Reflection paper

How Old Is Music? Author(s): Jeremy Montagu Source: The Galpin Society Journal, Vol. 57 (May, 2004), pp. 171-182 Published by: Galpin Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25163800 Accessed: 10/01/2010 16:14

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JEREMY MONTAGU

How Old is Music?

ORIGINS No musical instrument can be created with

out purpose. Before an instrument can even

be envisaged there must be the concept of

sound and the desire to create sound. And so before we begin to consider the age of music and its

instruments, we must first look to that sound that we

call music.

Our search begins far away in time. Not perhaps so far away as the music of the spheres, but certainly to the times before mankind became human, for

song is inherent in nature, in the sense of the

vocalisation or other creation of sound combined

with the inflection of pitch or frequency. Dance, too, is inherent in nature in the sense of movement

combined with regular or repetitive rhythm. When did either of these become a conscious part

of human development is a question impossible to

answer but, on the basis of what we know of the

behaviour of the animal kingdom, one has to say that it was probably with homo erectus, from the

earliest time that hominids stood upright. Certainly

fellow-primates have been seen dancing, or so we

would call it if they were human, and accompanying the dance with movements which make more noise

than is necessary for locomotion.1

The progression from clapping paws, or hands, to

the use of a pair of sticks or a couple of stones is

surely the origin of musical instruments. When did

this take place? One could say with some confidence

'before the Palaeolithic Age' for it could well have

been precisely this act which led to the earliest phase of the Palaeolithic or, as it used to be called, the

Eolithic, or Dawn of the Stone Age. As stones are

clashed together, they are liable to crack, to split, even to shatter. The sharp fragments that fell could

have been the first tools.

Whether this scenario is true, or whether stone

tools came before instruments, no one will ever

know. If tools came first, then two flint knappers,

chipping in ear-shot of each other, could have been

the first musicians to produce rhythmic counter

point as they interlocked their rhythms, as smiths, and other workers such as those who use pestles and

mortars, do worldwide to this day. Many other such

theories are equally possible, but it remains likely that musical instruments began with the concussive

sounds of two objects struck together. These are instruments which are still in use today.

We use wooden sticks as the claves of Latin

American dance music, and in Australia they

accompany the didjeridu. Wooden shells are used as

castanets, similar objects of metal are used as

cymbals, large and small. All are common around

the world, many of them to accompany the dance, and the two most powerful influences on mankind, that may have led to music and to instruments, are

dance and ritual. Dance, as we noted above, is

inherent in nature, and we see such movements,

apparently instinctive, in the youngest of our own

children. Why it happens is a matter for studies

other than this. Why an impulse towards religion or

ritual is almost equally instinctive is again beyond our field, but we must accept that it exists,2 accept that it is often expressed in dance, and accept that it

is often, even normally, accompanied by sound, and

that that sound is what we can call music.

How, then, do we define music? That is something on which there is no general agreement. For me it is

sound?without sound there can be no music, even

though there can be no music without silence. It is

sound that is generated deliberately?casual and

accidental sounds are not musical, though they are

often created by objects which we call musical

1 Leonard Williams, The Dancing Chimpanzee: A study ofthe origins of primitive music (London: Andre Deutsch,

1967). There are many other similar records. 2 Whereas any inclination towards atheism or even agnosticism is the result of deliberate thought and decision.

171

172 The Galpin Society Journal

instruments.3 It is sound that is generated

deliberately to create emotion. What that emotion

may be is irrelevant. It can be pleasure (it usually is

today, especially if the creator expects remuneration

for its performance); it can be fear, even terror,

certainly awe; very often it is to impel movement.

From this it follows that any object which is used

to produce such sound can be called a musical

instrument. These are not only those tools which we

use to create the music of our concert halls, theatres, dance halls and other places where we hear music

today, but all the sound-makers, even noise-makers,

which extend and derive from them. The old

fashioned motor-horns, those with a rubber bulb, the hooters with which our children enjoy making sounds revolting

to our ears, these have the same

reeds as our church organs and so cannot be ignored as instruments. The ratchets whirled by football

enthusiasts, which indubitably reveal our jubilation when our team has scored a goal and so express an

emotion, and which are used by children to scare

birds from crops, just as they were used by the Watch

to scare those of evil intent from our streets, these

appear from time to time on our concert platforms,

and more frequently in our music halls. Anything with which people make sounds generated

deliberately to create emotion are grist to our mill, even more when we mill that grist with deliberate

rhythms. One further word of introduction. We shall use

frequently in these pages such phrases as 'in our

culture', 'in our music'. They are used in place of the

meaningless terms 'Western music', 'European

orchestras' and so forth. Possible alternatives are

'international culture' and 'international music', for

'our' music has become international. We cannot

talk of Western music when 'our' sort of music is

played worldwide, for how can we term the Tokyo Philharmonic western from where I sit? Nor can we

speak of 'European' when, since the seventeenth

century, even since the sixteenth south of the Rio

Grande, 'our' music has been composed and played in the Americas. When saying 'our', I write as

someone brought up in England and trained as a

musician first in America and then in England, but

it implies no value judgment?all musics are

music?it is only if 'Western' and 'European' are

without meaning in this context, that we must

have available some word for distinction between

'ours' and that of people brought up and trained

in different musics and different traditions from

mine.

VOICES There is a small number of instruments which have

their own voices. Most instruments need to be

played, but these merely to be moved or stroked, and

of themselves they will speak. One of our great frustrations in all studies of ancient times is to

wonder how on earth anybody could ever have

discovered that doing something produced a

beneficial or useful result. How did someone

discover that drilling a hole in the end of a piece of

wood or bone, tying a string through that hole, or

else shaping the end so that the string could be tied

securely round it, and then swinging that piece of

wood or bone in a circle on the end of the string,

produced a sound? Some actions and their results are obvious enough

? pick and eat a fruit from a

tree and the result is either pleasant or unpleasant and perhaps fatal. But something so elaborate as

this? Not merely the choice of the piece of wood or

bone, for too small or too large, the wrong shape, the wrong surfaces, even the wrong cord, render it

ineffective, but the fact is that it must be swung, that

it must rotate, and that it must spin on its own axis.

It is difficult to conceive ofthe action or purpose that

might accidentally have led to this discovery. And

yet the use of the bull-roarer is widespread round the

world, even, so far as we know, a universal

instrument that no culture, no people has been

without at some stage in its development.4 The bull-roarer is commonly an elongated oval in

shape, sometimes described as fish-shape, though

rectangular and other shapes are also seen. Often

one or both faces are carved with decorative

patterns and it has been suggested that it works

better if one face is flatter than the other, or more

deeply carved, so as to present greater or lesser

resistance to the air than the other face, though the

large number known whose two faces appear to be

identical suggests that this, while perhaps an

enhancement, may not be essential. What is certain

is that the sound is produced as the bull-roarer spins on its own axis while being swung in a circle round

the player, and that both rotary motions are

necessary, which suggests that some of the sound is

due to the passage of the string, and the bull-roarer,

through the air, and some to the perturbance of the

air as the bull-roarer spins. Certainly the sound

varies according to the size of the bull-roarer, the

length ofthe string, and the speed of rotation. Larger roarers, slower rotation, and longer strings produce a low muttering sound, threatening like distant

thunder, hence one of its names, the thunder stick,

3 The casual and accidental sounds from which musique concrete was created were not in themselves music: only

when a composer had manipulated and transformed them did they become music. 4

J. R. Harding, 'The Bull-Roarer in History and in Antiquity', African Music 5/3 (1973/4), 40?2.

Montagu?How Old is Music? 173

and hence perhaps its association, as the rhombos, with Zeus, the god of thunder. Smaller and faster

bellow like a bull, hence the name in English. Bull roarers smaller and faster still scream like a demon.

The French name, rhombe, comes from its' shape and derives from the Greek rhombos; the German name Schwirrholz, from its use: whirring wood.

Thus it is not surprising that it was so widely used as a ritual instrument, a spirit voice, and one that in

many areas was secret and known only to initiates.

Nobody, unless initiated and shown, could imagine that so simple an object could produce such a sound.

So it was used in the Dionysian mysteries in ancient

Greece, and as the voice of an ancestor, a spirit, a

god,

in the initiation rites of cultures from New Guinea,

Australia, Africa, and South America. It was used in

Palaeolithic times in Europe, for examples have been

found in Magdalenean sites in the Dordogne of

southern France, at Laugerie-Basse and elsewhere.5 It

must surely be of equal, if not greater, antiquity elsewhere?our knowledge ofthe Stone Ages is badly skewed by the accidents of where archaeological

work has been done and discoveries made. The fact

that the caves of central and southern France have

been well explored is not, in itself, evidence that

objects found there did not exist, were not used, or

are earlier than in other parts of the world whose

remains have yet to be investigated. The bull-roarer had in many areas a smaller

relative, called by Schaeffner le diable, the devil.6

This is a disk, often with dentations round the rim, with two holes each side of the centre, or sometimes a bone such as a knuckle bone with a hole across the centre of its length, on a loop of string. There is no

single name in English, for 'buzzing disk' excludes

the phalange or knuckle bone, and many other

things might be called a 'buzzer'. Cajsa Lund

advocated the Swedish term 'snorra' (strictly snorra), and this, with its almost onomatopoeic

sound, seems a better choice.7 One end of the loop is

held in each hand and the snorra swung like a

skipping rope to twist the string. An outward pull by the hands spins the snorra and, by relaxing the pull at the right instant, allows it to twist the loop again in the opposite sense. Repeated pull and release

produces a shrill buzzing, whirring sound, again

regarded in some areas as a voice, ancestral or

spiritual, protective or

menacing.

Few mysteries, few rituals are eternal. Things once secret become known, that which was sacred

becomes mundane. So it has been with the bull roarer and the snorra. People in many

areas use the

bull-roarer as a bird-scarer, using its sound and

perhaps its hovering flight, which some birds might mistake as that of a hawk, to frighten the birds and

animals from the crops. This is a task which is often

relegated to children, and thus it has also become a

child's toy, as has the snorra. Many of us have, as

children, swung a ruler on a piece of string or made

a bull-roarer from the bottom of a date box, a snorra

from a coat button or a piece of card. This has long been recognised as a classic cycle, the progression from ritual through mundane to toy. As Curt Sachs

observed, many children's toys had an origin in

ritual or magic.8 This is why many of us study and

collect musical toys, and why others collect and

record children's rhymes, songs, and games.

Another instrument with a voice of its own, a

voice of magic, though one much later in our history, is the friction drum. Although this is a drum in the sense that there is a skin stretched over a vessel or

shell (and thus requires the technology, perhaps as

recent as the Neolithic, to create the necessary vessel

and to prepare and securely tension the skin), the

skin is not struck, indeed frequently it is not touched in any way. With a few friction drums, the skin itself

is rubbed by a stick or a hand, as we rub the skin of a tambourine with the thumb in our orchestras, but

with the vast majority a stick stands in the centre of

the skin, or a cord passes through the skin, and the

stick or the string is rubbed by the hand or by a piece of cloth or leather held in the fingers (rubbing the

string with the bare hand can be painful). It is not the

stick or the string that sounds but the drum that

grunts or roars. So loud can the sound be that in our

orchestras, where it has been scored by composers such as Edgard Varese, the string friction drum is

known as the lion roar.

Henry Balfour, in what remains the most detailed and most comprehensive study of the instrument,

postulated an origin from the smith's bellows, which in turn would postdate the instrument further, into the Bronze or even the Iron Age.9 A common form of

simple bellows is a pot shape covered by a skin with a stick or a string in the centre, and a pipe leading from the base ofthe pot to the fire. The stick is pulled

5 Otto Seewald, Beitrdge zur Kenntnis der Steinzeitlichen Musikinstrumente Europas (Vienna: Anton Schroll, 1934), 13?18 and Taf. 1: 5, 6, and 7.

6 Andre Schaeffner, Origine des Instruments de Musique: Introduction ethnologique a Vhistoire de la musique

instrumentale (Paris: ?, 1936; reprinted Paris: Mouton, 1968), 132. 7

In personal discussion. 8 Curt Sachs, The History of Musical Instruments (New York: W. W. Norton, 1940), 43.

9 Henry Balfour, 'The Friction Drum', Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 37 (1907), 67-92 and plates

XII-XIV, specifically 80-3 and pi. XIV.

174 The Galpin Society Journal

up to fill the pot with air and pushed down to drive the air into the forge, or the cord is pulled up and the smith's feet push the skin down again to drive the air. In either case, sooner or later the sweating hands slip and slide on stick or string and it seems as though the

metal groans or cries as it flows from the ore, as a woman cries in her travail as she gives birth to a

child, or as the gods shout their approval ofthe work

of the smith. Of course this is hypothesis, but the

smith, as well as being a person of such importance in every locality that his name today is the most common of all surnames in English (and in other

languages also), has in many places been regarded as

the possessor of magical powers?how else could metal be induced to flow from the stone?

There are numerous varieties of friction drum.

That common in Flemish genre paintings of the

seventeenth century as the rommelpot was a pot

with a skin covering the opening and a stick tied into a pocket in the centre of the skin. It was then most

commonly a child's toy. Similar instruments were

used in Italy and Spain for the 'rough music', the

way in which a community expressed its dis

approval of the life-style of a neighbour. Some

peoples reverse this pattern by placing the stick

inside the drum, in which case it often pierces the

skin, a lateral peg through the projecting part of the

stick, on the outside of the drum, preventing it from

being pulled through the skin. In many places this

type of stick friction drum has been a fertility

symbol, the male stick within the female vessel being rubbed to produce its effect. The type with external

stick is also often a fertility symbol, again as the stick

is rubbed in the hand, perhaps fueled by the idea that

the male symbol of the stick is trying to push its way into the female hollow of the drum, or else the stick as the male organ emitting its sound from the scrotum of the drum.

String friction drums are also widespread in use,

and not only in our orchestras Whereas the stick will

grunt, or roar at best, the string, if it is pulled fast, can scream as well as roar and grunt, all sounds that

can well be terrifying when used in mystic rituals.

On the string drum, the cord is most commonly outside the drumshell and may either be knotted

below the skin or pass in through one hole and out

through another, so that it is double.

A variant of the string friction drum, one that returns us towards the bull-roarer, is the whirled

drum, a small drum whose cord is tied to a stick. The

stick is usually smeared with rosin where the cord is

tied, so that the cord rubs on this to produce the

sound which would otherwise be provided by the

fingers. While this whirled drum is today thought of as a toy, the German name, Waldteufel or wood

devil, suggests some ritual element, the voice of

spirits or demons howling from the depths of the

sacred grove.

Recent publications have suggested that the locus or place may also have its own voice, and here we return again to the Palaeolithic period. Lucie Rault cites the work of French palaeologists in some of the painted caves of southern France.10 They have

discovered that different parts of the caverns have their own pitch and resonance, that certain notes

and overtones of those notes resonate in different

parts ofthe cavern, and that these parts are indicated

by specific markings placed on the walls of the cave.

The shaman or priest (for it is difficult to think of him as a musician who plays the cave) must first

make a sound, but need no more than whisper in some cases, and that sound is then taken up and

transmuted by the cave itself. Did Cro-Magnon man

in the Aurignacian period, some 15,000 years ago, make use of these phenomena? We do not know, but at least these theories make sense of some of the

groupings of figures and other details of the

paintings in these caves, and once these phenomena took place, and the slightest sound in the right place

would create them, it is difficult to imagine that they would not be used.

What follows on from the use of voices in the

painted caves is the suggestion in many of the same

references and in articles by researchers such as Lya Dams in the 1980s and Abbe Glory in the 1960s that

the stalagmites and stalactites, those curtains and

columns of stone, built up over aeons as calcite-filled water dripped slowly from the roof and petrified,

that these were struck as instruments.11 Some have

been broken off short, as though struck too hard, others seem to show marks of striking below the

later layers of calcite, and many of them have what seem to be deliberate marks of colour, black pigment and red ochre, as though to indicate which were the

best points for sound, the black overlaying the red, with enough calcite between the red and the black to

suggest that whatever these marks may mean, the

points that they indicate were of importance over

10 Lucie Rault, Musical Instruments: A Worldwide Survey of Traditional Music-Making (London: Thames &

Hudson, 2000), 14-24, referring to Iegor Reznikoff and Michel Dauvois, 'La dimension sonore des grottes ornees',

Bulletin de la Societe Prehistorique Francaise 85:8 (1988), 238-46. See also Michel Dauvois and Xavier Boutillon, 'Grottes et Lithophones' in Acoustique et Instruments Anciens: Colloque organise par la Societe Franqaise dAcoustique et la cite de la musique, 17 et 18 novembre 1998 (Paris: 1999), 215-23.

11 Lya Dams, 'Palaeolithic lithophones: Descriptions and Comparisons', Oxford Journal ofArchaeology 4:1 (1985),

31-46; Abbe Glory, 'La Grotte de Roucadour', Bulletin de la Societe Prehistorique Franqaise 61 (1964), 166-9, and further articles in subsequent volumes.

Montagu?How Old is Music? 175

long periods of time, centuries certainly, possibly millennia. Dams suggests that many ofthe chips and

breakages appear to have been made deliberately,

especially in such formations as 'curtains' of folded

calcite, and that the shorter such folds, the higher the

pitches produced, so that these might indicate

deliberate attempts to tune the formations. For such

details as this, of course, there can never be any

certainty, but the evidence adduced for musical

purposes seems so convincing that it would be very difficult to say, at the least, that these formations

could not have been used in that way. There appears to be a growing consensus that the deliberate use of

music and instruments is very much older than was

thought until recently, and that there is positive evidence that certainly goes back at least to the Late

Solutrean period of these painted caves, some

14,000 to 17,000 BC, and for at least some

instruments such as flutes and whistles, very much

earlier, into the Aurignacian.12

From the Upper Palaeolithic in the Ukraine,

roughly contemporary with the painted caves in

France, S. N. Bibikov published a musical ensemble

of mammoth bones.13 Again there can never be

proof, but certainly many of the bones show

undoubted signs of wear, mainly of striking but sometimes (though this is not mentioned in the

English summary but is apparent from the

illustrations) of striations similar to those of a rasp.

Considerably later, but still of high antiquity, we

have the lithophone from Ndut Lieng Krak in

Vietnam, now in the Musee de l'Homme in Paris.14

These eleven stone slabs were found while road

making but although Tran Van Khe has dated them to the early Mesolithic and others have suggested a

somewhat later period, in the Neolithic, they are

essentially undatable. Clearly they have been

worked and shaped and, like any other bars, whether of stone, wood, or metal, will produce a

pitch when struck and even perhaps, as alleged, a

pentatonic scale, but we have no idea of how, when,

why, or even if, they were used for musical

performance.

We are on much surer ground when we look at the

lithophones of our own time, for people still make

music from stones. Going back to where we began

this article, people still pick up stones from the

ground to strike together to accompany music or

dance, and Bonanni showed children doing it in Italy in the eighteenth century?we can surely accept this as something that has happened continually from

the beginning of humanity till today.15

Peoples in East Africa place a group of rocks of

different sizes on the ground, each producing a

different pitch. Peoples in northern England in the

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (and who can

say how much earlier?) made instruments more

elaborate than, but similar to those of Ndut Lieng Krak. Peoples in China have for many centuries

played stone chimes, now associated with

Confucian ritual but known from archaeological discoveries to be very much older than Confucius's

time. Peoples in many parts of the world have played the percussion boulders which are somewhat

misleadingly called rock gongs, misleading only because they bear no resemblance to the discs of

bronze which we normally call a gong. The rock gong was first introduced to the

anthropological community by Bernard Fagg in

1956.16 He discovered a number of sites, many of

them associated with rock-paintings and painted caves. The instruments varied in size, from a

hundredweight or so to massive boulders weighing several tons. Some would produce a single pitch, others produced a range of pitches from different

points on the rock, with depressions showing where

they had been struck over long periods of time. Once

the first were found and recognised, others followed

fast, some because Fagg recalled seeing similar

depressions on other rocks and now realised their

purpose, others because, as word spread, their use,

previously unrecognised as anything important, was

now reported. Uses varied, many for ritual,

some for

signalling with sounds that carried for several miles,

many also for normal musical purposes, accom

panying singing and dancing. Musical practices also

varied, some being played by a single player at a

time, others by groups as

percussion ensembles.

After the first publication in Man, the newsletter as it was then of the Royal Anthropological Institute in London, many reports came from other Fellows

12 For a very recent survey, see David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave (London: Thames & Hudson, 2002),

with a specific discussion of music 223-7. 13 S. N. Bibikov, The Oldest Musical Complex Made of Mammoth Bones [in Russian with English and French

summaries] (Kiev: Institute of Archaeology, Academy of Science, Ukranian SSR, 1981). 14 Paul Collaer, Siidostasien, Musikgeschichte in Bildern 1:3 (Leipzig: Deutscher Verlag fiir Musik, 1979), 10 and Abb.

1 and 2; Tran Van Khe, La Musique Vietnamienne traditionelle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962), 11. 15

Filippo Bonanni, Gabinetto Armonico (Rome: 1723); all the engravings reprinted, but much reduced in format,

with new captions by Frank LI. Harrison and Joan Rimmer, as The Showcase of Musical Instruments (New York: Dover,

1964), pi. 96. 16 Bernard Fagg, 'The discovery of multiple rock gongs in Nigeria', Man (1956) 17-18; published also in African

Music 1:3 (1956), 6-9.

176 The Galpin Society Journal

of the Institute, often associating the rock gongs with rock slides, frequently a part of women's

fertility rites. Examples are now known over much

of Africa and far beyond. Catherine Fagg has

continued her late husband's research and, as well as

those from Africa, has published examples from

Canada, California, Brazil, Colombia, India,

Thailand, Australia, France (with, medieval, mega

ithic, and palaeolithic examples), and indeed much

of Europe, with the suggestion that cup-marks, which are a frequently found feature of megalithic monuments of the Neolithic and Early Bronze Ages,

may well be indicators of their use as rock gongs.17 Such sites are today, at least in Britain, legally

protected against damage, and anyone striking such

marks to see whether they ring may well find

themselves in serious trouble.

Smaller lithophones, portable slabs, as one might

say, are also used in Africa, one player with a group of five or so slabs of rock of different sizes set on the

ground in front of him. So far as we know at present this pattern of lithophone seems to be confined to

northern Togo in West Africa. According to Francis

Bebey, every family among the Kabre people has its

own set of stones, which are used to mark the

agricultural seasons ofthe year.18 Another use which

seems restricted to one area only is the Ethiopian, where a slab, often just one, is suspended at the

nodal points close to each end from a tree or other

support and is used instead of a church bell. This use

is reminiscent of that of the Greek church, and of

other churches in Muslim lands where churches are, or have been, forbidden the use of bells. There the

semantron, a wooden, or sometimes an iron bar, is

suspended horizontally so that it can be struck for

that purpose. So far as one knows the Ethiopian

Coptic church has never been the subject of such a ban, but it may be that bell-founding is not a

local practice and these rocks are therefore used

instead.

Suspended stones go back several millennia in

China, and many sets have been found archaeo

logically in recent years, for example in the tomb of

the Marquis Yi.19 This set of thirty-two calcareous

limestone slabs covers a fully chromatic range of

three and a half octaves, but the markings on their

storage boxes, all dating from the fifth century BC,

make it clear that they were used to play pentatonic scales. The reason for a complete chromatic set in

our terms is that a five-note scale could then be

started on any note desired. The shape of these

stones is more curved than L-shaped, but the L, with

the angle more obtuse than a right-angle, is the

shape more commonly seen, with a suspension hole

in the bottom left-hand corner of the L so that the

slabs hang down with the longer side lower than the

shorter. Those of the Marquis Yi were certainly used

for general musical purposes, for they are associated

with an enormous bell-chime, but both bells and

stones came to have a special role in Confucian

ritual music. This, of course, is.no longer a feature of

mainland Chinese life but it survives in Taiwan and

particularly in Korea.20

Stone chimes have also been used in Britain, but in

only one area. It was found that stones on a certain

part of Skidaw, a mountain near Keswick in the Lake

District; rang when struck and, in the late eighteenth century the earliest of the surviving instruments was

built.21 This is in the form of a single-row diatonic

xylophone covering a range of two octaves plus

one

note.22 Whether there was any earlier use of these

stones in unknown; it is possible, but seems unlikely, that Peter Crosthwaite, the builder of this instru

ment, was the first to notice their sounds. Certainly it was not the last, for another, also in the museum in

Keswick, covers five chromatic octaves and the

array used in 'Richardsons' Original Monstre Rock

Band' [sic], in the mid-nineteenth century, was even

larger (as well as giving a very different meaning to

the term Rock Band from that which we know

today), though the present whereabouts of that

instrument is unknown. Nor were they the only such

band, for Daniel Till and his sons were also well

known and, according to Blades, their instrument is

preserved in the museum in Orange, New Jersey.

Another is in the Horniman Museum in London, but

that is a simpler version of twenty slabs, similar to

those of the eighteenth century.

Although it was long before the xylophone was to

become a regular member of the orchestra,

Crosthwaite's lithophone in that shape was built at

just about the time that the wooden instrument, which had certainly been known in Europe since the

sixteenth century, when Agricola and Holbein drew

17 M. C. Fagg, Rock Music (Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum, 1997). 18

Francis Bebey, African Music: A People's Art, translated Josephine Bennett (London: Harrap, 1975), 91.

19 Jenny F. So, ed., Music in the Age of Confucius (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2000), 54-6.

20 Chang Sa-hun, Korean Musical Instruments (Seoul: 2nd edn, 1976), 305 in English, and with more detail in

Korean, 115-18. 21

James Blades, Percussion Instruments and their History (London: Faber, 2nd edn 1975), 82-4. 22

'Lithos' is Greek for stone, and 'phonos' for sound, whereas 'xylon' is Greek for wood. Thus one can speak of

instruments in any material as being 'in xylophone shape', but 'a stone xylophone'

or 'a metal xylophone' can only be a

nonsense.

Montagu?How Old is Music? 177

it, began to be taken seriously in Vienna.23 The

German name of Strohfiedel, which arose from the

type illustrated by those artists, with the wooden

bars lying across hanks of twisted straw, strongly

suggests a derivation from East Africa, where the

bars normally lie across banana stems or some

similar soft material, rather than upon the wooden

frames more often seen in West Africa. No one could even begin to assess the age of the

xylophone in Africa, nor in South East Asia, where it

is also endemic, but one could venture to say that it

would seem unlikely that instruments of stone, such as that from Ndut Lieng Krak, were earlier than

simpler, and more easily carved and tuned, instru ments of wood. Wood, however, does not survive

burial in the earth for as long as stone. If we may return to the beginning of this article, when we

mentioned the use of concussion sticks, as soon as

there was any perception of pitch at all by early man, it must have been recognised that two different

sticks produced two different pitches, even that one

stick, when rotated 90 degrees in the hand,

produced two different pitches (a problem known

today to claves players, who often mark their sticks to show which side should be uppermost in the

hand). Thus the date at which anybody first laid out two or more sticks, and struck them with another, is

open to the widest speculation. The simplest form of

xylophone, still found both in Africa and South East

Asia, has two or three bars (seldom more for reasons

of space) laid across the outstretched legs of a player seated on the ground?whether this was the earliest

we can never know.

SYMBIOSIS

Almost all musical instruments require some human

intervention but in only a few of them do the cavities

of the human body form a part of the sound chain.

Two of those few are the trump or jews harp and the

simplest form of the musical bow, the mouthbow.

With each, the player uses the mouth cavity to

resonate overtones of the fundamental provided by

the instrument, and to produce the music that is a

sequence of these overtones or harmonics.

It has long been accepted that the musical bow is

the earliest of string instruments. In Greek legend, it was Apollo, the sun god, who was inspired by the

twang of his sister Diana's bow string as the divine

huntress's arrow sped from the bow; in India the

bow was invented by Shiva, again a god; and in

Japanese legend the music played on a group of

bows tempted the sun goddess Amaterasu, who had

hidden herself deep in a cave, plunging all the world

into Stygian gloom, to come forth and thus restore

light to the world. These legends, and many more, are cited by Henry Balfour in what is still the most

comprehensive survey of the instrument, The

Natural History ofthe Musical Bow.24 Such legends are surely true in essence, that the bow was the

earliest of the string instruments, but what we can

never know is whether the archer's bow inspired the

musician's, or whether the musician's use of a bow

led to the archer's. Just as the technologist can claim

that flint-knapping came before the musical use of

stones, the toxophilist can claim that the archer

preceded the musician, but we, as organologists, have the equal right to claim that the musical use

inspired the mundane.

The most common playing technique with the

bow is to tap the string with a light stick, and while

this could have been an arrow in the archer's hand,

equally it could have been a stick in the hand of a

musician who saw a target, tempting him to launch

the first arrow. In the same way, the ground bow, a

flexible stave with one end planted in the earth, and a string running from the upper end to a plate of

wood or bark over a resonating hole in the ground, could have inspired the snare, and equally easily the snare could have inspired the ground bow.

In neither case shall we ever know the answer, for

the archer's bow must date back to the Mesolithic or

even to the later Palaeolithic times, which are when

the first arrowheads appear in the archaeological record, and the ground bow is probably even earlier. If this origin for the musical bow is true, it means

that string instruments are comparatively late in

human history, the last group to be developed, save

perhaps for membranophones, the skin drums and, of course, the electrophones, which were developed from the earliest years of the twentieth century, with

wind instruments probably a good deal earlier and

the idiophones, the hard percussion instruments, the

first of all. The archer's bow is simply

a wooden stave,

flexible enough to be bent, yet rigid enough and

strong enough always to resist such a bend and to try to revert to the straight. It is normally thinned

somewhat towards the two ends, and this is true of

the musical bow also. Balfour cites as his first

example, the bow of the Damara people of South

West Africa, for this is one which was, when Francis

Galton was travelling in that area around 1850, still

used for both purposes.25 A hunter would:

23 R. M. Longyear, 'Ferdinand Kauer's Percussion Enterprises', Galpin Society Journal XXVII (1974), 2-8.

24 Henry Balfour, The Natural History of the Musical Bow: A Chapter in the developmental History of Stringed

Instruments of Music, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899). 25

Balfour, Musical Bow, 5-8, citing Francis Galton, Travels in S. Africa (1851) and other authors.

178 The Galpin Society Journal

while away his spare time in strumming upon his

improvised instrument... When required for music, all

that is done is to add a little string bracing towards, but

not at the centre of the bow, drawing the bow string to

the bow. This not only tightens the bow-string and

raises the notes producible, but also divides it into two

unequal lengths giving different notes, which can be

elicited by tapping rhythmically with a small stick.

This account describes the technique used on a

wide variety of mouthbows. Most have a string braced and divided in this way, then by tapping one

half of the string with the striking stick one obtains

the overtones of, for example, C and on the other

half those of D or whatever the equivalents may be in the local scale system. The same is achieved with an unbraced string which is stopped near one end by

raising a knuckle against it or by stopping it with a

short stick?both techniques are known, and either

gives enough notes for any simple melody. A few

combine both techniques, to provide a third

fundamental and thus a fuller sequence of available overtones.

The player holds the bow between the lips or the

teeth, or sometimes the string between the slightly parted lips, and, by altering the mouth-shape as one

does when forming the different vowels, a, e, i, o, u, and moving the tongue to alter the mouth-capacity,

produces overtones of the fundamental. These are

drawn from the harmonic series. However, C. J. Adkins has shown that in the case ofthe trump some

of the overtones are non-harmonic, and it would

seem probable that this applies also to the bow,

though that instrument has not yet been studied in

the same scientific detail.26

The bow is widely known from Africa and many

reports have been published, in addition to

Balfour's, particularly those by Percival Kirby and David Rycroft.27 Shapes and patterns vary some

what. Most stick fairly closely to the archer's pattern

though, particularly in East Africa, a somewhat

elaborated pattern is found. This has a rigid

cylindrical central section, sometimes quite short,

15 centimetres, 6 inches or so in length, sometimes

twice that or even more, with an arm at each end

only half a centimetre (a quarter of an inch) or so in

thickness, continuing the line of the outermost part of the cylinder. Very commonly one arm is more bent

than the other. A complex variant of this is the three

part bow: the central cylinder with a hole bored in

each end to receive a flexible arm.

The normal material for the stave is wood, though cane is sometimes seen. With those bows which were

both archer's and musician's, the string would

normally be of gut or sinew. For bows of strictly musical purpose, more fragile 'strings' were often

used, of reed and other vegetable matter. Since the

advent of commercial materials, wire has often

replaced those of natural origin which require more

preparation, as has common string and, more

recently, monofilament nylon.

Most bows are, as we have noted, tapped with a

light stick. Few if any have the string plucked, for

this would on the whole be a less-effective method of

performance. Some have notches cut in the bow

stave, usually near one end, and these are then

rubbed, or rather rasped, with a stick. The sound is

then a combination of a musical rasp and of the bow

string and its overtones, for rasping the stave makes

it vibrate and that vibration is in turned passed to the

string. More rarely the string itself is rubbed, as

Rycroft recorded.28 Some bows are blown, though this seems confined to the lesiba of the Xhosa people and the Igor a of the Korana, both of South Africa.29

These have a bow string which is attached to the stave at one end but at the other is attached to a strip of quill which is, in turn, fixed to the end of the stave.

The player blows forcefully on this quill, which

makes the string vibrate.30 These are the only known

mouth-resonated blown bows, though aeolian

bows, attached to kites, were widely used in China.

The ordinary mouth-resonated musical bow is by no means confined to Africa, though it survives there

more widely than elsewhere. Examples are known

from India and Melanesia and Polynesia. These are

sometimes differently shaped, the stave a flat

wooden lath, thin enough across the width to be

flexible. The fact that in those and many other areas

gourd-resonated bows are known suggests that

26 C. J. Adkins, 'Investigation of the sound-producing mechanism of the Jew's harp', Journal ofthe Acoustical Society

of America 55:3 (March, 1974), 667-70. 27 Percival Kirby, The Musical Instruments of the Native Races of South Africa (London: Oxford University Press,

1934); David Rycroft, Zulu, Swazi en Xhosa, (Tervuren: Musee Royal de l'Afrique Centrale, in conjunction with the

Belgian Radio and Television, nd). 28 David Rycroft, 'Friction Chordophones in South-Eastern Africa', Galpin Society Journal XIX (1966), 84-100. 29

Kirby (Musical Instruments ofthe Native Races) devotes a whole chapter to descriptions and photographs of these

instruments, 171-92. Henry Balfour also devoted a separate paper to them, 'The Goura, a

stringed-wind musical

instrument of the Bushmen and Hottentots', Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Northern

Ireland XXXII (1902), 156-76 with plates XII-XIV. 30

How he at the same time alters the mouth-shape to produce different pitches I do not know; neither Rycroft nor I

were able to get any sound out of his or my examples, which inhibited investigation.

Montagu?How Old is Music? 179

mouthbows may well have existed there once. One

problem with the mouthbow is that the sound is very

quiet; it is an instrument primarily designed for the

player's own enjoyment. Another is that if a player wishes to sing

to their own accompaniment, they are

then reduced to the two, or at most three, funda

mentals ofthe bow-string, as evinced in a number of

Rycroft's recordings. The use of a gourd or other resonator solves both these problems, and the use of the gourd bow is as we said above much more

widespread today than that of the mouthbow.

Meanwhile, there is one problem that we should at least outline, and this is the vexed question of

whether any string instruments existed in the Americas before the arrival of Christopher Columbus

and his successors. Certainly there have been no

archaeological discoveries of string instruments on

the American continent, nor has any evidence been

adduced for their existence in any of the ancient

cultures. Many instruments appear in the Mexican

codices, many others on Mochica pots, but none of

them are stringed.

The peoples of North America were certainly archers by the time that the Europeans arrived, and

arrow-heads have been found there from much

earlier periods. And yet it is normally held that there were no string instruments known in pre-Columbian times, and certainly there is no evidence for their

presence. The Brazilian gourd-resonated bow, the

birimbao, is believed to derive from those made by African slaves. There is a very simple bowed tube

zither known from the North American Plains,

always referred to as the Apache fiddle, but nobody has ever produced any definitive evidence for its

origin or date.31 It would seem surprising if there were archers but no musical bows, but at present no

more can be said than that.

The bow is not a difficult instrument to make,

though a suitable piece of wood has to be found, cut, and shaped, and a string of some material must be

obtained and prepared. With the advent of trading stores, it may well often have been easier to pay a

few pence for a ready-made instrument which

would play the same music. The resemblance

between the mouthbow and the trump was noted by several of the early travellers, who would describe

an instrument which was new to their readers in terms of one with which they were familiar. One

writer cited by Balfour, a German, even referred to

the bow as 'die Maultrommel', using the German name for the trump.32

This was our second example above of a

symbiotic instrument: the trump or jews harp. The common English name is a stumbling block, and

nobody knows its origin.33 The modern form, in our

culture, has a metal frame with two parallel arms

which lie closely to each side (the closeness is

acoustically important) of a flexible steel tongue, which functions as a reed. One end of the reed is

fixed rigidly to the back of the frame and the other is turned up in a right-angle so that it may be plucked

with a finger; the end is usually rolled over, or at least

bent, so as not to scratch the finger. The instrument is played with the frame against the teeth, and as the reed is plucked the overtones of its sound are

selected and amplified by movement of the tongue and alteration ofthe mouth capacity, exactly as with the musical bow. The sound of the reed provides a

constant drone just as does that of the bow string. Where the trump originated is unknown but the

relationship between it and the mouthorgan in

South-East Asia is so clear that one would suggest with some confidence that it is likely to have been

somewhere in that area. Each instrument will only function if, fitting closely in a frame, there is a reed

which is free to vibrate to and fro within that frame, which is why such instruments as mouthorgans, reed

organ, harmoniums, concertinas, and accordions, are

called free-reed instruments. The pitch of each reed

depends on its length and its mass, and it is quite common to see the free end of the reed loaded to

increase its mass and so lower the pitch. Many South-East Asian varieties have reeds cut integrally in a piece of bamboo. Those for the mouthorgans are small enough to respond to blowing by the

player's mouth; the trumps are too large for this to

work and therefore they are plucked, but just by looking

at them one can see that they are the same.

Others are cut in a piece of thin metal sheet, and

again the same resemblance is apparent. All these are idioglottal, the reed or tongue being cut in the same piece of bamboo or metal as the frame.

31 David P. McAllester, 'An Apache Fiddle', Ethno-Musicology Newsletter 8 (September 1956), 1-5.

32 Dr Oscar Baumann, Eine Africanische Tropen-Insel, Fernando Poo und die Bube (Vienna: E. Holzel, 1888), 99. 33 Jew's trump is the oldest English name, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (p. 1508 in the compact

edition, p. 579 ofthe relevant volume in the original), in a reference to the rates of Customs charges from 1545. The first

reference to a Jew's harp is fifty years later. Various writers have pretended that jaws is the original term, into which Jew's has been modified by folk etymology, but there is no lexical justification for this; the earlier name is Jew's, but why nobody knows. Frederick Crane has rightly suggested in his editorial, that in these days when people are liable to take

offence from perfectly ordinary, or traditional, language, the instrument would be better referred to as the trump tout

court. See Crane, ed., Vierundzwanzigsteljahrschrift der Intemationalen Maultrommel-virtuosengenossenschaft 4

(1994), 5-7.

180 The Galpin Society Journal

Heteroglottal trumps and mouthorgan reeds are

also known from the same area.

Genevieve Dournon-Taurelle and John Wright go into far greater morphological and typological

detail than we have space for.34 It will probably suffice here to introduce three main types: the flat,

mainly idioglottal examples such the above, which are characteristic of Eastern and South-East Asia,

made usually of bamboo, metal, bone, or ivory; those partly circular in section from New Guinea

and other parts of Oceania, mainly Melanesia,

always of bamboo; and those of metal, always

heteroglot, a metal frame with an inserted reed, most commonly steel, used from India and western

Siberia through to Europe and, subsequently,

beyond. The simplest of these are the Melanesian.35 These

are made by slicing a section of bamboo longi

tudinally, usually retaining part of the node at what

will become the hinge end, and forming the body into a narrow, elongated almond-shape, coming

to a

point at the distal end. A narrow tongue is cut or

abraded down the centre line of the body, usually

stopping just short of the distal end. This end is

separated into two points, which are tied together with thin cord to aid structural stability; the cord is

knotted between the points to hold them far enough apart to allow the reed to vibrate freely, yet close

enough together for acoustical linkage.36 A hole or

projection at the hinge end has a cord attached and

the player holds this cord, partly to jerk the hinge but

partly as a measure of length so as to knock on the

reed at the correct position and aid its vibration. The

instruments may look clumsy to our eyes, though

they are often elaborately decorated with incised and

stained, or burned, patterns, but in skilled hands they are as efficient as most other patterns.

The flat East and South East Asian variety has

been described above and differs from the trump that we know also by being plucked at the hinge end

rather than at the free end ofthe tongue. This is done

either by plucking directly with the finger on the

body at that end or again by jerking a cord tied

through a hole at that end. In either way the reed is

made to vibrate.

The third type, with an iron frame, is seen in

Nepal and the Indian sub-continent in general. It has

been suggested that it travelled thence into Europe where it was known by late Roman times.37

Medieval examples are common in collections and

show that the instrument was known and used

throughout Europe. An important centre of

manufacture in historical times was, and remains, in

the Austrian Tyrol, centred on the town of Molln.38

It was produced, certainly in England and probably elsewhere, for export and trade to Africa and other

colonial areas. This European form of the

instrument was generally adopted in Africa, where

there is no known earlier indigenous form, probably

partly because it was a common article of trade

goods from the sixteenth century onwards, carried to Africa for exchange for gold, ivory, and other

products of greater value, and partly because it

formed a cheap and ready-made substitute for the

musical bow, whose music it could play and whose use it could supplant. As a result, instruments

copying the European form were made by African

blacksmiths, especially in the western areas such as

Nigeria. In Mongolia and Siberia there is a tradition of flat,

idioglottal instruments, often made from bone and

similar materials, but today they have adopted vari ants of the European model, often somewhat larger and heavier than the norm, and of much better quality than most others save perhaps the Norwegian. In

both areas there is a strong tradition now of skilled

craftsmen making individual instruments to order.

Elsewhere in Europe, and America, there seems to be more

emphasis on

mass-production, excellent for the

amateur and for the increasing popularity of the

instrument, which has begun to appear once again on

the concert platform and frequently in the studios, but

less suited to the virtuoso.

In many areas the trump was used for magical

purposes, especially love magic. It is believed that it can speak and certainly in some traditions both

players and hearers purport to hear and understand

the words it sounds as well as the music. It is also

used for dance music and, particularly in Indonesia, in groups somewhat orchestrally. In many

areas

34 Genevieve Dournon-Taurelle and John Wright, Les guimbardes du

musee de Vhomme (Paris: Institut d'ethnologie,

1978). 35

Hans Fischer, Schallgerdte in Ozeanien: Bau und Spieltechnik?Verbreitung und Funktion (Strasbourg: P. H. Heitz,

1958), translated Philip W. Holzknecht and ed. Don Niles, as Sound-Producing Instruments in Oceania (Boroko:

Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies, revised edn, 1986?the first edition should be avoided), 27-29 (in the

translation, 47-52) and figs 107-113. 36

Dournon-Taurelle and Wright, figs. VII, 1-5 and 14, pp. 45-50. 37

Dournon-Taurelle and Wright illustrate Gallo-Roman examples, p. 103, which will also be found in Le Carnyx et

la Lyre (Besancon-Orleans-Evreux: 1993), 20-1, nos 3-7. 38

Karl M. Klier, Volkstiimliche Musikinstrumente in den Alpen (Kassel: Barenreiter, 1956), 71-7.

Montagu?How Old is Music? 181

trumps are made with more than one tongue, or

several trumps may be used together, as among the

Naxi in Yunnan and Sichuan in southwest China, where three are held to the mouth together.39 Heinrich Scheibler's invention of the Aura, which

had up to ten trumps clamped together, so that the

player could modulate from one key to another, was

an extreme form of this.40

We said just now that the trump was used in

Africa as a substitute for the musical bow. There are

some areas which have produced a substitute for the

trump. One is in New Guinea where, among the

Tifalmin, often as a boy's plaything, a beetle may be

held against the mouth, its wings buzzing furiously to produce the fundamental pitch which is varied

by altering the mouth capacity.41 Lajos Vargyas described a Mongolian substitute to the Nineteenth

Conference of the International Folk Music Council

in Ostend in 1967, introducing for the first time to many of us the phenomenon now usually known as overtone or multivoice singing.42 The musician

sounds a vocal drone and, by manipulation of the

tongue and the vocal tracts, sounds the overtones of

that drone. A detailed study of the techniques

employed to achieve this, and the acoustical

phenomena involved, by one performer, Tran

Quang Hai, has been published by the Institut de la

Voix in Limoges.43 This technique is widespread in the eastern parts

of what was once the USSR, especially among the

Tuva, the Bashkir, and their neighbours, and there is a number of recordings of its use. Tran Quang Hai

and his followers have taught many people in our

culture how to do it, and it is beginning to be heard

with some frequency in our own music. The basic

technique is not difficult to acquire?it consists of

humming (but with open lips) a sound similar to a

nasal 'ill' or 'ell' at the back of the mouth, with the

tongue curled up towards the roof. Far more diffi

cult, the result of long practice (it has been suggested not all of it good for the physical well-being) is to

produce a clear, flexible, singing overtone sound

with a minimum of obtrusive drone.

A recently published study by Mark van Tongeren goes into this technique in considerable detail,

describing the use in many parts of the world,

including by composers such as Stockhausen and

many references to recordings where it may be

heard, as well as its own CD of folk use and

demonstrations of how it is done.44

A rather different technique is cultivated in some

parts of Tibet. Here the drone, instead of being

generated at the back of the mouth, comes, it would

seem, from the depths of the stomach, though in

practice probably no lower than the base of the

throat, resembling the sound of the long trumpets so widely used in that culture. To see and hear a

group of monks producing these eerie sounds,

accompanied by cymbals and alternating with the

long trumpets, is indeed impressive, but how the overtones are

produced I cannot say.45

We said at the beginning of this section that with

only a few instruments does the human body

provide part of the sound chain, but this may be

because conventional scientific acoustical analysis of instrumental sound concentrates solely upon the

instrument, usually divorcing it from the player, and

generating its sound by mechanical means in order to keep it as constant as possible, well separated from the vagaries of

a musician's input. However,

this is not how instruments are played. Every teacher

knows that the player's posture, and thus the access

to the player's inner spaces and organs, has a very

considerable impact on the sound produced. To take just one very clear example, when

a

trumpet player fills the lungs and then holds that

39 Helen Rees, Echoes of History: Naxi Music in Modern China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 62-4 and

CD, track 6. 40

Leonard Fox, The Jew's Harp: A Comprehensive Anthology (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1988),

translates Scheibler's original article from the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 30 (24 July 1816), as 'The Aura',

87-95, and also Wilhelm Ludwig Schmidt's booklet in praise of the instrument (Quedlinburg: Gottfried Basse, 1840), as 'The Aura or Mouth-Harmonica Presented as a Musical Instrument', 97-152. He also provides a translation of

Klier's chapter on the trump, noted above, 65-83.

41 Described, with a recording, by Professor Anthony Forge at

a meeting of the Ethnomusicology Panel of the Royal

Anthropological Institute in London in the early 1960s and, according to Gilbert Rouget (in Dournon-Taurelle and

Wright, 6) by B. Juillerat at a seminar of the Departement d'ethnomusicologie in Paris in 1971.

42 Lajos Vargyas, 'Performing Styles in Mongolian Chant', Journal of the International Folk Music Council 20

(1968), 70-2. 43 Institut de la Voix, Dossier no 1: Le Chant Diphonique (Limoges: Institut de la Voix, 1989). 44

Mark C. van Tongeren, Overtone Singing: physics and metaphysics of harmonics in east and west (Amsterdam:

Fusica,2002). 45

So often in any research, descriptions depend on being able to do something oneself, and I have tried this without

success. The technique was first brought to general notice by David Lewiston with his recording Tibetan Buddhism:

Tantras ofGyiito: Mahakala (New York: Nonesuch Records, 1973), recorded in the Gyiito Tantric College, Dalhousie, Himachal Pradesh.

182 The Galpin Society Journal

posture and that lung expansion with the muscles of

the chest as the lungs slowly empty of air, this will

produce a far brighter and stronger sound than

when the chest is allowed to fall as the lungs empty, even though playing at the same dynamic level. In some way, the air cavities of the chest are providing resonance chambers for the sound, even though that

sound is being produced far above, at the contact

point between lips and mouthpiece. The trumpet cannot be alone in this, though my

experience has been in teaching brass instruments

and not in woodwind or strings. Clearly, this is one

of the many reasons why no two players ever sound

the same, even if one hands the instrument to

another, and thus why, as we just said,

no

mechanically induced acoustical experiment can

ever tell us the truth about any instrument. With

wind instruments, as with the voice, it is all the parts of the vocal tract, from the diaphragm up to the

cavities of the sinus, that affect the sound.46 A more overt use of the vocal tracts with an

instrument is humming while one plays. This is how

horn players produce chords, for example in

Weber's Concertino; one note is played, another is

hummed, and a third, sometimes a fourth, just appear as resultant tones. Put simply, if one plays the

5th harmonic and hums the 3rd (on a fundamental

of C these are E and G respectively), the 2nd will

result as a difference tone (5 minus 3) and the 8th as

a summation tone (5 plus 3), each an octave of C, but the effect is by no means restricted to those overtones. It is also one of the ways by which

modern wind players produce special effects called

for by various modern composers. More impor

tantly, within their own culture, this is how Turkish

and Balkan, especially Bulgarian and Romanian, flautists produce a drone to accompany their

instrument. Characteristic of both the kaval, the

long end-blown flute, and the dilli kaval or fluierul, the duct flutes, Turkish and Romanian, the drone, often referred to as the ison, which may also be

varied into a slow-moving true second part or

harmonic bass, is an essential part of the music. As

well as being an ideal accompaniment, the hummed

drone has a drastic effect on the tone quality. The sound of a flute tends to be a very pure and

simple one, with very little harmonic content. The moment one begins to hum, this changes. The tone

quality becomes narrower, more

reedy, with a strong

hiss and the semblance, at least, of a fuller harmonic content. Just why this

occurs is not clear. Laurence

Picken, whose study of Turkish folk instruments is

beyond compare, says only 'The possibility of

producing a vocal drone while blowing depends on

the throat being relaxed, which in turn has a decisive

effect on the character of the air-stream and the

generation of the edge-tone.'47

We have come full circle, from instruments which

represented voices, to a use of the voice which

replaced an instrument and another which enhanced

the sound of an instrument. How old are any of

these techniques? We do not know, we cannot know.

The flutes with which the player hums are little

different from those found in the caves of

Magdalenian France, and others of equal or greater

antiquity. What we can do with the passages of our

vocal tracts, the Cro Magnon could do with the

passages of their caves. What homo habilis could do

with a pair of sticks, we can do in our dance bands.

What pre-hominids could do on a dancing ground, we can do in our dance halls today. How old is

music? Surely the only answer we can produce is

'older than we can ever imagine'.

46 This also is the apparatus with which overtone singing is achieved.

47 Laurence Picken, Folk Musical Instruments of Turkey (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 399. He gives

one extended musical example of this technique, on pp. 401-11, showing during its course all three uses, the drone, the

varying harmonic bass, and the true second part.