A Brief History of Music by a Leading World Expert

A Brief History of Music by a Leading World Authority

Ok, maybe not leading. Alright, not even an authority. However, I was struck by an idea that I decided to research.

Can you imagine Elvis singing Jailhouse Rock without the brilliant, sliding 'duh-DUn' of the electric guitar? Can you picture Sinatra crooning One for My Baby without a piano beside him?

It was sort of thinking aimlessly about that sort of thing that led me to an idea that I wanted to test out.

Anyway, here’s the idea, and it has two parts;

Part 1 - every major form (or genre) of music is defined by a particular musical instrument

Part 2 - the arrival of the instrument precedes the arrival of the form of music?

Note; we’ll stick with mostly North American music here as it's what I’m familiar with.

So in a nutshell; I could easily in my mind determine what instrument defined what genre (they'll be noted below). What I wanted to know was; did the instrument precede the genre or the other way around. I though the former - the instrument led to the very formation of the music - and decided to put it to the test.

I started with the oldest common genre, classical music. The instrument classical music is based on is the violin, something I think most people would agree with. Strings commonly make up about 3/4 of a symphony orchestra and the sounds most of us associate with classical music are the sounds of strings. The first sort of modern style violin was built in Italy in 1530. And though it is subject to some argument, classical music is generally dated from Italy around 1550. Ok, chalk one up. This very much encouraged me to look some more.

Classical ruled for a long, long time (some 470 years later it is still very much around and still based on the violin). Classical ruled for so long that the next thing I could come up with was the blues. The instrument it is based on is the flat top, steel stringed guitar. Whether a twangy pluck or a mind-bending steel slide, the sound of this guitar pretty much defined early blues. Interestingly, although the nylon stringed classical guitar had been around for quite a while, it wasn't until a guitar maker named C.F. Martin moved from Germany to the US in 1833 and started designing and building the x frames (that essentially are still used today) for steel stringed guitars that they came into being. And though dates for the start of the blues are understandably vague, basically it started with the slaves in the mid 1800’s and by the time that music got to resemble the blues, perhaps in the 1880's, it was happening with the flat top steel stringed guitar. Again, the instrument pre-dated the genre. Later on blues very much adopted the electric guitar and the fact that it altered its base instrument may explain why blues is such a diverse genre. The blues of course, 170 years later, is everywhere, and still very much based on the guitar, both acoustic and electric. Country and folk music both sort of grew up out of the blues, probably starting in the 1920’s, and both are guitar based as well.

Whether we could call ragtime and honky tonk a genre of music is probably debatable, but it is important, as we will see. Although most people would recognize ragtime music, it is rarely played anymore. The sidecar of it that survives is boogie woogie (which may well pre-date the other two, with rumours of it in the late 1870’s in Texas). All of these are based on the piano; the key thing here is that is not just the piano, which had been around for quite a while, but the sturdy, upright piano that found its way into saloons and bars everywhere, from the wild west to English pubs (as well as into the drawing rooms of many homes leading to popular songwriters like Stephen Foster). That piano didn't start getting built until the early 1870's by places like Tonks Pianos in Chicago. And all these styles of music followed shortly thereafter. Once more the instrument came first. Saloon signers, which Sinatra liked to refer to himself as, basically emerged signing alongside these pianos, a tradition that continues very much today, maybe most notably in jazz.

Here is Sinatra singing One for My Baby; if you watch two clips you'll get a feel for the song both early and late in his career - I love the feel of the club in the first one with everyone talking. Ironically, it's the wrong piano in both :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcV0Ahxvb3c

Jazz. Yeah baby. Jazz is the one genre based on two instruments, not one; the saxophone and the trumpet. Forms of the trumpet had been around forever, but the B-flat valve trumpet was perfected about 1890, and the saxophone, though invented in 1840 reached its modern form about the same time. And about ten years later, in New Orleans, jazz was born. And 120 years later, it’s still with us and although it can be recorded in all shapes and sizes, is still very much based on the trumpet and the saxophone. The instrument(s) came first; and it is impossible to consider the sky searing riffs of Louis Armstrong on Potato Head Blues without imagining it being on the trumpet (a song Woody Allen naming as one of his "reasons why life deserves to be lived.")

This is by far the best rendering of the original recording I have ever heard of this - I feel like I'm sitting next to them in the jazz club;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-f2HoYA9aY

And of course, the current reigning champ, rock and roll, which no one would argue is based on the electric guitar. Les Paul invented the first crude one of those around 1940, and about 12 years later, rock and roll happened. And 65 years later it is thriving and the electric guitar is king; although the folk, country and blues elements of rock are undeniable. And because it is rooted in the very loud electric guitar, the signing style of rock is as different as night and day from the saloon style of singing that went with the piano, and the storytelling of folk and blues that went with acoustic guitar (not to mention a dancing style on display here by Elvis - I don't think it has ever been duplicated, which might be just as well)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gj0Rz-uP4Mk

Is rap a legitimate music form? I’m willing to consider it legitimate - it’s now been around some 35 years. But if so, what instrument would it be based on? Well, I would say the manually manipulated turntable. And there is no doubt, in the history of rap and hip hop, that the ‘breaks’ and break dancing produced by handling the turntable preceded the rapping that went over them. In fact, like all the other examples, it is those very breaks that opened the door to rap itself.

Just as the soaring sounds of many strings together bred classical music, and the soulful twang of a steel string guitar or its mind bending slide sound bred the blues, and the incredible twinning of the lightning fast riffs of saxophone and trumpet by jazzmen like Charlie Parker and Dizzie Gillespie defined jazz, and people like Jimi Hendrix made a guitar do things nobody imagined in shaping what rock could be; the instruments themselves both bred and defined the genre.

So, there it is. My brief history of music. Interestingly, it probably points to what will be next - a form of digital music would be my guess. Perhaps a new digital instrument will lead the way - after all, almost every electric guitar doing live blues and jazz and rock still performs with an analog tube amplifier. And there is still nothing in the digital world that does what a saxophone or trumpet does. The piano is a different story, as digital keyboards are everywhere. Perhaps something will come that way. We’ll have to keep our eyes, and ears, open.