Music History
Primitive Music
We are sixteen year old girls. In our lives music has been a great influence in our social life, in happy times and in sad times. In some way music brings us memories from the past. For example, the group “Mazapan” reminds us, and most of our friends, our infancy years. Well, this is what has been happening for fifty thousand years all over the world. Greece, Europe, Africa and even in Latin America music is a type of language and part of the culture. “Music has been a fundamental part of history in a cultural and static way.” Those are the words of Michael Steinberg.
It all started with natural sounds people heard, animals, rain and water. Then humans started to express themselves when the language was created and therefore the rhythm appeared.
Music has played a fundamental role in the older times in many areas like religion, education, culture and all related with spirits.
In the VIII century B.C, in Greece music was like a message of the God Hermes. Greek philosophers even related music with mathematics because they believed that the rhythm of music was related with numbers. They even believed that it was possible to find the perfect equation, and thus the perfect sound. For Greeks music was so important that it was part of their most important ceremonies such as marriages, funerals, and birth and religious festivals.
In another part of the world, China, the emperor Hoang-Ti in the II century B.C, made their servants invent music but with sounds of nature. It also had some religious meaning in other places like Germany. In America, people used music to scare bad spirits, bring rain, cure people etc. Now a day, some primitives of the Amazons still use these techniques.
The sociologist Karl Bücher believes that songs were created because of rhythms of nature, later it meant a shout of expression, and then sentences were added and finally it became poetry with some rhythm.
Music Importance
Music has always played a special place for those who suffer. For Africans slaves it represented a scream towards freedom, for the oppressed it means a breath of liberty, for the ones who cannot be heard a way to express their feelings. There is a dance, the Capoeira which was created in an African tribe who were escaping from slavery in the XVI century. It represents the attack of the white people against the black people.
In other words music has been part of human beings since their beginning of communication. Today we can notice many different styles of music, themes, instruments, type of artists, etc. But we should ask if music represent our culture and feelings. Music must communicate and hopefully it will never lose its essence which is to express feelings.