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THE TRADITION OF MUSIC: FROM PREHISTORY TO THE PRESENT

although music is as intrinsic to human life as the air we breathe, we must never fall for the line that it is a universal language. Music is neither universal, nor a language.

The use of the word 'universal' suggests that all music speaks equally to all people. Clearly, it does not. While music might be everywhere, no one appreciates all of it and often enough the barrier to appreciation is cultural. American country music, Italian baroque arias, Indian ragas, hip hop, twelve-tone string quartets: everyone can name a form of music that leaves them unmoved and possibly drives them mad - assuming, that is, they can agree on what constitutes music in the first place. In most of the indigenous languages of Africa, although there are words for performing, for singing and dancing, for drumming and playing other instruments, there is no equivalent word for music.

Were music a language, it could be translated into other languages. But that is not how music works. Music might be good at generating emotion, but it can tell you nothing precise: a shopping list, a set of directions, a love letter are all beyond it. Music communicates nothing; it is something.

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I think music is the art of agony. Music is, after all, derived from screaming; it is not derived from laughing.

-Percy Grainger (1882-1961), Australian composer

Music is a precursor to language. It is not that it predates language in the historical sense (though it probably does), but that a version of music comes out of the mouths of babes and sucklings before they are able to form words. Some of a baby's cries will have to do with hunger or the desire for company, but there are also moments when the infant lies there experimenting with sound for its own sake, and that is music. Why do babies do this? We know that children learn through imitation and that this begins at about six months. They respond to the sounds around them, including birds and animals; they imitate the voices of their parents and siblings; and they form a particularly strong bond - a musical bond - with the parent who sings. Originally, perhaps, this 'singing' consisted of cooing reassuring tones, and it can still be that. Archaeological evidence suggests that Homo erectus - the ancestor of both human beings and Neanderthals - had the facial bone structure to make different pitches.

A rudimentary form of music having come first in a child's development, the words that follow gain meaning from pitch, rhythm, tempo, timbre and emphasis - the component parts of music. With tonal languages, such as Vietnamese, Cherokee and Yoruba (spoken in much of Nigeria and Benin), infants learn relative pitches or pitch shapes as part of pronunciation. Chinese children learning Mandarin must differentiate between four tonal shapes, a single syllable having completely unrelated meanings depending upon whether the pitch is high and straight, rising, falling then rising, or abruptly falling. So ma means mother, má means cannabis, ma is a horse and mà is the verb to scold or curse (and, what's more, context is important, because má also means leprosy, while ma can mean agate). Even in non-tonal languages, such as English, pitch remains important as speaking voices rise and fall to indicate sense. Our speech slows down and speeds up; it grows louder or quieter, softer or gruffer; we stress certain words and not others, creating free-flowing rhythmic patterns. We do all this at the service of the words we utter, the music of our voices allowing those we are talking to to understand the nuances of meaning and gauge veracity. If you want to know whether your new hairdo looks good, you will have to listen to the way your interlocutor says, 'Oh, it really suits you.'

So, music is both more primitive than speech and a part of speech. Crucially, music can also be a step up from speech when the rhythms and pitches of vocal communication are exaggerated into song. Vowels are extended and perhaps decorated with more than one note; important syllables are placed on strong beats and high notes. Song is stylised speaking, although precise distinctions will vary from culture to culture.

Is this, then, how music began? With singing? It's tempting to believe so. But perhaps even before people sang, they made rhythms. Consciously or not, we do this all the time: we do it when we walk; even asleep, our breathing and heartbeat create patterns in sound. Early hominins must have noticed this. Stone tools date back more than two million years, and their use would have generated rhythm. Working together, our ancestors created spontaneous polyphony, or perhaps, listening to each other, their hammering fell pleasingly into step. The patterns might have been basic and almost unconscious, but as soon as people pay attention to one another's rhythms and interact with them, they are making music.

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The way music passes, emblematic

Of life and how you cannot isolate a note of it

And say it is good or bad. You must

Wait till it's over.

-from 'Syringa' by John Ashbery (1927-2017), American poet

The cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, who has written on rationality and humankind's instinct for language, has tended to pooh-pooh music. Because music isn't a language, and since it is hard to say in what sense it might be entirely rational, Pinker regards it as something of an outlier, 'an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of at least six of our mental faculties' but conferring 'no survival advantage'. Music is all very nice, but it doesn't matter; it is, in Pinker's view, the auditory equivalent of 'cheesecake'.

Now, just because something can't be explained in words does not make it unimportant. On the contrary, it may be because music is so hard to pin down that it has been valued throughout history. The sites of archaeological finds place musical instruments in temples, royal tombs and inner sanctums at the heart of cave systems; early visual depictions of music-making show people playing instruments for kings and queens and gods. But alongside what we might think of as these high-end uses of music, there must always have been the crooning parent. From ancient times, music was part of life at every level.

It was the ancient Greeks who invented cheesecake, so it is conceivable that Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were all partial to it. In any case, these philosophers would have made short shrift of Steven Pinker and his theory. Music had a vital importance not only in the Greeks' individual lives, but also at the level of government, and it involved choral singing and dance as well as lyric poems, sung or chanted to the accompaniment of a lyre. What are now generally considered separate disciplines - music, dance and poetry - to the Greeks were one thing (they still are for many First Nations peoples). Even so, Pythagoras found a certain purity in musical sounds born of the mathematical proportions of the harmonic series - the way, for example, a vibrating string half the length of another vibrating string will produce a tone one octave higher. Music, Pythagoras believed, was a key to the cosmos and vice versa.

For Socrates, far from being Pinker's 'exquisite confection', music wasn't even about enjoyment but the bestowing of order - although, recognising music's power to beguile and make the listener lazy, he recommended its teaching alongside gymnastics. Plato, in his Laws, suggested that music - in particular choric music (dancing as well as singing) - might be employed to calm youthful hotheads and bring discipline to their minds; and he goes further, for in The Republic he asserts that the power of music is that it bypasses reason, going straight to the soul or self. Both Plato and Aristotle were somewhat disapproving of purely instrumental music, as many societies have been, especially religious societies. But singing for Plato was such a serious matter that he proposed putting the laws of the state to music.

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We see how the songspirals can be destroyed. If Yol?u all die, then the land dies with us.

-from Songspirals by the Gay'wu Group of Women

For the Yol?u people of northeast Arnhem Land, songs embody law and lore. The Gay'wu Group of Women, who write so vividly about this, prefer the term 'songspirals' to the more common expression 'songlines' because their 'songs are not a straight line . [moving] in one direction through time and space'. For Yol?u people, these songspirals not only come from the land; they are continually forming it.

Yol?u women have responsibility for milkarri, which 'is an ancient song, an ancient poem, a map, a ceremony and a guide, but it is more than all this too'. When they sing - or cry, or...