The Ancient Times
(Before 476 A.D.)

For thousands of years, mothers sang their children to sleep. In Ancient Egypt, farm workers hit sticks together to frighten birds away from the crops. In time these clappers came to be used rhythmically to accompany working songs in the fields. These working songs were featured in dances of a ritual intended to bring good harvest.

The Sumerians were an agricultural people who lived the land known as Mesopotamia, modern-day Iraq. They built temples for the worship of nature gods who needed to be appeased with the right kinds of singing and playing. For example, a reed wind instrument and a drum were used to appease the gods of weather and water. There was solo singing by priests and choral music, too. They used various instruments including flutes, horns, tambourines, rattles and a range of plucked string instruments. We know something about their music from Sumerian artifacts and from their cuneiform writing on clay tablets. An inscription from about 2400 BC shows that music was also used for pleasure.

The Egyptians considered the human voice to be the most powerful aid in praying to the gods, so their priests were carefully trained in signing. But they had instruments, too, to accompany their chants. And, just as in Sumeria, music was also used for pleasure, it’s charms being considered one of life’s principal delights.

The Babylonians, who lived in the modern-day Middle East, used music in temple services, including music for instruments alone. But the warlike Assyrians increased the importance of secular music, or non-religious music. Banquets and military occasions were incomplete without music, minstrels were respected members of society, and Assyrian dancing girls were sent to delight the Egyptians. In the Bible, Daniel Chapter 3, it explains the size of the band at the Babylonian court. The description suggests that there were horns, pipes (perhaps an early form of the organ), lyres, and harps of two different sizes.

In China, there were flutes, drums, and bells. We know this from writings and archaeological excavations, which probably date from between 1500 and 1000 B.C. We also know that most of their music was improvised, or not written down. The Chinese were interested in relating numbers and music. The philosopher Confucius, who died in about 479 B.C., had the idea that music expressed 'the accord of Heaven and Earth'. Later in Chinese history, they used small organs with bamboo pipes and plucked stringed instruments as well as the earlier bells, flutes and drums. Players of these instruments often formed themselves into bands for the entertainment of nobles. In the early centuries A.D., a plucked stringed instrument called a ch'in became important in development of learned music. It had five or seven strings arranged in a series of perfect fifths and were supposed to have amazing effects on the soul.

In India, music also had a philosophical significance. At around 1500 B.C., an Eastern Mediterranean race called the Aryans invaded the country from the southern part of Russia. This began India's Vedic period. The word veda means 'knowledge', and books of hymns and temple rituals date from the early part of this time. There were many books of hymns even one that emphasizes the correct pitching of the voice on one of three levels: high, middle or low. Like the ancient Egyptians, the Indians treated the human voice as the most important form of musical expression, but they, too, had plucked string instruments, percussion, flutes and reed instruments; these perhaps featured especially in music for entertainment and dancing. The Indian musicians thought their chants were composed by the gods and not by themselves. Since nature was also considered to be the gods' creation, mystical links were established everywhere in the ancient world between particular aspects of music and nature.

The ancients went a good deal further than this. Indian and Chinese stories tell of singers changing the seasons and creating fire or water; while the Bible describes Jericho's walls falling at the sound of military horns, and Jewish priests wore bells to enter a holy place, to ensure their spiritual protection. Though music today has abandoned all these ideas, the story of the minstrel Orpheus taming wild beasts with his melodies reminds us that the ancient Greeks also believed strongly in the magical force of music.

Greek musical style came partly from Egypt, through Crete. Thrace, a north-eastern part of Greece, was the birthplace of the greatest minstrel of Greek mythology, Orpheus; and Greeks claimed that Hyagnis and Marsyas, from Phrygia in Asia Minor, were the founders of their music. They are also credited with the invention of the aulos. But the aulos was known in Sumeria, Egypt and Crete long before. It was a pair of pipes, each having a double reed like an oboe’s and with holes stopped by the fingers. Sometimes the player played the melody on one pipe and a continuous bass note on the other. It had a shrill and penetrating tone, and probably its closest modern day instrument would be the bagpipes. It was popular in the theater, at weddings and other festive occasions, such as banquets. Appropriately, the Greeks consecrated the music of the aulos to Dionysus, their god of wine. The more refined lyre was the other principal Greek instrument and this was regarded as the instrument of the god Apollo. The lyre had three to twelve strings, the largest and most popular of the lyres was the Kithara. Since the gentle tone of the lyre did not mix well with that of the powerful aulos, they were not often played together. According to legend, Apollo protected his style of music, and made King Midas grow asses’ ears for daring to prefer the sound of a shepherd’s pipe to that of the lyre. In the sixth century B.C., Pythagoras restated the Babylonian discovery of the harmonic series. It stated how notes could be broken into halves, thirds, quarters and so on and how when the notes are sounded together, it can give you the major chords and a suggested keynote, which is the most important note in a melody.

Besides songs, music for instruments alone was popular among the Greeks, and performers competed for public acclaim at festivals. Music was still widely believed to have a considerable power over men’s minds. Many believed the shaping of a man’s character depended on him having the right kind of musical environment. The Greek theater was an important institution of public life which rose to great artistic heights with the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides in the fifth century B.C. These dramatists used a chorus which both sang and danced. Actors occasionally sang instead of speaking; and the aulos, which accompanied all this, sometimes provided incidental music as well. Here the aulos joined in ensembles with lyres, flutes and cymbals. There was also a great deal of dancing. Sadly, hardly any actual music has survived, for in this ancient culture, as in others, music was essentially improvised, or not written down.

Greek music took root in Rome so firmly that when we speak of Roman music we really mean Greek music that was developed and practiced there. We have seen how in Greece the art had become more colorful, but also coarser, and now a vulgar taste for the colossal brought about the development of a more powerful aulos and lyres ‘as big as chariots’.