My love of music, listening, playing and creating, is a huge part of my life. I’ve never really considered where music was first written down. I assume, perhaps wrongly, that the first rhythms were created by banging things in a percussive way.
Recently I came across an article that spoke of the first notated music.
It was on a tablet written as a hymn to the Hurrians’ goddess of the orchards, Nikkal.
And it sounds pretty strange – although our understanding of melody and beauty is, I think very fixed. Anything out of the ordinary is dismissed readily as being experimental, or just plain odd. I like a bit of oddity in my music, I like dissonance and unusual time signatures. I know that if I presented many of my amateur musical friends with half of the stuff I adore or enjoy, they would consider me even more unusual than they already do.
Anyway, here is an attempt to reconstruct the first written melody.