A Brief History of Music – From Origins to the Present Day

Music has always been an important cultural and social factor throughout human history. It helped people form tribal bonds and often served religious and spiritual needs. Music has stood the test of time from the prehistoric age till this day.

How did music develop throughout the centuries and around the globe? What do different cultures and generations have in common, in terms of music? What can we learn from all the different musical genres, styles, and approaches the human brain has developed throughout the years?

In this article, we will shortly go through the history of music, trying to find an answer to these challenging questions. Let’s dive in!

Key Takeaways

• Origin of music. The human voice may have been one of the earliest musical instruments, but we cannot date the first song. Surviving bone and ivory flutes from the Swabian caves show that people were making instruments around 40,000 years ago. Older proposed instruments, including the so-called Neanderthal flute, need to be distinguished from these finds.
• Origin of Musical Notation. Early surviving notation includes the Hurrian hymn from Ugarit, around 1400 BCE, written in cuneiform. Different cultures developed different ways to record music. In medieval Europe, Guido d’Arezzo helped develop staff notation and a system for teaching singers in the eleventh century, rather than inventing every feature of modern notation.
• European and Asian Ancient Music. The Hurrian hymn from Syria is an early surviving song with notation, not evidence that nobody wrote music before it. By studying ancient cultures, researchers found drawings of musical instruments, including the lyre and the flute. The Hebrews also had their musical forms for religious purposes.
• The Middle Ages. Gregorian chant became an important part of medieval church music. Its name refers to Pope Gregory the Great, but the repertoire developed over centuries. Instruments used during this period included flutes, harps, lutes, drums, and dulcimers.
• Renaissance to Modern Electronic Music. Renaissance composers developed polyphonic writing, followed by Baroque composers such as Bach and Vivaldi. Opera emerged around 1600, before Mozart’s Classical-era works and the later Romantic period. Down the line, jazz, blues, rock, pop, and electronic music added further approaches, with older traditions continuing alongside them.

The Origin of Music

By looking at the behavior of some existing tribal populations, we can conclude that even in the simplest forms of society music plays a prominent role. This was probably true for our ancestors too.

Prehistoric men and women may have made music by imitating the sounds of nature, either for religious or recreational reasons. The first musical instrument ever employed may have been the human voice, although it leaves no archaeological trace. Archaeologists have found bone and ivory flutes from the Swabian caves, around 40,000 years old, giving us physical evidence of early music-making.

Older objects have also been interpreted as musical instruments. The National Museum of Slovenia presents the Divje Babe bone as a Neanderthal flute. That is a different find from the later Swabian flutes, and an attribution of an object does not establish the exact moment when humankind first discovered music.

The Origin of Musical Notation

Among the early surviving examples of musical notation is the Hurrian hymn from Ugarit, in present-day Syria, around 1400 BCE. Its words and musical instructions were written in cuneiform on a clay tablet. This gives us evidence of an early written musical tradition, rather than a date for the invention of music itself.

The Ancient Greeks also had a form of musical notation that dates back to at least the 6th century BCE. Their form of notation included letters and symbols, with only a few music compositions ever found.

Afterward came the Byzantine round notation which also used letters. In some form or another, each culture used either letters, numbers, or even two-dimensional graphs to depict music.

Fast forward, we have modern musical notation, which developed over many centuries. Guido d’Arezzo’s eleventh-century work was influential in staff notation, and his method of using syllables to teach pitch helped singers learn unfamiliar music. That was an important step toward later notation, rather than the complete modern system appearing at once.

European and Asian Ancient Music

With the development of a writing system, it became possible to compose music as we do today.

One especially early surviving song with musical notation is the Hurrian hymn found at Ugarit in Syria, dating to around 1400 BCE. Its cuneiform signs preserve words and musical instructions, rather than an alphabet or a score written like the music we read today.

Researchers were able to find out more about ancient music by studying the drawings on walls, vases, and other objects, deducing that in Ancient Greece, for example, instruments similar to modern bagpipes already existed. With this method, they also discovered the existence of string instruments (such as the lyre) and flutes (the aulos). Some writings of that time also suggested the existence of polyphony.

To deepen their knowledge of music in ancient Asia, in India, in particular, researchers consulted the sacred Hindu books, the Vedas, which contain precious information about Indian classical music.

Ancient music also blossomed in the Middle East, in the Persian empire in particular, and in Egypt. Hebrews also developed specific musical forms early on, mostly for religious reasons.

The Middle Ages

There is a rich corpus of research about medieval and Renaissance music.

The interest in this topic is still so vivid that lots of contemporary ensembles and choirs devote their existence to a repertoire of this kind. During the Middle Ages, Gregorian chant became central to Western church music. It is named for Pope Gregory the Great, but the chant tradition developed over time; it was not simply invented by him during the years 540-604.

Medieval music is actually quite trendy on YouTube and streaming platforms too, where it is not unusual to find covers of popular modern songs in this historical style!

During the Middle Ages, polyphony blossomed, together with a new notation system that set the foundation for the one we still use today. At that time, music was mostly devotional, although there was also a secular current mostly dealing with tales of love and cavalry. The most popular instruments in medieval music were flutes, harps, lutes, drums, and dulcimers.

From the Renaissance to Classical Music

During the Renaissance period, composers laid the foundation for what Baroque music would later become. The development of counterpoint and the use of chromatism, in particular, would later inspire Baroque artists such as Bach and Vivaldi.

During the Baroque period, in particular, composers started creating music for richer ensembles, that would later develop into full orchestras. Some forms still in use today, such as the sonata, the fugue, and concertos were invented during these times.

Key Composers

• Josquin des Prez
• Johann Sebastian Bach
• Antonio Vivaldi
• Georg Friedrich Handel

Opera and Romantic Music

From the XVIII to the early XX century, many different composers, from Mozart to Beethoven, from Haydn to Schubert, experimented with different forms, melodic ideas, innovative harmonic solutions, and instruments.

Opera, the form that mixes music and theater, had already emerged in Italy around 1600, before the Classical era. Mozart and later composers developed it further, while symphonies became increasingly prominent. Chamber music also flourished, with pieces written for small ensembles like string quartets, piano trios, or wind quintets, rather than a full orchestra.

In this wide time span, various currents and sub-genres flourished. One of the most known and loved current today is Romantic period music, brought on by Chopin, Schumann, Brahms, and many others.

Key Composers

• Giuseppe Verdi
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
• Ludwig van Beethoven
• Franz Schubert
• Frédéric Chopin
• Johannes Brahms

Jazz and Blues

Outside Europe, in the Afro-American communities, a brand new approach to music, inspired partly by the African traditions and partly by the Christian religion, took over and shook the norms.

Jazz and blues set an important foundation for all the other contemporary genres, just as European classical music had done before.

Based on improvisation and a clear call-and-response structure, jazz songs soon took over the mainstream and remained solid protagonists up until the Sixties, through a lot of different currents and sub-genres, such as bebop.

Key Musicians

• Duke Ellington
• Billie Holiday
• Louis Armstrong
• Bessie Smith
• Charley Patton

Rock and Pop Music

Throughout the Fifties, a revolution happened: rock’n’roll appeared and blasted the music scene. Originating directly from the blues form, rock’n’roll became a great trend and influenced many different aspects of culture and society. It also became a strong foundation for countless other genres and sub-genres, extending to the realm of pop music.

Groups like The Beatles, for example, worked as a bridge between these two worlds, that often overlapped in their songs. Other bands like The Rolling Stones, instead, made their classic bluesy rough sound a trend.

Key Musicians/Bands

• Elvis Presley
• Little Richard
• Chuck Berry
• The Beatles
• The Rolling Stones

Electronic Music

The development of new technologies and computers allowed artists to approach music in a whole different manner. They no longer had to play an instrument to compose a tune, they could just use a piece of software or an electronic device to deliver.

In today’s mainstream music, electronic tools and resources are very present, although the song structures, from a musical point of view, still maintain the standards of the classic rock and pop music we have heard since the Fifties.

The only downside to this is that it takes away from the creativity that artists have and put into their music by using instruments. The process of creating the whole song using instruments should be more appreciated, however, in this day and age, that is not the case for most people.

Conclusion

This short summary of the history and evolution of music leaves many questions still unanswered. After all, we would need to write a series of books on the topics to be as complete as possible! What we can underline, however, is how music is a recurrent aspect of our lives and societies.

It keeps changing, but it evolves always maintaining points of contact with its past. Just like a city first built in ancient times and then constantly developed throughout the years, music is never the same as it was when it began, but it still shows its solid foundations.