Boogie Tablet

Boogie Tablet

Historical source for behaviour adaptation to modern 7-tone music

 

 

Historical source for
behaviour adaptation
to modern 7-tone music

By Wendell W. Solomons
__________________________________________________

 

Do you recollect ABBA saying it this way?

Thank you for the music,
Thank you for the joy its bringing,
Thank you - for giving it to me.

Whom should we thank for our first musical instruments? From which geographic area did waves of sound first ring out? Stones and wood could make a sound but perhaps bells, xylophone slats and frets of metal provided for the distribution, modulation and standardisation of musical scales and music?

The metal first put to wide use by men was copper. Mixed with a little tin, it produced the more resilent substance bronze.

Regarding sources for copper, Gunakar Muley says:

"Presently the site Tal-i-Iblis near the Kerman range in south-east Iran is regarded as the earliest known centre of copper metallurgy. The smelting equipment discovered from this site is datable to circa 4500 BC. From here the knowledge is believed to have spread to the west and the east. Towards the east Mundigak in Afghanistan and some pre-Harappan sites from Baluchistan provide evidence of copper and bronze metallurgy."
<www.vigyanprasar.com/dream/august99/AUGUSTArticle1.htm>

Among those first copper mines seem to have been mines in the Kheeveri mountains which fall within the borders of modern Afghanistan. Western European names for copper come probably from this region _1/ .

As for Eastern Europe, the commonest Slav name for copper is `med.' That name leads us to the Median people (living in Persia,) once again in this region. The name of the fabled Magi appeared here and from them we derive the terms `magic', `magistrate' and `majesty'. The Hungarians believe they arrived from that homeland and they call themselves `Magyar' to this day.

An encyclopaedia entry now:

"The Bronze Age occurred at different times in different parts of the world. In most areas, the development of bronze technology was preceded by an intermediary period when copper was used. This stage, sometimes called the Copper Age, did not occur in some areas, including ancient China and prehistoric Britain, where the transition was made directly from stone to bronze technology. In certain ancient cultures in Africa and elsewhere, stone was replaced directly by iron technology, and the Bronze Age was bypassed completely." (Grotelier Encyclopedia)

Later, in the Biblical era of West Asia, Ur of the Chaldees, the traditional birthplace of Abram and Sara and a river port, imported the metal. The island of Bahrain (Dilmun) served as a transit point for the metal to the Euphrates river from whence the metal was moved westwards by overland caravan.

IMPACT OF METAL INSTRUMENTS AND TOOLS

The Bronze Age permitted the creation of more accurate measuring instruments. So the first sophisticated calendars for agricultural work appeared in areas incorporating the Indus Valley. The first metal tools (including metal plowshare) enhanced man's agricultural productivity.

An increased food surplus could physically support the mental work of a larger population share of sages, healers, scribes, artisans, artists and musicians.

Much later in Rome, calendar makers still followed the count of fingers of the hands and had ten months ending in December. Then, Julius Caesar was advised to implant two months in the middle of the year and he named the months for himself and his chosen successor, Augustus. Still later, with the arrival of lenses and telescopes, planets Neptune and Pluto were discovered. With these changes, Napoleon Bonaparte is among those who attempted metrification now of the week, to ten days.

However, the seven heavenly bodies known before Caesar to Mesopotamian and Vedic astronomy continue to serve as the base for the seven-day week in our times. Even the names of days describe that (in many languages Saturday means Saturm's day.)

Sabbath' comes directly from the Semitic word `seba'a', which means seven'. Similar syllables occur in the Indo-European word stream. There is the Greek `septa' for seven.

THE SET OF 7 HEAVENLY BODIES

If we go by early Greek, Chinese and Japanese civilisations, many early musical scales were pentatonic (5 "main notes;" still a feature of Gamelan music in Bali). In the pentatonic, the octave was divided by the simple means of counting the figures on one hand. Russian composer Borodin noticed it in folk song and used it in "Prince Igor" (it was represented in the modern production `Kismet' by the song `Stranger in Paradise'.)

The earlier scale was tri-tonic (3 "main notes") if we judge by fisherman/sailor hauling chants (take the `Volga Boatmen' shanty sung by greats such as Paul Robeson) and the music of Native Americans and existent pre-Bronze Age tribesmen.

If the piano did not accomplish the task, two millennia later the world's population is in the process of behavioural conditioning to the `major' key of Western Europe. That comes about through the use in network media of the 7-tone scale of the electronic organ now factory-created by corporations such as YAMAHA in the Far East.

Instruments such as the violin and cello can produce half-tones and quarter tones between each of the seven tones, but the piano and Western fretted instruments are set to reproduce only five half tones. That gives a total of twelve that is - no more than the number of houses of the Zodiac used by early astronomers in making calendars.

This set scale seems to have percolated via traditional merchant settlements. In Cochin, India, alongside the Mattancherry synagogue (visible on the Net) still exists an ancient spice market that served rich trading houses in Genoa and Venice. After a day of taxing their wits, merchants would rejuvenate with entertainment and thence came aggregated commercial demand of the human faculties for music.

A variant based on the same number of tones and called the `minor' key had become basic to the Eastern Slavs (it must be noted that in the late 19th and 20th Century composers such as Borodin, Mousourgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky contributed to a wave of the `minor' key in Western Europe.)

Both the `minor' and `major' and scales of Western and Eastern Europe respectively seem to be gypsies, which took off from Asia somewhere adjacent to India.

So we seem to deal with the possibility that besides orienting with Bronze Age astronomy and mathematics, Europe seated itself on an Asian musical carpet.

MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR EXTRAVAGANZA

The `Magical Mystery Tour', an album title of the Beatles, could reflect this journey on a magic carpet.

The Beatles had began like Elvis Presley with boogie-woogie and be-bop adopted from Fats Waller and other performers in harmonic progressions such as `Hound Dog'. This was served up like hot potatoes in the late 1950s by music distributors. In short, using White American performers, music distributors sold Black American staples.

After a repackaging enterprise far across the breadth of the Atlantic in Liverpool, the Beatles turned their electric guitars and seemed to stumble into something else with manager Brian Epstein - into music academy.

Britain was historically known to be long on shop-keepers (even military man Napoleon has a quip) and on puns, immortalised by Shakespeare,

At the same time the country was known to be short on composers.

Howver, the electric guitars of the Beatles roamed into Slav music in academic archives. The English words in their song `Those Were the Days' were set note for note to the Russian traditional ballad `Dorogoj dlinnoju'. Only the tempo was altered from the original 6-beat, the same as in the gypsy airs `Two Guitars' and `Dark Eyes' (the rhythm resembles the later `Blue Danube' waltz, which Strauss made famous in Vienna.) Most Russian ballads are pitched in minor key (in contrast to the episodic minor transition, say in, in time-honoured English favourites such as `Ash Grove' or `Greensleeves'.)

From the `Swan Lake' ballet, the haunting harmonic progression of Tchaikovsky's main theme became for Les Beatles the main chorus in their song `All my loving.'

Then there was Rimsky-Korsakov's famed `Song of the Guest from India' in the opera `Sadko'. The song is based on a wafting between major and minor scales because the composer's objective was to let India dialogue with Russian audiences (he intended a multicultural event.) In the repertoire of Les Beatles , a waltz rhythm was introduced and the problem of song title resolved by calling the melody `Norwegian Woods'. However, it remains a give away. In the mind of a musicologist still constrained in the 1960s by `Britannia Rule the Waves', Norse would represent multiculturalism too.

So whether John Lennon and lads took their `Magical Mystery Tour' together with consultant musicologists from OUTSIDE the erstwhile British Empire is a question for us to resolve.

For circumstantial evidence in the matter we observe that extraordinary happenings had aroused the universal (that is also the meaning of `Catholic') in Liverpool-born Irishman John Lennon. Catholic Ireland does not call itself England's oldest colony without cause and we observe Lennon setting aside `Britannia Rule the Waves' with an other-worldly universality which stretched to Transcendental Meditation in India.

For attire, Lennon had discarded the tie. He was now discarding his designer polyester/wool Kommisar attire and adopting the customary habit of commonfolk Asia, called in India or Pakistan the Salwar Khamiz (compare `chemise.') He adopted Yoko Ono as mother for his child instead of camp-following blonde or brunette debutante, the choice of a hundred Western venue's wealthy entertainers.

Viewing all the events in the prism of statistical probability, cause and effect become more explicable if something had really got under Lennon's skin by his surmising more than the average about the laboratory of behaviour control.

This great Les Beatles musical extravaganza was soon to lead a huge number of pop groups to follow the revealed cosmopolitan lode. The trend also led Ravi Shankar's sitar to world fame.

As events proceeded apace, music distributors began to fear a Pandora's box effect of sponsoring through music, an unnecessary hyper-world consolidation. So by the 1990s, distributors put on blinkers and switched to bankrolling (i) lyrics that dumb down or debilitate. The same bankrolling was to follow for (ii) rhythm too.

Yet, it proved difficult to rub out the full effect of the Beatles. For the part of (iii) harmony their influence became ineffaceable in pop music. Of late TIME magazine (on July 1, 2002) complains that compact disk buyers are switching from the common coin of AOL-TIME-WARNER, EMI and the three other top music distributors to recordings sold thanks to the Internet, by small, outsider companies.

The Beatles extravaganza amused when it did not distract the anti-war protest rallies that plagued the Establishment in the 1960s. Such historical dovetailing of music and rallies waits repeating.

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How could we round off a discussion of the subject of social behaviour adaptation in music and time?

We know that the West had absorbed monotheism, Judaism `fulfilled' in Christ's words in the New Testament. Its birthplace was in the city cultures of the East. "History Begins in Sumer" is the name of an illustrious book. Here, a change had taken place from tribal, nomadic life.

A changed behaviour and ethic had emerged in cities with organised housing (right down to the size of bricks), organised streets, organised water supply systems, organised weights and measures for ease of sales of goods stocks. This change was firmly established before 2000 BC in cities of the Indus Valley civilisation. This civilisation deserves our attention because archaeologists have learnt that the territory exceeds not only the extent of deservedly famous Sumer but of the river civilisations of Mesopotamia and Egypt taken together.

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_1/ Gene Matlock tells us: "About 5,000 BC or earlier, a brilliant deified Phoenician Naga king and philosopher named Kuvera (also Kubera) learned how to smelt copper, gold, and other metals. These activities took place in the kingdom named after him, Khyber ("Kheeveri"), which consisted of a group of craggy mountains in what are now Southeastern Afghanistan and Northeastern Pakistan (i.e. the Khyber Pass). According to Hindu mythology, Kuvera and God Shiva lived in the totally barren, mineral-poor, goldless, frigid, lofty, bell-shaped or pyramidical peak of Kailasa in Western Tibet ...'

"We derived our word `copper' from Kuvera's name. Eventually, the Nagas extended their influence over all of India. If you've intuited that Afghan Khyber (Kheever), Hebrew Heber (pronounced Kheever), Egyptian Khepri, Greek Khyphera, Cabeiri, Cypriotic Cip'ri (Kheep'ri) ... ad infinitum, are somehow linked, you've intuited correctly." Excerpted from <http://www.mondovista.com/baboquivari.html>

For mathematics and computing, it helps to travel onwards on our journey with Gene Matlock.

In Europe, mathematical calculation was once difficult. With the count of fingers on the hands, Latin used symbols such as VIII. Multiplication and further computation were held up until the decimal system was completed with the use of zero. Webster's modern dictionary confirms that the term 'zero' is related to 'cipher' and Arabic 'tsifr'.

Webster's year 1828 dictionary helps us with a further bridge.

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CIPHER, noun

1. In arithmetic, an Arabian or Oriental character, of this form 0, which, standing by itself, expresses nothing, but increases or diminishes the value of other figures, according to its position. In whole numbers, when placed at the right hand of a figure, it increases its value ten fold ...

2. A character in general.

3. An intertexture of letters, as the initials of a name, engraved on a seal, box, plate, coach or tomb; a device; an enigmatical character. Anciently, merchants and tradesmen, not being permitted to bear family arms, bore, in lieu of them, their cyphers, or initials of their names...

4. A secret or disguised manner of writing; certain characters arbitrarily invented and agreed on by two or more persons, to stand for letters or words...

CIPHER, verb intransitive. In popular language, to use figures, or to practice arithmetic

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In general, the Russian-speaker uses 'tsifra' for numbers somewhat in the manner of the contemporary term 'cyber' (e.g. 'cyberspace'). Also, Russian 'kibernetika' is 'cybernetics' (in robotics.)

Records in cuneiform set in baked clay tablets tell us that Mesopotamia did not have a symbol for zero. Therefore the completion of our decimal notation seems to have been achieved thanks to the Khyber areas of the Indus Valley civilisation. At the end of the day Harvard's attempt to construct its iron curtain around that civilisation with a funded 25-odd year research project turns out to be a waste of social resources. That had also been in the case of the 1947 to 2001 delay in the release into public domain of the Dead Sea Scrolls, government property kept under lock and key primarily in the Rockefeller Museum and the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem .

 

About the Author

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