A Brief History of Instrumental Music

I haven’t posted in a while, been out of town. I’ll try to be more regular.

I decided to start off with a history of instrumental music in general, in order to understand a bit better where it all has come from. After a first draft where I started to go from prehistoric times until the present day in one sitting. I decided instead to go by installments. First installment: ancient music.

No one knows how old instrumental music is, in fact no one knows how old music is or whether vocal or instrumental music came first. Partly it would depend on just exactly what you mean by music. Is a bird song music? I don't propose to get into that debate. Since even pre-human primates were presumably capable of some types of vocalization, and such vocalizations can have at least some of the characteristics of music, perhaps vocal music came first. However, even pre-human primates can pound one thing on another, and if done in any sort of rhythm, this could also be considered music. Rhythm, in the form of the heartbeat, breathing, the one-two of bipedal locomotion, etc., is a basic of at least higher life forms. Ad hoc percussion instruments can be anything from hands (clapping) to various rocks, bones, pieces of wood, etc., and would not leave any clear evidence of musical use in an archeological context.

Melodic instruments are another case. There is a a find of a of a juvenile cave bear femur fragment, pierced with at least 2 holes, which some believe is a Neanderthal Flute. Others feel it is simple a bone pierced by some carnivore bite. The oldest undisputed flute is a German find dated at 36,000 BP.

Horns, developed from animal horns, are another ancient form of instrument. String instruments probably developed from the bow. Archers would hear the note that a plucked bowstring would make, and it would not take a whole lot of experimenting to discover the effect that string length, tension, etc., would have on the note.

I would suspect that by the time man developed agriculture and was able to settle down in one place, some 10,000 years ago, man probably had a pretty well developed system of music of some type. Ancient civilizations, in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome had well developed music, with variety of instruments, and perhaps some type of notation. Brief references to musical instrument playing may indicate some type of instrumental music, as opposed to instrumental accompaniment of vocal music, existed at this time.

Consider this: while percussion and string instruments would at least allow one to self-accompany singing, wind instruments do no allow this. So any player of a wind instrument who either wanted to take a front role in an ensemble, or perform solo would of necessity have to “go instrumental”. And any player who could sing would also be interested in performing instrumentally.

Also consider the role that instruments played in military contexts, for signaling, timekeeping and just general rousing the troops. This would have also been instrumental in nature.

So, while we know not much specific about ancient music (at least in terms of knowing the music itself), it is safe to assume that a certain amount of it was instrumental in nature.