In our previous article, we had our little prehistoric percussionist man, with a simple and behavioral thought: "if a noise occurs and water falls, imitating that noise, water must also fall".
Thus began the percussion and therefore the first sounds produced purposely with objects external to the body of man result in the creation of an idiophone musical instrument.
However, these instruments not only served to imitate sounds but, over time, the same man realized that the predators stayed away with that percussed sound. Therefore in its beginnings the sounds produced by objects in order to imitate nature, also served as a defense for the group and drive away the beasts. This brought with it a specialization in the use of these sounds: it was not enough to hit two woods just like that, but in a peculiar way.
All this is not something exclusive of the human species but it comes from the apes: who does not remember the image of a gorilla beating his chest with his fists with an almost perfect rhythm like sixteenths? This example is not something invented, but the rudiments of what later became the percussion with the same purpose that the gorilla produces it: "drive away their enemies and show fierceness".
Prehistoric art has no connotation of abstraction but quite the opposite, it is absolutely concrete and useful for daily life. The percussionist did not try to play in a rock band to gain fame and millions, but only because of his instinct for survival and the little brain that primitive man had. Who painted on the walls of the cave was not an illustrious painter who in a fit of madness cut his ear and sent it to his best friend or that his intention was to exhibit his works in an art gallery. All this was done with the purpose of driving away beasts and imitating the sounds of nature to generate an indispensable event to survive, in the case of percussion; in the paintings, it is believed that they were signals so that, when the nomadic tribes moved and saw these paintings, they knew what kind of animals could be hunted there or what the tribe that had previously lived had done (a kind of beginning of the story in drawings). Everything was concrete and behavioral, the abstraction came many centuries later and not with the development of an organized language but with the development of the ability to understand the environment that surrounded man.
That beginning of music and painting was the result of this improved capacity to understand an environment full of dangers and difficult for the survival of the species. All this happened long before knowing how to generate fire to heat up, let's say that we are located at the antipodes of prehistory with men more like simians that little by little were losing their simian factions.
About the Author:
My name is Gabriel Beguerie, I'm a Music Teacher and Piano Teacher in the city of Mar del Plata, Argentina.
Currently I work at the Luis Gianneo Provincial Conservatory and the Art No. 1 High School.
Passionate about History in general and the History of Music in particular.
Contact: gabriel.arturo.beguerie@gmail.com
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