Marxist musicologist Sergei Chemodanov, himself also a pianist, offers ideas on what was a large part of his life’s work; the study of early music and its social role. For years he taught music at Moscow’s Russian Institute of Theatre Arts and was a prolific author of books and articles.

‘The Origin of Music’ by Sergei Tchemodanov from New Masses. Vol. 15 No. 1. April 2, 1935.

THERE are many theories of the origin of music. In long past epochs all the arts were thought of as divine gifts. In ancient Greece there were even special goddesses of art, the Muses, from whose name the word “music” is derived. Also in the Christian period as well, music was held to be a gift from heaven. Only in modern times (and to some extent previously) do we encounter a series of attempts to approach the problem scientifically. Most of these attempts have been made, not by historians of art, but by naturalists scholars who sought the sources of music in man’s natural environment (e.g., the singing of birds or the howling of the wind) and also “inside” the man; and they ascribed to him an innate instinct for beauty, which incited him to artistic creation.

Attempts at sociological approach to the origin of music are rarely encountered in bourgeois science, but the most valuable and consistent work in this direction is Labor and Rhythm by the German scientist, Karl Beucher. It contains a great number of facts and musical notations. Buecher, however, includes a whole series of errors which have been thoroughly exposed by Plekhanov in his article on “Art and Primitive Peoples.” Indeed, these articles are practically the first sign of a Marxist approach to the history of art.

After firmly establishing that the “art of any people” stands in the closest causal relationship to its economy, Plekhanov starts out with an outline of primitive economics, of which the principle feature was the social striving after food. The primitive form of economic activity was the gathering of the existing gifts of nature, mainly by fishing and hunting. The next historical stage was production, and its main form agriculture. The fields were for the most part tilled by the collective effort of the clan. Thus the social forms of labor were widely applied at the earliest stages of man’s economic activity; and primitive art was rooted in the social labor process. Buecher and Plekhanov called the simplest forms of this primitive art, “play.”

From this point on the opinions of the two critics diverge: for Plekhanov, “play” is an effect of work, for Buecher, “play” is older than work, that is, art is older than the production of useful objects. Let us examine more closely the essence of “play.” According to Spencer (to whom Plekhanov refers), its distinctive feature is “the fact that it does not pursue a definite utilitarian aim, though by its nature it may be useful,” for instance, by exercising those organs it involves. Why or when does a man or an animal play? When the organism has accumulated a surplus of energy which has not been absorbed by utilitarian activity and requires an outlet. According to Plekhanov, “play is born of the desire to relive the pleasure caused by the application of strength”; the greater the store of energy, the greater is the tendency to play. The play of wild animals often consists in an imitation of hunting or fighting; in their case, the content of play being determined by the activity necessary to their very existence.

We observe the same phenomenon in the case of savages. In their dances they reproduce the movements of the animals they hunt, or else war scenes or the motions of the worker. One of the Brazilian tribes, for example, performs a dance which represents the death of a wounded warrior. Among the Philippine Bajabos, the males, at the time of rice sowing, execute a dance in which they stick iron pikes into the ground. A primitive Australian women’s dance represents the pulling from the ground of edible roots. The same motives are present in primitive painting and dramatic expression. The Chukchi reproduce hunting scenes in their drawings. The Bushmen draw peacocks, elephants, hippopotami and ostriches, because these animals play an important role in their existence as hunters. With depressing monotony the Brazilian Indians draw their artistic motifs from animal life. Likewise the dramatic expression of savages, which chiefly depicts hunting, war, domestic life, animals and work. Therefore Plekhanov concludes that “labor precedes art.” Man first regards objects and phenomena from a utilitarian viewpoint, and only later assumes an aesthetic attitude toward them” (Art, A Symposium).

In what does this aesthetic attitude consist? Is it an impulsion toward so-called “pure art” or the satisfaction of an “innate” instinct for beauty? It is not. Here, just as in labor, utility is the primary determinant. The only difference is that when he enjoys beauty “the social man is almost never consciously aware of the utility which is associated with the representation of these objects in his mind. In the majority of cases this utility could be discovered only by scientific analysis, for a most distinctive feature of aesthetic enjoyment is its immediacy. But there is utility nevertheless, and utility is at the basis of aesthetic enjoyment” (ibid). Lacking this utility the object could not be accepted as beautiful. And here the analogy between art and morality is complete: only the useful acquires a moral meaning for man.

Fritche (in his Essay on Art) also holds that the so-called “aesthetic” sentiment is related to production, having grown out of the struggle for existence as an aid in this struggle. Thus, for instance, when a savage adorns himself, he does so either to please the female or to frighten his enemy. In the first instance, art serves the utilitarian end of propagating the species, while in the other it serves to preserve the tribe. “The dance serves the same purposes: the preservation and propagation of the tribe.” Among the Australians, for instance, the popular “Koroboro” dance was performed only before and after a military expedition or a hunt. The males danced while the women played musical instruments. Exercising the strength and dexterity of the male, the Koroboro made him a better warrior and hunter and also a better father of new generations. After the war the two tribes danced together, uniting the former enemies in the utilitarian interests of peace.

Representations of bisons, found in the caves of savages, “served as a means to command success in the hunt, to subjugate those animals used for food by the cave-dwellers, and at the same time possibly furnished a means of educating the young in the necessities and habits of hunting” (writes Fritche). At higher stages of civilization where there is already ant organization of physical labor, art is born from the very labor process as a means of organizing this socially necessary labor. Thus we may conclude from what has been said above that man has no specific and independent aesthetic sentiment. At its basis, as in the case of the moral instinct, there is always a conscious or unconscious concept of utility.

Can this thesis be applied to music? Indeed it can, for there is no essential difference between the various arts; they differ only in their means of communication. The character of man’s collective activity in his struggle for existence (hunting, war, labor) determined the character of primitive music in its two fundamental elements: melody and rhythm. By melody we understand a certain sequence of sounds combined in a general design; by rhythm, the organization of these sounds in time, the introduction of regularity and a determined measure into their flow. Although these two elements are found separately in nature, they assume an organized form in the hands of man in the course of his struggle for existence.

The melodies of war and labor songs had as their primary source those involuntary and sometimes voluntary cries emitted by the social man in the course of his war or labor activity. These cries were nothing but “an imitation, first with the voice and later with the help of a musical instrument, of the sounds issuing from the worker’s throat or produced by one or another of his tools.” The primitive tunes, derived from the social man’s desire to keep up his courage in a difficult task, served at the same time as signals for collective activities and helped to organize them. In time the tunes assumed a determined rhythmical form, dictated by the rhythm of the war and labor. Insofar as they arise from these activities and increase their efficiency, the primitive songs ultimately correspond to the utilitarian criterion mentioned above. “The working songs originating in sounds uttered at work” observes Fritche, “had the obvious aim of facilitating the work, of organizing the worker’s motions so as to make his labor as productive as possible.”

Often man reproduced these songs in his hours of leisure, as if to rehearse them and to prepare himself for their further application. These exercises gave him a certain pleasure, which again derived from his deep awareness of the songs’ utility. The same conscious or unconscious idea of utility lay at the base of other forms of primitive songs. Thus the religious songs, which formed an organic part of the ritual of all peoples, served “to appease the anger of the gods” and to compel them to serve man. Songs with an erotico-lyrical content derived from the sexual instinct, from man’s desire to preserve and perpetuate his species. Thus at the beginnings of man’s history, music constantly accompanied his struggle for existence. Music was the faithful sentinel of his life.

In the opinion of almost all historians, music at the earliest stage of human culture was an organic unity with the other arts, one aspect of a single process. Music, poetry and the dance were, in ancient art, fused into one. They were actively rooted in labor and struggle, and had in their turn an organizing effect. More than that, music was often the principle element in this trinity. From the work song poetry was gradually born: its technical character, the alternation of long and short, accented and unaccented, high and low syllables, was nothing else but “the legacy of the working song that rhythmically [that is, in regular alternation] reproduced the motions performed by the hand or the whole body during work.” Simultaneously with the work song, the work dance was born. To the sound of their song the workers reproduced, in the form of a dance, the movements of their labor. This work dance was a sort of drill to prepare them for the best possible performance of labor. Unfortunately, we possess very little data relating to the forms of primitive music. The notation of sounds is comparatively recent, dating only from the third millennium before our era. Our opinions regarding the music of primitive peoples are usually based on analogies with the music of present-day savages. Those examples of which we possess notations show, firstly, that these songs are homophonic, secondly, the great poverty of their melodies and rhythms. Thus, for instance, the Caraibs (the natives of the West Indies) sing for hours at a time a melody composed of two adjacent sounds. In another song, wherein a young Esquimo pours out his nostalgia for his homeland, there are only three sounds. A very interesting example of a work song is the song of the Egyptian water-drawers, which, according to authorities, contains motifs of ancient Egyptian origin. The song has four episodes: A. A brief, beautiful melody. B. A pause of the same length. C. Another melody. D. Pause.

Villoteau, the French specialist in Egyptian music, offers the following explanation of this song, confirming its labor character: “A. During this part of the song the workers lift and empty the vessel for drawing water. This is a basket of palm branches and leaves, lined with sheepskin. It is attached to the end of a long rope, and the rope is tied to a pole balanced on a sort of scaffolding or a forked tree. B. During this phase they lower the basket and draw the water. C. They again lift the basket. D. They lower the basket. Thus while the work process is at its point of maximum activity and the muscles are exerted, the workers sing; and during the interruption of the process, when this exertion is absent, the song ceases as no longer useful. Similarly the songs of Egyptian oarsmen are suited to their work. “It is well known,” says Fetis, another French historian, “that from the very earliest times the navigation of the Nile has been as indispensable as the drawing of water,

in this rainless land where the floods fertilize only a part of the soil. In antiquity, as today, these labors required the accompaniment of rhythmical songs in order to diminish the fatigue.” There is no reason to suppose that the Egyptian nation has forgotten these songs which were transmitted from generation to generation of the working classes.

The New Masses was the continuation of Workers Monthly which began publishing in 1924 as a merger of the ‘Liberator’, the Trade Union Educational League magazine ‘Labor Herald’, and Friends of Soviet Russia’s monthly ‘Soviet Russia Pictorial’ as an explicitly Communist Party publication, but drawing in a wide range of contributors and sympathizers. In 1927 Workers Monthly ceased and The New Masses began. A major left cultural magazine of the late 1920s and early 1940s, the early editors of The New Masses included Hugo Gellert, John F. Sloan, Max Eastman, Mike Gold, and Joseph Freeman. Writers included William Carlos Williams, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Day, John Breecher, Langston Hughes, Eugene O’Neill, Rex Stout and Ernest Hemingway. Artists included Hugo Gellert, Stuart Davis, Boardman Robinson, Wanda Gag, William Gropper and Otto Soglow. Over time, the New Masses became narrower politically and the articles more commentary than comment. However, particularly in it first years, New Masses was the epitome of the era’s finest revolutionary cultural and artistic traditions.

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