Why is music so popular?
4 Feb | Written By Samira Talbi
Music is probably one of the only consistent things humanity has ever had. The first evidence of music can be traced back as far as 40000 years ago. As long as the conscious mind existed, humanity felt a need to explore their feelings through music. The first date is going back to 40000 BP of the Upper Palaeolithic for which archaeologists have found evidence of bone flutes. These seem to have been a popular early instrument in our ancestors’ pasts.
Before than it would have been common for communities to get together and sing, followed by more organised sounds like clapping or foot stomping. There has always been a need to create music. In the early 1st to 4th century most songs were religious hymns. Back in the days when written texts had yet been a vision of the future, cultures used music as a way of keeping stories alive and passing them on to the next generations through oral singing, this was also common as preservation of written texts was not guaranteed even in later centuries.
This passing on of stories and folklore through music has also caused some alterations of these stories. One tale describes the journey of a man, who is so captivated by the sound of the fiddle that he follows the sound and ends up with the fairy folk. He cannot cut loose from it and stays listening and dancing to the music for what he thinks are merely hours. Once the fiddle player stops his tune, the man returns to his world, only to find that he had not been gone for a few hours, but in fact hundreds of years. Everyone he once knew had long since passed away and the environment around him had gone through many changes. There are different variations of this tale, as each time it had been passed on to the next generation the words of the song had been changed.
Music is everywhere and it has been since the dawn of time. It allows us to communicate in ways we usually wouldn’t be able to communicate with each other. Music can tell stories, better than words can. So much can be said with words, but even more can be said with the right setting of these words. Whether we are telling a folktale through music, are preaching a religion through it or are telling our own tales.
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