Sounds produced by non-human beings are mere discharge of surplus energy, in a creation of rhythmic stimulus, and not conscious sound combinations in song. Music is a “natural” product of human society. It must be as old as those integrations of parts in the human body, which became aggregates of matter and motion, to take care of new stimuli colliding with the motions already contained. Through lower, middle, and upper savagery,[21] even before the beginning of speech, Music must have been at hand, although in its simplest conceivable form. Music kept pace with the comparatively simple external stimuli of each period.
With the use of fire and of the bow and arrow in upper savagery, came a new heterogeneity in the stimuli entering the organism; disturbances were still simple, but with the domestication of animals, with the cultivation of plants by irrigation, with the use of adobe brick and stone in architecture, Music must have gradually increased in its complexity in order to cope with the new disturbances of bodily motion consequent upon those changes in man’s reaction to his environment. Then, with the use of iron in upper barbarism, Music began anew to exhibit its needed usefulness, as in the Grecian tribes of the Homeric Age, and in the German tribes of Caesar’s time.
By these times Music had passed well out of the stages of “appreciation,” into those of “utilization.”[22] Strongly rhythmic, it contributed to the recreation (re-creations indeed) of bodily equilibrium! It calmed intense inward motion, or stimulated flagging circulation in its union with religious rites. From such accomplishments of later barbarians as poetry, mythology, fine temple architecture, walled cities, ship building, wine manufacture, woven fabrics, implements for grinding corn, the side hill furnace for smelting ore, and many other early mechanical contrivances,[23] civilization evolved its phonetic alphabet and its literary records, building the rhythm-disturbing stimuli of civilization. In the meanwhile the family develops to the point of monogamy, and individual property rights usher in a new political system. An advanced form of municipal life in fortified cities having already created the ideal of city treasure to be protected, the step was ultimately taken from this to individual property rights distinct from those of the gens.
The fact that Music as we first encounter it is already somewhat complex, is not surprising when we regard it in terms of motion, duplicating in principle the construction of the human body. The latter may also be regarded in terms of motion; for what are bodily organs but integrations of molecules in motion? The rhythm of a bodily organ is like a note composed of periodic motions.[24] The various organs of differing masses and motions, acting together under one chief rhythm, are but chords of various notes, while that average of averages, the pulse, registers the governing rhythm of all of these together, as does the time in music.
With the differentiation of the Aryan race from those barbarians who were not active in making and utilizing new inventions, certain re-arrangements of bodily motions resulted which could not fail to “disturb” old life habits. With artificial rhythm already at hand, instinct alone would be sufficient to prompt its application. Appreciation of Music at this stage would mirror only the satisfaction derived from the hearing of rhythmic sounds, sufficiently varied to inflame or calm inward motion, without carrying it too far from the norm. The “gens” system as found in Greece, Rome, and among American aborigines, as also among the Irish sept, and Scottish clan, would tend to restrain complex emotions. Such gentes, being consanguine bodies, descended from the same common ancestor, and having a gentile name, and held together by actual or fictitious ties of blood, were compact bodies with institutions comparatively simple. They were like primitive bodily forms, consisting of motions contained within an outer crust, and with few distinct inward integrations.
Music, as simple rhythm agreeable to the ear, would fulfill all disturbance needs of that time, and would itself be a mere contained motion, with few integrated parts. Only with the beginning of “rational” thinking or the “interposition of new ideas between stimulation and the consequent muscular action,”[25] does such complexity of mental effort induce the integration of new parts with new motions in order to meet the added strain.
FOOTNOTES:
[17] Giddings’ Descriptive and Historical Sociology, pp. 186 to 212.
[18] Giddings’ Descriptive and Historical Sociology, p. 237.
[19] Otherwise known as rationalistic.