| | From Curt Sachs' Rhythm and Tempo -
When Hans von Bulow, the great conductor and pianist, boldly decreed: "In the beinning was rhythm," he took advantage of the perogative of so many pointed sayings to be pithy, impressive, and unfounded. Organization of rhythm came long, long after men - like the birds - had given melodic shape to mirth and to mourning. As long as singers stand alone, without other voices or instruments to join, the urge for strictness in rhythm and tempo is weak.
From Jourdain's Music, the Brain and Ecstasy -
Yet rhythm is often described as music's most essential trait, since music unfolds across time, and time is rhythm;s domain. A drummer can tap out complex rhythms that everybody agrees are a kind of skeletal music, and she does this without playing tones. Where there are no tones there is no pitch, and without pitch there is no melody. For this reason [the argument goes] rhythm can exist without melody, and so rhythm must precede melody in our experience.
All evidence contradicts this logic. Not only is strict meter rare among traditional cultures, it is virtually unknown in the early history of Western music. Our eight-century-old tradition evolved from chant that had little rhythm beyond the prosody of language. Some musicologists believe that even that paragon of metrical music, the supposedly "primitive" drumming of black Africa [which in fact is highly technical], is actually a relatively recent development, one that may have been seeded by contact with the metrically rich music of the Middle East.
Developmental psychology also offers clues about music's evolution, on the assumption that cultures are likely to discover first what comes most easily to human beings. Children acquire music initially as melody, often by emphasizing the natural intonation of lyrics. Early melody is unstable, following no strict beat and wavering in pitch level. Rhythmic regularity comes years later, and a true sense of harmony later still.
Sachs describes what may be the precursor of melody as "tumbling strains". These are single, drawn-out noises that ethnomusicologists have sometimes encountered in technically primitive cultures:
Its character is wild and violent: after a leap up to the highest available note
in screaming fortissimo, the voice rattles down by jumps or steps or glides
to a pianissimo respite on a couple of the lowest, almost inaudible notes;
then, in a mighty leap, it resumes the highest note to repeat this cascade as
often as necessary. In their most emotional and least "melodious" form,
such strains recall nearly inhuman, savage shouts of joy or wails of rage
and may derive from such unbridled outbursts.
But why would human beings expend energy on making such sounds? Civilization has led men to indulge in all sorts of useless activities. But in prehistoric societies everything served survival one way or another. Many suggestions have been made for music's survival value. Charles Darwin believed music evolved for courtship, pointing to a much greater difference in the frequency range of male and female voices than can be accounted for by body size alone. But such narrow explanations do not account for music's presence in every aspect of life.
Because music is possible only in very intelligent brains, one approach to understanding how we developed music is to ask why why we evolved so large a cerebrum. Increasingly, anthropologists have come to regard the benefits of social interaction as the driving force behind the explosion in human brain size. Where once scholars emphasized the value of a large brain in building tools, now they extol the virtues of cooperation in hunting, fighting, and above all, in child rearing.
Cooperation is not easily achieved. Animals are overwhelmingly self-interested. Those that triumph in life's competitions live on to spread their genes to future generations, so that their characteristics triumph in the species as a whole. Individual self-sacrifice for the good of all is rare among animals, if only because there is always advantage in taking more than one gives. An organism must be able to look far into the future, and to remember far into the past, to make possible the give-now-and-receive-later calculus of cooperation. Only the symbolic minds of human beings are up to the job.
Above all, cooperation entails reust. Human beings must constantly reassure one another that each is equally committed to the common good.We exchange symbols of our concern in a thousand ways, from a polite hello to a cheer at a political rally. The rituals of cooperation are everywhere and bear constant repitition. Those who fail to participate, or who do so half-heartedly, earn suspicion and resentment in excess of what seems warrented. But it is the whole community that is at stake, not merely a moment's pleasantness.
In the view of many anthropologists, music first evolved to strengthen community bonds, and resolve conflicts. This idea is anything but far-fetched. Many animals employ their vocal apparatus to convey fine gradations of emotions and intention. When one dog whines in submission to another, it is voicing a kind of melody that cements a social pact. As humans evolved language, with intonation inherent in every word, it seems inevitable that formal expressions of emotion would gradually coalesce into something like melody. After all, ritualized displays of emotion often appear in traditional cultures as stereotyped physical motions - little dances performed to demand or threaten or assuage or reassure. Why not ritualized motions of the voice as well?
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