Music has always been around us in the natural world and somewhere along the line Homo sapiens latched onto the concept. In the early days of man, we probably just drummed. It was good to beat things and communicate in anger or in joy with nearby tribes. The drums sounded good in the night and probably kept the ghosts of dead ancestors away in addition to the saber-toothed tigers.

Chanting and little mumbles ended the mating and the hunting and the feasting. For a moment, there was an inner peace and maybe a few hours of sleep before the game of survival began again.

Melodies began to be played in Mesopotamia and out of Egypt came systems of tonality that are still utilized today. There were instruments that could be plucked, there were light wooden horns that didn’t project, but they sang in a quiet sweet voice. Already there was music for war and ceremony, music for love and death and an emergence of the soul of humankind. The animal howled within us, but we were learning to stifle the primitive cry and in its place compose a tale of aural spirituality.

The lyre and kithara helped us in praising Dionysus. Playing music was worshiping. Music was a microcosm. And with our playing, we felt that were controlling our fate and the fate of the very heavens. The aulos accompanied our poetry reading like a migratory bird. The first examples of written music came to us from thirteenth century Greece.

And after the fall of Rome there was darkness over Europe. The Edict of Milan came about in the year 313 A.D. In China and the Middle East there was twelve-tone scale development with complicated heterophony championing the nuances of life? Much music was being made though little of it was being written down. Martianus described the trivium and the quadrivium and Bothius emphasized the influence of music in a high sense of morality based thinking.

For the next several centuries vocal music developed to a high degree. Vocalizing became an integral part of the Christian faith and Canonical hours provided people with the time of day and a melody. Choirs and soloists played out thematic elements of their faith. The antiphon was the song of the age.

Certain instruments came into their own. The lute, the psaltery (a type of zither), the recorder, the trumpet, bagpipes and drums all were being played in praise of God with a minority of compositions dealing with secular issues. Composers were becoming interested in polyphony. By the sixteenth century the madrigal was the most highly regarded manifestation of secular music. Poems composed for the purpose of being set to music. They could be emotional, erotic or concise text paintings. Monteverdi’s polyphonic madrigals were statements of the very nature of Europe in the 1600's.

The basso continuo and a new intricacy in counterpoint moved us through the baroque period. Opera materialized into some of the highest forms of musical expression. The baroque organ had only a tiny wind pressure utilized in its mechanisms in comparison to today’s church organs, but still organ music in Germany during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries reached towards the heavens in resounding toccatas or praeludias. Bach composed most of his works on the organ and synthesized the best stylings of Italian, French and German musical flavoring.

The eighteenth century included the American Revolution, the French Revolution, Mozart and Beethoven and an emphasis on internationalization of European life. It was the Age of Enlightenment and a humanism never seen before. The masses were beginning to have their own musical tastes. Suddenly it seemed that every person owned a piece of musical consciousness. We were now a society of humankind that seemed to be making true progress with the belief in the value of every human life.

The great composers and the nobility and the commoner began to develop notions of classicism versus romanticism. The orchestra and the symphony played works that seem to explain the birth of the cosmos, the advent of man and the fall from grace. In Beethoven’s Ode to Joy there is a sense of spirituality so deep that the listener hears the creator in him or herself as easily as the Bushman could hear the approaching herd of antelope.

In the nineteenth century we see the rise of nationalism. From The Mighty Handful all the way to Sir Edward Elgar, one can see the presence of a feeling of unification within the motherland. Patriotism was on the rise and the western world was about to confront another demon more fearsome than any other the world had ever seen before. On the horizon were world wars, the industrial age leading to the information age, racial and national genocides, and our ability to destroy the entire planet and the overwhelming Age of Angst if you will.

On May 29, 1913 Stravinsky gave the first performance of Le Sacre du Printemps in Paris and the world would never be the same. With its emphasis on rhythm and the very sounds of primitive man, he single-handedly created the sounds of the modern and post-modern ages. If you listen closely, you hear the unyielding intensity of bebop metric time, the serialist notions of tone rows, the piercing wail of the distorted electric guitar and ultimately a question of what is buried in our hearts....Is it the frightened little mammal or the self-made deity splitting the atom and the genetic code?

Today composers may sample the sound of breaking glass and write a sound scape around this theme of shards in motion. Western and Eastern musical notions have perhaps come closer together with an overall acceptance of micro tonal composition. And even as you read this, Netscape is that distant family relative we all share. I would ask you to consider the human voice in all this or even the cry of the wolf. Musicologists and music educators and artists tend to agree on the point that even the most emotive tenor saxophone line or the lushness of a perfect string section cannot communicate what is in our natural biological voice. The value of human life has grown in most societies and certainly life expectancy has skyrocketed, but I wonder if the voice can ever learn to sing the song of FORTRAN, cesium 137, secular humanism, the destroyed Amazon or the extinct Walmarticided corner deli? Or did the simple vocal cords have their finest hours in the moonlight as we crouched naked on the windswept plains?