Book Extract | The Shortest History of Music by Andrew Ford

—W.H. Auden (1907–1973), English poet

Musical sounds exist in time and the time is always now. It doesn’t matter whether the music is spontaneously improvised, remembered from childhood or sung from a 500-year-old manuscript: it is made in the present. The manuscript is a repository of music, but it is not the thing itself. For any music fully to exist, it must be lifted off the page and played or sung. In that moment – in the here and now – it comes to life.

Modern notation had its origins in eleventh-century Europe. Much developed and refined, it led to the composition and preservation of the world’s largest body of music, loosely called ‘classical music’, somewhat (though only somewhat) more accurately known as Western art music. But in the eleventh century, music notation had already existed elsewhere for more than two millennia.

Why do we write music down? Why do we write anything down? In the first place, to remember it. Just as we might make a packing list so we don’t forget things, we jot down a tune so we can sing it again in more or less the same way. Until the invention of sound recording, there was no means of preserving music except by trying to remember it. But what was being preserved in the earliest forms of notation? Lists of instruments, information about tuning strings and instructions for playing and singing the music itself: it’s a tantalising glimpse of something we can never hear, because even if we could fully understand the instructions, the instruments no longer exist.

The earliest example of notated music is the cuneiform writing on baked clay tablets in the city of Ugarit in what is now Syria, dating from around 1400 BCE. The notation evidently relates to a set of approximately thirty-six hymns (because they are in fragments, it is hard to be certain of the number). They’re known as the Hurrian Hymns, after the Hurrian people and their language, and one of them – the Hymn to Nikkal, a goddess of orchards – has a complete set of lyrics and some instructions for accompanying the singing on a lyre.

Among the many problems faced when attempting to decipher the notation is that we don’t understand Hurrian very well. Also, it is hard to be sure of the relationship between the words and the music, because interpreting the music itself is largely a matter of conjecture. It is clear from one tablet that the lyre has nine strings, and we know something about their tuning and the intervals between the strings. But there is no real indication of melody or rhythm. Consequently, every modern attempt to produce a reading of the Hurrian Hymn to Nikkal – and there have been quite a few – has resulted in a substantially different piece of music.

Many of the Sanskrit hymns in the Hindu Rig Veda date from around this same period, so when they were written down, probably in the third century BCE, they had already been chanted for a thousand years. The chanting, known as samagan, consisted initially of three tones or tonal accents derived from the pitch accents of Sanskrit. They were later expanded to seven accents and eventually resulted in the ragas of Indian classical music. Since the Sanskrit texts were annotated with these accents, the Rig Veda itself offered a musical score of sorts, similar to those of Greek and Byzantine chant and early Western plainsong, in which neumes placed above the words indicated the rising and falling of pitches without being precise about them. This sort of notation was really an aide-mémoire. If you knew or half remembered the melodic contour to which you had previously sung the words, the neumes might help you sing them again, but you couldn’t pick up one of these scores and sightread it. Also, this was music for a single voice or voices singing in unison. Anything more elaborate was going to require a system of notation capable of providing specific information about pitch.

The naming of notes, known as solmisation, began, one may assume, with the naming of tonal accents in speech. Many musical cultures use a system of solmisation. The version most familiar to Western musicians is solfège, probably invented by an Italian monk, Guido of Arezzo, in the eleventh century. He called the notes Ut, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol and La, taking their names from an acrostic of an eighth-century hymn to John the Baptist in which each line began a step (or half a step) higher than the last: Ut queant laxis / Resonare fibris / Mira gestorum / Famuli tuorum / Solve polluti / Labii reatum / Sancte Iohannes. The so-called Guidonian Hand was invented, employing the fingers and their joints as a mnemonic technique.

Fans of Rodgers and Hammerstein will notice that Do and Ti are missing from Guido’s scale. The more singable Do replaced Ut in the sixteenth century, but it wasn’t until the eighteenth that Si was added – formed from the initials of Sancte Iohannes (Saint John). Until then, if you wanted to go beyond six notes, you had to rename La as Mi and start all over, a cumbersome way of doing things. The addition of Si solved that. (In the English-speaking world, Si finally became Ti in the nineteenth century, paving the way for Julie Andrews.)

But even with the seven-note scale (that will bring us back to Do), there are still limitations with solfège and two distinct ways of applying it. In one version, Do is the note C, Re is D, Mi is E and so on, and they never change. But there is also the concept of the movable Do, in which Do becomes the first note of whatever scale you happen to be dealing with. Either way, it is clear that solfège and its equivalent systems are a formalisation of the oral transmission of music. In classical Indian music, sargam – Sa, Re, Ga, Ma, Pa, Dha and Ni – is used by teachers to pass on ragas to their students, and sometimes by a performer wanting to call out to an audience the details of a raga.

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Andrew Ford, Shortest History of Music,‎ Picador India, 2025. Pb. Pp. 384

Music is not only widely discussed but also the most readily available form of art known to mankind. At just the click of a button, one can now listen to any song of any genre – even from the last century! But it wasn’t always this way.

In this brisk, breakneck journey across millennia, award-winning musician and broadcaster Andrew Ford paints a glorious picture to show what really draws us to this sonic art form and how it has evolved. He traces the inventions and reinventions that have contributed to the popularity and accessibility of modern music; early oral forms; the invention of notations; the first recording technology and record companies, and explores how the multibillion-dollar industry we know today came to be.

Andrew Ford's music has been performed and recorded around the world, played by ensembles such as the Australian Chamber Orchestra, the Brodsky Quartet and the New Juilliard Ensemble, and sung by the likes of Yvonne Kenny, Katie Noonan and Iva Bittová. He presents The Music Show on ABC Radio National and has written ten books ranging from a study of sound in film to the songs of Van Morrison to the compulsion of composers to explore the primitive in their music.