Problemy z zagadnieniem genezy muzyki

Abstract

Problems with the origins of music

The origins of music have attracted the interest of representatives of various areas of knowledge and intellectual movements; however, the theory of music being born at a very early stage of human evolution is yet to be sufficiently substantiated. As things stand now, various hypotheses are proposed to be assessed for their scientific usefulness. Those hypotheses testify to the popularity of a belief that music was first made of sounds related to primitive people’s needs, i.e. functional sounds. The authors of the hypotheses also find these needs in the ways food was procured, in work-related processes, in communication over a distance, participation in rites, games, etc., or simply in human nature. Some of those needs are referred to and analysed here. Another question is why and when those functional sound structures could be transformed into the art of music, or when they started to provoke people to be handled that way. In the author’s opinion, this happened when somebody became interested in a sound structure if only for the fact that they liked it, or in other words, because of an aesthetic need or simply for fun. Accordingly, the author believes that the birth of music can be pinpointed neither to any place on the map nor any time in history, as it was induced by many individual instances of a new non-functional approach to sounds produced or only heard by people.