The Origins of Music Author(s): Ian Cross Source: Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 24, No.

1 (September 2006), pp. 79-82 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/mp.2006.24.1.79 . Accessed: 06/10/2011 16:40
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The Origins of Music: Some Stipulations on Theory

79

T HE O RIGINS

OF

M USIC : S OME S TIPULATIONS

ON

T HEORY

I AN C ROSS Centre for Music & Science, University of Cambridge

IT IS ARGUED THAT APPROACHES

to music that employ evolutionary theory must seek to define music as explicitly as possible. Without such a definition, the relationships between music and other domains of human and animal behavior must remain underspecified, limiting the generality of any claims that can be made concerning its evolutionary roots.

Key words: music, evolution, communication, archaeology, ethnomusicology

HESE TWO PAPERS EXPLORE MUSIC , and specifically music cognition, from an evolutionary perspective. This is a strand of the cognitive and musical literature that has grown in volume and significance only in the last decade, though consideration of the question of musics origins considerably predates Darwins publication of his theory of natural selection (see Thomas, 1995; Spencer, 1858). The two papers seek to address somewhat different questions; while each has their own individual strengths and weaknesses, both pose difficulties for themselves in the ways in which their authors choose to characterize music. Justus and Hutsler focus on specifying the criteria for assessing music as adaptive. They put forward cogent arguments for considering innateness and domainspecificity to be at the core of any consideration of adaptive or exaptive value for music, as well as providing a potentially useful and original reconceptualization of the notion of exaptation. McDermott and Hauser present a broad-ranging and critical overview of the types of evidence that would be required to sketch an evolutionary view of music, devoting particular attention to the ethological and developmental literatures. In doing this they provide a synopsis of what is known which, in conjunction with the recent paper by Fitch in Cognition (Fitch, in press), will be of great value to researchers in all areas of music cognition.

While Justus and Hutslers paper is well argued throughout, it does tend to rely on evidence for some of its claims that can be argued to be somewhat softer than is apparent here. For example, with respect to the success of computational approaches in modeling aspects of music cognition, they suggest (p. 9) that musical grammar appears to be highly learnable. However, in the absence of empirical evidence derived from behavioral or neuroscientific studies (and as far as I am aware no conclusive evidence yet exists), the fact that grammars can be computationally applied to reduced and abstracted versions of aspects of music does not speak to the question of whether or not such grammars may be instantiated in music cognition. McDermott and Hauser explicitly limit the scope of their claims in noting that they are privileging the dimension of pitch in their account and neglecting that of rhythm, in part because rhythm remains less well studied and documented, hence questions such as how it is that (p. 52) human adults are often spontaneously entrained to musical rhythms remain unaddressed. In fact a substantial body of research has explored musical rhythm, resulting in well-developed theories (such as that of Jones, see Jones & Boltz, 1989), and the issue of the foundations of human capacities to entrain is also receiving attention (see Clayton, Sager, & Will, 2004; Thaut, 2005). McDermott and Hauser also note that the preponderance of evidence from Western cultural contexts on which they have relied inevitably biases scientific accounts of music in mind, although they appear to imply that the directions that they outline for future research would be likely to remain substantially the same irrespective of the nature of evidence from other cultures. Despite the many good things in these papers, they share two main failings, one of fact and one of interpretation. The factual problems center on the citation of the Neandertal flute from Divje Babe in both papers. The best evidence would suggest that this is not a musical instrument (see DErrico & Villa, 1997; DErrico et al., 2003) but the result of carnivore activity which has been misinterpreted as the partial remains of a musical instrument. This object has escaped from the archaeological record into the badlands of modern

Music Perception

VOLUME

24,

ISSUE

1,

PP.

7982,

ISSN

0730-7829, ELECTRONIC

ISSN

1533-8312 2006

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I. Cross

myth; within archaeological circles it is recognized that it is not the product of intentional human action, but it has acquired an afterlife of its own outside these circles (in part perhaps because of its co-optation as a national symbol, a silver replica was presented to the last pope). In any case, Justus and Hutsler err in assigning this object to a human context; it was found in a Mousterian (Neandertal) context, and hence, were it to be a musical artifact it would be not only the oldest known but the product of a quite different species of hominin, indicating a long and complex provenance for musicality in the hominin lineage. McDermott and Hauser also cite the Neandertal flute but err in a different direction in suggesting that the earliest well-preserved musical instruments are from Neolithic China, dating to between 7000 and 5700 BC. This might suggest a late emergence of music, at least in the form of instrumental music. In fact, the oldest wellpreserved musical instrument, a bone pipe found in Geissenklsterle in southern Germany (Hahn & Mnzel, 1995), is considerably older than this, dating to around 37000 BP (Before the Present). This date is around the time that modern humans arrived in Europe; it suggests that humans brought music with them out of Africa and that music was of considerable importance in their lives; the pipe is a remarkably sophisticated artifact (see DErrico et al., 2003) and would have required considerable time and effort in its manufacture, all this is a new and hostilesurvival-threateningenvironment). However, perhaps the most significant weakness in both papers is their lack of specificity in their use of the term music. Neither sees it as necessary to define the term explicitly; indeed, McDermott and Hauser state (p. 30), In our view a definition of music is not particularly important at this stage as long as it is approximately clear what we refer to with the term. Unfortunately, in papers that are concerned with exploring the behavioral, neural and ethological roots of music, some operational definition of the term is necessary, not least in order to delineate the relationships between music and other domains of human (and animal) behavior. McDermott and Hauser are more explicit than are Justus and Hutsler about the provisional nature of their conclusions; nevertheless, the lack of an explicit definition, and the partial nature of the implicit definitions that both rely on, limit the powers of their arguments. In essence, both papers treat music in terms of only two of the three aspects of music that Merriam (1964) proposes are required to characterize it. He suggests that music can best be explored in terms of a tripartite model that embraces music as sound (what might conventionally be thought of as constituting music from a

Western perspective), as behavior (which embraces the musicaland nonmusicalacts of musicians, and the activities in which the production of music is embedded) and as concept (how people think about music in terms of its powers and its relations to other domains of human life). Music appears in these papers as sound and (in part) as behavior (little attention is devoted to the range of activities in which music may be embedded), but concept is missing; there is no consideration here of how is music construed as functioning by those who are engaged in it or by the societies within which it manifests itself. From the perspective of the concerns of these papers, this means that a critical question that is central to any consideration of music in evolutionary terms remains unasked: can any general and universally applicable theories of musical functionality be proposed? While Merriam himself was somewhat agnostic on this point, explicit proposals have come from other ethnomusicologists (see Blacking, 1969, 1976, 1995). Blackings views certainly contradict some of those expressed here, as, for instance, McDermott and Hausers claim (p. 39) that because music lacks referential precision, being fundamentally expressive of emotion, it is commonly produced and listened to for enjoyment rather than for communicative purposes. While enjoyment is certainly one of its main purposes, music generally does other jobs as well; for instance, for Blacking, it is a medium that models social structures and facilitates the acquisition of social competence by young people (see Blacking, 1967). Music can legitimately be regarded as part of the same human communicative toolkit as language when viewed from the perspective of pragmatics; its semantic indeterminacy, together with its capacities to entrain, provide a potent medium for human interaction which may, over an evolutionary timescale, have fulfilled the types of functions at the species level that Blacking identifies at the level of individual societies (see Cross, 2005, in press-a, in press-b). Irrespective of the validity of such hypotheses, consideration of music as a generic behavioral capacity does require that music be characterized as rigorously and fully as possible. Only then does it seem feasible to attempt both to understand how music relates to other aspects of human life and to formulate proposals about the evolutionary roots of human musicality.
Author Note

Address correspondence to: Ian Cross, Centre for Music & Science, Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge, West Road, Cambridge CB3 9DP, UK. E-MAIL ic108@cam. ac.uk

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