Music

1. Music's Origins Lie in Creative Destruction and Power

A key theme of this book is that the shameful elements of songs—their links to sex, violence, magic, ecstatic trance, and other disreputable matters—are actually sources of power, serving as the engines of innovation in human music-making.

Primordial Bang. Music's genesis isn't a gentle hum but a disruptive explosion, mirroring the Big Bang itself. This initial act of creation and destruction sets the stage for music's ongoing role as a force that shatters existing social orders, creates turbulence, and eventually coalesces into new forms of expression. From the cosmic background radiation to Shiva's drum, the universe itself seems to affirm that sound is the foundation of existence.

Beyond Entertainment. Early myths rarely depict music as mere entertainment. Instead, they emphasize its power to create, transform, and even destroy. Music is a force, a tool for genesis, metamorphosis, and annihilation. It's a song that can contain a cataclysm, a power that our ancestors understood intimately.

Sex and Violence. The most persuasive theories about music's origins often boil down to sex and violence. Charles Darwin saw sex as the source of all music-making, while others argue that music arose to make war, not love. Both aspects of music seem to arise from the same biological foundations, creating group cohesion for both creative and destructive purposes.

2. Music's Evolution: From Carnivores to the Concert Hall

If you only judged matters from the musical instruments, you might conclude that orchestras were built out of the remnants of the primitive dinner table or the leftovers of a sacrificial killing.

From Prey to Play. The instruments themselves began as part of the food chain. Wind instruments came from the bones of prey, hides became drums, and animal horns served as the first 'horns.' Even the hunter's bow evolved into the earliest stringed instrument, blurring the lines between weaponry and music-making.

Orchestral Echoes. The symphony orchestra, the most respectable of musical institutions, carries this legacy of the hunt within its DNA. The instruments can be traced back to primitive origins, and the music itself often evokes images of bands of men embarking on the hunt, using sound as a source and symbol of dominance.

Territorial Assertions. Classical music continues to be used as a tool of territorial assertion, from dispersing vagrants in parking lots to deterring drug dealers from public spaces. Even Tesla's car security system plays Bach at high volume to ward off robbers, demonstrating the enduring power of classical music to establish dominance.

3. The Elusive Quest for Universal Musical Truths

Those who study the multiplicity of musical practices arrive at too many commonalities for it to be just a matter of chance.

The Universal Language. Despite the diversity of musical traditions, striking similarities exist across cultures, raising questions about the existence of musical universals. These coincidences challenge theories of dispersion and migration, suggesting a deeper, perhaps biological or psychological, connection between human beings and music.

Ethnomusicological Resistance. Ethnomusicologists have often resisted the notion of musical universals, emphasizing the uniqueness and incommensurability of each musical tradition. This skepticism has created a divide in music research, with scientists and experts in other fields increasingly recognizing cross-cultural congruencies in song.

Reconciling Differences. The growing body of science on musical universals requires a reevaluation of conventional accounts of previous eras, and a greater sensitivity to evidence and circumstances that the previous isolationist models of 'incommensurable' cultures failed to consider.

4. Music History: A Tug-of-War Between Magic and Math

At a certain point in Western history, music became a quasi-science.

Pythagorean Revolution. Pythagoras's attempt to define and constrain musical sounds by the use of numbers and ratios continues to shape how we conceptualize and perform songs. This revolution marginalized other approaches, especially the belief that music possessed powerful magic.

Science vs. Shamanism. The rise of Pythagorean music theory, circa 500 BC, changed all that by conceptualizing music as a rational science of sounds that could be described in mathematical terms. Before Pythagoras, songs possessed magical potency.

The Enduring Tension. Even today, the Pythagorean spirit is the implicit philosophy undergirding the advances of digital music—the ultimate reduction of song to mathematics. Yet the subversive magical element persists in the margins of society and retains its loyal adherents, surviving into modern times.

5. Ancient Rhythms: Sex, Bulls, and the Sacred

Everywhere bloodshed and music showed their intimate connections.

Animalistic Origins. The instruments themselves began as part of the food chain. Wind instruments came from the bones of prey, hides became drums, and animal horns served as the first 'horns.' Even the hunter's bow evolved into the earliest stringed instrument, blurring the lines between weaponry and music-making.

Zoological Mania. Mesopotamian culture reveals a similar animal obsession, with musical instruments built to look like animals and images of animals added as decorations. Sumerian literary texts reveal a similar animal obsession, with these creatures serving as the single largest source of poetic comparisons.

Fertility and Eroticism. Eroticism in these old hymns is linked with vegetation and the natural world. In a description of the sexual union of King Dumuzi with Inanna, the goddess of love and fertility, her naked body is repeatedly compared to a field that needs plowing.

6. The Rise of the Storyteller: Songs as Cultural Vessels

At a certain point in human history, weapons of mass destruction became primarily instruments of mass entertainment.

From Lyric to Narrative. At a certain point, weapons of mass destruction became primarily instruments of mass entertainment. Storytelling songs could teach lessons much better than the lyric, which had always relied more on emotional resonance than narrative clarity for its effects.

Songs as Data Storage. Storytelling songs preserved historical knowledge and religious dogma. They propagated treasured myths, cultural beliefs, and core learnings from generation to generation with extraordinary precision—you could call them the cloud storage of antiquity.

The Power of the Epic. The ability of tribal elders to remember long stories has been widely documented, but their skill in preserving scientific knowledge is just as impressive. The earliest documented concert halls in the Western world were the odeons of ancient Greece—the name derived from aeidein, meaning “to sing.”

7. The Singer Emerges: From Anonymity to Individuality

At a certain point in human history, weapons of mass destruction became primarily instruments of mass entertainment.

The Anonymous Past. For most of human history, the song was more powerful than the singer—performers and composers were so unimportant that their names weren’t preserved. This anonymity of the singer went beyond hiding a work’s origins.

The Egyptian Turning Point. The first stirrings of this more personal approach can be found in the surviving songs of the Egyptian New Kingdom, which date back to the thirteenth century BC. If we want to trace the history of the modern concept of the singer-songwriter, this is our proper starting point.

The Power of the Personal. Musical practices eventually changed, and song turned into a platform for the inner life, almost a kind of musical autobiography. Songs might actually deserve credit as the point of origin for psychology, a door into the psyche for societies that didn’t have access to Freud or Jung or pay-by-the-hour therapists.

8. The Enduring Shame and Power of Music

After the Pythagorean revolution, the rupture in Western music comes out into the open.

The Battle Lines. After the Pythagorean revolution, the rupture in Western music comes out into the open. On the one hand, we encounter the music of order and discipline, aspiring to the perfection of mathematics and aligned with institutional prerogatives.

The Power of the Shameful. The institutional power brokers in music can’t exist without periodic infusions of energy from the disreputable songs they want to exclude. This is the engine room of music history. The intense songs of outsiders and various marginalized groups possess power, and that power can’t be ignored.

The Lyric Loses Touch. The lyric will lose touch with both streams long before the rise of Christianity—we will see how the invocations of divinities become formulaic, and how the lyric turns into a platform for publicly praising military leaders and other powerful men.

9. The Battle of the Sexes: Manly vs. Unmanly Music

At a certain point in human history, weapons of mass destruction became primarily instruments of mass entertainment.

The Gendered Divide. After Pythagoras, the Greeks had grown ambivalent, perhaps embarrassed, or even hostile, to this legacy from the past. But Sappho invites us to treat it with reverence even as she prepares us for the new order of things.

The Feminine Tradition. The tradition that emphasizes fertility, ecstasy, and magic is labeled as the feminine tradition in music. The contrasting approach, celebrating discipline, social order, powerful men, and group conformity, is called the masculine alternative.

The Power of Drumming. The drum is a woman’s instrument, and that is true whether we turn our gaze to Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Greek, Hebrew, or other early cultures. These women are often shown playing a frame drum, a round, shallow, handheld percussion instrument that resembles a grain sieve.

10. The Devil's Songs: When Music Becomes Sin

At a certain point in human history, weapons of mass destruction became primarily instruments of mass entertainment.

The Rise of Sin. With the rise of Christianity in the Western world, a new element entered the equation: the notion of sin. Now, every aspect of music was scrutinized for signs of profanity and impiety—not just the lyrics, but also the instruments, the time and place of performance, the character and sex of the performer, and the emotions stirred by its melodies and rhythms.

The Recurring Pattern. The authorities try to control these passionate songs, but music resists this kind of imposed respectability and subservience to ruling institutions. Over the long run, songs defy the ruling class and create an expanded space for individual freedom and personal autonomy.

The Power of the Shaman. The relations between primitive man and animals are spiritual in nature and of a mystical intensity that a modern, desacralized mentality finds it difficult to imagine. At Lascaux, for example, around one hundred intact paintings of animals have survived, but only one of a human figure—and that person is depicted with a bird’s head.

11. Oppression as a Catalyst for Musical Innovation

At a certain point in human history, weapons of mass destruction became primarily instruments of mass entertainment.

The Power of the Oppressed. Musical innovation happens from the bottom up and the outside in, rather than vice versa; those with power and authority usually oppose these musical innovations, but with time, whether through co-optation or transformation, the innovations become mainstream, and then the cycle begins again.

The Purifying Process. The authority figures who impose their preferred meanings on our messy music have changed over the centuries. In the past, they might have been kings or prophets or esteemed philosophers. In the current day, they can often seem nameless and faceless, at least from the perspective of most music fans.

The Recurring Cycle. The songs of outsiders and the underclass have always posed a threat, and thus must be purified or reinterpreted. The power of music, whether to put listeners into a trance or rouse them to action, has always been feared, and thus must be controlled.

12. The Audience Takes Center Stage: A New Era of Taste

At a certain point in human history, weapons of mass destruction became primarily instruments of mass entertainment.

The Rise of the Audience. The officially ‘cleansed’ public image is promulgated—whether we are dealing with the Beatles, or back in a previous day, Sappho or the troubadours or Bach—while the disreputable past is shuffled offstage and out of view.

The Power of the People. Musical innovation happens from the bottom up and the outside in, rather than vice versa; those with power and authority usually oppose these musical innovations, but with time, whether through co-optation or transformation, the innovations become mainstream, and then the cycle begins again.

The Cycle Repeats. The authority figures who impose their preferred meanings on our messy music have changed over the centuries. In the past, they might have been kings or prophets or esteemed philosophers. In the current day, they can often seem nameless and faceless, at least from the perspective of most music fans.

Last updated: February 28, 2025