So you think that rock music is something new under this sun? Well, the title of this section is from a public hand bill printed in 1840. The Richardson family built a rock xylophone taking thirteen years of cutting and fitting together. This incredible instrument covered seven octaves and came from the Skiddaw Mountain in the Lakeland region of England. The stones are rendered musical because of a freak of nature caused by an active volcano of Skiddaw which overflowed. The lava, unable to flow out evenly all around because of the

other close mountains, became compressed over a very small area.

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Today, the stones are rare, particularly those with a deep tone, so that is impossible, or certainly improbable that new xylophone could be cut.

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However, another Lakeland family did make a xylophone in 1881 and toured the United States, and the instrument is in the Museum of Orange, New Jersey.

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Stones were of utmost importance in the music of China. There is a Chinese tradition that about 2,000 years ago, a complete stone chime was found in a pool and then became a model of future instruments.

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Another legend dates stone chimes back to 2300 B.C. About this time, a chant refers to a musical stone:

" When I smite my musical stone - be it gently or strong

Then do the fiercest hearts leap for joy

and the chiefs do agree among themselves,

When ye make to resound the stone melodious,

When ye touch the lyre that is called Ch'in,

Then do the ghosts of the ancestors come to hear." 39

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In Confucian music, the stone was struck to end a verse and transmit the tone to the next verse.

 

The materials of the instruments in a Chinese orchestra were believed to express the changes and permutations taking place in the universe.

Sonorous Stone

Cardinal Point

Season

Phenomena

Substance

Northwest

Autumn

Winter

Heaven

Stone

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Lithophones have been found elsewhere in the world; Ethiopia, Nigeria, Venezuela, and in Europe on the island of Chios and Sardinia. In southern India there are musical stone pillars and the Ye stones of the Central Highlands of West New Guinea. There is a West Polynesian rite to prepare the intoxicating drink Kawa for religious purposes. Maidens perform the solemn ceremony of sitting on the ground and pulverizing the roots of the pepper plant, piper methysticum, on flat, sonorous stones which are insulated with small pieces of coconut and tuned to definite pitches.

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Laura Bolton in her book The Music Hunter describes two lithophones found in 1950 in what is now central Vietnam, made by the Bacsonians, a tropical race of Stone Age men that may date the instruments as much as nine thousand years old. They may turn out to be the oldest known musical instruments in the world.

 

The Rolling Stones have been with us a long time!

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* * * * * * * * * *

"We prefer to look at flowers, but not through

botany, for it seems that if we look at them

alone, we see a beauty of nature's poetry, a

direct gift from the Divine, and if we look at

botany alone, we see the beauty of nature's

intellect, a direct gift of the Divine, if we

look at both together, we see nothing." 40

Charles Ives

39. Blades, James. Percussion Instruments and their History

40. Ives, Charles. Essays Before a Sonata. Bew York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc. 1970, p. 339