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THE ORIGINS OF POETRY, MUSIC, AND DANCE

Poetry, Music, and Dance Began With Our Remote Ancestors' Spontaneous Cries

Our Ancestors Screamed In Fear

Our remote ancestors, the first primates, are said long ago to have roamed the savannas and forests in bands. Like baboon and chimpanzee troops today they made automatic clicking, chattering, and other noises that kept them close to each other while foraging.

But occasionally the band stumbled on unforeseen, terrifying dangers: leopards, perhaps, cheetahs, or lions.

Startled, they screamed.

Gestures Spontaneously Accompanied These Cries

We tend to think of these screams in isolation. But gestures, appropriate to the emotions underlying their screams, spontaneously accompanied the primates' cries. For example: encountering a leopard, a primate would scream, throw a hand in front of his face, shrink away, or turn to run.

The Other Side of Fear

Conversely, pleasant situations also caused the ejaculation of cries and noises: very different ones. When encountering pleasant situations, primates made little spontaneous noises or cries of pleasure -- clucking or gurgling sounds perhaps, or giggling or laughter -- along with appropriate accompanying gestures or motions of the hands and body. For example: rolling back and forth on the ground while moaning with pleasure.

Each Cry-and-Gesture Combination was Originally a Unified, Spontaneous, Automatic Reaction

Each cry-and-gesture combination was originally a spontaneous animal reaction; that is, a unified reaction of the primate's whole body -- of its reflexes and automatic unconscious defence mechanisms -- to a strong, dangerous stimulus, or to a happy one. In the primates' repertoires there were cries- and-gestures which together expressed fear, defiance, joy, and grief.

"The Muses Are The Daughters of Memory": Brainier Later Primates Discovered the Joy of Reliving Their Experiences

Often -- in other circumstances than the one in which he or she had felt a powerful emotion and reacted with a cry and gesture -- the primate would remember the experience. The primate would then be without the same powerful stimulus to emotion. But it would have the memory of the stimulating situation, and of the emotions it had felt and the cry-gesture it had made. It would spontaneously relive these experiences and perhaps repeat the cry and gesture.

Our remote ancestors had discovered the questionable "joy" of memory, and the joy and power of repeating their cries and gestures. They had discovered the power of reliving the experience of

encountering threats or pleasures, and
reacting to them.

At this point the cryer going over his experience was not trying to communicate it to others in the band. He may have repeated his cries and gestures out of obsession-compulsion, or purely for the pleasure of reliving them. Sometimes they must have been for their pleasure in themselves (though perhaps repeated gesture-cries were accompanied with pleasurable feelings of relief through their repeated association with the primate's survival). The experience of reliving the stimulus might be traumatic, but it might possibly also be pleasurable. It might be as terrible as reliving a rape, or as thrilling as reliving the climax of a horror film.

Repeated Cries And Gestures Became Non-Representational Songs and Dances

These repeated cries and gestures, not necessarily intended for communication, were the first proto-music, the first "songs" and "dances". These "songs" and "dances" were the equivalent of wolf howls at night, or a dog's prolonged series of nocturnal yips, growls, and whines. Songs and dances were perhaps useful for attracting mates, or territorial, like the cries of birds. As genuine cries, they were at first non-communicational; as philosophers say, they were "non-intentional" (directed at nothing). They were for the pleasure of making the noises and gestures, and, probably, for the pleasure of feeling the accompanying emotions of relief and survival.

As primates became more intelligent, evolving towards homo sapiens, however, they became more directed, more 'intentional' in their cries. Hominids more and more attempted to communicate with others of their species or band. In situations a little less dangerous than an actual confrontation with a lion, hominids would spontaneously attempt to warn others of their band of impending danger through cries; if the situation were only slowly becoming dangerous, through low cries hopefully not to be overheard by predators.

As hominids became yet more intelligent, they learned to suppress their excitement and spontaneous cries in times of danger; they invented silent gestures. (Thus they invented sign language; it followed their earlier invention of spontaneous cries but preceded the invention of spoken words).

When repeating spontaneous cries, the temptation would be to vary them as well: to amplify them, to magnify them, to exaggerate them, and so to change the nature of their re-experienced memory for greater enjoyment.

Perhaps song and dance demonstrated fierceness and viability. Perhaps hominids unleashed their songs to say, "I'm here; competitors stay away." Over time these primitive songs and dances became elaborated into longer songs made, I think, for the singer's pleasure (but still with no words).

Non-Representational Singing Became Song About the World

Some Cries Become Symbols of Things: That Is, (Spoken) Words

Eventually, perhaps by hominids, some cries were used to identify things; they represented the things. These sounds or cries became the first words, the first human speech. Probably a concept symbolizing "leopard", enlivened with gestures of the motion of the animal and an onomatopoeic cry to name it, became a tool for communicating with others. In time singers, experimenting, "sang" with their developing vocabulary of words rather than with their previously contentless noises; for instance, telling with cries and gestures the story of how the singer had encountered a leopard and reacted to it.

In effect, remembering their experiences later, in the absence of their stimulus to emotion, our ancestors discovered the joy of combined cry-and-gesture recollection and repetition; that is, of storytelling; and the joy of hyping up, exaggerating the tale by varying their cries and gestures, making them bigger and louder, to exaggerate the threat of the leopard. Eventually -- like good storytellers everywhere -- they learned phrasing and suspense, sudden, rapid alterations of pace, and the interjection of meaningful silences. Each repeated combination of cry and gesture reminded the cryer (and his or her audience) of frightening experiences he or she had survived, and therefore produced thrills of pleasure -- or as the primate philosopher Aristotle would later say, catharsis.

Phrasing: Many Words Or Syllables Could Be Sung On a Single Breath

Spoken words (speech) was a special kind of singing. Our ancestors eventually discovered that a number of simple words and cries could be repeatedly sung, chanted, or spoken comfortably and effectively on a single breath. Thus came about the spoken or sung phrase. Phrases could be of several lengths, depending on how many simple words (or, more likely, what we would call syllables) one chose to sing or speak on a single breath.

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Last modified: 7:33 PM EDT 7/4/2001