So it's almost certain that any clever chap (and, sadly, almost certainly it was a chap) who got us from grunt to note - from savage breast to soothing rest - is never going to show up in the history books. T thought up plainchant for Pope Gregory, you know,' might make a good story down the pub, but it's not going to get you a place in Euterpe's^1 Hall of Fame. And don't for one minute think that this book is going to shed any light on them. It's not. It isn't called the 'incomplete' and utter history for nothing, you know.
What I will do, however - and don't say I don't give you anything. - is take a look back at which sets of people got the whole music business moving. And to find that out, you have to go way back. And I mean way back. And it's not to ancient Egypt, it's not to Shang Dynasty China, it's not even to the Sumerians or Greeks. You may not believe this, but it's only France, isn't it!
FRENCH WITHOUT EARS
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ypical. Not only do they make great food, great wine and great lovers, but some people also believe they got the whole music thing first, too. How best to explain this? Well, maybe you could just go with me for a minute, and imagine you are in a cave. You are not far away from Perigeaux some 30 kilometres north of the Dordogne river, once it has parted company with Bergerac. Gorgeous part of France, so possibly take in a spot of wine-tasting when we've done. It's here, in a little place called Ariege, in the Magdalanian cave of Les Trois Freres, that you come across a groovy little wall painting of a character who appears to be half-man, half-bison. (Now there's a phrase I haven't heard since my coming-out party.) In his hand is clearly some sort of bow, and many scholars who can claim to be far cleverer than me have stuck their academic necks out and said: it's almost certainly a musical bow, possibly even a dual-purpose bow -one that doubled up as half instrument, half lethal hunting weapon. I can think of any number of orchestral musicians who would relish a chance to pull one of those from their case.
If it is indeed a musical bow that the half-man half-bison is carrying, then he probably fixed it to his hunting mask - lining it up with his nose - and struck it with his hands. A not dissimilar practice goes on in many a city traders' toilet today, albeit of far less interest to fl Euterpe, incidentally, was one of the Nine Muses, her particular area being music. musicologists. If you take all this as even, fairly believable, then you do realize that we're talking at least eight and a half thousand years before I lie first Egyptian cat looked up from his food, cocked an eye at his master and thought, 'Something in my gut tells me that bloke's up to something'?
OK. 13,500??, and you've got some sort of sketchy evidence of some sort of music going on. After that, give or take the odd 'mammoth-bone flute' turning up here and there, you have to wait another nine or so thousand years - or two and a half Wagner operas -lor any real proof that music even existed. If you were to chart a musical map of, say, 4000??, then you really wouldn't need much in the way of different coloured crayons at all. You simply have a colour for the Egyptians, one for the Sumerians or Babylonians, and another one for the Greeks. If you happen to have a couple left over for China and India, then all well and good. Let's start with the top three first, though, and that rather uneasy cat.
CAT GUT YOUR TONGUE?
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'm presuming that die Egyptians' love of cats meant that, in actual fact, they probably looked elsewhere when they came to find strings to fit their harps. By now, somewhere around 4000 and 3000??, the Egyptians appear to be putting a flag firmly in the ground and making a healthy enough claim to be the first culture to use riot only harps but also flutes. If the harps were anything like the Sumerian harps from around roughly the same time, they were elliptical in shape, and probably had three strings and a rather ornate soundboard, usually carved in the shape of something important at the time. So, in Mesopotamia, you would often see your friendly, local Sumerian harp player sat there, going away at his three strings, with a lavishly carved bull resting on his thighs.
It's the time of the building of the Great Sphinx at Giza, a time when metal coins had finally replaced barley as the currency, and a time when musicians fought over the best gigs in town - playing for the religious ceremonies that celebrated the day's chief deities: the Mother Goddess Innin and her son Tammuz. Of course, it's always made me think that double-bookings must have been very common, partly because musicians have always been a scatty bunch at the best of times, and partly because the Sumerians and the Egyptians were operating on different calendars. Egypt had adjusted its calendar to 365 days by now, whereas the Mesopotamian cities were operating on the good old-fashioned 'twelve months of thirty days each', making 360. Decidedly confusing and, if your birthday fell in the wrong five days, very disappointing for presents. 'SUMER' IS ICUMEN IN .-JLJ^ ? the time you get to the Sumer of 2600 Be and the period known to its friends as Early Dynastic III, the latest, must-have limestone reliefs seem to show the harps have now got six or seven strings. There's even a pot found somewhere near Bismaya that shows the harps slung round the neck - either things are coming on, or this lot had worked out what to do with all that left-over barley and were as drunk as skunks. The Egyptians, meanwhile, had taken to using a rounded, bowed harp called a 'bint' - presumably because it was curvy and everyone wanted to pluck it - as well as long flutes and a double-pipe, often referred to as an 'aulos'. Some one hundred years later, when the tomb of the recently deceased Queen Pu-abi was being prepared at Ur - a good four hundred years before Abraham was ready to leave - she was provided with a fetching eleven-stringed, straight-necked harp. Clearly, by now, the harp has become the 'electric guitar' of its day - utterly ubiquitous and open to numerous stylistic interpretations.
There even appears to have been a niche for the 'glam-rock' harp, one with not just a bull-shaped soundboard but an entire bull. Honest. The whole harp was one big… thing which sat on the wooden bull's legs. Sadly, reliefs do not show whether it was customary to pick it up at the end of a concert and bash it into your amp and speaker. 'GANG' OF FIVE
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et me momentarily flit away from Egypt and Mesopotamia for a.J moment. I know it must be hard to think snow amidst all this but it is i rue that it was around about now that paintings were made in Rodoy, in southern Norway, of what appears to be people skiing. No doubt 11 icy were less concerned with the 'I say, let's go for a jolly gltihwein.iltcr the piste, what?' aspect of it, preferring to concentrate on the 'RUN FOR YOUR LIFE THERE'S A MAMMOTH!' feel of things. Seems fair. Of course, it has nothing to do with music, you understand. I just wanted to fill in a little detail for you, as it were. Anyway, while I am flitting, then, let me go the scenic route back to neolithic Babylonia, that is to say via China.
China was - and still is - a bit of a genius when it came to the maths stakes, so it is probably no surprise to find that, by now, they had put two and two together to make… five. Or at least, a five-note scale, which appeared to be in use, big-time. It went something like this: gang | shang | jiao | ji | yu which I think loosely translates as Dave, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Titch. That is, more or less, the first five degrees of the scale, early Chinese style. Had Dame Julie of Andrews been around at the time, it's just minutely possible that the big song of the day would have been not 'Do, a deer' but 'Gang, a fang'… Would have gone something like:
Gang, a fang, a big wolf fang,