Howling, braying, grunting, neighing, bellowing, bleating, yelping: these exhaust the phonetics of our near neighbours in organization. A musical score composed of such elements would be called a hullabaloo. Man, forming a striking exception at the top of the scale of these makers of raucous noises, took it into his head to sing. An attribute which no other shares with him, the attribute of coordinated sounds whence springs the incomparable gift of speech, led him on to scientific vocal exercises. In the absence of a model, it must have been a laborious apprenticeship. When our prehistoric ancestor, to celebrate his return from hunting the Mammoth, intoxicated himself with sour tipple brewed from raspberries and sloes, what can have issued from his hoarse larynx? An orthodox melody? Certainly not; hoarse shouts, rather, capable of shaking the roof of his cave. The loudness of the cry constituted its merit. The primitive song is found to this day when men’s throats are fired in taverns instead of caverns. And this tenor, with his crude vocal efforts, was already an adept at guiding his pointed flint to engrave on ivory the effigy of the monstrous animal which he had captured; he knew how to embellish his idol’s cheeks with red chalk; he knew how to paint his own face with coloured grease. There were plenty of models for form and colour but none for rhythmic sounds. With progress came the musical instrument, as an adjunct to those first guttural attempts. Men blew down tubes taken all in one piece from the sappy branches; they produced sounds from the barley-stalks and made whistles out of reeds. The shell of a Snail, held between two fingers of the closed fist, imitated the Partridge’s call; a trumpet formed of a wide strip of bark rolled into a horn reproduced the bellowing of the Bull; a few gut-strings stretched across the empty shell of a calabash grated out the first notes of our stringed instruments; a Goat’s bladder, fixed on a solid frame, was the original drum; two flat pebbles struck together at measured intervals led the way for the click of the castagnettes. Such must have been the primitive musical materials, materials still preserved by the child, which, with its simplicity in things artistic, is so strongly reminiscent of the big child of yore. Classical antiquity knew no others, as witness the shepherds of Theocritus and Virgil. Silvestrem tenui musam meditaris avena, says Meliboeus to Tityrus. [53] What are we to make of this oat-straw, this frail shepherd’s pipe, as they used to make us translate it in my young days? Did the poet write avena tenui by way of a rhetorical figure, or was he describing a reality? I vote for the reality, having myself in the old days heard a concert of shepherd’s pipes.