“What actually is music?” – The documentary “Swinging Stone Age” gets to the bottom of this question today on Arte.
Singing, for example, has complicated physical requirements: whoever sings must be able to let air flow from the lungs through the voice-generating organs in a controlled manner and for a comparatively long time. That is why many animals can be heard with comparatively short calls, without complex phrasing and melody formation. Blackbirds, parrots, whales and a few others are exceptions worth hearing. People too, of course. On the other hand, physical prerequisites are not sufficient for the creation of music. Which leads to the timeless question of what music is anyway.
Pascal Goblot’s documentation with the somewhat more pointed title “Swinging Stone Age – How did music come about?” Investigates this question with an anthropological interest in knowledge. Archaeologists have found flute-like instruments whose holes were finger-sized with sharp stones drilled into hollow goose bones 35,000 years ago. Which could mean that at that time our genre could not only paint cave walls, but also make music and perhaps also use the different pitches of different stalactites to create a percussive melody. An acoustic exploration of caves, in which early evidence of the visual arts were found, reveals interesting indications of close connections between old musical and visual arts.
“Swinging Stone Age” (Arte): Even the early Homo sapiens celebrated festivals
As is usual in anthropological and archaeological circles, rituals and contacts with spirits and ancestors are whispered. The fact that the early Homo sapiens also celebrated simple festivals and enjoyed images and music without pareligious mystifications and solemn rites does not fit well with our picture of prehistory.
But the film goes a big step back: Even the Neanderthals could do it all: singing, playing the flute, playing the drums. Were there perhaps mixed bands of Homo sapiens, flute, Homo neanderthalensis on the percussion instruments and a mixed choir in the distant past? Maybe even with an instrument in which an empty skull is connected to a thigh bone and with gut strings … well, here we leave the sector of serious speculation.
The evolutionary lines of Homo sapiens and Homo neanterthalensis separated about 660,000 years ago. It seems certain that their acoustic perception must have been very pronounced back then and that everything audible was linked to emotions. But music?
Documentation on Arte: Maybe music is much older
Everything we understand by music is more than just creating sounds. Music creates connections between sounds and emotions. That is why the documentation even takes a little detour into brain research, locating areas of the brain in which language and music generate activities – with the not entirely surprising result that there are connections.
Swinging Stone Age: How did music come about? Documentation. Arte, Saturday, June 26, 2021, 8.15 p.m.
However, there is still a lot of uncertainty as to what exactly these relationships look like. A wide gate has been opened for the history of the genesis of music: Perhaps, in future, the criterion for distinguishing between human and ape representatives of the homo genus should not be the use of tools, but the ability to make music?
But maybe music is much older than that. Ornithologists like Olivier Messiaen or Albert Mangelsdorff are of the opinion that there was music on our planet long before it was made by humans. Just listen to what the blackbird has to sing to you tonight. (Hans-Jürgen Linke)
