A friend who aspires to intellectualism claims that music ,
"anthropologically" came before poetry and that writing came after
music...
What I find interesting in this view is that she has
supported it with the claim that anthropology actually knows which came
first.
As an intellectual, a lover of ideas and a philosopher, I
wonder how so many seemingly intelligent people can accept as "gospel"
academic claims.
There exist numerous reasons to doubt the claims
made by social scientists, even reasons to doubt the findings of "the
hard sciences". I don't say this as a knee-jerk skeptic, but rather
because it is through such doubt, sometimes called "peer review", that
epistemology advances.
The claim that music is prior to
human writing and poetry may seem true on the face of it, but if we
consider that in nature animals communicate, have use of language
(albeit proto-language) and engage in ritualized behaviors as a form of
communication, then the order of developments seems wrong. It can be
understood easily by simply watching animals go about their affairs.
Even differing species can communicate , often through sound.
If
we consider that music is a complex process, a phenomenon that requires
certain conceptual understanding, then it hardly seems logical that
music appeared before poetry. Poetry being an art form that is both
sound and marks, (or writing) dependent on repetitive structure, meter,
and rhyme and an aspect of the internal play of the mind, it would
naturally come before music. In fact, it would be more likely that mind
games that played with sound as an aspect of communication were well
established before any ritualized behavior could develop, ie; music.
It
is true that we have no evidence for the argument that I propose, but
that is because we consider writing to be necessary for poetry to exist,
yet no such proof has ever been found either.
Consider that communication/language in whatever form was used by our ancestors likely developed out of hunting behavior.
That behavior relied on clicks, pops, whistles, claps and calls. These
eventually came to be used in other forms of ritualized behavior. These
sounds also derived from internal ability, they required no abstracted
element such as an instrument because the sounds could be made by our
bodies.
Another important consideration is that necessities are
fulfilled before luxuries are available. Food, shelter, security all
come before free time. Free time is essential for creative activity,
specifically for art. Before the ritualized behavior could be
accompanied by abstracted elements/instruments it had to complete the
course of survival. Communication is essential in group survival.
Our first efforts at communication were through use of our internal abilities;
calls, clicks, pops, etc. This implies that our mouths were primary in
the making of sounds that were useful. Music would follow poetry in this
case, if only because one can be a poet without a drum.
