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- The Devil's Music. By Giles Oakley. In this sweeping account, Giles Oakley traces the origins of blues music from the honky-tonks of New Orleans and the plantations of the Mississippi Delta to blues legends such as John Lee Hooker and B. B. King.
- Becoming Belafonte. By Judith E. Smith. Harry Belafonte was the son of poor, Jamaican immigrants and grew up in Depression-era Harlem. Despite these challenges, Belafonte became an immensely popular singer and a champion of civil rights and Black power.
- Let's Do It. By Bob Stanley. Pop music was born long before you probably even realize. In this enlightening history of the genre, Bob Stanley traces the origins of pop all the way back to the late 1800s.
- Somebody to Love. By Matt Richards, Mark Langthorne. Freddie Mercury, the iconic frontman of Queen, took the world by storm with his impressive four-octave vocal range, genre-bending songwriting abilities, and flamboyant stage presence.
- Introduction
- The Beginning: The Sounds of Music
- The Beginnings of Instruments
- Music Types: The Emergence of Different Music Types
- A Brief Guide to The History of Music
- How Has Music Changed Throughout The Ages?
- What Will The Music of The Future Sound like?
- Summary & Conclusion: The Evolution of Music
Welcome to our guide on the history of music. Here we’ve composed the historical origin of the musical genres we know and love today, along with how classical music is crucial to many music types through its establishment of musical theory. We’ve gone even deeper than composed music, however, as we’ve also had to explain how music itself as a socia...
Even before we get into the origins of musical instruments, there has been a debate on where the first sounds of music originated from. We have to walk before we run, after all, and the very sounds that encapsulate music have origins that are just as complex as the instruments we’ve invented to play them. Where most will think of those instruments ...
As we’ve mentioned, the capacity for rhythm is thought to predate melody and many of the other aspects of musical creation we’d consider nowadays. Because of this, the earliest instruments are thought to be simple and percussion-based. When we say simple, we’re talking about literal rocks and sticks, and whatever else could come to hand, anything t...
What happened after the invention of instruments is exactly what you’d expect, an explosion of different music types informed by the cultures and time periods in which each instrument was being used. The cultural context and the traditions surrounding music types came to be known as genres. In truth, what classifies music as one type or another is ...
To put the entire recorded history music into a “brief guide” is no small task, but we have a way of doing it here. We’ve instead written a set of brief descriptions of musical styles throughout the last six hundred years, since presenting the entirety of music’s history in one brief would be impossible. First, we’ll start by outlining musical dram...
There’s an obvious answer here and a not-so-obvious answer. The obvious is that the instruments we use have become a lot more advanced and specialized. We’ve come a long way from flutes that are made from bones, and the rate of instrument invention has dramatically increased. Consider this, there were tens of thousands of years between the ancient ...
More genres and musical traditions, inevitably. Look at all the 1900s had given us, the explosion of global civilization in the last century has all but guaranteed that the rapid innovations in the music industry are only going to continue. Music-making tools are available for anyone, and there’s something to be said for the democratization of thes...
With that, we’ve given a general guide to the entire history of music. There are a few things we missed out, for sure, but condensing tens of thousands of years of musical expression means that a microgenre or some of your favorite performers’ names get dropped for the big names out there. We’ve covered how music, as well as musical literacy and th...
The story of how humanity arrived at its current relationship with music is the subject of the Big Think interview with Spitzer above, in which he covers 40,000 years in 8 minutes: “from bone flutes to Beyoncé.”. We begin with his thesis that “we in the West” think of music history as the history of ...
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The 20 best music history books recommended by Kirkus, Booklist, Ken Burns, Songlines, John Lewis, Jeff Weiss, Nico Muhly and Jeff Chang.
The Rise of Music Drama. We speak of the intellectual life of the Renaissance as Humanism--the study of man--and the first writer to use the term Renaissance, the French historian Jules Michelet, referred to the reawakening or "rebirth" of ancient culture as both la découverte du monde and la découverte de l'homme --the discovery of the world and the discovery of man.
Feb 14, 2018 · Adler’s (2009) discussion in Nature of a 40,000-year-old bird-bone flute has the provocative title, “The earliest musical tradition”. But the search for the origins and expansion of music begins not at merely 40 Kya with the onset of European flutes (pipes) in the Upper Palaeolithic, discussed in the next section.
"But that music is a language by whose means messages are elaborated, that such messages can be understood by the many but sent out only by the few, and that it alone among all language unites the contradictory character of being at once intelligible and untranslatable—these facts make the creator of music a being like the gods and make music itself the supreme mystery of human knowledge."
