A Novel – In One Page Per Day
Day 107, Tuesday
April 17th, 2018
Chapter Two: The Music
The music of the people, the drums they beat, the rhythms they made, they pushed the stories of each tribe, each family, deep into the memory of its members.
Drums, and rhythm, these operated as a visceral reinforcement of the memories that the human tribes passed down from one generation to the next.
It changed them on the genetic level, setting up successive generations to recall them, relive them, to transform those stories into a part of their being.
Jim played to this phenomenon, he avidly worked to eradicate any form of written narrative. He succeeded. Every tribe developed its own oral tradition. Stories were handed down from master to pupil.
Paintings and images, sculptures, these became objects of religious ritual and devotion. People only engaged in their creation with careful attention.
Music was the heart of the people.
Each tribe found its own interpretation of the musical scale. They developed their own drums, and their own pipes and horns, and instruments made of string.
This was a great science.
The exchange of music between cultures was often met with alarm, and fear.
All music was recognizable as music. But the form that it could take, the beat, the measure and the timing, the tonal quality, these could create significant psychic disturbances in people who heard an alien scale for the first time.
For thousands of years Jim worked to exasperate those differences, before finally bringing them together. The result were new traditions of overwhelming beauty and complexity. Which not only captivated human audiences, but enthralled the Collective as well.
It was a grand orchestration.
#Emergence #SuperShortFiction #365SciFi #OnePagePerDay
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