XPost: soc.history   
   From: internetado@alt119.net   
      
   "We're drowning in music," says Michael Spitzer, professor of music at   
   the University of Liverpool. "If you were born in Beethoven's time,   
   you'd be lucky if you heard a symphony twice in your lifetime, whereas   
   today, it's as accessible as running water." We shouldn';t take music,   
   or running water, for granted, and the comparison should give us pause:   
   do we need music -- for example, nearly any recording of any Beethoven   
   symphony we can think of -- to flow out of the tap on demand? What does   
   it cost us? Might there be a middle way between hearing Beethoven   
   whenever and hearing Beethoven almost never?   
      
   The story of how humanity arrived at its current relationship with   
   music is the subject of the Big Think interview with Spitzer above, in   
   which he covers 40,000 years in 8 minutes: "from bone flutes to   
   Beyoncé." We begin with his thesis that "we in the West" think of music   
   history as the history of great works and great composers. This   
   misconception "tends to reduce music into an object," and a commodity.   
   Furthermore, we "overvalue the role of the composer," placing the   
   professional over "most people who are innately musical." Spitzer wants   
   to recover the universality music once had, before radios, record   
   players, and streaming media.   
      
   For nearly all of human history, until Edison invents the phonograph in   
   1877, we had no way of preserving sound. If people wanted music, they   
   had to make it themselves. And before humans made instruments, we had   
   the human voice, a unique development among primates that allowed us to   
   vocalize our emotions. Spitzer';s book The Musical Human: A History of   
   Life on Earth tells the story of humanity through the development of   
   music, which, as Matthew Lyons points out in a review, came before   
   every other metric of modern human civilization:   
      
   The earliest known purpose-built musical instrument is some forty   
   thousand years old. Found at Geissenklösterle in what is now   
   southeastern Germany, it is a flute made from the radial bone of a   
   vulture. Remarkably, the five holes bored into the bone create a   
   five-note, or pentatonic, scale. Which is to say, before agriculture,   
   religion, settlement - all the things we might think of as early signs   
   of civilisation - palaeolithic men and women were already familiar with   
   the concept of pitch.   
      
   If music is so critical to our social development as a species, we   
   should learn to treat it with the respect it deserves. We should also,   
   Spitzer argues, learn to play and sing for ourselves again, and think   
   of music not only as a thing that other, more talented people produce   
   for our consumption, but as our own evolutionary inheritance, passed   
   down over tens of thousands of years.   
   (continue)...   
      
   https://www.openculture.com/2022/08/the-evolution-of-music-40000   
   years-of-music-history-covered-in-8-minutes.html   
      
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