Incomplete And Utter History Of Classical Music

SUMERIA 1, EGYPT 0

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ver in Egypt, things were not half as good. The Semitic Hyksos kings, having driven the Egyptians south and set up their own regime around the Nile Delta, appear to have been the exact antithesis of their more or less contemporaneous Babylonian next-door-but- one neighbours. When it comes to music, culture and the arts in general, their tenure of this precious region, roughly from around 1650 to 1550??, produced the following things: nihilum, ouSev and ,W~^AU~^II P Although there is no surviving relief depicting this encounter, the conversation has been handed down through the centuries. (»i, to expand, nothing, nothing and nothing, in Latin, Greek and cod l-nvptian. Yes, a bit of a don't-hold-your-breath period for Egyptian arts. No new instruments, no new music and the charts full of sad i over versions.

I KX me round up a little, then. 1500?? already, and we're doing pfttty well. We have a 'version' of music, as it were: very little harmony, though, and mosuy one-note stuff, with rather weird instru-numation. So, something that we in the UK today might not i ii i ignize too much, unless you happen to be a Phil Collins fan. The I liuites of northern Syria were doing very well, thank you very much, with a whole host of instruments, among them the guitar, trumpet, lambourine and lyre. Later still, around 1000?? onwards, there's also evidence of professional singers and musicians being connected with religious ceremonies in Israel, using many of the same instruments. But to get to the first actual recorded piece of music, you have to skip a full two hundred or so years, back to the Sumerians. They had got their five-note scale, too, some time after 800?? and left the first ever piece of music not long after. It was a hymn and, obviously, when I say recorded, I mean it was carved on what is known as a cuneiform tablet, a wedge-shaped piece of clay, which would be inscribed with a stylus when wet. Now, if I simply ignore the best part of a hundred years or so - and believe me, I am more than prepared to do that - then I can get on to the Greeks, in earnest. And who better to start with than Terpander of Lesbos? Er, that's a rhetorical question, by the way.