# Music and the show The history of music and entertainment: notation, opera, recorded sound, jazz, rock, hip-hop, cinema, television, and games. *This story part of: State, law, and coercion* ## c. 1400 BCE — The oldest written music The Hurrian hymns, carved on clay tablets around 1400 BCE, hold the oldest known musical notation. One of them can still be partly played today. ## c. 534 BCE — Greek drama and the City Dionysia Athens held drama contests at the festival of Dionysus, where tragedy and comedy took form. Playwrights like Aeschylus and Sophocles laid the foundation of Western theatre. ## 80 — The Colosseum opens in Rome The emperor Titus opened the Colosseum with a hundred days of games. Gladiator fights and staged spectacles drew tens of thousands as mass public entertainment. ## c. 100 — Ancient Greek melody survives in full The Seikilos epitaph, cut into a stone column, is the oldest complete piece of music with notation that survives. It sets a short poem about enjoying life to a written tune. ## c. 200 — The Natya Shastra codifies Indian performing arts The Sanskrit treatise Natya Shastra set out the rules of drama, dance, and music in ancient India. It has guided Indian performing arts for close to two thousand years. ## c. 800 — Gregorian chant takes shape Church singers across Europe settled on a shared body of plainchant for the Latin Mass. It became the main sacred music of the medieval West. ## c. 1025 — Guido d'Arezzo invents staff notation The monk Guido d'Arezzo set out a system of lines and spaces to fix the pitch of each note. It let singers read music they had never heard and became the basis of Western notation. ## c. 1200 — Polyphony flowers at Notre-Dame Composers linked to Notre-Dame cathedral wrote music with several independent voice lines at once. This break from single-line chant opened the way for centuries of Western harmony. ## 1501 — The first printed music Ottaviano Petrucci printed a book of polyphonic songs using movable type. Printing made music cheap to copy and spread it far beyond monasteries and courts. ## c. 1550 — Commedia dell'arte takes the stage Traveling Italian troupes performed improvised comedy with stock masked characters. Commedia dell'arte shaped European comedy and the idea of the professional actor. ## 1599 — Shakespeare's Globe Theatre opens The Globe Theatre opened on the south bank of the Thames as home to Shakespeare's company. Its open-air stage hosted first performances of plays like Hamlet and Macbeth. ## 24 February 1607 — Monteverdi's L'Orfeo, an early opera Claudio Monteverdi's L'Orfeo told a full story through song and orchestra at the Mantuan court. It is the earliest opera still regularly staged today. ## 1637 — The first public opera house opens Venice's Teatro San Cassiano opened as the first opera house that anyone could pay to enter. Opera moved from private courts to a paying public. ## 24 March 1721 — Bach writes the Brandenburg Concertos Johann Sebastian Bach gathered six concertos and sent them to the Margrave of Brandenburg. They stand among the high points of Baroque instrumental music. ## 13 April 1742 — Handel's Messiah premieres George Frideric Handel's oratorio Messiah was first performed for a charity concert in Dublin. Its Hallelujah chorus became one of the best-known pieces in Western music. ## 1768 — Astley invents the modern circus Philip Astley staged trick riding in a round ring and added acrobats and clowns between acts. His format became the modern circus. ## c. 1770 — Haydn shapes the symphony Joseph Haydn wrote over a hundred symphonies and dozens of string quartets in the service of the Esterházy court. His work set the form for the Classical era that Mozart and Beethoven built on. ## 30 September 1791 — Mozart's The Magic Flute premieres Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's The Magic Flute opened at a suburban Vienna theatre weeks before he died. It mixed fairy tale, comedy, and grand music into a lasting favorite. ## 7 May 1824 — Beethoven's Ninth Symphony premieres Ludwig van Beethoven, by then deaf, unveiled his Ninth Symphony with a full choir singing the Ode to Joy. It pushed the symphony to a new scale and remains a symbol of shared hope. ## 13 August 1876 — Wagner opens the Bayreuth Festival Richard Wagner staged the first complete Ring cycle in a theatre built for his own operas. His grand vision of music drama reshaped Romantic music and stagecraft. ## 1877 — Edison invents the phonograph Thomas Edison built a machine that could record sound onto a tinfoil cylinder and play it back. For the first time, music and speech could be captured and heard again. ## 1877 — Edison invents the phonograph have been vinyl, but in this case it was copper, plated with gold. This analog means of capturing, preserving, and reproducing sound was invented in 1877 by Thomas Edison, who called it phonography. > "have been vinyl, but in this case it was copper, plated with gold. This analog means of capturing, preserving, and reproducing sound was invented in 1" > — The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood ## c. 1881 — Vaudeville dominates the American stage Vaudeville bills strung together singers, comics, dancers, and acrobats for a broad family audience. It was the most popular live entertainment in America until film and radio took over. ## 1887 — Berliner patents the gramophone Emile Berliner replaced Edison's cylinders with flat discs that were easy to copy. The disc record became the standard format for selling recorded music for a century. ## 28 December 1895 — The Lumière brothers hold the first film screening The Lumière brothers charged an audience to watch short films projected on a screen in a Paris cafe. This public screening is often marked as the birth of cinema. ## 1902 — Melies releases A Trip to the Moon Georges Melies made A Trip to the Moon, an early film that told a fantastical story with special effects. It showed that film could be a tool for imagination, not just record real life. ## 26 December 1906 — The first feature-length film The Australian film The Story of the Kelly Gang ran over an hour, far longer than the shorts of its day. It is widely regarded as the first feature-length narrative film. ## c. 1910 — Jazz is born in New Orleans In the bars and streets of New Orleans, musicians blended blues, ragtime, and brass band music into jazz. Its swing and improvisation would spread across the world. ## 1912 — W.C. Handy publishes the blues W.C. Handy published Memphis Blues, one of the first blues songs to reach print. The blues carried the feeling of Black Southern life into the heart of American music. ## 1913 — India's first feature film Raja Harishchandra, directed by Dadasaheb Phalke, was India's first full-length feature. It launched what would become the world's largest film industry. ## c. 1915 — Hollywood becomes the film capital Film companies gathered in Hollywood for its sun, space, and cheap land, and built the studio system. Los Angeles became the center of the world film business. ## 26 February 1917 — The first jazz recording The Original Dixieland Jass Band cut the first commercially released jazz record. It sold widely and pushed the new sound into homes across the country. ## 1925 — Louis Armstrong and the Jazz Age Louis Armstrong's Hot Five recordings put the solo improviser at the center of jazz. The 1920s came to be called the Jazz Age as the music defined a decade. ## 28 November 1925 — The Grand Ole Opry begins broadcasting A Nashville radio show first aired the country music program that became the Grand Ole Opry. It is the longest-running radio broadcast in U.S. history and made Nashville a country music capital. ## 6 October 1927 — The Jazz Singer brings sound to film The Jazz Singer was the first feature to sync spoken dialogue and singing with the picture. It ended the silent era and forced the whole industry to adopt sound. ## 21 December 1937 — Disney's Snow White, the first animated feature Walt Disney released Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first full-length animated feature in color. Its success proved animation could carry a major film. ## c. 1950 — Television enters the home After the war, television sets spread quickly into ordinary homes. TV became the dominant form of home entertainment and reshaped daily life. ## 5 July 1954 — Elvis Presley and the birth of rock and roll Elvis Presley recorded That's All Right at Sun Studio, mixing country and blues into an early rock and roll sound. The new music and its young star soon reshaped popular culture. ## July 1955 — Chuck Berry releases Maybellene Chuck Berry's Maybellene fused country storytelling with a driving guitar beat. His songwriting and guitar style became a template for rock and roll. ## 17 July 1955 — Disneyland opens Walt Disney opened Disneyland, a themed park built around his films and characters. It created the model for the modern theme park. ## 12 January 1959 — Motown Records is founded Berry Gordy started Motown Records in Detroit and built a hit factory of Black pop and soul. Its polished sound crossed over to a wide audience and shaped 1960s music. ## 1 January 1963 — Astro Boy launches TV anime Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy became the first popular weekly animated TV series in Japan. It set the style and pace for anime, which would later win fans worldwide. ## 9 February 1964 — The Beatles spark the British Invasion The Beatles played The Ed Sullivan Show to a huge U.S. television audience. Their arrival set off the British Invasion and years of Beatlemania. ## c. June 1967 — Ravi Shankar brings Indian classical music west Sitar master Ravi Shankar performed for Western rock crowds, including at the Monterey Pop Festival. He drew a global audience to the raga tradition of Indian classical music. ## 15 August 1969 — Woodstock Around half a million people gathered for three days of music on a dairy farm in upstate New York. Woodstock became the defining symbol of the 1960s counterculture. ## c. 1970 — Fela Kuti pioneers Afrobeat Nigerian musician Fela Kuti fused Yoruba rhythms, jazz, and funk into Afrobeat. He paired long, hypnotic grooves with sharp criticism of those in power. ## 29 November 1972 — Pong launches the video game industry Atari released Pong, a simple table tennis arcade game that became a hit. It turned video games into a real business and started the arcade boom. ## 13 April 1973 — Bob Marley takes reggae worldwide Bob Marley and the Wailers released Catch a Fire, their first album for an international label. Reggae's Jamaican sound and message of resistance reached a global audience. ## 11 August 1973 — Hip-hop is born in the Bronx At a back-to-school party in the Bronx, DJ Kool Herc stretched out the drum breaks of records for dancers. That trick grew into hip-hop, one of the most influential cultures in modern music. ## 20 June 1975 — Jaws launches the summer blockbuster Steven Spielberg's Jaws opened in a wide summer release backed by heavy television advertising. Its huge earnings created the model of the summer blockbuster. ## 1976 — Punk breaks out Bands like the Ramones and the Sex Pistols stripped rock down to fast, raw, do-it-yourself songs. Punk rejected polish and gave a loud voice to disaffected youth. ## 25 May 1977 — Star Wars changes Hollywood George Lucas's Star Wars became a runaway hit and a merchandising powerhouse. It pushed Hollywood toward effects-driven franchises and tie-in products. ## 16 December 1977 — Saturday Night Fever ignites disco The film Saturday Night Fever and its Bee Gees soundtrack pushed disco to the top of the charts. Dance floors and mirror balls defined a stretch of the late 1970s. ## 1978 — Space Invaders and the arcade golden age Taito's Space Invaders became a worldwide craze and swallowed coins by the millions. It opened the golden age of the arcade. ## 1 July 1979 — Sony launches the Walkman Sony's Walkman let people carry their own music and listen through headphones anywhere. It made music personal and portable for the first time. ## 1 August 1981 — MTV launches MTV began broadcasting music videos on 1 August 1981, fusing television with pop music and advertising. It reshaped youth culture and the marketing of entertainment. ## 1 October 1982 — The compact disc reaches the market The compact disc brought digital sound to home listeners with no surface hiss. It soon replaced vinyl and cassettes as the main way people bought music. ## 30 November 1982 — Michael Jackson's Thriller and the MTV era Michael Jackson released Thriller, which became the best-selling album ever. Its ambitious videos in heavy MTV rotation showed how central the music video had become. ## 15 July 1983 — Nintendo revives home gaming Nintendo launched the Famicom console, sold abroad as the NES, after a crash had gutted the game market. Quality controls and hits like Super Mario Bros. brought gaming back into the home. ## 13 July 1985 — Live Aid Two linked concerts raised money for famine relief in Ethiopia and were beamed to a global television audience. Live Aid showed the reach of pop music as a worldwide event. ## 1 June 1999 — Napster launches file sharing Shawn Fanning released Napster, which let people swap MP3 files directly with each other. It threw the record industry into crisis and changed how people expected to get music. ## 23 October 2001 — Apple releases the iPod Apple's iPod held a thousand songs in a pocket-sized player. It made carrying a whole music library normal and pointed music toward the digital age. ## 28 April 2003 — Apple opens the iTunes Store Apple's iTunes Store sold single tracks for 99 cents with the backing of the major labels. It offered a legal answer to file sharing and reshaped the music business. ## 14 February 2005 — YouTube and the creator economy YouTube let anyone upload and share video with the world for free. It grew into a platform where independent creators could build audiences and earn a living outside traditional media. ## 16 January 2007 — Netflix launches streaming video Netflix added instant streaming to its DVD-by-mail service, letting members watch over the internet. Streaming went on to upend television and film distribution. ## 7 October 2008 — Spotify launches streaming Spotify opened in Europe offering instant access to a huge music catalog for free or a monthly fee. Streaming soon became the main way the world listens to music. ## 6 June 2011 — Twitch and live game streaming Twitch launched as a platform for people to broadcast themselves playing games live. It turned watching others play into a mass pastime and a career path. ## c. 2011 — Esports go mainstream Competitive gaming grew into a spectator sport with big prize pools and packed arenas for events like the League of Legends World Championship. Millions began watching others play online. ## 15 July 2012 — Gangnam Style and the rise of K-pop Psy's Gangnam Style became the first video to reach a billion views on YouTube. Its success signaled the global rise of K-pop from South Korea.