- 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're drowning in music. We in the West have tended
to have a misconception that history of music is a
history of works or composers. This tends to reduce
music into an object, into an exhibit in an
imaginary museum. It also overvalues the role
of the composer compared to most people who
are innately musical. And I wanted to get away
from the usual thing of 'Which composer wrote
what piece at what time,' to see the bigger picture. We're in the kind of
moment of the global, of the universal— and music is absolutely universal. I'm Michael Spitzer. I'm Professor of Music at
the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom. I've written a book called "The Musical Human: A
History of Life on Earth." It's almost inconceivable to
write a prehistory of music because Edison invents
the phonograph in 1877 and prior to that, we have
no record of any sound. In terms of the evolution
of instruments, the very oldest instrument
we have is the human voice. We also have lithic
instruments made of rocks, such as stalactites or the famous 'rock gongs'
in Tanzania. But the landmark is a
discovery of bone flutes, flutes made out of
the bones of vultures, and they're dated
about 40,000 years. And they were found in
the South German caves. One of the problems
with instruments is that the materials biodegrade. So we have to work inferentially by mapping from
what we do know. If you're looking at
the broad picture of the evolution of sapiens, then the epochs are hunter-gatherer, farming community, and
then the founding of cities and city-states. Each of these epochs is
associated with mentalities. So, hunter-gatherers
tended to be nomadic. And if you're essentially
journeying through a landscape, what you don't do is
carry heavy instruments. Music has to be portable,
ideally, just a voice or if not, a very light flute or a
small percussive instrument. And if you look at the
music that is played by the Cameroon Pygmies, every time they play a
piece, it sounds different. It's very much music
of the moment. Now, what changes when
you invent farming? You settle down. And your whole
mindset becomes fixed on the circle of the
seasons, the circle of life. And you invent repeatable work. And the structure of the
work becomes as cyclical as life itself. You invent a circle in music,
invent musical rituals. And once music migrates from the farm to the town,
certain changes happen. Instruments can become heavy because you start to set
quite permanent roots into the town. You create heavy instruments
like bells and gongs, but also very delicate
ones like harps and lutes which would be damaged
over a journey. And music's function
now also changes with the growth of social hierarchy. The job of music is to be a
handmaiden to serve the power, the power of the
prince or the church. And musicians
become professionalized and their job is to create
music to be listened to for people with leisure. And this is the origin
to what we call concerts. To have a concert requires leisure, requires money, and oftentimes, it's the aristocrats or
the upper middle class who had the time to sit back and enjoy music
performed for them. For most people over millions
of years, that doesn't happen. So, the rule is that most music
was performed functionally, as we say, "Whistle as you work." Also, it was performed
in a participatory way. So there was no distinction between those who
create the music and those who listened to it. It was the same people. The idea that we have a
composer, we have a listener, is a purely modern invention. 1,000 years ago in 1020, an Italian monk called Guido
invents staff notation. And life was never again
the same for Western music. Why is that so important? Staff notation was a
tool of church control. And through writing chants down, the church could ensure,
literally, that monks singing at the furthest outpost of
the empire of Christendom, literally sang from the
same hymn sheet. And then, once the empire expands beyond the Mediterranean basin and Cortes invades Mexico in 1519, he takes notation with him. 10 years after Cortes
decimates the Indians in 1519, by 1530, you have Aztec
musicians singing Spanish polyphony in
Mexico Cathedral. So music notation becomes the sharp end of
the stick of globalization. Now, there are various
consequences to staff notation, many of them are frankly bad. By pinning notes down to a page, it's almost like
capturing a butterfly. You're taking a note
away from the voice, making it very precise. If you look at the way
most people speak or sing, the pitch slides. It fluctuates. It doesn't stay still. Notation freezes a note. It becomes rather
cold and mechanical. It also freezes music as an object, which is actually
quite counterintuitive. Music isn't an object. It's an activity. It's a thing you do,
like dancing or jogging. But once you turn it into an object, you create a division between
the composer of the object and those who merely
mechanically reproduce it. We're regaining the
participatory condition of music, which was the norm
thousands of years ago, where we all had an
equal stake in creating and enjoying music. Greater integration
with technology has served to accelerate
a cultural change and we see that in the
extraordinary role of the internet. We can both create music
in our homes and share it. The original bone flute
was a piece of technology. It serves to extend
human capacity. It extends the voice, which extends our imagination. I think it's fair to say
that just as what Stockhausen or Beyoncé is achieving today
would've been completely out of the comprehension
of a Mozart or a Beethoven a few centuries ago. We can't even begin to
imagine the possibilities awaiting us in the future.