Re: Music 30-35,000 years ago

[Jurriaan Bendien <bendien@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> BBC World service this week featured a programme about drums quoting a
> Paul Barnes saying that the earliest evidence for human music making
> goes back 30-35 thousand years ago

Well you shouldn't believe just any sort of sexed-up English story, you
know. There's the serious side of the BBC and then there's the puberal side
of it, as anyone knows, that's "market forces". Neanderthals were already
making music, i.e. probably twice as early as Barnes suggests.
Anthropologically, the origin of language and music are very much related in
human culture. Cognitively music and math are also closely related. A much
better, thoughtprovoking site to consult (if you get bored with dumbdown
culture) might be:

http://theologytoday.ptsem.edu/oct1983/v40-3-criticscorner1.htm

Personally I am mostly just concerned with a few pop tunes at the moment,
not profound musicological interests (although I have always taken my pop
music very seriously; it's just that if music just becomes degraded to
functional suck-and-fuck, or a mere sign, well then one just has to reframe
music in a different way, for an interesting, enjoyable or creative effect).
There is a lot of interesting literature on the use of music in workplaces,
wars, and so on, i.e. the uses (and abuses) of music in politics, economics
and "regimes of accumulation" (if I may use that awful term for want of a
better word). But that sort of thing is far removed from the Neantherthal
phase of musical enjoyment of course. What kind of tonalities are actually
conducive to social amelioration in this crumbling postmodernist culture we
live in ? It's an interesting question I think, although some idiot would
probably trivialise and banalise that also.

Jurriaan