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What is The Oldest Song?

2014-04-18 · explainer · Hank · 3:59 · watch on YouTube

Topic: History & curiosities · mode: Curiosity & trivia · tags: song or performance, self promotion

Hank asks how old the oldest song is: the first songs are lost, Hurrian Hymn No. 6 is the oldest playable one, and the oldest complete song, a burial epitaph he sings on guitar, is basically about YOLO. He closes by announcing his band's album Incongruent.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Oldies are newies; the oldest song is unanswerable (a bird, a dinosaur); all cultures sing, John should not

  • ★★ Hank says that on the scale of things oldies are very new, and that the oldest song is an impossible question: it was probably sung by a bird, maybe a dinosaur. (playful, hedged) — 00:00:04
  • ★★ Hank says singing is innate and uniquely human: there are no cultures on Earth that do not sing. (hedged) — 00:00:18

00:00:38 — First songs lost; Hurrian Hymn No. 6 on 3,500-year-old cuneiform tablets; hearing the past makes people more human

  • ★ Hank says the first human songs are lost: they were probably improvised, so the first melody was probably lost right after it was made. (hedged) — 00:00:38
  • ★★★ Hank says the oldest song that can still be played is Hurrian Hymn No. 6, incomplete, pressed into cuneiform tablets 3,500 years ago; clips are on YouTube. — 00:00:44 · YouTube
  • ★★★ Hank says archaeology shows what the past looked like, but hearing back in time makes people of the distant past much more real and human to him. — 00:01:07

00:01:21 — The oldest complete song, music plus lyrics on a burial cylinder; played on guitar for lack of a lyre

  • ★★ Hank says the oldest complete song is a brief composition preserving both music and lyrics, unusually, on a burial cylinder probably placed in a man's wife's grave by the man. (hedged) — 00:01:21

00:01:45 — Hank sings the Seikilos epitaph in Greek and in English with acoustic guitar

  • ★★ The epitaph's lyric, as Hank sings it in Greek and in English: while you live, shine, be joyous and seize the day; we are only here until we're gone, and time demands to be paid. — 00:02:20

    “While you live, shine on Be joyous and dance And seize the day”

00:03:05 — The theme of the oldest song is basically YOLO

  • ★★ Hank says the theme of the oldest song we have is basically YOLO: the more things change. (playful) — 00:03:05 · YOLO

00:03:17 — Album news: Incongruent by Hank Green and the Perfect Strangers, release date, Tumblr, pre-order; sign-off and closing song

  • ★★★ Hank announces that Incongruent, the first album of Hank Green and the Perfect Strangers, will come out at the end of April or beginning of May; he jokes it won't matter in musical history. — 00:03:17 · Incongruent
  • ★★ Hank says some of the album is already on his Tumblr, including the song 'I F***ing Love Science', and it is available to pre-order at DFTBA.com. — 00:03:36 · Tumblr, DFTBA Records, Incongruent

In the description and comments

  • ★★ The description says that, unlike most songs of the period, written down as lyrics only, the Seikilos Epitaph, buried at a funeral, contains a chord chart, so Hank can sing it 2000 years later. — video description

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: Hurrian Hymn No. 6 · Incongruent · Seikilos epitaph

Also: DFTBA Records · Hank Green and the Perfect Strangers · I Love Science · Tumblr · YOLO · YouTube

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