinations of instruments in concerts, either in instrumental performances or for accompanying vocal music. Everything that we know about them shows that the Assyrians were greater noisemakers than the Egyptians, for they not only had drums and trumpets, but they also marked rhythm by stamping their feet instead of clapping their hands.

The instruments pictured on the monuments, probably existed many centuries before the building of these monuments, which would make them very old indeed. In fact, almost all of them are still in use in the Orient today and are played in the same way. The monuments also prove that some of the special ceremonies in which music was used are still in existence.

Both the Assyrians and the Egyptians had flutes, and double flutes which were actually two flutes connected by one mouthpiece and looked like the letter v. The Assyrians also had harps that varied in size from some that could be carried in the hand, to some that stood seven feet high and had as many as twenty-two strings. The dulcimer, an instrument something like a zither, was very popular and was made so that it could be played standing upright or lying flat. They also had drums, castanets, cymbals, tambours or tambourines, and lyres, all of which could be easily carried.

The Assyrians being a warlike nation made their instruments so that they could be strapped to their bodies. So it seems that people in 3000 B.C. were practical.

The Assyrians were so fond of music that when their war-prisoners were musicians they were not put to death.

Hebrew Music

We get our knowledge of the Hebrew music not from stone monuments and wall pictures, but from Biblical writings and other ancient Hebrew records. In the Second Commandment, God forbids the Hebrews to make images:

“Thou shalt not make unto thyself any graven image, nor the likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth.” (Exodus XXI: 4.) With so strict a commandment, you can understand why there are no pictures of singers and of instruments, and that we have to go to the greatest literary gift to the world,—the Old Testament, to find out about their music.

The first musician mentioned in the Bible is Jubal. It says in Genesis IV: 21, “he was the father of all such as handle the harp and pipe (or organ).” From an old Spanish book found in the early 18th century in a Mexican monastery, comes the story that Jubal was listening to Tubal-Cain’s forge, and noticed the difference in pitch of the sounds made by the strokes on the anvil. Some tones were high, some low, and some were medium. He compared this to the human voice, and tried to imitate the sounds, high, low and medium, of the forge. Thus he became the first singer of the Hebrews. Jubal invented a flute and a little three-cornered harp called the kinnor. These small instruments were most convenient to carry about, for at this time the Hebrews were shepherd tribes wandering from place to place. Their music was simple as is the music of all primitive peoples.

We know from the Biblical story that the Children of Israel were sold into captivity and remained many centuries in Egypt; that Moses was found in the bulrushes by Pharoah’s daughter, and was educated as an Egyptian boy and “was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.” Therefore, he must have learned music from the priests. It is natural then, that the Hebrews must have borrowed the music and instruments of their adopted country in the making of their own.

After Moses had been commanded by the Lord to lead the children of Israel out of the land of captivity, and after the Red Sea had divided to allow them to pass through, we read the great song of triumph sung by Moses:

“Then sang Moses and the Children of Israel: ‘I will sing unto Jehovah, for he hath triumphed gloriously, the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea, Jehovah is my strength and my song and he is become my salvation.’” etc.—(Exodus XV: 1–2).

And “Miriam, the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a timbrel in her hand, and all the women went out after her with timbrels and with dances.” (The timbrel is a small tambourine-like instrument.)

This story, like others in the Old Testament, is full of the accounts of musical instruments, singing and dancing, and shows us that the ancient Hebrews used music and the dance for nearly every event. If you read carefully you will get the musical history of this poetic people.

While the Children of Israel were in the wilderness, Moses received from Jehovah the command: (Numbers X.)

“Make thee two trumpets of silver; of a whole piece shalt thou make them; that thou mayest use them for the calling of the assembly, and for the journeyings of the camp.”

Then follow directions as to the meaning of the blowing of the trumpets. One trumpet alone called the princes; two trumpets called the entire tribe together; an “alarm” gave the signal for the camps to go forward, and so on. So, you see the ancient Hebrews used trumpets much as we today use the army bugle. The trumpets mentioned as one of the earliest of all instruments called the people to religious ceremonies too; it announced festivals, the declaration of a war, the crowning of a king, proclaimed the jubilee year, and gave warning of the anger of God.

One instrument has come down to our times and is still used in the Hebrew temple services. This is called the shofar and is usually a ram’s horn on which two tones may be blown. Probably, as the ram was one of the animals of sacrifice, they used its horn as a sacred instrument. This shofar is 5,000 years old, at least. It is sounded in all the synagogues of the world on the Jewish New Year and on the Day of Atonement in memory of the wanderings of the Children of Israel.

When the twelve tribes, after their wanderings in the wilderness, had settled down in Palestine, they gave music a most important place in their daily life. Samuel, the last and most respected of the judges, built a school of prophecy and music. Here it was that young David hid himself to escape the persecutions of Saul. You remember that David is called the Great Musician and he gave us many of the Psalms, the most beautiful religious verse in the world. How much it would mean to us if we knew the music David sang to these songs! In spite of the fact that the music in which they were originally sung has been lost, the Psalms have been an inspiration to all composers of religious music throughout the ages. David learned so much at Samuel’s school that he created a most beautiful musical service for the temple, which is the basis of the one used today in Jewish synagogues (temples).

The number that were instructed in the songs of the Lord was two hundred, four score and eight (288). There were in all four thousand, including assistants, students, players of instruments and the two hundred and eighty-eight professional singers.

All of these people did not perform at one time; for the ordinary services they used twelve male singers, twelve players on instruments,—nine harps, and two players of the psaltery and one of cymbals. Women were not allowed to sing in the temples but they were a part of the court and sang at funerals and at public festivities and banquets.

The great Jewish historian, Josephus, tells us that Solomon had two hundred thousand singers, forty thousand harpists, forty thousand sistrum players and two hundred thousand trumpeters. This is hard to believe, but as everything belonged to the kings in bygone days, probably this was only Solomon’s musical directory.

The psaltery was an instrument something like our zither, with thirteen strings on a flat wooden sounding board, rectangular in shape. The sistrum was a metal rattle which made a very sweet sound.

It isn’t easy to describe the instruments used thousands of years ago, for the names have become changed through the ages, and we find the same type of instruments called by different names in different countries and periods. For example, the psaltery is much the same instrument as the dulcimer, the Arab’s kanoun and the Persian santir. We find the same psaltery in Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale” as sautrie. By the addition of a keyboard this Biblical instrument became the spinet, which you will meet again in the 15th and 16th centuries. In the 13th century, in Italy, we find a kind of psaltery hung around the neck and called “Istroménto di porco” because it looked like the head of a pig.

Not all the songs of the Bible are religious. The Song of Solomon, a most beautiful poem of marriage, gives us a vivid picture of luxury and magnificence, as well as showing us that music was used for other than religious ceremonies.

After the death of Solomon, the music in the temple lost its splendor and again the Children of Israel were made captive. When one hundred years later Nebuchadnezzar (586 B.C.) the King of Babylon, destroyed their temple, the song of the Hebrews became sad and mournful, as you can read in the Book of Lamentations and in this beautiful song of grief, the 137th Psalm: