Lesson 2
Evolution in Music
There are countless ways to show there have been lots of different developments in music, from instruments to consumers to boybands to styles of music. We are going to give you a brief history of a couple of these ‘music-pillars’.
History of Instruments
The first musical instrument was the human voice. Then the humming, singing or whistling was probably accompanied by clapping hands, stones and other things to create rhythm. The oldest musical instrument ever found was a flute, made out of bone. Later on, people used some kind of harp instruments , which were the basis of the string instruments that we know now. Throughout history we see a lot of different styles of music, but the basic concept was the same, small groups (usually a group of 4) who made music. It was during the classical music era (1730) people started to make orchestras. One of the most famous classical composers is Amadeus Mozart.
History of the consumer
How did people listen to music when they were at home 300 years ago? The only way to listen to music was to create music themselves or go to a concert. There were a lot of people on the streets playing songs. Higher class people could afford concerts. In those times there were a lot of travelling minstrels. People who travelled from place to place and sang stories about far away places.
In the 19th century again something big was invented, that’s right, electricity! A few years later the first grammophone came out. Now people could listen to a recorded musical piece at home without having a string quartet in their homes! Sounds weird, doesn’t it? We have come a long way.
It wasn’t long before electricity influenced the type of music as well, with electrical guitars and of course the keyboard. We got the radio in 1909, cassettes in the 1980s, cds in the 1990s and nowadays we stream all of our music by computer and phone. I wonder what’s next!
Imagine your grandparents listening to music. They could only listen to live music and there were only regular musical instruments. They couldn’t listen to music like you do now. No ipods, which are already kind of old fashioned. No Spotify….
In the last 20 years people started writing
music on the computer, which nowadays is one of the most popular ways of expressing and writing music.
History repeats itself
Some things never change, look at your boybands! Screaming girls, crying adolescents, bedrooms filled with posters, magazines of your favourite artists.
The first time this happened was in the early 1960s with The Beatles, a 4 persons band from Liverpool. Everywhere they went, people started screaming, crying, yelling. The boys never had any privacy.
In the 1980s the same happened with The New Kids On The Block, followed in the 1990s by Take That and the Backstreet Boys. Nowadays History repeats itself with girls going mental when they see OneDirection or 5 Seconds of Summer! Don’t you love history?
