Why Music?
Recently, I've been rewatching old episodes of Top of the Pops, currently beaming into the present from the early spring of 1995. Originally intended as background noise while I work, I’ve found myself instead captivated by the show. Perhaps because a programme that showcases the state of pop music as a whole feels quaintly eccentric, with well-known pop acts sharing screen time with RnB singers, jungle and techno artists, and plucky indie bands.
A large part of the appeal is also the dim recollections I have of many songs and individual episodes, but really it’s these tonal hairpin bends that make it such compelling viewing. While the internet is celebrated for collapsing boundaries between one genre and another, and between artists and audiences, it has also created its own limitations. Nowadays, anyone can curate their entire music experience, excluding all else to the point where songs, artists, and genres may be huge cultural presences to millions but are unknown to others.
As I grow older, I find I value music more. Not necessarily with a deeper appreciation of individual pieces, but the basic phenomenon of music increasingly strikes me as fascinating and mysterious - the combination of different notes, textures, and rhythms working to locate and give voice, quite literally, to emotions locked inside.
These emotions at times seem to somehow inhabit a terrain beyond language - or, rather, music is the only language that feels adequate for their authentic expression. Scrolling through Spotify, I marvel at the sheer amount of available music (a novelty I feel will never wear off for someone like me, very much a product of the era of £16.99 CDs), but also grieve the fact that the vast majority of humanity that has gone before us was populated with people who not only didn't get to experience the mega-abundance of music that we have here in the digital age but also didn't get to hear any recorded music at all during their lives.
However, they did have music. Even those who lived thousands of years before streaming services, MP3s, CDs, vinyl, or radio signals had it. While specific traditions may differ widely, music as a concept appears to be a universal aspect of the documented human experience. For those centuries ago whose lives played out from start to finish in their villages, their songs may have been as rudimentary as a single voice, perhaps with a foot tapping the floor or a hand on a table to keep the rhythm, but it was music nonetheless. Although technology has changed how we experience music, the principle is the same today as it was then: it was put out into the world by someone performing and received by others who listened.
But music is never just about performance. It's also something we carry inside ourselves, our own personal rhythms and melodies lurking somewhere inside us, endlessly repeating and echoing, their presence delineating the emotions that dance and creep beneath the substrata of human life - emotions that may well otherwise pass without expression.
But why? Why do we have music? What evolutionary purpose does it serve? Visual art is understood to be rooted in our need to facilitate communication and enable the exchange of information, a more complex extension of which is language, all of which presumably increased the odds of early human communities surviving and reproducing. But music? The evolution of music may likewise be woven through the fabric of our shared human history, but what was its locus in our grand story?
I've heard it said that music, given its capacity to transcend linguistic and cultural boundaries, may have played a crucial role in bridging communities in early human societies, establishing the identity we all share. I'm sure this is true - it feels true. But this, for me at least, still doesn't answer why music specifically. Music may well have this overwhelming bonding power, but why music and not, say, something else entirely?
And where does it come from? An obvious source is the human voice, commonly referred to as the first musical instrument - although maybe the drumming of a fist predates the singing voice, perhaps even the rhythm of the heartbeat. Is music an extension of these human attributes?
An interesting theory is that music, as a phenomenon, grew out of a basic survival instinct, with our capacity for rhythm being a by-product of our need to pick out and distinguish the creeping approach of potential predators from the natural sounds of an environment.
A more speculative theory is that music was gifted to us, that there was some encounter experienced by early man - some grand moment, the arrival of some celestial presence, the opening of some divine portal - whereby music was handed on to them. And while the memory of this moment has been forgotten, sealed off from us in the murk of the past, its echoes remain, with melodies and rhythms handed on like a flame from one generation to the next.
I’m happy to live with the not knowing, but I think my own personal answer is simply those emotions. When we developed our systems of language to communicate for better survival and dissemination we also discovered that communication has its own power, the potent sense of liberation one experiences when one expresses oneself successfully.
Whatever means by which music found us, we discovered it acted as a valve, allowing the transmission of those emotions - yearning, desolation, love - which struggle and sway inside all of us. Perhaps, in its harmonies and rhythms, we find music is the only language that speaks to the truth of whatever it means to be human.
As can be seen in the expressions, dances and whoops of the Top of the Pops audiences, we never feel more truly and joyfully free than when we're caught in the toil of a song.