The evolution of music: Theories, definitions and the nature of the evidence

Book section

It is nowadays uncontroversial among scientists that there is biological continuity between humans and other species. However, much of what humans do is not shared with other animals. Human behaviour seems to be as much motivated by inherited biology as by acquired culture, yet most musical scholarship and research has treated music solely from a cultural perspective. Over the past 50 years, cognitive research has approached the perception of music as a capacity of the individual mind, and perhaps as a fundamentally biological phenomenon. This psychology of music has either ignored, or set aside as too tough to handle, the question of how music becomes the cultural phenomenon it undoubtedly is. Indeed, only over the past 10 years or so has the question of the ‘nature’ of culture received serious consideration, or have the operations of mind necessary for cultural learning explicitly engaged the attention of many cultural researchers (D’Andrade 1995; Shore 1996). The problem of reconciling ‘cultural’ and ‘biological’ approaches to music, and indeed to the nature of mind itself, remains.

One way of tackling this problem is to view music from an evolutionary perspective. The idea that music could have evolutionary origins and selective benefits was widely speculated on in the early part of the twentieth century, in the light of increasing bodies of ethnographic research and Darwinian theory (e.g., Wallaschek 1893). This approach fell rapidly out of favour in the years before the Second World War, for political as much as for scientific reasons, with the repudiation of biological and universalist ideas in anthropological and musicological fields (Plotkin 1997). However, evolutionary thinking has again become central in a range of sciences and in recent philosophical approaches, and music’s relationship to evolutionary processes has been increasingly explored over the past two decades

Authors: Ian, C; Morley, I

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Host title: Communicative Musicality: Exploring the Basis of Human Companionship
• Issue: 5
• Pages: 61-81
• Chapter number: 5
• Publication date: 2010-03-11