A Short Prehistory of Western Music, Chapter 3

Egypt P Tagg: A Short Prehistory of Western Music 7
doms (2850-1570 BP), were superseded in the New Kingdom by scales containing
intervals of a semitone or less (more ‘Arabic’ and less ‘African’ to our ears). 14
Such changes in tonal system were almost certainly due to frequent Egyptian warmongering
which brought about continual contact with the musical cultures of
neighbouring peoples such as the Hebrews and Assyrians. Complete court ensembles
belonging to foreign potentates were acquired in this way and brought to Pharaoh’s
court, where the appearance of foreign artists was always regarded as an
extra treat. Soldiers, however, were warned by state moralists of the time against
the sweet sounds of foreign music and against the good looks of foreign women, perhaps
with ‘good’ reason, for, as we just mentioned, at some time during The Middle
Kingdom the music of Asia Minor and the East appears to have made substantial
inroads in Egypt, to the extent that the old pentatonic system had virtually disappeared
by the middle of The New Kingdom. This is also the period during which the
lyre, lute and shawm entered Egypt. It is also the time when, with the rising importance
of trade as a basis for economy, the middle classes started using music as
sonic-aesthetic decoration, i.e. as entertainment to listen to or to hear in the background,
rather than as a set of practices intimately connected to state religion or
the court.
Perhaps this course of events confirmed the fears of learned men in the old
Pharaonic court: that the order and rule of God or gods on earth, upheld by the selfappointed
keepers of divine seals here below, will crumble and fall when the old order
of divine music falls into disarray. There is something disconcertingly familiar
about this line of thought …
3:3 Fresco of nomads (c. 2000 BP, found in an Egyptian aristocrat’s burial chamber). Note
the armed men, the finely clad women and the young man playing a lyre.
14. Paraphrased from Elsner (1975: 402).