Howard Goodall's Story of Music

In the early 21st century, we take it for granted that the vast

and diverse world of music that's all around us can be

summoned at the flick of a switch.

But not that long ago, music was a rare

and feeble whisper in a wilderness of silence.

How on earth did that miracle happen?

Instrumental version of "Poker Face" by Lady Gaga

Music, one of the dazzling fruits of human civilisation,

has become a massive global phenomenon.

And so it's hard for us to imagine a time when, in centuries

gone by, people could go weeks without hearing any music at all.

Even in the 19th century, you might hear your favourite symphony

four or five times in your whole lifetime,

in the days before music could be recorded.

The story of music, successive waves of discoveries, breakthroughs

and inventions is an ongoing process.

The next great leap forward may take place in a backstreet

of Beijing or upstairs in a pub in South Shields.

# Can't read my, can't read my No, he can't read my poker face

# She's got me like nobody... #

Whatever music you're into,

Monteverdi or Mantovani, Mozart or Motown, Machaut or mashup,

the techniques it relies on didn't happen by accident.

Someone, somewhere thought of them first.

Music can make us weep or make us dance.

It's reflected the times in which it was written. It has delighted,

challenged, comforted and excited us.

In this series, I'm going to trace music's extraordinary

journey from scratch.

They'll be no fancy jargon nor misleading labels.

Terms like baroque, impressionism or nationalism

are best put to one side.

Instead, try to imagine how revolutionary

and how exhilarating many of the innovations

we take for granted today were to people at the time.

There are a million ways of telling the story of music.

This is mine.

You may think that music is a luxury,

a plug-in to make human life more enjoyable.

It's fine if you think that,

but our hunter-gatherer ancestors wouldn't agree with you.

To them, music was much more than mere ear candy.

ANIMALS ROAR

It was a matter of life and death.

You don't believe me? Let me take you back to 32,000 BC,

to the Stone Age cave paintings in Chauvet, France.

The people who painted them may have used singing as a life-saving

form of sat nav, a bat-like type of sonar to help you find where

you were in the labyrinth of caves.

In 2008, acoustic scientists made the extraordinary

discovery that the Chauvet paintings,

which lie within huge, inaccessible, pitch-black networks of tunnels,

are located at the points of greatest resonance in the networks,

so that singing would carry throughout the whole subterranean

system from these special points, echoing and ricocheting.

HORN ECHOES

We also now know that music played an important part

in Palaeolithic rituals, since whistles

and flutes made out of bones have been found in many of these caves.

From these dusty artefacts would one day grow Duke Ellington's

horn section and the massed ranks of the Dagenham Girl Pipers.

HORN BLARES

By the time that tribal communities began settling in one place

and farming, between 9000 and 7000 BC,

we know that music had become an essential activity.

As well as helping along the rhythm of work,

music was seen as something potent, magical,

and, if the mood required, seductive.

And yet, we've absolutely no idea what the music of these

ancient societies actually sounded like.

Because they couldn't write their music down,

it has disappeared completely.

There's no surviving video, no sheet music, no Pythagorean MP3,

not a note of it.

A few ancient instruments have been dug up, mind.

HORNS RESONATE

These ones are called lurs.

A set of six lurs were excavated in a field in Denmark in 1797,

now known as the Brudevaelte Lurs. They were perfectly preserved in a

peat bog for 2,500 years, and are still playable today.

These two are replicas.

Lurs are so famous in Denmark they've even had a butter

named after them.

These lurs may look a tad unwieldy

but in terms of technology, they're a long way from being some

hollowed-out piece of fruit, or a drum knocked up from a clay pot.

What they tell us is this...

It's a grave error to describe what musicians were up to

in 800 BC as primitive.

Making these elaborate brass instruments could only have

been the handiwork of culturally sophisticated people.

Remember, these lurs were made and played nearly a thousand years

before the building of Hadrian's Wall.

We don't know what the Bronze Age Scandinavians

played on their lurs but it was probably meant to be scary.

Around the time the Brudevaelte Lurs were intimidating

the neighbours, much further south, in the sunshine,

the Ancient Greeks were laying the foundations of western civilisation.

The Greeks believed music to be both a science and an art,

and took it extremely seriously.

It's worth noting what their seven compulsory subjects in school were -

grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy

and music.

What they loved best about music were talent contests. No, really.

Everyone knows that the Ancient Greeks invented the Olympic Games.

For the Greeks, though, it wasn't just nude running, wrestling

and throwing the javelin that was important.

They were mad about singing competitions.

Yes, The X Factor is a 3,000-year-old format,

the Epsilon Factor, one might say, or Sparta's Got Talent.

Contestants would appear before a live audience and a panel of judges.

The winners were awarded cash prizes.

This is the beginning of music as a profession.

The Greeks also invented European drama and the musical.

It's thought that the comic dramas of Aristophanes, for example,

were mostly sung.

I wish I could sing you a number from a Greek musical drama

at this point - Thank You For The Moussaka

or Greece Is The Word, perhaps - but I can't.

The tunes are all lost to us, even if we know what the words mean.

The Greeks passed on their passion for theatre,

poetry and music to the Romans,

who exported it, along with their legions, all over the Mediterranean.

But the Romans, too, never got round to writing their music down,

and so, when Rome fell in the 5th century,

the music of the ancient past was lost to us.

It's as silent as the grave.

Almost.

MALE CHOIR SINGS

Our one remaining link to the music of the late Roman world is

Christian plainchant, which dates from at least the 3rd century AD.

The singing of chant has always been central to Christian worship.

It was a sung version of the Latin words of the Psalms

and of the Eucharist, or Mass.

It's, by default, often been described as Gregorian Chant, after

Pope Gregory the Great, who was pope at the end of the 6th century.

It's beautiful, ancient and mysterious.

What it is not, we now know, is anything to do with Pope Gregory.

This is one of the worst branding mistakes in cultural history.

It would be like discovering the Wellington boot had nothing

to do with the Duke,

or that the Earl of Sandwich had nothing to do with a BLT.

HE SINGS

THEY SING IN UNISON

In the earliest form of plainchant,

musical monks would sing a meandering tune with no

accompaniment, no discernible rhythm and no harmonising.

They are singing together in unison.

Plainchant stayed the same for centuries.

But then, sometime before the 8th century, someone, somewhere had

the bright idea of adding some young lads to the choir.

HIGHER VOICES JOIN THE SINGING

It sounds fuller and brighter with higher

and lower voices combined, doesn't it?

The boys sang an octave higher than the men.

It's called an octave because in church music at the time

there were only eight notes to choose from.

On the white notes of a modern keyboard,

the two lines of voices are eight notes apart.

Having men and boys sing an octave apart prompted a further thought.

What if we had two notes together that weren't octaves,

but completely different notes taken from the choice of eight?

What if they added this note, for example?

TWO NOTES OF A FIFTH INTERVAL

THEY SING THE INTERVAL

Genius.

THEY SING IN HARMONY

They didn't go too far, mind. The new line wasn't independent

but stayed exactly in parallel to the original.

This parallel lines technique,

which began in around the 9th century, was called organum,

because, to them, it sounded like an organ, which it does.

ORGAN PLAYS SAME MUSIC

What we're hearing is the first experiment in what we'd call

harmony, the simultaneous sounding of more than one note.

THEY SING IN HARMONY

Bland and unadventurous it may seem to us now,

but then, in the early 100s, it was audio dynamite.

The heady excitement of singing two notes at once had another spin off.

This time, they went crazy.

They stopped one of the lines moving around.

In this form of organum,

one singer just stays put on one note all the time.

I say singer, but this technique is

so boring to perform they also used to play it on instruments instead,

an organ, perhaps, or now almost forgotten instruments

like the psaltery, the hurdy-gurdy or the symphony.

I'm not making this up, they really did have an instrument that played

just one continuous note. They even had a name for the long-held note.

It's a drone.

INSTRUMENT DRONES

VOICES JOIN, SINGING ONE NOTE

This drone-plus-tune-type of plainchant is still

remembered today on bagpipes.

The perforated tube you play the melody on is still called

the chanter.

BAGPIPES MUSIC

By the 9th century, the most adventurous musicians had

started to mix the two available styles together.

Parallel organum and drone organum.