Harmony In Ancient Music

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HARMONY IN ANCIENT MUSIC
The Oldest Song in the World

For fifteen years Prof. Anne Draffkorn Kilmer puzzled over clay tablets relating to music including some excavated in Syria by French archaeologists in the early '50s. The tablets from the Syrian city of ancient Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra) were about 3400 years old, had markings called cuneiform signs in the hurrian language (with borrowed akkadian terms) that provided a form of musical notation. One of the texts formed a complete cult hymn and is the oldest preserved song with notation in the world. Finally in 1972, Kilmer, who is professor of Assyriology, University of California, and a curator at the Lowie Museum of Anthropology at Berkeley, developed an interpretation of the song based on her study of the notation

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Why Do Scales, Keys and Harmony Exist?
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At the earliest times in musical development, a sense for "melody" would not have occurred overnight. Prior to it, music often was the playing of single notes, assigned to various rituals, such as one gong for moon, another for sun, another for death, birth, etc., and played without much or any regard to their succession as musical melody of any sort. Scales might even be virtually non-existent as was harmony.
What is harmony for? After all, a single tone is more "pure" than any combinations of tones or chords, which are cluttered with overtones that are usually dissonant with each other. Why did humanity bother to add, to the relatively clean single tone, "harmony" notes (and therefore, greater dissonance)?
The answer is that harmony's function has evolved mostly to make the notes of melodies "connect" or to make their connection to each other melodically more apparent to the ear by making their common inner overtones audibly explicit in chords.
It follows that harmony had no reason to exist among any people who are lacking scales. Scales are, historically, "congealed" or "generic" melody in the abstract.
Once scales developed (especially a favoured two, major and minor), then we are looking at a people for whom connections between notes is very important. The agenda is whether melody is important enough for them to overlook the dissonant elements in chords (compared to their purer, more consonant single tones), so as to allow them to use chords in the enhancement of their melodies. Only after the full scale and melody develop first can harmony even begin to appear on this historical agenda.
The oldest song dates this agenda far earlier in time and gives to the diatonic scale a near-universal status not formerly ascribed to it.
"Tonality", which is defined as a "loyalty to a keynote", is also exhibited in the oldest song by repeating phrases found at the end of sentences, usually on the same note as the keynote of the tune.

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مستقبل الموسيقي الحديثة
The Future of Modern Music is more than just a history or a who's who of early to mid-20th century art music--that which is most commonly called by musicologists and other art historians “the modernist era”. McHard shows us that the "modern" in "modern music" refers not to just one specific historical era in the 20th century that is now over; it is, as he develops it, a compositional attitude that transcends any given era in music. For example, one might argue that, in the most general sense, the best music of any given historical era is always "modern" in that it is always experimental and groundbreaking; that is, of its time, as were the masterworks of Bach, Mozart, Berlioz, etc. in their time. It is only in retrospect, after a radically new work has become accepted by the critics and by the public, that one can say that it has become a “classic”. It frequently can take, in our time, up to fifty years or more after a work has been composed for that to occur.

For McHard, any type of "post" music is decadent; a "post" music being one that looks back to previous eras, attempting to recover the lost listening satisfactions embodied in those beloved older musics by imitating, parodying, or collaging them. This may be due to nostalgia on the part of the composer, or possibly, in some cases, a cynical attempt to pander to the public's nostalgia. Another possible cause might be due to a failure of imagination on the part of the composer to get beyond his personal musical impasse. In any case, it would seem that McHard's point is that the only "authentic" attitude possible (in the existential sense) for the composer of any era to adopt is "modernist". We may define this "modernist" attitude, in the most general sense, to be that intransigent, uncompromisingly tough stance of the composer who says to himself and to his public: "On, ever on . . ." In other words, no turning back. No "post-music". If a musical impasse is reached, one must find the courage and imagination to compose one's way out of it; no return is possible to the halcyon days of past musics

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تابع مستقبل الموسيقي الحديثة
The Future of Modern Music is also a unique overview of music in the 20th century in that it focuses on composers who are either unjustlyneglected (i.e., Malipiero, Ruggles, Varèse, etc.), or who have simply not yet been recognized for their great radical genius (i.e. Scelsi, Xenakis, Estrada, etc.). Mr. McHard's book gives us a very different picture of the 20th century's contribution to art music. This book does not emphasize sterile historical debates such as Schoenberg vs. Stravinsky, or, more recently, the blind alleys of neo-romanticism, post-modernism, or other pastiche-ridden musics that all seem to scream out that sincerity and originality are dead, no longer possible, or even relevant. Instead, the book focuses on those composers who are the very antithesis of all that musical decadence.

What links all these figures, despite the heterogeneously sounding qualities of their musics, is that they all adopted that tough, uncompromising attitude of "On, ever on...", often to their immediate personal and economic detriment. Each composer studied in this book took the hard route, making music that was uniquely his own. Thus, not only is this book a lesson in musical history; it is also a study of artistic integrity and ethical courage.

The heart of this book, that which shows that "modern music" is not dead today, is that part which describes the work of those composers who have contributed to the new paradigm of working with sound itself as the primary material to be developed in a musical composition. From Cage's admonition of "Let the sounds be themselves" to the Scelsian voyage into the "heart of sound", we find in these "sound-oriented" composers very unique contributions to a new kind of "modern music". It is a music which is the true music of our time, where a personal sound world is forged out of the very stuff of the inner musical imagination of the individual composer, as Julio Estrada so rightly emphasizes, both in his work as composer and composition professor.

McHard, himself, is also a composer of the very type of "modern music" of which he writes. He, quite modestly, never mentions his own music in his book. Having heard his music, however, I know that he knows, from his own direct personal compositional experience, what it means to attempt to translate personal sound fantasy into rigorous musical form. Such works as his Tremors for ensemble and tape and Virtuals for tape, attest to McHard's own experiences of composing, with the sound, itself, as the privileged vehicle for the transcription of inner personal experience.

McHard's book not only tells the story of some of the most interesting musical compositions of the early to mid-20th century; it also describes what is happening in the present, and what might happen in the future with "modern music". Beyond describing the rich and interesting past of the historical "modern music" era, James McHard shows us the great potential benefit for the future of art music, which continuing to maintain a "modernist" attitude would give to the musical compositions of the future.

[ابراهيم العمراني]

Hallo Master
Please translate your music harmony message
so as to develope the culture of the members
and to make him access her
Thank you Wadalsheglla
Ibrahim