You're listening to Catholic Sprouts, the daily podcast for Catholic Leskowitz, and I'm a music teacher, a composer,

which is someone who writes music, and I helped found the Hildegard Collective, a ministry for Catholic musicians.

Today is Monday, March 13th, and this week we're going to go on an adventure together,

a time-traveling adventure.

We're going to learn all about the impact Catholics have had on music

from the time of the early church all the way until now.

So music is really important to us as Catholics. You've probably heard music at

mass before, right? We sing the Gloria and the Holy Holy Holy and the Lamb of God, and we sing songs together

too, called hymns. The cool thing is that music has been important to the Catholic Church since the

start of the Catholic Church,

and we're going to see how it grew and took on new forms over the centuries.

But before we do that, we need to go way, way back in time before Jesus was born, all the way back to early humans.

See, music has always been important to humans. Thanks to archaeologists

who find new things out about ancient cultures, we have a flute that was made all the way back

in about 40,000 years before Jesus was born. Music was both important in everyday life as well as religious

practices for ancient cultures, and this included the ancient Jews. King David from the Bible was a

musician as well as a king, and song is referenced a lot in the Psalms. And you know, the early Christians, they came from

the Jewish tradition, right? Jesus was a Jew, and so are all of his followers at the beginning.

And so they brought this love for music right into the early church. The beginning of the

gospel of John might be an early Christian

hymn. St. Cecilia, an early Christian martyr, is considered the patron saint of music because

legend has it that she sang songs to God in her heart. The first Christmas music even goes back to the

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