Music is everywhere, including in our heads. So why is it so hard to describe?

We’ve all heard the line, variously attributed to Elvis Costello, Frank Zappa, Thelonious Monk and even Clara Schumann (though the last seems unlikely): “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”

It’s a cliché. But while dancing about architecture would undoubtedly be tricky, you could try. Certainly, millions of words have been expended on attempting to explain and account for music, and the trouble starts with defining the term.

Most of the indigenous languages of Africa, though they have words for singing and storytelling, dancing and playing instruments, lack a word for music. Equally when human beings have made tuneful sounds to assist them in their work (field hollers, sea shanties), or to praise their gods or for any sort of ritual, they’ve probably not been thinking first of the nature or quality of their musical utterance. Many branches of the world’s religions, disapproving of what they consider to be music, find other words to describe the singing and chanting of scriptures and prayers.

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The American composer John Cage said music was “organised sound”, which is a nicely inclusive definition, leaving room for the organising to occur in the mind of the listener. But Cage’s definition misses music’s importance, and it’s that importance that gives it its place in our lives and in history. Music is so important and so ubiquitous, that we can easily get suckered into the belief that it’s an international language – another cliché. In fact, it is neither international nor a language. If it were genuinely international, we’d all understand all of it. But everyone’s heard music that means nothing to them. “That’s not music!”, we say.

As for being a language, if it were, you could convey specific information in it – you could write a shopping list or give someone directions – and you could translate it into another language. No one believes this is how music works.

Still, even if we can’t articulate it, we probably sense its importance. Music is something personal to us. We carry it around in our heads or on our phones. Sometimes it takes over our minds, our imaginations, sometimes our bodies: as TS Eliot wrote: “You are the music while the music lasts.”

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So how, when and where did music start? Since we can’t even be precise about the origins of blues and jazz – musical forms that sprang to life around the turn of the 20th century – we’ll never be able to say for sure when it began. As early hominins chipped away with stone tools two million years ago, did they hear how their rhythms fell into and out of step? Homo erectus possessed the facial bone structure to sing different pitches: did they croon to their hairy babies? It’s hard to believe that they didn’t. 

What is certain is that human beings and their forebears have always breathed, and breathing creates rhythm willy-nilly. We might, then, with some confidence, postulate the origin of music as the moment the first hominins noticed and paid attention to the sounds of their own bodies, their breathing and their heartbeats, the rhythms created by their feet as they walked and ran. 

Most of us feel music’s power and will have noticed how it can bind us together in the most intimate and public of situations. We sing to our babies, establishing a vital early connection; we sing at sporting events and in karaoke bars, in churches and on political marches. And from prehistory, at the highest echelons of society, music has celebrated and aggrandised kings and queens. We know this, because we have pictures of ancient Egyptians and Aztecs playing at royal ceremonies. What we don’t have is the music itself. Perhaps this is one reason historians avoid writing about music.

But the other reason, surely, is that they can’t explain the phenomenon. This bothers the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, who once wrote that while music might “tickle the sensitive spots of at least six of our mental faculties” it confers “no survival advantage”. Accordingly, he claimed, music is the auditory equivalent of cheesecake. One senses his frustration. Pinker works with language and rationality, but because music isn’t a language and is scarcely rational, he can’t explain it. 

Right there is music’s importance. If we can’t fully explain something, then we can’t explain it away. Music arrived with our first breaths – and continues to arrive every time a baby is born – and it will die with our last.

Andrew Ford’s The Shortest History of Music is out on 1 October (Old Street Publishing, £14.99). You can buy it from The Big Issue shop on Bookshop.org, which helps to support The Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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