Ancient Echoes

Jonathan L. Friedmann, Ph.D.

In her book, Sacred Space, Sacred Sound: The Acoustic Mysteries of Holy Places, music therapist Susan Elizabeth Hale attempts a sonic link between our ancient cave-dwelling ancestors and modern spiritual aesthetics: “Canyons, caves, and rock amphitheaters were sought out and sanctified for the purpose of amplifying prayers. Later, sacred architecture was created to house our song-prayers so that Spirit could hear us and reverberate us into stillness—into a living silence where we could listen more closely to the pulse of life.” An acoustic leap from Paleolithic caves to acoustically vibrant cathedrals might seem a speculative stretch. However, according to University of Paris archaeoacoustician Iegor Reznikoff, pictographs occur in reverberant parts of a cave, and red dots were often used to mark off resonant spots too difficult to paint. This suggests that ritual chant played a role in cave paintings.

Reznikoff’s acoustic discoveries add potential clarity to ongoing debates about the purpose of Paleolithic pictographs. The images—made by hand prints, daubed fur, or sprayed pigment from the mouth or a bone tube—typically portray game animals. This holds true wherever the paintings are found (Europe, Africa, Mexico, Australia, and Southeast Asia), implying a universality of impulse and function. Some see them as inventories of animals killed, or records of animal migrations. Others contend they were used as hunting magic, perhaps to “catch” an animal’s spirit in order to make the hunt easier, or to increase the abundance of animals encountered. David Lewis-Williams, founder and past director of the Rock Art Research Institute, imagines shamans retreating into the darkness of the caves, entering a trance state, and painting their visions.

Each of these theories addresses the uniqueness of art-adorned caves, which have no signs of ongoing habitation, and are often too remote to access for everyday usage. They were special places set aside for a special purpose. Their acoustic richness best complies with a shamanistic ritual involving painting and chant. Dance might also be added to the mix, as a few images include stylized females or animalesque “sorcerers” engaged in transformational dance. Reznikoff explains in a 2012 paper, “On the Sound Related to Painted Caves and Rocks”: “When the cave has been vocally explored and the best resonant places discovered, then, in such resonant locations, provided there is a panel or panels that are suitable for painting or that can be prepared for painting by scraping, it would be natural, indeed, to paint pictures of animals. A ritual dedicated to the animal is best performed in such a place, since a ritual is always done with chant, sounds, and possibly dances, if the space is large enough. This is why the paintings are mostly located in resonant places.”

These findings support a twofold ethnomusicological observation: all known cultures have vocal music, and all cultures associate singing and chanting with the supernatural. Human beings not only possess reasoning capacity (Homo Sapiens), but also an instinct for music (Homo Musicus) and a yearning for transcendence (Homo Religiosus). Since the dawn of humanity, people have sought contact with energies greater than themselves through music-infused rituals. More often than not, these rituals have taken place in especially resonant settings, where voices are amplified and echo back—a mysterious reverberation analogous to the voice of the cosmos.

Visit Jonathan’s website to keep up on his latest endeavors, browse his book and article archives, and listen to sample compositions.

Whence Came the Musical Bow?

Jonathan L. Friedmann, Ph.D.

A note of caution should be added to any discussion of musical origins. Musical history predates recorded history. Practice comes long before theory. Current forms mask a gradual evolutionary process. Using the present to reconstruct the past is as tempting as it unreliable. As ethnomusicologist Klaus Wachsmann related, “Perhaps the most important lesson to be learned from ethnological studies is that argument based on plausibility can be dangerous.”

Wachsmann’s warning came in a 1962 article, “The Earliest Musical Instruments.” A pioneer in the study of African music, he learned firsthand the fallibility of “practical” assumptions. These include hunches concerning the musical bow, one of the oldest known instruments. “What for instance could be more plausible than that the shooting bow and the manipulation of its string led to discoveries in the sphere of harmony?” British archaeologist Henry Balfour proposed such a timeline in his 1899 treatise, The Natural History of the Musical Bow: the shooting bow was emancipated from hunting and warfare to become a musical instrument, in the process accumulating modifications.

A hunter happening upon a bow’s musical qualities is not the only possibility, nor is it the most likely. Musicologist Curt Sachs, writing twenty years before Wachsmann, declared the idea “plausible but wrong, like many plausible explanations” (The History of Musical Instruments, 1940). According to Sachs, the false assumption hinged on two biases: the practical (hunting) always precedes the aesthetic (music), and similar forms necessarily point to a shared source. He asserted that the oldest musical bows were ten-feet long, and therefore useless for shooting. Other early designs were idiochordic, with the bow and string cut from the same piece of cane and still attached at either end—an equally ineffective hunting tool. Moreover, to make a clearly audible sound, the bow needs a resonator, usually a hollowed-out gourd or the player’s mouth. This effect does not come about naturally by simply shooting an arrow.

The musical bow’s cultural meanings are similarly mixed. A cave painting at Trois Frères, dating to about 13,000 B.C.E., apparently shows a bison-man playing a hunting bow, and Plutarch described Scythians playing music on their hunting bows. Yet, Wachsmann considered the cave painting too ambiguous to be conclusive, and cautioned that a hunter plucking his bow tells us nothing about which came first. Complicating the matter, Sachs noted several customs unrelated to war or the hunt: “among many tribes only women play [the bow]; in Rhodesia it is the instrument played at girls’ initiations; and the Washambala in eastern Africa believe that a man cannot get a wife if a string of the musical bow breaks while he is making it.”

Absent a time machine, it is impossible to know for certain if the musical bow derived from the hunting bow, the hunting bow came from the musical bow, or the two emerged independently. When an instrument’s lifespan extends so far into the unrecorded past, it is perhaps unwise to disregard any plausible theory. Nonetheless, there is enough evidence to refute a simple, mono-directional development from hunting to music. Resemblances between the modern-day weapon and instrument could reflect later interactions, rather than a conjoined evolution. After all, just because we can set up pots and pans in a drum set configuration does not mean the cookware gave rise to percussion instruments, or vice versa.

Visit Jonathan’s website to keep up on his latest endeavors, browse his book and article archives, and listen to sample compositions.

Feeling Belief

Jonathan L. Friedmann, Ph.D

Anthropologists place the world’s religions into several categories, including animism, ancestor cult, nature religions, polytheism and monotheism. Each of these broad groupings contains a diversity of convictions, practices and mythologies reflective of the fertility of human imagination. Religion, it seems, is as variegated as humanity itself. Still, it is possible to locate shared purposes within these sundry (and in many ways incompatible) systems. For instance, they all strive to help people deal with uncertainties, provide meaning for their lives, give answers to difficult questions and promote social cohesion. While no particular belief or practice is common to or deemed valid by every group, these aims are universal.

A rationalist might argue that the extreme variety of religious beliefs is evidence of their falsity. If each claims to be the absolute truth, then none of them can be absolutely true. It might also be asserted that scientific research and other modern advances have made and will continue to make religious answers obsolete. Even sacred subjects like the soul, morality and apparent glimpses of the afterlife have been shown to have brain-based origins. At the same time, it is clear that the core issues religions address are inherent to the human condition. If centuries of philosophical inquiry and empirical data have taught us anything it is that life is uncertain, unpredictable and devoid of absolute meaning. That religions construct order in this chaos is justification for their persistence, even in the age of science.

It would be a mistake to dismiss religious beliefs as mere wish fulfillment. Though faith derives from and appeals to the intellect, it is not without experiential confirmation. Believers genuinely feel that they are in contact with supernatural forces. Proof of divine concern is not always observable in the course of everyday life, but there are certain feelings that provide assurance. Knowledge of horrors and tragedies might pose a challenge to belief, but sensations mitigate doubt.

It is no coincidence that cultures far and wide associate singing with the supernatural and infuse religious activities with song. Religion needs singing. It is a primary mode by which convictions become feelings. Songs of hope generate feelings of hope, songs of peace promote feelings of peace, songs of gratitude create feelings of gratitude. They yield tangible results. Of course, all of this can be attributed to music-triggered emotional and neurological responses. But in the context of worship and the mind of the believer, they are confirmations of faith.

Music’s role in supporting belief can be traced to prehistoric times. Archaeological ruins indicate that rituals were often performed in rooms and caverns with the liveliest acoustics. Paleolithic paintings are generally clustered on the most resonant cave walls, suggesting that they were used in conjunction with ritualistic chant. Neolithic stone configurations, like Avebury and Stonehenge, were similarly composed of echoing rocks. As society advanced, the association of vibrant sounds with the holy found its way into sacred architecture, where reverberating sanctuaries symbolically convey a back-and-forth between humanity and the supernatural.

It is not necessary to accept this devotional interpretation to understand music’s confirmatory power. Whether we are religious or not, we remain a species attracted to the emotionalizing effects of song and vibrant acoustics. Their impact is enough to convince us that what is being sung is right and valid. While the beliefs themselves might not resonate with people outside of a particular worldview, we can at least appreciate the persuasive hold of the music.

Visit Jonathan’s website to keep up on his latest endeavors, browse his book and article archives, and listen to sample compositions.