The Voice

The most subtle, profound and nuanced musical instrument ever to exist; or, how music preceded language, and how losing a shared musical experience is akin to losing the connection to the divine.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God John 1:1, KJV

[Note to readers: there is not a lot of text in this piece. It is video and audio based, and cannot truly be apprecitated without the sound of the videos. I encourage you to sit with this one awhile and listen. You don’t have to listen to them all, but they are all worth listening to.]

I’ve been working slowly through Ian McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary; one part early in the book I think gets overlooked (and really only a few pages of treatment¹) is the bit about which came first, language or music. As of the writing of this book, in 2009, there was no evidence of language until about 80,000 years ago, when cultural artifacts suggesting symbol manipulation started to appear, and humans first started to ritually bury the dead. Homo Heidelbergensis 300,000-400,000 year ago, predecessor to Neandertalis and Sapien, had all the verbal architecture for language, but no language. At least 500,000 years ago, human ancestors had a hypoglossal nerve to control the tongue, sufficient for speech, as well as a thoracic nerve canal sufficient to house nerves controlling the kind of respiration characteristic of speech. So we had all the verbal architecture sufficient for language more than 400,000 years before we could talk. That is odd.

We sang long before we talked.

We mimicked bird calls. We clicked, grunted, hummed, whistled, but mostly I think, we mimicked bird calls, which became the foundation of song and then speech.

I hear them but never see them in the north woods. They have two voice-boxes, the key to their trill.

This one on the lyre bird only really gets going halfway through.

I am no fan of starlings, but I had no idea.

Maybe it was a back and forth with birds that spurred language.

Starting really at about 5min, a lesson on bird sounds. Early hunter gatherers would have excelled at this, by necessity.

The Piraha people of the Amazon, have no real grammatical structure to their language. Theirs is a language like no existing language, like something from the dawn of language. The meaning of things can change depending on the light, on the context of the moment, on the mood. They also communicate by whistling. Because their language has no need for a fixed structure, because it is so much about the immediacy of the moment, they have little use for the past or the future. Their life philosophy is something like, live and let live. Researchers have described them as the happiest people on earth.

Maybe we are not as happy as our innocent ancestors, but we have come a long way with the Word.

Ultimately music is the communication of emotion, the most fundamental form of communication…came and comes first. Neurological research strongly supports the assumption that ‘our love of music reflects the ancestral ability of our mammalian brain to transmit and receive basic emotional sounds’, the prosody and rhythmic motion that emerge intuitively from entrainment of the body in emotional expression: ‘music was built on the prosodic mechanisms of the right hemisphere that allow us affective emotional communications through vocal intonations. Presumably such mechanisms were highly important for group survival. They were also likely to have deep roots: the deeply emotional stirrings generated by music’, writes the influential anthropologist Robin Dunbar, ‘suggest to me that music has very ancient origins, long predating the evolution of language.’

Some of that is a fancy way of saying, dancing was synonymous with song from the beginning.

Much is made of the Dionysian trance dancing tradition of Greek antiquity. It started long before that.

The voice and a drum equals dancing and trance, probably since we started banging on hollow logs.

Left brained modernity and consumer society has turned the voice, drum and trance into a shallow spectator sport for mass consumption, like sportsball.

…the way we in the West view music: we have lost the sense of the central position that music once occupied in communal life, and still does in most parts of the world today. Despite the fact that there is no culture in the world that does not have music, and in which people come together in song and dance, we have relegated music to the sidelines of life. We might think of music as an individualistic, even solitary experience, but that is rare in the history of the world. In more traditionally structured societies, performance of music plays both an integral, and an integrative role, not only in celebration, religious festivals, and other rituals, but also in daily work and recreation; and it is above all a shared performance, not just something we listen to passively. It has a vital way of bringing people together, helping them to be aware of shared humanity, shared feelings and experiences, and actively drawing them together.

In defense of Ms Swift, the people who go to her concerts know most if not all the words to her songs, they sing along, and something similar to trance happens, even if it is more like the shallow worship of a human idol, than ecstatic immersion in the divine. The above quote should be instructive especially for my conservative readers, that traditional, conservative societies around the world have held on to traditional ritualistic music, while here in America conservatives have almost abandoned that entirely. As a child I attended several different evangelical churches where something of that musical tradition was in restoration, with speaking in tongues, dancing in the aisles and even something like trance. But as an American culture we have abandoned that shared experience, and it has had devastating consequences in the American psyche.

Even in American bars, at least here in the north, it is rare to hear live music, and even rarer to hear communal singing in bars, except should a band play Piano Man, or some such commercial favorite.

I’d like to change that, but it is a monumental task, not for anyone alone. As an aside, Tuesday evening I sat in a guitar circle and sang and played two songs with my guitar, for the first time ever in front of people. Several people said I have a good voice, even if it is hobbled by my less than accomplished guitar work. Whatever, I’m recovering something of enchantment and the divine for myself, making music; it isn’t my singing and guitar that is going to build a culture of shared musical experience here in the north country. That is more what I imagine for a venue that would be a foundation for such a local shift.

Though it may very well be, the West and America will have to decline to the point of collapse, and be reborn, before any kind of true shared musical re-enchantment and a true re-aligning of the hemispheres of the brain can occur. The West is chronically left-brained, hence the near abandonment of music as integral to cultural relations. Restoring the primacy of the right brain is essential to recovering a broad love and appreciation for shared musical experience, and to healing a lot of what ails the West and America.²

1. Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, 2018, New Expanded Edition, p 100-106

2. I’ve posted this one before. It is in part about realigning the hemispheres of the brain, right oriented. It aloo has links to John’s other work dicussing Iain McGilchrist.

Political Conflict in the Age of Psychic Warfare