Music as a vector of civilisation

 [On waking at half past one am with Smokey Robinson and the Miracles' I'll Second That Emotion on my mind.]

– Civilisation came to an end a few centuries ago. Was it all-out nuclear war? Was it an asteroid strike? Various folk tales persist. The evil one, 'Shmumptin' was to blame. The rebirth of historiography as a profession is low on people's priorities as they struggle to survive...

If we are to look at those humans as they work hard to rebuild, based on little more than the myths and legends they tell one another, what feature of their future-primitive society would be most recognisable to us today?

It is music. 

Unamplified (electricity has not yet been reinvented), but played to an amazingly high degree of fidelity by competent musicians, who have had passed down to them tunes stored in the memories of survivors. Drums, wind- and string instruments, crafted with ever-greater care and precision, to make sounds that conjure up atavistic resurgences of emotion. Not only the tunes, but the lyrics. Passed down orally from generation to generation, sung to children, sung aloud, sung together. Language persists and evolves through song.

Men and women, young and old, gathering to make music, attract crowds of tired humans who have finished toiling to feed, clothe and heal the slowly growing population. They come to listen, to sing, to dance, to engage in the sense of shared culture and tradition.

Some anthropologists claim that singing predated speech, that songs encode information in a more memorable way that disseminates easier and deeper than spoken or even written instructions.

So, imagine the year 2175, a clearing in a post-apocalyptic glade; the harvest has just been brought in, flagons of fruit wine are passed around by people seated in a semicircle, and the musicians enter, taking their places on a raised platform with their hand-crafted instruments at the ready. To your early-21st century ear, the melody seems familiar – some of the lyrics even – could this be Bohemian Rhapsody evolved to fit post-apocalyptic social landscapes? [AI image by Grok – once again beating Google Gemini 1.5 Pro at the task.]

The first portent of civilisation's rebirth will be its music. The last will be streaming services to disseminate that music across humanity.

"Just be thankful for what you got."

{{ I dreamt of a German writer with the surname Ulitz, with connections to Poland, and wondered whether a street had been named after him, Ulica Ulitza. Turns out there was such a guy, though no street in either Katowice or Wrocław yet bears his name.  }}

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