Welcome back to Between the Barlines! I’m your host Dr. Maeve Berry, and today we will be continuing our chat about music in the antiquity. Last episode, we discovered how the very basics of music, something that we call monophony, has created a lasting impact on the way that we create music today. In this episode and the next, we are going to dive deeper into the concept and explore the different ways Asian and European countries play a key part in using monophony and what led to its eventual expansion. 

	In the centuries prior to the first century AD, archaeologists and researchers have found that music in Mesopotamia strongly influenced their culture. Instruments like lyres and harps, both of which are plucked string instruments, have been found in tombs. These researchers have also found written sources on hymns that were composed by Enheduanna, an Akkadian high priestess, which are very similar to the hymns we know today; these hymns were songs to gods, specifically the moon god Nanna and moon goddess Inanna. 

Other research has been done in the East, including areas like China and India. Because of a strong Western music focus in most universities and textbooks, these traditions aren’t discussed nearly as much. Earlier in Shang/Zhou dynasties of China around the 13th century BCE, music was created by instruments like ocarinas, transverse pipes, mouth organs, and pan flutes. These instruments along with others contain their own tuning and scalar systems. 5 and 12-pitch systems were recognized around this time as the natural scales in this tradition.

Along with instruments from these dynasties, an important piece of writing from the time of these dynasties is the I Ching. This literally means “The Book of Changes.” The I Ching was a divination text that has no particular author. The book is primarily used for divination, guidance, and decision making. It also has some very interesting and important relevance today. A basis of tertian harmony can be attributed to the shapes of bigrams in the I Ching according to an article by JooWan on Medium.  20th century composers like John Cage and Henry Cowell have also based entire pieces off of teachings from this text. This book among others are artifacts that we fortunately still have today. Unfortunately later down the timeline for the Qin and Han dynasties, many books were burned in order to promote and uphold a Chinese governmental philosophy called Legalism.

Amongst other writings, around 1800 BCE Babylonian musicians began to write down what they knew instead of spreading it by word of mouth. What’s really cool about these specific writings is that Babylonian musicians used a seven-note diatonic scale when writing for their instruments. This diatonic scale is the same one that corresponds to our white keys on the piano! Now, the tuning system was probably a little different from what we hear today, but just to think about how a seven-note scale was used literally thousands of years ago and that it is what we still use today is mindblowing! 

In our “intro to music history” classes, we are typically told the first music that we know to be written down was from the 1st century AD, but the Babylonians, as previously mentioned, started writing things down way earlier than that. The oldest notated piece is from 1250 BCE that was found by scholars in Ugarit. Unfortunately, the “believed” musical notation is too difficult to make out and understand and has been assumed to be improvised or played from memory. This is also not a completed piece of music.

The first complete piece of music that we typically hear about in music history class was only discovered a few hundred years ago; it is called the Epitaph of Seikilos. We will pick up with this and transition into Greece and other European countries in the next episode! I hope you’ll join me next Monday for another episode of Between the Barlines!



Information taken from personal notes, Burkholder’s History of Western Music, and various aurally cited websites.