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← Where the Songs Came From

Where the Songs Came From

Three short lessons on where music comes from: four instruments from four places, the punched paper that played tunes before computers, and why so many children's songs use only five notes.

Spark & Whetstone · sparkwhetstone.org/learn/where-the-songs-came-from · CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Answers are at the end, so you can try each question first.

Lesson 1. Four ways to make a string or a bar sing

The kora comes from West Africa: Mali, Senegal and The Gambia. It has twenty-one strings over a large gourd covered in cow skin, and the player plucks them with the thumb and first finger of both hands. Its players, the jali, are also the keepers of family histories, so a kora song is often a story about real people.

The erhu comes from China. It has two strings and no fingerboard, and the hair of the bow runs between the two strings, so the bow can never be taken off. The player's fingers press the strings in the air, which lets a note slide up or down like a voice.

The đàn tranh comes from Vietnam. It is a long zither with sixteen or more strings, each on its own movable bridge. The right hand plucks; the left hand presses the string on the other side of the bridge to bend the note, which is where its sighing sound comes from.

A gamelan comes from Java and Bali in Indonesia. It is not one instrument but a whole set, mostly bronze bars and gongs struck with mallets, made and tuned together. Two gamelans rarely match exactly, so the players learn their own set.

BandPals sorts its instruments the same way children do: by what you do to make the sound. Pluck, bow, hit, blow or shake.

Question. How does an erhu player make a note sound?

  1. By plucking twenty-one strings with the thumb and first finger.
  2. By drawing a bow that runs between its two strings.
  3. By striking bronze bars with a padded mallet.

Say it back. In your own words: pick one of the four instruments and say where it comes from and how it makes its sound.

Lesson 2. Punched paper, the player piano and the first programs

A music box plays a tune that someone wrote down as holes or pins: a row for each note, low to high, and a column for each beat. Turn the handle and every hole that passes the comb plays its note. CrankPals is one of these, on paper.

In 1804 the French weaver Joseph Marie Jacquard built a loom run by a chain of punched cards. A hole meant lift this thread; no hole meant leave it. Change the cards and the same loom wove a different pattern.

Around 1900, player pianos played music from long paper rolls with holes punched in them. Air rushing through a hole pressed that key. Many homes had one, and famous pianists recorded rolls so that people could hear them play.

The same idea ran the first computing machines. In the 1830s Charles Babbage planned an engine that would take its instructions on punched cards, and in 1843 Ada Lovelace wrote that it would weave algebraic patterns as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves. She also wrote that such an engine might one day compose music. In 1890 the United States counted its census on Herman Hollerith's punched-card machines.

Question. On a music-box strip, what does one hole tell the machine?

  1. Which instrument should play the tune.
  2. Which note to play, and on which beat.
  3. How loudly the whole tune should be played.

Say it back. Say it back: what do a music-box strip, a Jacquard card and an early computer card have in common?

Lesson 3. Why so many children's songs sit on five notes

Play only the black keys of a piano and you are playing a five-note scale, a pentatonic scale. Tunes from many places use one: Scottish and Irish folk songs, much Chinese, Japanese and Vietnamese folk music, and many West African and Native American songs. "Amazing Grace" and "Auld Lang Syne" fit on the black keys.

Nobody can say for certain why it is so common. Here are the reasons teachers give. A five-note scale leaves out the two notes that sit only a half step from their neighbours, so almost any two notes sound fine together and a child making up a tune rarely hits a harsh clash. And a small child sings most easily in a narrow range, so a song with few notes fits their voice.

Music teachers took this up on purpose. In Hungary, Zoltán Kodály's method starts children on two- and three-note playground songs and builds up to the five. Carl Orff, in Germany, gave children instruments with the clashing bars taken off, so that anything they played would fit.

So a five-note song is less a rule of nature than a very old, very widespread good idea, found again and again.

Question. Why do some music teachers give children only five notes to make up a tune with?

  1. With no half steps, almost any notes fit together.
  2. Five-note songs are always older than songs with more notes in them.
  3. Five notes is the most a young child can hear.

Say it back. In your own words: give one reason teachers give for starting children on five-note songs.

At the table: One song from each of our families

Players: two families, or two or three generations of one, ages 5 and up. You'll need: paper, a pencil, and the songs you already know.

  1. Each family (or each generation) chooses one song it sang to its children, in any language.
  2. Say where it came from: who taught it to you, and where they learned it.
  3. Sing or hum it once; the others join the second time.
  4. Write its first line and where it came from on a card. Keep the cards together, one from each family.
  5. If you like, write the words line by line in the Family Songbook so a grandchild can lead it.

Seat sheets and a run-through: sparkwhetstone.org/family-songbook

Answers

  1. By drawing a bow that runs between its two strings. — The bow hair runs between the erhu's two strings. Plucking twenty-one strings is the kora; striking bronze bars is the gamelan.
  2. Which note to play, and on which beat. — Its row says which note, and its column says when. That is a program: an instruction written down for a machine to follow.
  3. With no half steps, almost any notes fit together. — Leaving out the half-step notes means a child's made-up tune rarely clashes. Young children hear every note; and five-note songs are not always the oldest.