But there's only 7 bloody notes to play with!

The history of music and why it works, is it creativity or plagiarism? So, music moves us but are we defined by it? Do we all have a personal soundtrack and if so why does it vary, taste-wise, from person to person irrespective of status, place and age? Just what is the chemistry?

Music defines our favourite films, TV shows, products, games, people, places and events. Can you imagine film without theme, James Bond without Monty Norman, Psycho without Bernard Herrmann, Star Wars and Jaws without John Williams, Match of the Day without the MOTD theme? 

Where has music come from?

The earliest forms of music were probably drum-based; percussion instruments being the most readily available at the time.Music likely stems from naturally occurring sounds and rhythms and phenomena using patterns, repetition and tonality. We begin to automatically combine what we can make with how it makes us feel – Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response [ASMR], before the psychologists got to work with their acronyms.

It is probable that the first musical instrument was the human voice itself; singing, humming, whistling, clicking, coughing and yawning. By 4000 BC the Egyptians had created harps and flutes, and by 3500 BC lyres and double-reeded clarinets had been developed.Humans are an ingenious and creative species and these noises would have been accompaniments to the images – cave paintings or hieroglyphics – and stories they told.

What affects us sonically?

There are only seven notes and only two fields: major and minor. Like alchemists, composers are trying to make gold from base elements. The Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows” uses one chord, yet we have the genius culture clash of melody in East meets West, drone repetition and “heavy rock” drumming. In Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” we have a lyric explaining how every song ever works: the first, the fifth, the major lift. We dance to disco music because it’s twice our normal resting heat-beat, hardly ground breaking science, but it’s a rhythm that can’t do anything else other than grab you!

We need to embrace the qualities of ‘loudness’, ‘closeness’, ‘repetition’, ‘speed’, ‘colour’ and experience, for all these ‘un-musical’ terms do more to help our very understanding and appreciation of music than the very absolutes of music. Dive into Coltrane’s ‘Africa’, pop out to the ‘Pet Shop Boys’, limbo to Mozart’s Requiem and feel the force of your music.

The ancient Greeks understood the science of maths and music, the principle that mathematical relationships express qualities or ‘tones’ of energy which manifest in numbers, visual angles, shapes and sounds – all connected within a pattern of proportion. Pythagorasfirst identified that the pitch of a musical note is in proportion to the length of the string that produces it, and that intervals between harmonious sound frequencies form simple numerical ratios.

In a theory known as the Harmony of the Spheres, Pythagoras proposed that the Sun, Moon and planets all emit their own unique hum based on their orbital revolution, and that the quality of life on Earth reflects the tenor of celestial sounds. Subsequently, Plato described astronomy and music as “twinned studies of sensual recognition”; astronomy for the eyes, music for the ears, and both requiring knowledge of numerical proportions.

I’m only human, after all.

We are tribal, we live in gangs and we follow, we copy and we evolve by copying, by creating.

The history of music and the evolution of instruments can be captured in us banging things, making things up, telling stories, by us entertaining ourselves. Food and fornication = life, but we have a natural purpose to fill the gaps and that’s where music, thought, stories, love, religion, superstition, exploration and investigation comes in.

So I am only human, after all. I am shaped by my surroundings, I am hardwired to my environment, I am an individual brought to life within the comfort of a gang. We find togetherness and we look back upon what and how we have been shaped and as with evolution we need a time lapse to appreciate the changes. The time lapse for the omnipresent trend of ‘pop music’ is only 60 years, yet this developed over thousands of years. Pop music as with pop culture is the human feeding cup, feeding ground.

When we as musicians look for ‘colour’ in music we revisit the 14th century renaissance period, when are shocked by an outlandish solo artist we need to remember the birth of the soloist, the first pops star, happened in the 16th century with the baroque period. This in turn opening the stage for the classics of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart. The first wave of musical revolution came with 18th century romantics and we argue for the birth of ‘heavy rock’ within Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (1913).

Then the explosion through the last sixty years from Bill Hailey and The Beatles to The Sex Pistols and to Lady Ga-Ga, Bieber and the X Factor.

Pigeon nested humans?

We looked for the best talent to make our orchestras of the 16th century as we manufacture pop idols on TV today. We are sprinting ahead with pace and looking back armed with the future skill to know what we can steal, use and re-use from our past!

The reality of this is all around us, just open your ears:

• Radiohead steal from The Hollies, Pharrel Williams vs Marvin Gaye , Julie Garland vs David Bowie, Led Zepplin vs Coldplay
• The secret of a great tune is all very simple, good ingredients, well made and well delivered. Like a great story, it echoes a very human rhythm from individual birth and life experience and transports us to that very unhuman place called ‘right now’ – let the music stop you, take you and make you.
• As for the future, we need music, but we need new music that “allows the creatives to breathe”. We have to understand the unique chemistry of sound and vision and move beyond the current, narrow alchemy into wider fields of musical invention. We will continue to go back to go forward, just make sure it’s additive and with respect. We might just create the explosions we need.
• Humans are moved by and defined by music.
• Tip: Never judge a book by the cover, but always judge a person by their record collection!

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