03 - Evolution of Music Pt. 1 : Can't You Hear Me Knocking

Ever wonder where music came from in the first place ? Why we sing ? Music gets deep or not deep at all depending on the sound and how we feel at the time. I played in a few bands when I was younger and it has always been very important to me, but I never looked into how it evolved in the first place. Most of this is tame enough but like all topics if you dive deep enough can get a little weird. Let's chill a bit and talk about it on today's evolutionary audio exploration. 

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Transcript

The Meat

Wes 0:34

Welcome to the Stone Date Podcast. I'm your host, Wes Ranson, and today we'll be talking about the evolution of music. I did want to take a second and talk about the Stone Date Podcast and what we're trying to do here. We're a bi-weekly pro-cannabis podcast that enjoys all types of history. We plan on delving into both of those, talking about the strains and companies that supply our smoke, and talk about a vast variety of historical topics. Anyway, that's who we are and who we want to be. And now we'll be starting out with the oldest known music and going until the electric age, or the early 20th century at least. For this one, we leaned heavily on the book The Evolution of Music Through Culture and Science by Peter Townsend. But before we start talking about music history, let's get high. And today I'm going to be smoking a cone I packed myself. I grabbed a bag of abundant organics from my local True Leaf. I believe that is a house brand. And the strain I bought was Ginny Kush. Alright, and this the particular grow I have says 26.18%. And again, Abundant Organics, mostly what I found about it was a house brand of True Leaf. And what it says on the Abundant Organics website about Ginny Cush is Ginny Cush is a hybrid cannabis strain named in memory of Ginny Monson, a cannabis activist who passed away in 2013. The strain was originally bred by Rare Dankness Seeds, with all proceeds going towards the Ginny Cush Foundation, a charity established to help support her children. This hybrid introduces itself with a sweet, earthy aroma cut with a sharp, zesty sweetness of citrus and lemon. Amnesia Haze and Rare Dankness number two are believed to have parented Ginny Cush, giving this strain the balance of sativa and indica effects, providing soothing relaxation with an uplifting burst. Ginny Kush is suitable for use at any time of the day. Alright, it doesn't sound bad. I have actually I got a half of this. I've smoked uh some of it already, and I will say it is a little bit from what I prefer in my sativas, a little bit on the kind of sleepier side. It was sold to me as you know a sativa, but it's actually a hybrid. And the whole hybrid thing, man, it it I don't understand it to be honest. And maybe somebody could send me an email and let me know what I'm not understanding about this. But the way I see it is every strain is a hybrid strain. There's no pure sativa, no pure indica. So they're all hybrids to me. So that's why you don't hear me uh ordering hybrids often, because whether I go sativa or indica leaning that was already hybrid, in my opinion, uh it's never going to be 100%. But on weed maps, it has Virginia Kush, uh, the relaxed bar kind of lever uh what am I trying to say here? The meter is relaxed all the way. Euphoric is, I don't know, a little bit past halfway, and happy is almost halfway, maybe a little less than halfway. It says that the flavors through weed maps are earthy, pungent, and lemon. And again, it talks about Ginny Monson, uh Ginny Montsafrida, I guess maybe was her real name. Uh, she was killed by a drunk driver in 2013, apparently, or at least that's what it says on the weed maps website. But yeah, that's what we're gonna be smoking today and talking about the evolution of music. So if you want to leave a comment or send an email, let me know what you're smoking when you're listening to the show. Music man. That was my first form of art. I played in a few bands, but yeah, when I was in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, playing with uh, I don't know, Scream Occor band. I don't know if you would even call it that. But we definitely did some screaming. But yeah, I always loved music, never really went on a proper tour, but it was always very important to me. And yeah, I was curious where it came from. So music. Let's get into it. Yeah, definitely touch the citrus or lemon in this genny cushion. So music. It's international, multicultural, and deeply embedded in the human psyche. Our understanding and appreciation of music is totally personal. Today, recordings are so accessible we can hear the same music over and over again, and this was pretty much impossible until 1877. But we'll get to that later. Our musical conditioning is so basic that the music we hear in the womb has an influence on our future enjoyment and musical preferences. This emphasizes how deep-seated our independence on music truly is. As we grow, our enjoyment or dislike of music is modified by our culture, our abilities, knowledge, nurture, and our previous or current musical experiences. So the oldest surviving sheep music we have, or the oldest complete melody, is the Hurrian hymn number six. It's a 3,400-year-old cuneiform tablet from ancient Syria dedicated to the goddess Nikal. And the oldest complete song we have is the Sekolos Epitaph, and that's a Greek composition from around the first century CE, but music has been performed and appreciated much longer than this. Folk music has a role in legends and history, and this goes back to the Anglo-Saxons in 400 CE in that kind of time frame. Folk music at that time had to be tuneful and have mass appeal so they could be remembered. And there are many examples of folk music transmitted entirely orally, like in the Caribbean, there are still small communities who sing and dance music that came from Africa two centuries earlier. By 1500 CE, the tight control of religion weakened, and new ideas emerged in literature and art, as well as some in science, and all these factors inevitably reflected in less control of music. So a cultural atmosphere which allows new ideas and opinions to flourish will be equally flexible with musical and scientific ideas. And this also seems true in reverse. That's why, if we go back to the 20th century, to the strictly applied state control and say Russia or Germany, they had an obvious effect on the styles of music that could be composed and performed. Political constraints imply economic constraints, in turn, influence and hinder the ability for musicians to perform, because they need audiences and funds to further their creativity. So when the West was dominated by the church, religious music was especially favored and predominant. During the latter part of the Middle Ages, there was a steady pressure to challenge the church control, and innovation crept in. Changes were accepted in painting, literature, science, and music, and there was a shift from all things being centered and controlled by religion to a development which allowed some individuality. Musical compositions were allowed to be attributed to specific composers and not just some unnamed monk. There were experimentation with new instruments and total patterns, chords, or singing parts rather than the single lines we think of today as early church music. Just really getting wild with it, you know. Another key advance was the introduction of musical notation that could be written down. And together with the printing press, it meant that music could be distributed in bulk and not just hand copied. Before we get there, we'll have to look at some early signs of music. So let's go back to the earliest signs. And those go to animals in general. So many creatures of all sizes, from whales to birds, and even some insects sing. Like all animals, singing brings out emotion, from happiness to sadness, and is frequently involved in seduction. Once we became articulate humans and heard the songs of birds and other sounds in our world, it seems inevitably we would try to emulate them and our attempts would later lead to singing. Archaeologists have found bone flutes dating back from the last ice age, like the Dibjave flute, currently the oldest known. And someone discovered this in a cave in Slovenia and it dates to be around 50,000 to 60,000 years old. This flute may not have been for music, but perhaps a bird lure or something like that, we're not really sure about it. Archaeologists have discovered other items they think could be musical instruments from the early Paleolithic and even Neolithic times. So super fucking old shit. These were basic instruments, they were easy to construct, like clapping sticks and drums. In terms of simple instruments, a plucking string, blowing into reeds, or hollow tubing, or banging metal pieces, uh pieces of metal, would have been our first musical steps, and all these have appeared in carvings from earlier civilizations across Africa and Asia. Much later, Egyptian cultures have clear images of musical performance for pleasure with instruments such as harps, drums, and lutes. Carvings in Assyria have trumpet-style instruments and battle scenes. According to the book of Daniel in the Bible, in Babylon, King Nebuchadnezzar had a royal band with brass, wind, strings, and drums. Religious images from many faiths across the world have similar artwork. And there seems to be some innovations of drums, flutes, and harps in civilizations as separated as China, India, and Egypt from some 3,000 years ago. The same is also true for the progression of stone tools to copper, bronze, and iron artifacts, and the universal development of weapons. These parallels across many emerging civilizations emphasize that human development is hardwired to include music as an essential part of being a human. And that's pretty wild to me that these places, I know everybody talks about the pyramids popping up near the same time, but it wasn't just the pyramids. I mean, it is wild that that happened, but all this stuff, I mean, from what it was saying, you know, musical instruments, stone tools, copper tools, bronze tools, it happened all over, but separated enough to where they weren't influenced by each other. Um, pretty wild that that happened, I guess. With the lack of written language for music, speech, sport, stories, and music would have to survive by repetition between generations. And for a non-literate society, there are always ways to reinforce the effectiveness of passing on information to the next generation. And songs and chants were a universal route for this, and they still are in some ways, some areas. It is clear that music, chants, and often dancing were key elements in the religious rituals from way, way, way, way, way, way back. Okay, historically in Western religious music, the earliest examples are from synagogues singing in a very limited range with a limited number of instruments and a small male choir. The pattern had existed since around a thousand BCE. Church buildings were often large and echoic, and the music was slow, so this singing in unison was acceptable. This was also called plain song. To minimize the boring aspects of these events, the more adventurous musical monks then introduced the use of two notes being sung together apart or separated by a musical fifth. Initially resisted, such moves evolved where the two parts did not necessarily sing identical lines. There were many forgotten innovators in these small changes. There were exceptions in the twelfth century. Leonin, for instance, added not just a second part singing to the same parallel words or words in parallel, but also used some variations and different words. The French word is mot or mot MOT, so the term is motet, and this emerged. The next step was the addition of several notes as musical backing, and this is what we now call chords, to add some freaking harmony. In a thousand years the church music had moved from having a single line sung by all the monks in unison to having some duplication in chords. This was a style called polyphony. Polyphony initially meant the two or more parts were either sung at fixed intervals, perhaps at an octave or a fifth. For the truly avant-garde monks, different singers had different parts. Getting really wild with it now. Here the pace quickened, and over the next 500 years, polyphony became even more complex, and it developed very strict rules on how the music could be different between parts, and also how many parts could be used. I mean, it sounds very objective at this point. Honestly, it sounds like the way that it kind of started, it was kind of very objective. Uh, but I think of music as being extremely subjective, right? There's a lot of popular music now that doesn't follow any rules at all at some level. I'm not saying I like it, but you know, it's objective in my opinion. Another key player in the development of music was the German Benedictine nun Hildegard of Benjamin, who wrote in the early 12th century and moved away from playing song into more melodic works. It was a phenomenal break from staying with the same chants from many centuries earlier, and she also introduced clusters of notes to underpin the solo voice line. By the 13th and 14th century onwards, the types of chords became less restrictive, and an early innovator was Pariton around 1200 CE. By the 14th century, another Frenchman, Guillaume Machot, had expanded motet writing to four parts. These are four lines of song in parallel. Polyphony survived until the time of Bach. The complexity of the rules and the skills needed to write good polyphony sowed the seeds of its destruction. In post-Bach, it went out of fashion. Throughout its evolution, technological innovation was already a crucial element in musical development. So that was that was the most technical as far as musical theory that we're going to be getting on this. But we still have more to learn. Some 2,000 years ago, after the Chinese had named the pentatonic notes, there were attempts to find musical notation that allowed works to be played without having a direct contact via at the performance. And the pentatonic scale, by the way, dates back to 40,000 to 60,000 years. And pentatonic, when I think of the pentatonic scale, I just think of jam bands. I think of the Grateful Dead and Fish and whatever. Um, I mean, I love when I I felt like as a guitarist, when I learned the pentatonic scale, uh major, minor, and pentatonic scales, I just felt like I'd made such a step up in the in the positive direction. But they have found flutes, ancient flutes, to tuned to these scales in various parts of the world. And this scale has been independently developed by many civilizations, and I just think that's crazy that they've been listening to this same kind of jams. Uh yeah, I just imagine some crazy awesome flute solos from back 50,000 years ago. One crucial step forward was introduced by the monk Guido D'Rizzo. His notation improved on earlier trials, and although it may look difficult to modern musicians, it nonetheless was a workable attempt to portray the simple church music from the time. During Guido's time, printing was non-existent. It required a scribe to copy the music for distribution, and the skills needed to make paper, to make black ink, and sharpen quills and pens was tedious, but good scribes had assistance to help with those tasks. In early church music, singing was primarily from the clergy and the choir, partly because of it being in Latin, which was not understood by the masses and added to the mystique. Choirs were not mixed, and women did not sing in church services except for nunneries. Women's rejection and all their exclusion from any important church decisions may have stemmed from just a few single verses written by Saul of Tarsus, Saint Paul, and the first epistle of the Corinthian church. The translation is approximately that women should not be allowed to speak in church, by any implication have any say in the organization of it, as this was totally the prerogative of men. And it seems like Saint Paul was an insecure misogynist, but he may have been just reflecting the current philosophy from the ancient Greeks and Turks. As church music developed, the sounds ranged from the lower registers of male monks to higher pitched singing of boys, and the church music inevitably exploited the differences. With a slow learnt skill like singing, there was a shortage of high-voiced boys. The obvious solution would have been having female singers, but this was excluded because of the Edict of Paul. And the church solution was dramatic to say the least, and it caused a great deal of pain and suffering for many men. It also had a significant influence on music because the church wanted music with high notes. Composers wrote operas where not only female parts were sung by men, but also many men's roles were sung very high. The religious route to produce these upper notes that sounded so well in big church buildings was to have castrati as the singers. This fucking word, I didn't even know this existed. The practice of producing castrati for church survived to the Vatican up to the 20th freaking century. And the last man castrated for this was Alessandro Moreschi, who died in 1922. And let that sink in. For around 400 years, boys were castrated for the sole purpose of keeping their voices high for singing essentially women's parts, and the last victim of this died barely a hundred years ago. Just like God wanted, I guess. Kroger grocery stores. I remember Kroger grocery stores. It was like my hometown grocery store before Super Walmart existed in Tennessee. But they were founded in 1883. So for 17 years after the founding of Kroger, uh the Catholic Church was still castrating boys. In the 18th century alone, some 4,000 boys were castrated in Italy in order to achieve a high vocal line with the power of an adult. And it does get a little worse. Apparently, the timing of this operation was very difficult to access. I could only imagine what this quote unquote operation was, uh, what they were freaking cutting. It says too early into puberty, and the voice would just stay weak, but if they wait later, it could have considerable power. For the successful, such as Fionelli, the reward was considerable wealth and fame. With good surgical time, the castrati grew quite tall. And what does that mean? Whatever they were cutting had a had something to do with how tall the person was? Could that be true? I'm not sure. And function well as a male, except they were sterile, you know. This apparently gave them a highly active social life, just loving it, not being able to get anybody pregnant. And this is, I mean, it stopped in the 20th century. Say it stopped, you know, say it stopped at 1900 exactly. I would think that at least for a hundred years, they knew it was fucked up, right? Or did they just truly not know? They just thought they were doing God's work there. Okay. The church was not the only source for music. Uh there were also folk songs and traveling singers who might have sung to a lute. I'm not sure exactly what a lute was uh or is, but I think it was like a guitar, not like a flute, even though it sounds like flute. These guys traveled around Europe or further, for example, the crusades, and that sounds like a pretty cushy crusades job, you know, not fighting or dying from scurvy, just playing your lute, trying to make a couple shillings. Protestantism also had an impact, as their services were translated into the local language, initially German and then English and others. Hymns were written with different emphasis and were sung by all the members, including women. So they stepped up a notch. Musically, new harmonies had emerged using intervals of thirds, and there were conscious differences between major and minor scales and groups of three notes called triads. Overall, music had progressed by the end of the 16th century to the point that it had strong resonances with the present-day musical tastes. The tune Greensleeves, which was incorrectly attributed to King Henry VIII, is instantly recognizable some 500 years later. And I did stream that before getting into doing this episode, and yeah, I absolutely recognize that song. Uh, it's probably been in every medieval movie that I've liked.

SPEAKER_00 20:24

It's just your classic dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun dun, dun, dun dun dun dun, dun, dun, dun dun dun, dun dun dun dun dun dun dun.

Wes 20:32

And there were lyrics to it too. I probably botched that, but I think the lyrics were something like uh what rhymes would hug me, hey, hey, hey. No, I don't know what the lyrics were, but it did have lyrics. They were kind of emo, if I remember that correctly. I mean emo for the time for sure. All right, so Henry VIII, he was very enthusiastic about music, even though he did not write the song. It was reported that he did have a vast collection of instruments comprised of 272 wind instruments and 109 strings. And I don't know, I thought that was kind of interesting. I watched The Tutors really got into that show, and I had no idea that he was into music like that. Alright, in most respects, one of the greatest composers of the polyphonic style was Johann Sebastian Bach. He may have been the ultimate peak of the genre. Despite its discipline and style popularity, modern musicians perform his work and that of his contemporaries, such as Handel. There were some similarities between Bank and Handel that were a little weird. They were almost identical in time span, they both went blind in an old age, and were both unsuccessfully treated by the same physician. Nevertheless, they never met and were very different in musical character. But they must have known of each other, right? In the earlier part of his life, Bach only focused on church music because that's what paid them bills. And he composed with the complex musical rules of counterpoint and fugues, and that's a complex musical form with interwoven melodies. These are works that. Seem to have mathematical transformations as they modulate from one key to another. The themes progress between instruments and run parallel but displaced, and there are inversions of the tunes. And I I know exactly what that is. Some sections could even be played with the music upside down or even backwards. And that kind of blows my mind. Of course, I'm not someone that reads music regularly uh or reads it well, but having some music that you could still play even if you had it upside down, I don't know. How does that make sense? Realistically, the complexity of polyphony and fugues with the highly developed roles limited the appreciative audiences to those with musical training. There was then the start to more familiar style and more siphonic music, and these included two of his sons, Carl Philip and Johann Christian Bach, who both played in London. And yeah, I've I've I've listened to this shit. I've listened to Bach for sure. I've listened, I I don't know. I definitely there are some people that I can separate, like who am I trying to think of here? Um Chopin. Chopin. I don't know if I said that right. But I think of him being mostly a piano player. Uh I guess I probably put Beethoven as a big piano player as well. I don't know. Maybe Bach was a big piano player. I just think of like big band kind of stuff when I think of those. I kind of mix them all together. Almost like, I don't know, Foreigner and Journey. They get kind of mixed with me. There's a lot of those bands there that's like Foreigner, Journey, Boston. I don't know. I like them, but I can't really pick them out. I don't know. I just call myself out. In addition to all the church-founded musical development, they were also making place in secular music, these developments. This band across all social classes and focused on aspects as diverse as love, the countryside, and life and death. Instrumental accompaniments were limited to simple items such as lutes. They were low power and were only suited for small, intimate performances. The Renaissance liberation changed music from church domination, and there was a greater focus on individuals, and the development of operatic style emerged. These new formats drew inspiration from a wide range of topics back to earlier generations such as mythology or the history of Greek and Roman times. Part of this development meant that there was a mixture of words, plays, and music in a single performance. The introduction of ballet was often an added feature. The writers, sponsors, and audience would have to be the wealthier class with classical educations. Many stories with music were based on Greek tragedies, and the production of Daphne by Paris in Florence in 1594 may have been the first true example of something we were recognized today as an opera. Paris later collaborated with Cacini on a version of Orpheus in 1600, and by then the opera had arrived. The center stage moved from Florence to Venice, where Monte Verde was successful in early opera format with versions still being performed today. Italy was totally taken by opera, and major cities had several opera houses. So going back to Johann Sebastian Bach for a second, he was at the climax and end of an era. He has partly survived due to his involvement with the new technology of keyboard instruments, and he had made major contributions to keyboard playing, most importantly, tuning. This was being adjusted so music could be modulated between different keys, and Bach wrote a definitive set of work and all possible keys. His music in terms of performance was excellent, but he did not venture into the operatic styles, so his work was often too complex to be appreciated by the public. He spent many of his later years assembling and packaging his compositions, not just for commercial sales, but with a clear view of posterity. Despite this effort, his music dropped off almost entirely until about the early 19th centuries when he started coming back into popularity. And honestly, that kind of makes sense. I mean, how could he have? No one had a way to listen to music until 1877. Handel was similarly skilled, but had a very entrepreneurial approach to his writing. He was financially successful, but rather than rely on church funding and all the political problems Bach encountered, Handel had continuous royal patronage in London. At first he had success writing music in the Italian style of opera. This style started to decline, but Handel had business acumen and switched to oratorios. Handel coped well with the changes in fashion, whereas other composers did not. It is worth noting that he was working at a time when the general public was attending events and paying for it. This opened the door for music that was neither religious nor aimed at those with education in Greek or Latin. While Bach had several children, some who became famous composers and performers themselves, Handel did not. He did fund many charities related to children. Sudden changes in the fortunes of composers and performers were the major disadvantages of not having patronage or church funding. One example, violinist Corelli, yeah, Corelli, went from being a top star composer to a minor one within a very short time as the public was demanding more virtuosic performances. His music was initially considered difficult by the then current standards, but the amount of people being able to play his work increased dramatically in a short amount of time, making his music not seem so difficult after all. He's also credited with being one of the first to have a small orchestra in relatively modern format and was one of the first to be able to use a printed type music. He introduced the use of a shorthand called figure bass, so he did a lot, but he has pretty much been forgotten. This was a period when any skilled performer was expected to be able to improvise at a very high level. So his figure bass died as musicians stopped improvising as much, I guess. Many other composers who were equally famous have almost totally slipped into obscurity. Box Tude, I don't know if I'm saying this right, was a famous organist that Bach took leave to walk 250 miles each freaking way. He was walking 500 miles just to see this guy and learn from him. Today some boxtude organ works may be played, but outside the world of organists, he has been virtually vanished. The small orchestras available to Bach and Haydn, I believe is how you say that, were professionals with experience playing together. But for the majority of musical events elsewhere, many orchestras were assembled from random collections of players. As far as rehearsals, there were few to none. Players opposed rehearsals because they were unpaid and frankly hard to get to. They may have had a single rehearsal if they were lucky. For professional musicians, there were some extreme cases with some last minute writing by both Razzini and Mozart. They were known to have been composing the day of their performance, and Beethoven sometimes performed the piano part of his violin sonatas at the point where he had only just finished writing the violin part and had not yet written the piano part. This guy was pretty fucking nuts. We needed to do an episode on him. The concerts then were played with candlelight, and this made the potential to misread notes immense, I bet. And he went blind. I mean, not only this guy was nuts. The shortage of permanent orchestras also meant that neither the audience nor the orchestral players would have the opportunity to hear the symphony or a symphony more than a few times a year if they were lucky. These brief encounters needed something different to hold attention. And one feature was the growth of more showmanship and more virtuosic playing. Spectacular and novel cadensas and improvisations were expected. Overall, this early focus on showmanship and being spontaneous meant that soloists that could make an impact with such techniques were often more important than the music itself. Showmanship sold seats and it still does. So we're going to look at some of the early evolution of violins and pianos, pretty much. And the oldest known violin is the Charles IX, built by Andre Amadi around 1560 to 1564. It was conventioned by the French king Charles IX and is now housed at the Ashmolan Museum in Oxford, England. One of the most important violinists by the end of the 18th century was Giovanni Battista Viatti. He has been called the father of modern violin playing. His use of the higher registers meant that there needed to be modifications to his violins to have a longer fretboard so he could hit those high notes. This in turn led to other changes and some significant changes or differences between violins of the originals and the violins of today. Beatti's performances totally transformed the Parisian scene so that the violin became the number one instrument, but today, except amongst violinists, his name is pretty much unknown. Many other violinists Virtuasi have performed or followed in his footsteps, and performers such as Paganini, who was a great showman. He cultivated an image of a tortured performer and dressed in black to emphasize that role. Publicly, stunts included rumors that he had been taught by the devil. And this is a story that I've heard several times before about more modern musicians like Bob Dylan or Robert Johnson. The net effect from this has been that his name is far more familiar than that of Viati, and his music is still firmly in the modern violin repertoire. I don't know of any of those guys though. The ancestry of modern piano includes instruments such as the harp, evolved from the harp bow, oldest found in the 3000 BCE time frame, and the clavichord from the early 14th century, and the harpsichord from the late Middle Ages, as well as mass developments under the umbrella of piano. Alright, so we're gonna touch a second on some conductors, or at least one conductor, and these were also important at the time. If you were a conductor for, you know, a king somewhere, an important king, then you were also important. You were a musical hero. The same was seen for conductors. Like mentioned, uh there was one guy, John Paptiste Loly, who was a highly successful composer and a bandmaster at the court of Louis XIV of France. More info on this guy and indoor performances, he used a long pole, and this had a spike on it. And in 1687 he damaged his foot with it and he died. I guess he just really got into his conducting and stabbed his foot, and that's the way I'm putting it together. So a music conductor does not just beat time in an attempt to keep all musicians together, but also defines the variations in dynamics and tempi, and should have a coherent overview of a particular piece to inspire the performers. It's no simple task, especially if the orchestra frequently played with other conductors. Conducting its tricky business because success is often credited to the orchestra, but failure to the conductor. We're going to talk about a few other things with music before wrapping this up here, and one of those things we mentioned in the opening is the phonograph. It was invented August 12, 1877 by Thomas Edison. The first model was completed, famously demonstrated by recording and playing back the phrase Mary Had a Little Lamb. Later, in 1887, the gramophone was invented by Emile Berliner. Berliner's invention was the first to use a flat disc for recording and playback, and this was a big improvement from the cylinder-based recording of the phonograph. The 1920s were the time when electronics had entered recording. This was a crucial time in the terms of appreciation of music. As human beings, we respond to new ideas with what psychologists described as cognitive dissonance. If we hear or read something new, we will mentally consider it and possibly accept it if it's close to our pre-existing beliefs. But any totally new idea or musical sound we automatically reflect as the first response. This is true not just in philosophy or music, but also in science. Despite the fact that there may be real hard factual evidence, in science, many truly innovative ideas can take up to 20 years to move from rejection to acceptance. Music's no different. The bottom line is new music takes time to be accepted. Music in new styles is almost automatically rejected at first, especially if it's very different. And I can definitely vouch for this. I can't tell you how many times you know a band had kind of changed their sound on an album and first listened to. I almost think that it's trash. I wish I wouldn't have paid for it. And then a little bit later I'm like, yeah, I actually can get into this. Not always. Sometimes it is just trash. Alright, so we're gonna wrap this up here. So that's music. We did not get into current music or the development of popular genres of today, because honestly, each genre could be an episode of his own, and probably will be. Music has always been an intensely emotive force. The effects can range from pleasure or sadness to romance and religion and to patriotism or revolution. Consequently, the ability to control the music we hear and play is such a powerful tool that it is and always has been exploited by those with political and religious powers, and equally by those who want to change or revolution. Numerous reports from military operations, even documents of the use of music, particularly at high volumes and for extended periods, is a psychological tool to force surrender or cooperation. This tactic, often referred to as music torture or acoustic bombardment, is recognized by human rights organizations and international bodies as a form of cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment. I'd like to do an episode on musical torture. The diversity of musical viewpoints can often parallel the social and political spectra and divisions within a society. Music is powerful, music is timeless and of its own time. Music can make us laugh or cry. It can make us realize something new is beginning or that something is over. Music can inspire both good or bad, or just be there for enjoyment without any deep meaning, like the song Barbie Girl or any black-eyed pea song. And that's gonna wrap up this exploration and music evolution. The wildest part for me had to be the Catholic castrati. My mom asked me why I wanted to research things like that, and I just said I was researching music, mom, not castrated men. I didn't think I would get into information like that researching the history of music, but I guess you never know what you're gonna find. Real life is truly stranger than fiction. Thanks for tuning in. If you liked the episode, leave us a comment or a review. If you have something else to say, leave us a comment or send an email to stonedatepod at gmail.com. Follow us on Facebook at the Stonedate Podcast with Wes Ranson, or on YouTube, youtube.com slash at the Stone Date Pod. We'll have links for these down below. Thanks again and have a chill day.