I’ve been wondering how far back I have to go before music stops belonging to somebody else.
This started, like a lot of things seem to for me lately, with a vague dissatisfaction with modern life. I spend an enormous amount of my day inside. I work on a computer. I communicate through screens. I listen to music through speakers. I drive somewhere rather than walk there. Even many of the things I do for pleasure are mediated through some sort of technology. None of this is particularly unusual, of course. It is probably a fairly standard life for a person living in 2026.
But I’ve increasingly had the feeling that something about it is wrong—or maybe not wrong, exactly, but incomplete. I don’t think humans spent a few hundred thousand years evolving so that I could sit in an air-conditioned room clicking between browser tabs for eight hours. Yet here we are.
This has somehow worked its way into the music I’ve been trying to write. For more than a year now I’ve been circling around the idea of creating my own kind of “ancient” music. Music that feels as if it is trying to move backward toward something elemental. Something closer to nature and perhaps closer to the body. Music that might return me, however artificially, to an older way of hearing.
Sorry, Milton Babbitt—not your music.
But Bach isn’t quite what I’m looking for either. Neither is Arvo Pärt, despite the fact that his music can certainly feel ancient, spacious, spiritual, etc. I’m trying to go much further back than that. Before Bach. Before Gregorian chant. Before Pythagoras started measuring strings. Before notation. Before concert halls. Before anyone had thought to divide music into “folk” and “art” music.
Ideally, I want to go back before agriculture and villages.
Which presents a fairly obvious problem.
Nobody knows what that music sounded like.
Going Back Far Enough
We do at least know that humans have been making music for a very long time. Archaeologists working in the caves of southwestern Germany have found sophisticated bone and ivory flutes associated with early modern humans more than 35,000 years ago. One remarkably complete flute from Hohle Fels was made from bird bone and has five finger holes.
I used to take discoveries like this and make the slightly too convenient leap that ancient humans were therefore playing pentatonic music. Five holes! Five notes! There we go. Apparently I’ve solved prehistoric musicology.
Unfortunately, it isn’t that simple. Five finger holes do not prove a five-note scale, and an archaeological flute certainly doesn’t tell us what people sang, how they organized rhythm, what counted as a “song,” how much was improvised, or even whether any of those categories would make sense to them.
Which is actually fine because I’m not really trying to reconstruct Paleolithic music.
I’m trying to imagine backward.
We can make some reasonable guesses. Humans had voices. They could clap. They could strike things. They could shake things. They could blow through hollow objects. We know they eventually made flutes sophisticated enough to survive tens of thousands of years for us to find them. Surely there were pulses, cries, repeated sounds, lullabies, calls, group singing, dancing—or whatever ancient equivalents existed long before anyone used those words.
So my thought is not: I am going to discover authentic prehistoric music.
My thought is: What happens if I deliberately limit myself to a musical world that could plausibly have existed before most of civilization did?
A few pitches. Voice. Breath. Flute. Wood. Stone. Skin. Space.
Then see what happens.
A Tradition Before Traditions
There is another reason I keep going so far backward, and this one is probably more personal.
I don’t really feel like I have a traditional music.
As an American, obviously I inherit an unbelievably rich musical culture. Blues, jazz, gospel, country, rock, minimalism, experimental music, hip-hop—there is no shortage of American music. But that isn’t quite what I mean.
I mean something older. The kind of musical tradition where the music seems tied to land, ancestry, ritual, seasons, animals, weather, stories, the dead. You can hear that relationship very clearly in traditional music from all over the world.
I love Native American music, for example, but those traditions aren’t mine. I can listen, learn, appreciate, perhaps even be influenced, but I feel an unwritten boundary there that I have no particular desire to cross. The same problem appears if I start grabbing musical materials from an African tribe, rural India, Aboriginal Australia, or somewhere else because the music sounds wonderfully ancient to my ears. Those sounds belong to actual people with actual histories. They aren’t simply a giant global sample library waiting for me.
Even contemporary projects like Wardruna make this distinction clearer to me. Wardruna uses historical Nordic instruments along with natural sound sources—stones, bones, water, fire, trees—to create a modern music consciously tied to Nordic traditions. Heilung goes even further into ritualized “amplified history,” drawing its aesthetic from Northern European material stretching from the Bronze Age into the early medieval period.
I think that stuff is fantastic. It looks fun as hell too. Give me a giant frame drum and some antlers and I’ll probably have a wonderful afternoon.
But it still doesn’t quite solve my problem.
So where is my tradition as a white American who doesn’t feel a particularly deep musical connection to some specific European folk lineage?
Maybe the answer is to keep going backward until the borders disappear.
Back before Nordic music was Nordic. Before Indian music was Indian. Before anybody was American because, among other reasons, America did not exist.
Maybe I’m looking for something no one—and everyone—can lay claim to.
Not my ancestors’ music, exactly.
Human ancestral music.
That’s a much stranger thing to compose, but I think that is closer to what I’m actually searching for.
A Body Making a Sound in a Place
The other major part of this experiment is nature.
When I imagine this music, I don’t hear everything beautifully close-miked in a studio. I hear sounds existing in actual space.
A voice might be thirty feet away.
A flute might come from somewhere behind you.
Something might move while it is being played.
The wind might obscure part of a phrase.
A bird might interrupt.
Maybe the instrument isn’t quite in tune. Maybe the singer isn’t either.
Perhaps one sound is very close while another is so distant that you’re not quite sure whether it was intentional. Maybe the music appears for a while and disappears again. Maybe the environment is not the background of the piece but one of its performers. This is sounding reminiscent of like a John Cage style.
This seems increasingly important to me because so much recorded music removes place. We put microphones inches from instruments, isolate everything, remove noise, tune pitches, adjust timing, compress dynamics, balance levels and then place the finished object directly between the listener’s ears.
And sometimes that is exactly what I want.
But what happens if we do almost the opposite?
What if the musical proposition is simply: a body is making a sound in a place, and you are there to hear it?
Charles Ives was thinking about something adjacent to this more than a century ago. Writing about Emerson in Essays Before a Sonata, he says:
“A rare experience of a moment at daybreak, when something in nature seems to reveal all consciousness, cannot be explained at noon.”
I like that because it gets at something I don’t think music can entirely manufacture. Sometimes place, time and attention align in a way that makes an ordinary sound feel enormous.
Ives returns to this throughout the “Thoreau” section of the same book, and the final movement of his Concord Sonataeven introduces a flute associated with Thoreau and Walden. George Crumb was exploring another version of this world decades later—pieces such as Vox Balaenae (Voice of the Whale), for amplified flute, cello and piano, where timbre, atmosphere and evocations of the natural world become as important as conventional melodic development. Pauline Oliveros went somewhere else again by making listening itself—the act of expanding attention to the entire sonic environment—a central part of her musical practice.
So, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, I am not the first composer to discover that going outside might be good for you.
This is reassuring.
The Problem With Banging Rocks
Of course, now comes the difficult part.
It would be extremely easy for me to walk into the jungle with a recorder, hit one rock against another for eleven minutes, yelp occasionally and announce that I have created Ancient Human Song No. 1.
Maybe I’ll cover myself in clay first for authenticity.
The problem is that an idea can be interesting while the resulting music is terrible.
That is really where this whole thing becomes a compositional problem rather than an aesthetic daydream. How do I use these materials in a way that creates something I would actually want to listen to?
Because “simple” is not automatically profound. Neither is repetitive. Neither is out of tune. Neither is natural. A badly played flute does not become moving because I record it in a forest.
And I don’t particularly want to make generic New Age drone music either. There is a version of this idea where everything becomes a low sustained tone, some wind chimes appear, perhaps water trickles nearby, and within thirty seconds I am being asked to align my root chakra.
That isn’t it.
But going in the opposite direction also seems wrong. I could take these elemental sounds and develop a very sophisticated compositional system around them—complex rhythmic transformations, spectral analysis, elaborate formal relationships—and eventually I’m right back inside the intellectual machinery I was trying to escape.
So there is a balance I haven’t figured out.
Maybe the piece uses only four notes.
Maybe it repeats for a long time. Or perhaps almost nothing repeats.
Maybe it has no climax.
Maybe it doesn’t “go” anywhere.
That last possibility interests me particularly because so much Western concert and popular music is organized around expectation and arrival – that’s what makes it so satisfying! Build. Develop. Chorus. Drop. Climax. Resolution. Even a lot of ambient music still slowly accumulates toward something.
But nature doesn’t usually behave like that.
A morning does not spend three hours developing toward a satisfying recapitulation.
Things happen.
Then other things happen.
The light changes.
A bird calls twenty times and stops.
Wind arrives for four minutes.
Nothing happens for a while.
Perhaps part of what I am looking for is a musical form comfortable with that kind of existence.
Conveniently, I’m Also Not a Great Pianist
There is another confession I should probably make.
This entire musical philosophy is extremely convenient for me.
I am not a good pianist. I’m not a good violinist. I’m not a good guitarist. My notation is weak. If the future of Western music depends upon me writing a ferociously difficult piano sonata, Western music is in serious trouble.
So there is undoubtedly some part of me that says: Aha! What if virtuosity isn’t important? What if four notes are actually better? What if the inability to play perfectly is an aesthetic feature?
Very convenient, Brandon.
I could probably construct an entire philosophical system to explain why my deficiencies are actually evidence of artistic integrity.
And perhaps I am doing that.
But I’m not sure that completely invalidates the idea.
Every composer works with limitations. Some limitations are imposed by instruments, some by the conventions of a style, some by money and available performers, and some by what the composer can actually do. Maybe one of my abilities is not instrumental virtuosity but creating systems, constraints and circumstances where interesting things can happen.
This is also territory I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about in my book, Formative Forces in Sound, where I look at the different structures and forces that give music its shape across cultures. Increasingly, though, I’m interested in what happens when some of those structures are stripped almost completely away.
I’ve always been drawn to that anyway.
So if I create a musical world where a piece can be made from five pitches, one drum, two voices, distance and wind, perhaps I am hiding my musical chops.
But maybe I am also finally designing music around the kind of musician I actually am.
Both can be true.
Intent, Unfortunately
Then we get to intent.
Ah, intent.
I keep coming back to how much of this music depends upon what I believe I am doing.
Imagine two people playing exactly the same five-note flute melody.
One says, “Here is a little melody I wrote.”
The other says, “This composition attempts to reconnect contemporary human consciousness to Paleolithic modes of embodied communal listening.”
Same notes.
One of those descriptions makes the music sound much more important. It also makes me want to roll my eyes.
So how much does the explanation matter?
I don’t know.
Intent clearly changes the decisions I make. If I am thinking about distance, ancient materials, environmental sound and bodily listening, I will create differently than if I am trying to write a conventional flute piece.
Intent may also change how someone listens. If I tell you to pay attention to the relationship between a distant human voice and insects in the surrounding environment, you will probably notice something you otherwise would have ignored.
But there is also a dangerous point where the explanation starts doing work the music should be doing.
If I need three pages of philosophy to convince you that my rock banging is profound, perhaps the rock banging needs some work.
That seems like a useful test.
So What Am I Actually Looking For?
The longer I work on this, the less I think I am trying to recreate ancient music.
I am looking for a way to use imagined ancientness as a constraint.
Strip things away.
Reduce the pitches.
Reduce the instruments.
Reduce the technological perfection.
Let the environment back in.
Allow distance.
Allow breath.
Allow mistakes.
Allow sounds to exist without immediately developing them into something clever.
Perhaps the deeper experiment is whether deliberately primitive musical materials can restore some feeling that contemporary life has weakened in me—not because ancient people possessed some mystical purity that modern humans lost, but because their relationship to sound necessarily involved bodies, spaces, environments and other people in ways mine increasingly does not.
I don’t want to live in a cave.
I like air conditioning. I like Spotify. I’m writing this on a computer.
But I also want another option.
I want to know what happens when I go somewhere outdoors with a flute, a drum, a few voices and no need for the music to prove how sophisticated it is. I want to hear what happens when the landscape is allowed to interfere. I want to know whether four notes can remain interesting if the sound of those notes—the person producing them, their distance, their repetition, the air around them—is doing more of the musical work.
Maybe this is all an elaborate excuse for a mediocre instrumentalist to bang rocks in the woods.
I’m genuinely open to that possibility.
But every once in a while I hear something approaching the sound I’ve been imagining: a voice far away, a slightly unstable flute tone, insects underneath it, a rhythm that repeats without seeming particularly concerned about arriving anywhere. And when that happens, I notice that I listen differently.
I become aware of where the sound is.
I become aware of the space around it.
Sometimes I become aware of my own body listening.
And for a moment the music doesn’t feel like another piece of content being delivered to me through technology. It feels like something happening.
Maybe that is the connection I’ve been looking for.
For now, that seems worth following.
Brandon Lee Alsup is a composer and writer interested in how humans make sense of sound—across cultures, environments, and musical systems. He is the author of Formative Forces in Sound: An Exploration of Global Music Structures.
