The Bible and Music

Today in class we talked about the oldest music we knew and tried to place the time period that each piece was from. We talked about different instruments that people used to play on, instruments that play in a specific key and others that don’t. Something that was really interesting to me was that the depictions of people playing instruments almost always showed women playing the drums. This was not what I would expect because in modern culture, drummers are usually male.

Another thing that was cool today was when the professor played Greensleeves for the class and asked what we thought it was. I immediately recognized the melody as Greensleeves from my experience playing in orchestra in high school, but the general consensus was that it was What Child is This. I am not familiar with that set of words, but evidently What Child is This is a more popularized version. This brings up the concept of the evolution of music and language with society and how music changes with language changes and society develops.