The Symphony and the Stars: How the Mysteries of the Universe and the Mysteries of the Muse Shaped our Mind and our Spirit
Part 1
In the Beginning
The birth of music in the human animal is forever lost to time. The best explanation is that a form of proto-singing served as subtle communication during conflict and the hunt. Humans, being extremely imitative like all our primate brethren, likely copied birds and various other animals first. However, this cannot be properly called “music” in the sense that, without metaphorical independence, it’s merely a by-product of experience.
In terms of dating, the obvious marker is the evolution of speech, which singing almost certainly would have pre-dated. There is no known culture that does not sing, and the ability to mimic animals and express emotions originates in non-speech vocalizations. There is a healthy debate amongst archeologists as to what species of the genus Homo would have first developed the physiology necessary for speech, and the earliest candidate is Homo erectus, the famous fossilized hominids found in the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania immortalized by Gary Larson in a dozen Far Side cartoons. Their skeletons—broad rib cages excepted—look human enough, but it is the small bones and subtle morphology of their throat and oral cavity that would have tipped the scales in their favor.
Speech requires the ability to control the breath as well as the tongue. Babies are born with their larynx higher in their throat because it allows them to breath more easily when they nurse. The repositioning of the larynx after infancy occurs in both chimpanzees and humans, but it is the descending of the delicate hyoid bone—invariably broken when a singer is strangled—that created the throat space necessary to expand our phoneme pallette beyond that of our frugivorous cousins.
If not Homo erectus, science is fairly certain that their contemporary cousin Homo ergastor had the anatomical necessities to produce speech or proto-speech, thereby comfortably dating complex vocalization to between 1.9–1.6 million years ago. It will never be known whether the musical ear accompanied or predated it, but it is not unreasonable to assume that a culture capable of crafting the unnecessarily elegant biface hand axes found in the Archeulian toolkit would possess a more general artistic sensibility. How long could our ancient ancestors have remained oblivious to the effects of familiar sounds on their psyche? Their lifestyle allowed plenty of time for musing, and absentmindedness often leads to a tune.
The oldest known musical instrument is a tiny flute made from a hollow vulture bone discovered in Hohle Fel cave in Germany. Scientists have dated it to around 40,000 B.C.E., which would put it squarely in the hands of a modern Homo sapiens freshly migrated from the upper African savannah. Of equal interest are the shattered remains of several mammoth bone flutes nearby, indicating the first possible examples of musical frustration.
Authorities are divided as to whether the flutes would have been primarily communicative for hunters or abstract music, but it hardly matters. The musical significance of the flutes is that they are concrete evidence of the use of pitch sets. This has two major implications. First, the concept that music is composed of notes rather than an infinite gradation of sounds means that rhythm and pitch are no longer separable commodities. Second, a simple flute raises its pitch by the sequential addition of fingers, suggesting a natural order of those notes; in other words, a scale.
It is one of the great ironies of music that limitation forces greater aesthetic discretion. As with ritual and ceremony, an instrument precludes the vocal ease of “close”; the music is either right or wrong, and for a troupe of primates awakening to the significance of the cosmic clockwork revolving around them, the mysteries of music and the heavens would be forever intertwined.
The Stargazers
In the very same cave the oldest example of religious iconography was discovered. Dated to 35,000 B.C.E., the Venus of Hohle Fel is about 2.5 inches high and carved out of mammoth ivory. Like the other so-called Venus statuettes that have been discovered from this time period, it has enlarged breasts, belly, and sexual organs, suggesting a fertility cult. Spirituality had centered around the hunt and the miracle of the female body for several thousand years, but in 25,000 B.C.E. the feminine iconography took on a surprising aspect. The Venus of Laussel is a bas-relief carving of the Venus with the familiar exaggerated features, but in her right hand she is holding the crescent horn of an aurochs; a paleolithic bull driven to extinction by the 16th century. On the crescent there are thirteen notches, likely representing the 13 cycles of the moon in a year. A connection had clearly been made between the lunar and female cycles. The woman had become the goddess.
Man’s eyes would continue to be drawn upward as the greater light moved north and south as seasons passed, and the waxing and waning of the lesser light ruled the night. In Lascaux’s Great Hall of the Bulls—dated to approximately 17,300 B.C.E.—an aurochs painted on the ceiling is depicted with the constellation Taurus inscribed on the bull’s face. The Hyades cluster is a double image of its eye, and the Pleiades sits above its shoulder, proportionally distant.
The terrestrial bull of the hunt, like the woman, had transformed into the eternal, celestial bull that rises overhead in the evening sky to welcome the return of spring and the herd. Similarly, the crescent shape of its horns also recalled the lunar crescent, giving body and sinew to the mythology of the the Moon Bull. It has more recently been discovered that on the summer solstice the sun would have shone directly down the original entrance shaft, freeing the bulls from perpetual night for roughly an hour before the long decline to winter began.
Exactly what the function of the cave was is unknown, but suffice to say it was ritualistic on a grand scale. Cycles of life would be accompanied by cycles of song, and together they would form the nucleus of mankind’s spiritual awakening as the first rays of light began to peek over the horizon of human history.