Incomplete And Utter History Of Classical Music

FRENCH WITHOUT EARS

T

ypical. Not only do they make great food, great wine and great lovers, but some people also believe they got the whole music thing first, too. How best to explain this? Well, maybe you could just go with me for a minute, and imagine you are in a cave. You are not far away from Perigeaux some 30 kilometres north of the Dordogne river, once it has parted company with Bergerac. Gorgeous part of France, so possibly take in a spot of wine-tasting when we've done. It's here, in a little place called Ariege, in the Magdalanian cave of Les Trois Freres, that you come across a groovy little wall painting of a character who appears to be half-man, half-bison. (Now there's a phrase I haven't heard since my coming-out party.) In his hand is clearly some sort of bow, and many scholars who can claim to be far cleverer than me have stuck their academic necks out and said: it's almost certainly a musical bow, possibly even a dual-purpose bow -one that doubled up as half instrument, half lethal hunting weapon. I can think of any number of orchestral musicians who would relish a chance to pull one of those from their case.

If it is indeed a musical bow that the half-man half-bison is carrying, then he probably fixed it to his hunting mask - lining it up with his nose - and struck it with his hands. A not dissimilar practice goes on in many a city traders' toilet today, albeit of far less interest to fl Euterpe, incidentally, was one of the Nine Muses, her particular area being music. musicologists. If you take all this as even, fairly believable, then you do realize that we're talking at least eight and a half thousand years before I lie first Egyptian cat looked up from his food, cocked an eye at his master and thought, 'Something in my gut tells me that bloke's up to something'?

OK. 13,500??, and you've got some sort of sketchy evidence of some sort of music going on. After that, give or take the odd 'mammoth-bone flute' turning up here and there, you have to wait another nine or so thousand years - or two and a half Wagner operas -lor any real proof that music even existed. If you were to chart a musical map of, say, 4000??, then you really wouldn't need much in the way of different coloured crayons at all. You simply have a colour for the Egyptians, one for the Sumerians or Babylonians, and another one for the Greeks. If you happen to have a couple left over for China and India, then all well and good. Let's start with the top three first, though, and that rather uneasy cat.