Stone-Age Man in the Time of the Forest

There was no music, thousands of years before the dawn of history, in the days when man had to wrestle with the forces of nature for his very survival. He knew nothing of the succession of night and day, nor of the sequence of the seasons, nor of thunder, lightning, and rain; and so he explained these natural phenomena in a way that suited the mysteriousness of things as they appeared to him at first sight. He imagined

that the trees, the sun, the rain, the animals, the birds, and fire were inhabited by evil gods and good ones, and to please these gods, or ward off the evil of those gods' anger, he would hold prayers for them. If one of the savages wished to please the god of the sun, or of the wind, or of the rain, he would summon the members of his tribe to hold a prayer to that god, and they would dance the dance peculiar to him; and when he wanted food, he would resort to acting

out the story of the hunt. And so on...

Music Is Man's Communing with His God

All the arts — music, dance, poetry, writing, and drawing — grew from this foundation, when man communed with his gods, either to ask some favor or to thank them for some blessing. But what were the means man used to express this? Without doubt he used his hands and his feet, either by striking them on the ground or striking one against the other, or by swaying his body to left and to right, or forward and back, or by trilling with his voice. Music was the outcome of those movements and sounds — the two pillars on which music rested in its birth and its development.

Let us go further, and call the "cries" that issue from man in his hour of joy "song":

we shall then conclude that man knew singing before he knew speech. Those cries — whether the outcome of joy, of grief, or of fear — are nothing but the expression of the emotions stirring in the human soul. And if this is true, then man's first expression of his inner feeling was through music; for song is but one of the forms of music, and music, in actual fact, is nothing but a record of the emotions of mankind, expressed in sounds.

Man Loved Music, So He Set About Making Its Instruments:

The first attempt to make musical instruments was a direct outcome of man's love of song and music, and his eagerness to express his feelings well; for he found that his bodily members were not enough to express the deep feeling stirring in his soul. He then looked about him and saw two pieces of wood; he took hold of them and struck them together gently, keeping time with the beat of his feet on the

ground. Then he noticed that if he stretched an animal's hide over a hollow body and tapped the hide with his fingertips, there arose from it a beautiful sound, sweeter in rhythm to the ear. Then he found his way to making whistles from pieces of bone and the branches of trees; then he bound several reeds of different lengths side by side, and noticed the difference in sound between one reed and another — and thus came man's first acquaintance with the musical scale. He noticed, too, that the hide string stretched on the bow he used for hunting animals, if drawn far back and then released, gave a soft sound; and thus he began to use strings of hide in musical instruments.

How Did Music Develop Through the Ages?

Music, once

In this installment, and in installments to follow one after another, Mr. Fadil Abu al-Nasr surveys for us the rise of music, from the Stone Age down to our own day. Today he will present a general glimpse of the development of music through the ages — the Renaissance, the Classical, the Romantic, and this latest age of ours — attempting to record in swift strokes the masters of music who shone in every age, showing their particular character and the influence of environment on their production.