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Since Music is prehistoric, by definition there is no written history concerning its origins; it already existed before it was first mentioned.
Because the prehistoric instruments and writing materials were constructed chiefly of materials which were bio-degradable, no examples currently exist; therefore we can only speculate to the origins of the instruments and the music they produced.
Since writing itself did not exist, at least not in any form we can now decipher, neither did musical notation. We speculate that music was "passed down" by rote from generation to generation, but it could have been improvised anew with each "performance", too. We simply do not know.
Even after the advent of written records, only the very rich and/or the Church could afford to hire someone to notate their records, and those records only mention that music occurred, and do not contain the music itself.
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All music is composed through the use of three basic elements: sound, time, and style. These elements are subdivided into various subsets.
- Sound is divided in categories of
Timbre, or Tone, Dynamics, or Loudness, and Pitch, or Frequency.
- Time is divided into categories of Rhythm, Pulse, or Beat, Tempo, and Meter.
- Style is divided into categories of Harmonic Language, Form, Instrumentation, and Orchestration.
Style is the result of the manipulation by the composer of the subsets of the first two elements.
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