Western History in Musical Perspective

By John Huber

Archaeological discoveries indicate that early man, even in a primitive state, made tools to produce and control sound. Music has evolved right along with us.

From the perspective of Western (European) culture, all known older, more advanced forms of music developed in the East. The first civilizations of Central Asia, the Middle East, and the Nile had music with well-developed applications, as did the Greeks and Romans, who follow them in our history books. The geographical regions now dominated by China and India, and the Turkic peoples spreading westwards from Mongolia, all had their own, as well as shared, variations of percussion, string, and wind instruments, as well as vocal music.

During the millennia since then, Western culture has undergone constant increasingly rapid and advanced development, and so has its music; during the sixteenth century it was spread into the Americas, eventually achieving total domination. Soon after, colonial activity also forced East Asia and eventually the rest of the world to deal with Western culture, which affected and often threatened native cultures.

Get a detailed look at history from a musical perspective with this scholarly work by a musicologist who is an expert in stringed musical instrument history and development.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Feb 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9781728379593

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© 2023 John Huber. All rights reserved.

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transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse   06/08/2023

ISBN: 978-1-7283-7960-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-7961-6 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-7959-3 (e)

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Contents

Preface: A Sixteenth Century World in Transition

Introduction: From an Awareness of Self

An Author`s Note to The Reader

1     Exchange, Experience, and Commerce

2     Industry, Expansion, and Politics

3     Liberté, Ègalité Fraternité?

4     Travel

5     Music, An Aural History of Western Culture

6     An In-Brief Summary to the Present

In Summary

Bibliography

Collecting facts can offer knowledge, learning how they fit together can offer wisdom.

F. R. Huber (1896-1968)

… modern music sounds like an audible jigsaw puzzle.

Uncle Hermann

Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.

Epistle to the Hebrews 13:1

Are world historians biased toward visual rather than auditory culture, or political-economic rather than cultural topics? Are scholars inclined toward music disproportionately diverted to musicology and other fields? Here, suffice it to say that music represents a realm as yet barely explored by global history.

—James A. Millward, in Introduction: Stringed

Instruments and Global History to Chordophone

Culture in Two Early Modern Societies

Preface

A Sixteenth Century World in Transition

After Constantinople fell in 1453, refugee scholars from the Eastern Roman Empire enriched their western colleagues, particularly in the northern Italian republics, with new knowledge of old history. Fifteenth-century Spain was emerging from centuries of Islamic domination to a prominent political position in Christian Europe with rapidly growing cultural, military, and economic power in international perspective, but was remote from access to Silk Road trade sources. Until the sixteenth- century, most of the profitable trade between Europe and Asia either passed overland through Islamic-controlled Central Asia or by sea through the Indian Ocean and Red Sea and on to Mamluk-controlled ports in the Levant and Egypt, from where European trade was dominated by rival Genoese and Venetian merchants who benefited from their advantageous location nearer continental intersections and trade route terminations.

While areas of urban concentration were forming in much of Northern Italy in the sixteenth century, similar development was taking place in the North Sea areas which trade; and advanced shipbuilding had enriched and empowered. Improvements in navigation and ship building allowed fifteenth and sixteenth century Atlantic Europeans with ocean-going ships armed with cannons to find, conquer, and exploit less developed parts of the world, and to trade or make war with the rest of it. Seeking geographic compensation for its remote European location, one Spanish expedition in search of direct contact with Asian resources and merchants sailed west in 1492; but instead found the American continents. The discovery and conquest of the Americas immediately altered both American and European politics and finances and instigated a consequent shift of political and economic power from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. Sixteenth-century Spain and the Roman church experienced a period of expanded international significance as conquerors, tradespeople, and priests carried Spanish concepts and music around the world to old and new lands and cultures.

Although it remained true that all roads led to Rome, there was little improvement in transport over the existing remnants of that empire. Without railroads and airports, Händel, Haydn, Mozart, their musical colleagues, and even Napoleon moved through Europe´s mountains, forests, and lowlands, and over its deteriorated (and often even non-extant) roads and bridges at about the same speed as Julius Caesar almost two thousand years earlier. But they did travel, and European culture still reflects the knowledge and experience they shared.

Aggressive demand for reform left sixteenth-century Northern Europe, from Britain across the Netherlands, northern Germany, and Scandinavia, Protestant and politically independent from Latin Europe. As new points of contact, rival Atlantic Christian European powers competed for world domination and imposed new technologies and cultural concepts upon the rest of the world; and the great international Asian inland centres of trade and culture, built and maintained for millennia by Silk Road trade, were forced to survive as provincial monuments of their past.

Are the effects of these evolving economic and political developments apparent in modern Western music´s cultural identities? This search suggests a reflection of our history in our music, but such a question requires more attention to political and technological history than are usually encountered in musical studies.

Introduction

From an Awareness of Self

From our earliest history, humans have used tools to facilitate survival in diverse environments. We first learned to use natural materials, such as sticks and stones, as basic practical aids, and then to alter them for specific applications to help feed and shelter ourselves. With experience, we eventually developed increasingly more specialized tool variations using selected materials and methods to meet specific needs for specific circumstances. Simultaneously, developing social structures further defined and refined both the purpose and application of many developing tools as well as concepts of ownership, useful knowledge dispersion, and specialized abilities. By the time human range expanded beyond Africa, the groups who migrated apparently did so with acknowledged identity, shared cultural experience, and sufficient adaptive potential to face new challenges in new environments with a rapidly expanding and variable toolkit. Successful human adaptations to new environments frequently evolved into unique civilizations, as collective living characterized by a social structure which incorporated centralized political regulation, some degree of urbanization, adaptation to regional resources and agricultural potential, and sufficient professional specialization in essential fields to allow a large degree of cultural continuity. But such development need not, and did not, remain static.

Our human origin lies in terrestrial biology, as a genuine part of nature, and our continued survival illustrates and confirms that we were able to observe and learn beneficial information from nature itself. Eventually, we learned to alter segments of nature to better fit our needs and aid adaptation to the resources it offered. As we observed and learned, we began to ask if meaning exists in nature. The results of such questioning are the art, religion, and science we use to describe, explain, and share what we understand about our existence and relationship to nature and the universe itself. Religion tends to explain that nature beyond our understanding from a supernatural perspective, postulating that creation and the apparent main reason for our awareness of existence is to honour the divine superhuman forces who caused it, but who also limit our primary existence and define the conditions for a possible secondary existence. Again, from contrasting observations of nature, questions arose which suggested alternative explanations to religious dogma. To answer those questions, we began to use science and art to describe and communicate our response to these observations of natural phenomena and human activity. As a primary principle, science attempts to discover collective universal truth and restricts credible description to objective observation documented with analytic measurement and confirmed by reliable repetition. Art is subjective description and individual response to observation, confirmation is possible as shared understanding or collective agreement, but is irrelevant to credibility. Art can be shared, but its observation and response, like its truth, is essentially individual. In Western history, both science and art, as usually recorded by historic documentation and transmitted by cultural activity, tend to reveal the perspective of the individual practical executant but not necessarily that of the later observer. Religion is also well documented but is subject to regional variations which often originate as collective agreement resulting from shared individual revelation. Religion, after the Western acceptance and spread of the Israelite rejection of polytheism, is usually collective activity under stratified leadership where the individual practitioner`s acceptance confirms a doctrine of defined collective truth without further question of qualification for such judgement.¹ History, an attempt to understand, interpret, explain, and document the conditions for the emergence of civilization from nature, and its later expansion, is dependent upon remaining records of religion, art, and science from our predecessors, as well as the present state of our knowledge and understanding.

In "The Geography of Thought", Professor Richard Nisbett offers a summation of Western history from a unique and revealing perspective:

". . .the values of individuality, freedom, rationality, and universalism became more dominant and articulated as civilization moved westward from its origins in the Fertile Crescent, The Babylonians codified and universalized the law. The Israelites emphasized individual distinctiveness. The Greeks valued individuality even more and added a commitment to personal freedom, the spirit of debate, and formal logic. The Romans brought a gift for rational organization and something resembling the Chinese genius for technological achievement, and after a trough lasting almost a millennium—their successors, the Italians, rediscovered these values and built on the accomplishments of the Greek and Roman eras. The Protestant Reformation beginning in Germany and Switzerland and largely bypassing France and Belgium, added individual responsibility and a definition of work as a sacred activity. The Reformation also brought a weakened commitment to the family and other in-groups coupled with a greater willingness to trust out-groups and have dealings with their members (These values were all intensified in the Calvinist subcultures of Britain, including the Puritans and Presbyterians, whose egalitarian ideology laid the groundwork for the government of the United States).²

Nisbett´s presentation of individual freedom as a concept with both rights and responsibility becomes particularly conspicuous in music history as a reflection of civil history during the period from approximately 1725 to 1825, which with reference to music is often referred to as Classical. The period encompasses such prominent musicians as Händel in London, Bach in Leipzig, and Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert in Vienna, whose careers in sequence exemplify a developing progression of individual freedom, recognition, and responsibility, to Beethoven´s example in the Romantic period of emphasis of individualism in all art. Worthy of note, and certainly not unrelated, is that during this period, three great events: the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution, altered and rewrote the course of history.

Although there are biblical and Classical references to ancient music, there is very little we can say with certainty about the origin of music except that like language, it seems to be universal; all known human groups practise the use of rhythmic vocal intonation in some form to share or participate in ritual or emotional expression. Since most other mammals utilize acoustic communication, we can perhaps assume that the potential created by our biological origins was recognized, applied, and developed into appreciated and perhaps useful music as we evolved. Mate selection, for example, is in most mammals a powerful tool of biological evolution and often engages acoustic communications.

There are archaeological discoveries which indicate that early man, even in primitive state, made tools to produce and control sound, and the earliest records of civilization confirm that music has evolved with us. From the perspective of Western (European) culture, all known older, more advanced forms of music developed in the East. The first civilizations of Central Asia, the Middle East, and the Nile had music with well-developed applications, as did the Greeks and Romans, who follow them in our history books. The geographical regions now dominated by China and India, and the Turkic peoples spreading westwards from Mongolia, all had their own, as well as shared, variations of percussion, string, and wind instruments, as well as vocal music. During the millennia since then, Western culture has undergone constant increasingly rapid and advanced development, and so has its music; during the sixteenth century it was spread into the Americas, eventually achieving total domination. Soon after, colonial activity also forced East Asia and eventually the rest of the world to deal with Western culture, which affected and often threatened native cultures.

Although the Eastern cultures which were subjected to colonial domination often acquired some vestige of Western music, most of them also managed to retain and preserve significant segments of their traditional musical cultures intact, perhaps because, as Nisbett explains, Carrying out prescribed roles—in an organized, hierarchical system—was the essence of Chinese daily life. There was no counterpart to the Greek sense of personal liberty. Individual rights in China were one´s share" of the rights of the community, not a license to do as one pleased.³ During the centuries since then, unlike most East Asian music culture, Western music has increasingly and consciously kept pace with the constantly accelerating developments in all phases of Western civilization. In the twentieth century, rapid development in electronics strongly affected Western music-enough in fact to create several parallel music cultures.⁴ And with the help of modern technology, electronic communications, and spreading cultural acceptance, Western music is now again threatening world domination, but this time with commercialism, not colonialism.

European music, meanwhile, is now transplanting itself so firmly to the East that Western seems a misnomer; it is threatening to swamp all of the other traditions, or at least to absorb them.⁵

An Author`s Note to The Reader

In parallel with the documented flow of civic history as we know it, the following text introduces the related segments revealing the development of music in western culture in proportional sequence; initially appearing as a unifying background role but with significant increase in importance, chapter by chapter, as cultural complexity in history evolves with time.

The author has sought to present a sense of consensus with his predecessors in understanding and determining the course of evolving development in history and therefore to a large degree states defining period characteristics with selected citations of recognized academic expertise in various related fields instead of merely attempting paraphrase.

But a few occasional statements concerning musical instrument construction and the evolutionary development of keyboards, bowed strings, and guitars; in this text might at first seem inadequately supported by authoritative academic documentation. The author has, however, drawn such conclusions and personal judgements from his many years as an instrument maker and player, from academic studies, and from professional activity with both the Music Museum and the Academy of Music in Stockholm, which presented opportunity to study their and other important instrument collections at length and to consider and discuss interests with international colleagues. Such comments reflect that experience.

1

Exchange, Experience, and Commerce

In several parts of the ancient world, about ten thousand years ago, tribal groups of various sizes began to reach a kind of equilibrium with their local, natural environment. Where natural (wild) resources were plentiful and for long time periods relatively easily accessed, semipermanent family or tribal territories developed; where the regional resources were primarily seasonal, a nomadic lifestyle was adopted. In those few places where both conditions and resources allowed it, plant and animal domestication gradually developed which augmented nutritional security enough to encourage population growth and more permanent geographic location.⁶.

At this juncture, we need to focus on the very notion of a surplus, and the much broader—almost existential—questions it raises. As philosophers realized long ago, this is a concept that poses fundamental questions about what it means to be human. One of the things that sets us apart from non-human animals is that animals produce only and exactly what they need; humans invariably produce more. We are creatures of excess, and this is what makes us simultaneously the most creative, and most destructive, of all species. Ruling classes are simply those who have organized society in such a way that they can extract the lion’s share of that surplus for themselves, whether through tribute, slavery, feudal dues, or manipulating ostensibly free-market arrangements.⁷

In Mesopotamia, (an historic region between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers to the Persian Gulf) during the eighth millennium BC, sheep domestication transformed hunting into herding.⁸ Development continued to include pottery making and cow domestication during the seventh millennium BC, and in the sixth millennium BC, the plough came into agricultural use. In the fourth millennium, Uruk, located along the Euphrates in Southern Iraq, grew to become the world’s first city and developed cylinder seals and cuneiform script to record its activity. The British Museum has in its collection a five-thousand-year-old cylinder seal from Uruk, bearing an image of an oud—probably our oldest known documented record of a stringed musical instrument. This earliest urban society in Mesopotamia was followed shortly by other similar societies. Early dynastic Egypt had joined by about 3000 BC. A third riverine civilization flourished in the Indus valley of present-day Pakistan between about 2500 and 1500 BC. All three of these western Asian or north-eastern African societies had so much in common in their technology and in other aspects of culture that historians assume some degree of intercommunication at a very early date.⁹

The uneven geographic distribution of essential resources and the tendency for regional populations to become specialists in the exploitation of local resources created both cultural distinctions and opportunities to share and profit by exchanging produce for other resources from other cultures and regions, thus establishing the basic principles of economic markets and growth. Each of the early expanding Egyptian or Mesopotamian civilizations found trade with its neighbours to be a first stage of absorption, not necessarily peaceful, into an evolving empire. Some resources, such as pasture, fishing, or hunting areas, could be shared; others, such as metal ores, required technical skills to use and defence to maintain access. But with or without conflict, defensive economic controls developed, resulting in the establishment of basic political principles, almost always with the support of local deities.

Small-scale trade between ancient China and Persia probably began much earlier, but when the Han Dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE) sanctioned trade with the West in 130 BCE it was obviously in recognition of both acknowledged existing and potential future commercial benefits.¹⁰ Long before then, the Persian Achaemenid Empire (550–330 BC) had established interconnecting routes for both commercial and administrative purposes from Central Asia to India, to Anatolia, and even to Egypt in Africa.¹¹ In light of this, the Silk Road extensions from China seem inevitable. As trade expanded, trade centers along the route, such as Bukhara, Samarkand, and many others, became major centers of culture.¹²

About twelve centuries before the Common Era, in the north-eastern corner of the Mediterranean where Europe and Asia meet in mountainous mainland and an archipelago of islands, numerous culturally related but independent and extremely competitive city-states developed and laid the fundamental groundwork for Western civilization.¹³ Although without themselves being democratic as understood today, the Athenians at least, among qualified male citizens, developed a unique concept of local civil loyalty with individual independence and the political responsibility to reach agreement in logical public discussions in an otherwise warlike region both divided and united by shared language and culture. When Alexander united and extended that network to Macedonia and set an example for Rome, a new world also eventually opened for Europe.¹⁴ Only a century or so after Alexander’s invasion brought Greek culture to Central Asia, Roman expansion provided new market strength for trade with Asia, which ultimately affected every culture between Egypt and China. Roman desire for Chinese silk and tea and Indian spices met and matched Asian interest in Western gold, silver, glass, and wine; the intermediate Persian, Arab, and Sogdian traders prospered.

ROME, A NEW APEX OF WORLD TRADE?

Then, with comparative suddenness, between about 200 BC and the beginning of the Christian era, regular overland trade came into existence across central Asia from China to the eastern Mediterranean. Seaborne trade also began over important segments of the whole route from Morocco to Japan, Trade now became a regular thing from the Red Sea and Persian Gulf to India, from India to southeast Asia, and from southeast Asia north to China and Japan. These trade routes, both overland and by sea, survived the fall of the Han and the Roman Empire, making possible a slow growth of cross-cultural trade, which continued to develop until the seventh and eighth centuries AD, when the Tang dynasty in China and the Abbasid caliphate of Bagdad again provided imperial umbrellas over most of the trade routes between China and the Mediterranean.¹⁵

The volume of trade with Central Asia—the Silk Road—grew to such an extent that Roman and Chinese writers, who normally disdain to mention commerce, actually discuss it. But despite the trade, and a few long-distance diplomatic contacts, the Romans and Chinese remained far apart both geographically and culturally. They knew extremely little about each other or about the rest of the world beyond their immediate neighbors, in whom they were not very much interested either.¹⁶

Not only agricultural and industrial products were exchanged, but exposure to the music, art, religion, philosophy, and science of other cultures also followed in company, as did such innovative and crucial key products as bowed musical instruments, paper, and gunpowder.¹⁷

In the Mediterranean there was a demand for pepper, spices and silk, a feverishly eager demand. But if there had not been a passionate thirst for silver metal in India and China, that demand might well have gone unsatisfied.¹⁸

In short, although the Littoral routes had existed for some two millennia before the Europeans set out across the open ocean to Africa, Asia and the Americas, they were politically and culturally unimportant, and therefore barely noticed. It was only when the Europeans established trading posts and began reaping huge profits from international trade that the Littoral zone became truly significant.¹⁹

By the time Marco Polo made his famous thirteenth-century journey, the Silk Road was well worn, and if still not a part of common public knowledge, neither a mystery to those utilizing its trade benefits.

"Referring to the Pax Mongolica, a result of `…balanced power among rivals within the empire, imposed Mongol-style law and order on sedentary subjects with unfamiliar political cultures and ethnic traditions, and fostered a trade network that knit together Central and Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean, Siberia, and the Black Sea. This was truly the Mongol exchange; the various participants knew it was the Horde that made the network run."²⁰

But among the benefits of international exchange, less beneficial disease was also often transmitted; thirteenth-century smallpox, fourteenth-century European and Asian plague distribution, and the fifteenth-century epidemics which caused African and American depopulation are well-known examples.

. . . the Horde was facing a challenge far greater than insubordinate Italians. The Horde was also facing the plague—the Black Death …during the siege of Caffa, an epidemic broke out in the Jochid ranks. The mortality rate was so high that, reportedly, no more than one in twenty Mongol warriors survived Finally, the epidemic struck Crimea in fall 1346, yet it reached Constantinople only in September 1347. Alexandria in October, Genoa in November, and finally Venice in February 1348. The plague did cross the Black Sea and penetrate the Mediterranean, but not as a result of the Caffa siege. The trade ships from the Horde that reached Italy in summer 1347 carried not only grain but also infected, rats, mice. And fleas."²¹

IN THE SHADOW OF ROME, MARE NOSTRUM

With so much of its male population occupied by military activity, the Roman economy, based on trade, agriculture, and slave labour, had little industrial production. The main industrial base was mining metal ore and producing tools and weapons, and the material for architectural and construction needs. Roman farmers cultivated various grains, grapes, and olives, but most grain was imported, especially from Egypt. Livestock propagation was practised throughout the empire: sheep for wool, milk, and cheese; goats in other regions for similar products; and pigs for meat, skin, bristle, and lard. Farmers, in lieu of monetary tax, could provide crops to the government. As Rome expanded, the Alpine barrier to the north encouraged the development of engineering principles and road construction techniques, and the need for controlled logistics to support that growth imposed mandatory maritime interest. Since Rome did not arise from a seafaring culture, its initial measures of success were all terrestrial, but growth required both transport and defence, and such expansion both offered and required learning from their conquests and rivals, in particular the Greeks, Egyptians, and Carthaginians, all of whom were mariners. The Roman name for the Mediterranean, Mare Nostrum, indicates that they learned well, both their warships and commercial fleets eventually long dominated the entire sea and its resources. Roman ships, for war or commerce, were powered by both oar and sail, but differed in construction according to their purposes. Warships were made fast and agile, and freighters large and strong enough to carry tons of agricultural produce, such as wine, grain, and oil; metal ingots; building stone; and such additional luxuries as silk, slaves, and exotic animals. The battleships of the ancients were oar-powered galleys which allowed much greater manoeuvrability for close-quarters engagement than sail-power permitted, until ship-mounted cannon standardized more distant engagement.²² The technical nautical requirements varied; knowledge of sail handling and navigation principles needed only a few skilled and responsible hands onboard freighters, but dealing with the number of oarsmen to power a warship required special training, discipline, and, most