Where Did Music Come From? How And When Did It Begin?

As an owner of an independent record label, I often get asked how to put together a great press kit. This concern for musical value appears to reflect a more intensive search for meaning, which is not likely to be the exclusive property of a particular style or era, nor is it to be sought in an indiscriminate acceptance or rejection of novelty per se.

Music music of the spheres the harmonious sound supposed to be produced by the motion of the concentric, transparent, hollow globes imagined by the older astronomers as revolving round the earth and respectively carrying with them the several heavenly bodies (moon, sun, planets, and fixed stars).

At first, these societies did not intend to give public concerts, but only practice concerts.” Later on, they were succeeded by organizations that gave public concerts (for example, the Concerts of Ancient Music between 1776 and 1848, in England; Le Concert Spirituel between 1725 and 1791, in France; and the Big Concerts in Leipzig, dating from 1743, which were continued in 1781 as the Gewandhaus Concerts).

Carrying over the miscellaneous comic spectacle of the minstrel show, which had been firmly entrenched in American popular entertainment since the 1820s, and combining these lighter touches with some attempt at serious virtuoso performance, the founders of American musical theater created a form of entertainment at once old and new, cultivated and vernacular.

Of the forms that have characterized distinct periods of music history, it is sufficient to remark here that the chief Renaissance forms— mass , motet , the polyphonic chanson , and madrigal —were allied to texts that strongly influenced their structure.