They were born of Eve and Adam. There was Abel. There was Cain. This we all know from near the very beginning of Scripture.

Strange question: did music (earthly music, for there is also heavenly music) derive from the darker of those two offspring (Cain)?

Let’s recount the key passage (from Genesis 4):

“Now the man had relations with his wife Eve, and she conceived and gave birth to Cain, and she said, ‘I have gotten a manchild with the help of the Lord.’

“Again, she gave birth to his brother Abel. And Abel was a keeper of flocks, but Cain was a tiller of the ground. So it came about in the course of time that Cain brought an offering to the Lord of the fruit of the ground.

“Abel, on his part also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of their fat portions. And the Lord had regard for Abel and for his offering; but for Cain and for his offering He had no regard. So Cain became very angry and his countenance fell.

“Then the Lord said to Cain, “Why are you angry? And why has your countenance fallen? If you do well, will not your countenance be lifted up? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door; and its desire is for you, but you must master it.” Cain told Abel his brother. And it came about when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother and killed him.”

God was not very happy about that. “He said, “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to Me from the ground. Now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you cultivate the ground, it will no longer yield its strength to you; you will be a vagrant and a wanderer on the earth.”

And Cain’s own descendants?

They included the prophet Enoch—a prominent prophet (see “Nephilim”) these days. That’s what he’s most known for.

But among the descendants was also Jubal. He the son of Lamech and Adah, making him a multi-generational descendant in Cain’s lineage.

The biblical Cain didn’t make music himself, but Jubal did. To quote Scripture (Genesis 4:21): “He was the father of all those who play the lyre and pipe.” Music and instruments are thusly credited to him.

The curiosity: we know music has powerful spiritual effects and that it can be for good or evil. Might it be that good music comes from a connection to those heavenly choirs, while the dark music is that way because it rises up from the earth (the world)?

To repeat: “Now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand.”

Since the first part of the 1900s and especially 1960s, from jazz and rock-and-roll to hip-hop to heavy metal to rap, we certainly have seen aspects that certainly were distinctly earthly (see also “worldly”) and, at least in many cases, seem to have carried a “curse.”

Let’s put it this way: it has strayed far from Saint Hildegard von Bingen, a medieval German abbess and mystic who recorded “heavenly harmonies” received directly during intense cosmic visions, which she described as the Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum  or someone like Johann Bach or Franz Liszt (1811–1886).

Interestingly, was the year Franz Liszt died effectively closing the book on High Romanticism and was the year Thomas Edison’s phonograph cylinder began transitioning from a laboratory novelty into a commercial reality (for better or worse).

Ah, electricity: a portal it opened and a world it certainly has charged and changed.