Music and Some Highly Musical People

by James M. Trotter

III.

A GLANCE AT THE HISTORY OF MUSIC.

"Thespis, the first professor of our art, At country wakes sang ballads from a cart." Dryden.

MUSIC is as old as the world itself. In some form or other, it has always existed. Ere man learned to give vent to his emotions in tuneful voice, Nature, animate and inanimate, under the hand of the Great Master, sang his praises. Of this we learn in the sacred writings; while all about us, in the songs of birds, the musical sighing of the winds, the fall of waters, and the many forms of the music of Nature, we have palpable evidence of its present existence, and assurances of its most remote antiquity.

It would seem that not long after "God breathed into the nostrils of man the breath of life, and he became a living soul," he learned to express the joys and yearnings of his soul in song first, and then with some sort of musical instrument. And to man it was given, commencing with the early ages, to develop the simple ejaculations or melodies of a praise-giving soul into a beautiful, a noble art, replete at times with harmonic intricacies, and again with melodies grand in their very simplicity; into a beneficent science, divine from its inception, which has ever had as votaries many of earth's greatest minds, and has become a fountain of delight to all mankind.

The history of the music of antiquity—that is, in an art-form—is nearly, if indeed not quite, enveloped in mystery; and it were futile to profess to give an historical presentation of an art from its birth, when documentary evidence of the same is lost.

We may, however, very reasonably suppose of music generally, that it must have been gradually developed, having had its infancy, childhood, and youth; and that it grew slowly into present scientific form with the advance of the centuries.

From all we can gather in regard to the early history of music as a system, it would appear that it had its infancy in ancient Greece; although it is supposed by some that the Grecian method was founded upon that of the still more ancient one of the Egyptians. Dr. Burgh, a learned musical writer states that, of "the time before Christ, music was most cultivated and was most progressive in Greece." The verses of the Greek poet Homer, who was himself a musician, abound in beautiful allusions to and descriptions of this charming science; while in mythology are recounted the wonderful musical achievements of the god Orpheus, who is said to have been so skilled in music that the very rocks and trees followed in his wake of harmony.

The first artificial music of which the Bible speaks was that which was sung or played in praise of the Creator,—sacred music. In fact, this noble quality of the soul was very rarely called into exercise, save in the worship of the Deity, until many centuries had passed. Of music before the Christian era, both vocal and instrumental, the books of the Old Testament often speak. As to its exact character, we are left to conjecture, being, as before intimated, without materials from which to form a judgment; but, in some form or other, there was, during that period, abundance of what was called music.