First Sound, First Song:
The History of Music Told in Pictures, Rhyme and Prose
Mark Weakland, Copyright 2000. All rights reserved.
First Sound, First Song uses pictures, rhyme and prose to tell the story of the history of music -- from Neolithic times through the 20th century. Appropriate for ages five
through 12.
Excerpts: All rights reserved. Mark Weakland 2000.
| Page 1 (Copy below to appear on facing pages: Rhyme on left; story on right.) |
|
A
long time ago, long before you and me |
|
A
Long Time Ago! Music is very old.
No one knows exactly when the first song was sung or the
first musical note was played. When music first began, sounds and
songs could not be recorded because paper, tape recorders and
computers did not exist. We don’t really know how music started.
However, music may have begun when prehistoric people first started
to notice the sounds around them.
Trying to recreate sounds for their own enjoyment, humans may
have tried to imitate what they heard in nature. Bird songs and
animal calls may have inspired people to start singing.
Soon these singers were thinking of sounds as musical notes.
As time went by people put groups of musical notes together to form
scales. Pentatonic- or five-note scales -are found in Chinese,
Eskimo and African music and may have been created more than 10,000
years ago. |
| Page 4 (Copy below to appear on facing pages: Rhyme on left; story on right.) |
|
For thousands
of years people listened to sounds |
|
Stone
Age Times People have been making music for thousands of years. Ancient paintings on cave walls and instruments discovered by scientists show that prehistoric people of all cultures played instruments and made music. One cave painting shows a man playing a musical bow. People turned common tools like clay storage pots and hunting bows into instruments. Others used objects they found in nature, like seedpods, shells and bones. The oldest instruments ever found are Neolithic or Stone Age bone flutes. Ancient peoples carved drums from wood and made rattles from seeds and gourds. They used them to accompany singing and dancing. Sometimes they made instruments from very strange objects- like animal horns and even a human skull! |
This book is looking for a publisher.
Please contact Mark Weakland at springwatermg@earthlink.net
