A couple years ago I was doing a lot of reading on the evolution of music and I recall being amazed that it took Western culture hundreds of years to ask, “hey, what if we played two notes at the same time?” And there’s some music forms — Indian music I believe, though I could be wrong — where this question was never asked.

But, when you really think about it, it’s kind of amazing man ever came up with music at all. Presumably, he started with rhythm by realizing you could divide a section of time up into equidistant subparts. That’s not all that amazing, nor requires the brain to have a pretty accurate sense of the passage of time. But to then arrived at the concept of tones/notes, and realize that different combinations can have different emotional connotations, and from there to start arranging them into scales and songs… well, that’s pretty impressive.

We really should take this moment to drink a toast to what is clearly the high point of all human music: “Crazy Crazy Nights” by KISS.