Music

Music is the art of organizing vocal or instrumental sound for beauty of form or emotional expression, shaped by a culture's standards of rhythm, melody and, in most Western traditions, harmony. Its true origins are prehistoric and undocumented; plausible theories hold that it began as primitive communication, as an aid to coordinate communal labor, or as an adjunct to religious ceremony, and none is settled fact. The tradition shaping Western music traces to the Fertile Crescent, where Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Hebrew cultures developed musical practices absorbed by the Greeks, who along with the Sumerians, Egyptians and Romans built the first surviving aesthetic theories and formal musical systems, transmitted through Rome into western Europe. Out of this base grew the European lineage of notated, harmonically organized music, from medieval chant and polyphony through the ornamented Baroque, the balanced Classical era, the emotionally charged Romantic symphony and song, and into the twentieth century's break with traditional tonality. In the twentieth century a largely improvisatory tradition, jazz, emerged from African American communities in the United States and became one of the most influential musical developments of the modern era.