Daniel Rex) 11, of Allentown, Pa., for his question:
WHEN WAS MUSIC FIRST WRITTEN?
Some of man's basic artistic feelings were expressed with music early in his history. The first musical instrument was one of the world's best: man's own voice. Long before man developed and built musical instruments, he used his own voice in song. Music was found to be a way of expressing feelings and as a way of communicating with others.
We know that ancient man played musical instruments and also recorded his favorite songs in writing. Only a few complete pieces of music from the ancient world still exist, and almost all are Greek.
The Greeks came up with a system of using letters of the alphabet to represent musical tones. They grouped the tones in tetrachords, or successions of four tones. The first and fourth tones have a relationship somewhat like that between C on our present scale and the above F.
By combining tetrachords in various ways, the Greeks created groups of tones called modes. Modes were the forerunners of more modern major and minor scales.
Greek musicians worked out musical theories more i thoroughly than any other ancient people, our historical records show.
Pythagoras, a Greek scholar who lived in the 500s B.C., thought that mathematics and music provided the key to all secrets of the world. He thought the planets produced different tones in harmony, so that the universe itself sings. This belief shows the importance of music in the early Greek way of life. Music was important in their worship, dance and drama.
The Greeks wrote music for chorus and also for instruments in the harp and wind families.
The Romans copied the Greek music theory and their performing techniques. They did, however, invent a number of new instruments such as the straight trumpet, then called the tuba, and the first pipe organ, called the hydraulic.
Taking another look at music and history, we know that the old expression that says Nero fiddled while Rome burned is incorrect. Historians tell us that by Nero's time the violin had not yet been invented. Perhaps Nero was playing the hydraulic, the pipe organ that was used in the sports arena. Air for the hydraulic' pipes, by the way, was maintained at an even flow by water pressure, so perhaps Nero was fiddling around with a water valve.
Medieval composers struggled with the problem of finding a way to write music so that persons who had never heard a work could sing it. A monk named Guido d' Arezzo in about 1000 A.D. was probably the first to use the parallel lines in the form of a staff and to name the notes of the scale.
Music of antiquity and the early medieval period was called monophony. It was a single melodic line which all performers played or sang. In the early Middle Ages, the people continued to sing both religious and secular music in a monophonic manner. By the late Middle Ages more complicated music came about, with two or more melodies put together. This type of music was called polyphony, which means many sounds.