A Child's History of the World

by V. M. Hillyer

But only birds and people sing.
All other animals simply make noises.
But people can do what birds cannot.
They can also make music out of things.

Have you ever made a cigar-box fiddle or a pin piano or musical glasses?

In the long-ago story-book times Apollo took a pair of cow-horns and fastened between them seven strings made from the cow’s skin. This was called a lyre. These strings he picked with his fingers or with a quill, making a little tinkling sound that could hardly have been very beautiful. Yet Apollo’s son Orpheus is said to have learned from his father to play so beautifully on the lyre that the birds and wild beasts and even trees and rocks gathered round to hear him.

Pan, the god of the woods, who had goat’s horns and ears and legs and feet, tied together several whistles of different lengths and played on these as you might on a mouth-organ. This instrument was called Pan’s pipes.

The lyre and Pan’s pipes were the two earliest musical instruments. The first was a stringed instrument; the second a wind instrument. The long strings and long pipes made low notes; the short strings and short pipes made high tones.

From Apollo’s lyre we get the piano with its many, many strings. Did you ever look at the inside of a piano and see the many strings of different lengths? They are, however, not picked as the strings of a lyre or harp are picked, but hammered by little felt-covered blocks as you touch the keys.

From Pan’s pipes we get the great church organ with its pipes like giant whistles. You don’t, of course, blow the pipes with your mouth as you do a whistle. The pipes are so big you must blow them with a machine like a tire-pump, and you do this as you touch the keys.

We know what the instruments in olden times were like, but we don’t know what the music that people made was really like; there were no phonographs to bottle up the sounds and, when uncorked a thousand years later, to pour forth the old notes once again. The music went off into thin air and was lost.

It was not until about the Year 1000 A.D. that music could even be written down. Before then all music was played “by ear,” for there was no written music. A Benedictine monk named Guy, or, in Italian, Guido, thought of a way to write down musical notes, and he named the notes do, re, mi, fa, and so on. These were the first letters of the words of a hymn to St. John which the monks sang like the scale.

Another Italian is sometimes called the “father of modern music.” His name is Palestrina, and he died about 1600. He set the church service to music, and the pope ordered all churches to follow it, but the people didn’t like his music very much; that is, it was not what we call “popular.”