Ending the Year on a High Note

A few straggling thoughts about music, and some recommendations

The Smithsonian Institute has a 35,000-year-old flute in their collection. Found in Germany, the instrument has three finger holes and played a five-note scale. Also, it was made from mammoth ivory, which is pretty bad ass. Flutes like this have been found dating back to 40,000 years ago. Music predates agriculture, the wheel, ceramics, rope, and the domestication of dogs.

Why did people first make music?

How did they even discover the concept of “music”? Why is music found in every culture across the globe? What is the driving need to create some sort of rhythmic, ordered sound? And why do so many people have such shitty taste in it?

Old flute. Pretty cool.

My cursory research into the subject (a few minutes on Wikipedia plus supplementary web surfing) appears to show that musicologists and others don’t know why music began. Some believe it evolved alongside speech; it’s possible that music and speech were inseparable in early human history. This Psychology Today article from 2012 makes the argument that music actually predates speech, which makes some sense if music arose out of “baby talk” and mimicry as a tool for communication.

It's also possible, as the soloist David Teie hypothesizes here, that the components of sound that we think of as “music” are echoes of the sounds we hear in the womb.

Creepy, although it makes a certain kind of sense to me. When I listen to music in an active way – when it’s more than background – I want to crawl into it and lose myself. I want sonic dissolution. Which is kind of hard to do when you’re listening to music on your iPhone, but I invested in AirPod Pros, which did a great job until I left them in a Pittsburgh hotel room. Idiot.

Regardless, we’ve got music here on Earth and I’m glad for it. As 2024 concludes, I’m reminded that I have gone long stretches of my life without consuming much music at all. I don’t know why that is. My appetite for music is a lot like my appetite for Hint of Lime Tostitos. I can go months or even years without having any at all, but then something mysterious happens and it’s all I want.

While I have not been eating any HoL Tostitos of late, I have been devouring a lot of music. I don’t know what activated this new hunger but it’s here (hear?) now and I am doing nothing to resist. Why should I? Music is both low calorie and filling so it’s a perfect holiday side dish. That being said, I listen to almost zero holiday music because I am not a masochist. Christmas music, in particular, tends to be a goddamned horror show except for that Bing Crosby/ David Bowie duet of “Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy” which breaks my heart every time I hear it, made more so by the fact that, apparently, Bing Crosby was suffering early dementia during the filming of this video. I’m sure you’ve seen this already but I just love it.

My album of the year is 1995’s The Bends by Radiohead I hate recommending Radiohead because they’re already very popular and also very twee. Not to mention vaguely pretentious. Then again, I am also twee and pretentious so maybe it’s a case of Narcissus falling in love with his own reflection. I began my re-exploration of Radiohead’s catalog with a deep dive into Kid A, which is also excellent, but I sort of prefer The Bends, which finds the band in between the commercial success of “Creep” from Pablo Honey and the critical adulation of Ok Computer. It’s very much the work of a band trying to claim new territory while simultaneously protecting their rear guard. I love it.

Radiohead led me to my second recommendation, which, again, is pretentious although not quite as twee. I’ve been listening to the Chopin nocturnes. Until I wrote this sentence, I had no idea what a nocturne is and, I have to say, I am both surprised and unsurprised by the definition. Apparently, a nocturne simply means music which “is inspired by or evokes the night.” I would have thought there’d be a more technical and grander explanation, but no. Just a lil’ night music, as the saying goes.

Chopin seems like he was a whole mood. A depressive who, apparently, feared being buried alive, I think it’s fiarly safe to draw a straight line from him to Radiohead. When I looked into it a bit, it turns out that Radiohead’s “Exit Music for a Film” is – maybe – inspired by Chopin’s Prelude op. 28 no. 4.

Neat-o.

Here’s a mash-up of the two:

Some other things I’ve enjoyed: Solange and Billie Eilish and the first version of “Dear Theodosia” on The Hamilton remix (there are two) and Philip Glass and lots and lots of random songs by artists whose names I don’t remember. Also, I still love that 17-minute song Bob Dylan put out a few years ago about the Kennedy assassination, but it’s one of those things that I don’t listen to very often because I know if I do I’ll get sick of it. But it’s gorgeous. Plus, I returned to one of my favorites as a kid, the Thompson Twins, and it turns out, they’re not very good. Which was crushing.

Earlier, I joked that many people have shitty taste in music and I don’t exclude myself from their company. Musical taste is obviously subjective and idiosyncratic. I have never believed myself to have particularly good taste in anything, but I will leave you with this video of Jon Baptiste playing his Beethoven/blues/George Winston combo and if you don’t like this then you’re just a soulless wreck.