The Cultural Study of Music

A Critical Introduction

Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert, Richard Middleton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136514722
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

What is the relationship between music and culture? The first edition of The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction explored this question with groundbreaking rigor and breadth. Now this second edition refines that original analysis while examining the ways the field has developed in the years since the book's initial publication. Including contributions from scholars of music, cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, and psychology, this anthology provides a comprehensive introduction to the study of music and culture. It includes both pioneering theoretical essays and exhaustively researched case studies on particular issues in world musics. For the second edition, the original essays have been revised and nine new chapters have been added, covering themes such as race, religion, geography, technology, and the politics of music. With an even broader scope and a larger roster of world-renowned contributors, The Cultural Study of Music is certain to remain a canonical text in the field of cultural musicology.

Part 1 When? Musical Histories

Chapter 1 Music and Biocultural Evolution

Ian Cross

DOI: 10.4324/9780203149454-1

Introduction

How should we understand music? The ways in which we can answer this question are conditioned by the status that we are willing to grant to music. If music is a universal human behavior, part of “human nature,” then it should be possible to understand music by identifying and applying general principles of the type found within formal and scientific theories. And music has been claimed as “a universal behavior” by Alan Merriam (1964, 227), though Blacking (1995, 224) is more circumspect in stating that “every known human society has what trained musicologists would recognize as ‘music’.”

But this view is difficult to square with much ethnomusicological, and most recent musicological, scholarship, which would replace music with musics, holding that musics are musics only in their cultural contexts. Musics make sense as musics only if we can resonate with the histories, values, conventions, institutions, and technologies that enfold them; musics can be approached only through culturally situated acts of interpretation. Such interpretive acts, as Bohlman (1999) makes clear, unveil a multiplicity of musical ontologies, some or most of which may be mutually irreconcilable: hence a multiplicity of “musics.”

In the first view, there is a singular phenomenon called music, which has material manifestations and some knowable relationship to human biology, mind, and behavior. In the second view, music exists as musics, diverse, multiple, and unknowable within a single unitary framework. But in this second view music seems to have lost much of its materiality, and while the materialities of “musics” may be heterogeneous and heteronomous, they are irrefutably grounded in human behaviors.

From a materialist perspective, underlying human behaviors are minds, and underlying minds are embodied human brains. Underlying embodied human brains are human biologies, and underlying human biologies are the processes of evolution. Musics as culturally situated, minded human behaviors—musics as material phenomena—thus stand in some to-be-determined relationship to human evolution. Of course it might be the case that the cultural dynamics of music owe little or nothing to the evolutionary processes that underlie our biologies. But this position is tenable only if our biological being can be cleanly dissociated from our cultural lives, and given that our cultural lives are mainly evidenced in material behaviors and their traces, a clean dissociation between culture and biology—or between music and evolution—is unfeasible. To state this is not to argue that musics are reducible to—are knowable wholly in terms of—an understanding of evolution, merely that the relation between musics and evolution needs to be explored and specified.

Current theories of evolution are concerned with the ways in which the operation of processes of random variation, natural selection, and differential reproduction within a population leads to changes in the state and makeup of that population. Random variation leads to the emergence of entities with different attributes or capacities; natural selection, operating through ecological pressures, leads to the preferential survival of those types of entities whose capacities are best adapted to immediately prevailing sets of circumstances; and those entities that are best adapted have a better chance of reproducing and passing on their genes than do less-well-adapted entities. It is important to note that the entities referred to above might be genes themselves, organisms, or individual or group behaviors (see, e.g., Boyd and Richerson 2010). An evolutionary approach will tend to focus on the attributes that allow a gene, a behavior, an organism, or a specific intra- or intergroup dynamic to be functional in the processes of evolution, that is, to be adaptive in contributing to the differential success in survival and reproduction of the entities that make up the population.

Hence an evolutionary perspective seems to offer an integrated framework that has explanatory power with respect to individuals’ biological components and behaviors, as well as with respect to groups of individuals (and the existence of groups of individuals is a necessary though not sufficient premise for the existence of culture). So evolutionary thinking may provide a means of exploring relationships between human biology, behavior, and culture. There are, however, very good reasons why anthropologists and psychologists have been wary of applying an evolutionary perspective to human behaviors and culture. The genetic determinism and racist stereotyping that the evolutionary thinking of the first half of the twentieth century appeared to sanction led to some of the worst barbarities in recorded history.

But contemporary evolutionary thinking offers comfort neither to genetic determinists nor to racists. Evolution is currently seen as impacting on human mind and behavior not by shaping or determining complex behaviors directly, but by providing general constraints on how minds interact, and develop so as to be able and motivated to interact, with their physical and social environments. And modern genetics has shown that two gorillas five miles apart in a central African rain forest are likely to differ more in their genetic makeup than are a Basque inhabitant of San Sebastian and an Aboriginal Australian from the Northern Territories. Despite recent evidence for a limited amount of gene flow between archaic humans and modern humans (Reich et al. 2010; Green et al. 2010), we are one single species—Homo sapiens—recently emerged from Africa. However, our biological homogeneity stands in extreme contrast to our cultural diversity; for a species whose members are, biologically speaking, all much the same, we have developed a superabundance of different ways of living—an enormous plurality of cultures.

Bearing this prodigious cultural diversity in mind, are there reasons to expect that musics, as culturally situated human behaviors, have anything other than a contingent relationship to evolutionary processes? In the first place, a hint of a more than contingent relationship can be found in music’s ancient provenance as a human behavior. The earliest unambiguously musical artifacts identified to date are bone and mammoth-tusk ivory pipes dated to around 40,000 BP found at Hohle Fels in southern Germany, uncovered in contexts that associate them with modern Homo sapiens (Conard et al. 2009). The pipes predate almost all known visual art, and in any case a capacity for musicality (most likely vocal) would predate the construction of a sophisticated musical artifact such as a pipe, probably by a considerable period. Archaeology thus suggests that human musicality is ancient; the fact that music appears about as early as possible in the traces of Homo sapiens in Europe, together with the fact that musicality is an attribute both of the peoples of the pre-Hispanic Americas and of the Aboriginal peoples of precolonial Australia, provides good grounds for believing that music accompanied modern humans out of Africa.

And not only is music ancient, but musicality may be universal for all members of the human species; it has been claimed that “musical ability [is] a general characteristic of the human species rather than a rare talent” (Blacking 1995, 236). Of course, there are societies within which the term music does not seem to offer a good fit to any discretely identifiable set of cultural practices. But this does not seem to connote an absence of activities that might be interpretable as “musical.” This lack of fit might arise because such “musical” behaviors are so embedded in broader categories of cultural practice as to be inextricable from them (as is the case in many African societies); or it may arise because “music” is a proscribed activity (as under the Taliban regime in Afghanistan). Even in this latter case, behaviors interpretable as “musical” may be manifested in contexts such as tarana (devotional song), though unacknowledged as music by the participants (Baily 2004).

Music is thus humanly ancient and ubiquitous, making it a good candidate to be considered as an evolutionarily adaptive behavior. But both music’s ancient provenance and its universality are more suggestive than conclusive. It may be that musics are contingently human. Perhaps they are human behaviors that are not adaptive (in the evolutionary sense), which have arisen simply because humans have evolved other capacities that music can parasitically exploit, or they might be behaviors that have specifiable and determinate functions but that have neither played a role in, nor been impacted upon by, processes of human evolution.

Music as a Generic Human Capacity

In order to evaluate the relationship between music and the processes of evolution we have to start by ascertaining whether or not music is a generic capacity of the human species; is there a sense in which we can claim that all humans are musical? A positive answer to this question will require that we are able to identify phenomena across all human societies—and across all typical members of those societies—that we can categorize as “music”; only then will we be in a position to determine whether or not this generic “music” has any specifiable function that has the potential to be considered as adaptive.

As we have seen, ethnomusicologists generally agree that all known societies have music, or perhaps more accurately, musics. However, the question of what precisely counts as “music” poses a significant problem; the diversity of cultural practices that ethnomusicologists have characterised as “music” seems to present no essential diagnostic features that would allow “music” to be identified unambiguously. Nevertheless, a pragmatic solution to the problem can be found in the ethnomusicologist Klaus Wachsmann’s (1971, 384) suggestion that what ethnomusicologists and others tend to identify as “music” in cultures other than their own are simply the phenomena that sufficiently “resemble the phenomena which I am in the habit of calling music in my home ground.”

While this may not seem to get us very far, we can at least start by suggesting that “musics” in cultures other than our own will tend to share some objective properties with the music with which we are familiar, typically employing complex patterns of sound that may be articulated in any or all of the dimensions of pitch, rhythm, timbre and intensity, typically by the voice. Most musics tend to “sound like” music, their sonic surfaces and structural organizations tending to exhibit similar features. These shared features can be understood as rooted in generic constraints on human perceptual, cognitive and motoric capacities (see Stevens and Byron 2009). A less evident shared property relates to the tendency of musics to exhibit temporally cyclical event-structures organized around an underlying, regular pulse. This not only allows the foci of listeners’ attention to be modulated according to the music’s underlying pulse (Jones and Boltz 1989) in presentational contexts, but also enables performers engaged in musical interactions (both formally trained specialists and enculturated individuals) to coordinate their musical behaviors in time—to entrain with each other (Clayton, Sager, and Will 2005). Aside from commonalities of structure, engagement with music across cultures tends to be associated with changes in the affective states of participants; universally, engagement with music tends to elicit emotion (see Fritz et al. 2009; Juslin and Sloboda 2010) and music is conceived of as emotionally expressive (see, e.g., Feld 1984).

Music also tends to be experienced as powerfully meaningful, but the meanings that are experienced embody the paradox of being somehow immediate and “natural” (e.g., Feld 1981, 28), yet at the same time indeterminate or ambiguous (e.g., Qureshi 1987)—what I have described elsewhere (Cross 1999) as “floating intentionality.” As Alan Merriam (1964, 32–33) noted, across cultures—and even from a perspective rooted in one particular society—music is more than just sound; it is also manifested as concept and as behavior. The concepts that underpin music may take quite different forms in different cultures, as might the practices that embody or that give rise to those concepts; hence, although the acoustical manifestations of music in two different cultures may appear quite similar to a Western listener, their conceptual and behavioral contexts may render them quite distinct as musics. For example, not only may music may be conceived of or enacted for entertainment or for its aesthetic value, it may be embedded in, and be instrumental in respect of, other domains of social action. It may be presentational, or it may appear as a participatory, communicative medium entailing active contributions from all culture members (e.g., Turino 2008) that involve both sound and movement; it may be an integral component of coping with social change (Cross and Woodruff 2009) or may be central to the maintenance of aspects of the social order (Marett 2005).

Despite the immense range of contexts in which musics manifest themselves in different societies, and the wide range of cultural functions that they appear to fulfill, music is part of the cultural repertoire of every known society, and there is a general presumption that all culture-members will be able to respond to it and engage with it. Blacking’s claim that “musical ability [is] a general characteristic of the human species” can be glossed by suggesting that each culture typically expects its members to be able to engage with music in culturally appropriate ways, irrespective of whether the primary mode of engagement with music in a particular society is presentational, differentiating between those who perform and those whose capacity to engage with music is limited to listening and appreciation, or participatory, imputing to each culture-member the capacity actively to contribute to collective musical behavior. In general, while the participatory mode is prevalent in pre-industrial or traditional societies (see Turino 1999), in contemporary Western societies the presentational mode predominates, privileging acts of listening; however, the participatory mode, involving collaborative music-making by nonspecialists, remains widespread in present-day urban societies, as shown in the work of Finnegan (1989) and others.

Prospectively Adaptive Attributes of Music

Across cultures, then, music appears to have several clearly identifiable attributes; it is complexly structured, affectively significant, attentionally entraining, and immediately—yet indeterminately—meaningful. If we restrict our view of music to the “folk-theoretic” (Walton 2007) terms in which it is typically conceptualized within Western societies—as an autonomous aural commodity that has hedonic (and perhaps aesthetic) value—then our identification of these generic attributes of music may be interesting but seem to offer little in the way of help in understanding the nature of any relationships between music and evolutionary theory. From this perspective music seems to have complexity but to lack purpose, incongruous features that have led evolutionary theorists such as Steven Pinker to dismiss music as a trivial pursuit—a “technology,” in his terms. For Pinker (1994), its complexity is parasitic on our capacity for language, while our use of it to move our emotions is on a par with our use of recreational drugs to simulate the pleasure engendered by the release of endorphins. He suggests that our faculty for music simply exploits capacities such as language, auditory scene analysis, motor control, etc., that can be postulated to have become universal components of the human behavioral repertoire through evolutionary processes because of their incontestable adaptive value. Pinker’s view still holds sway in much of the scientific literature that has addressed music and evolution (see, e.g., Balter 2004). However, as should be evident, such a view is tenable only if almost all the world’s musics other than those of the last one hundred and fifty years of technologized Western societies are excluded from consideration, and if we completely disregard the fact that music is experienced as meaningful.

If we think of music as primarily interactive and communicative, as fused with other domains of human thought and behavior rather than constituting an autonomous domain in its own right, then its complexity, its immediacy and indeterminacy of meaning, together with its tendency to occur in contexts of entrainment, endow it with considerable powers. Its cyclic periodic structures afford individuals interacting through music the experience that their behaviors are coordinated with other participants, endowing musical interaction with the impression that each participant is somehow sharing each other’s time and laying the ground for the emergence of...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction Music Studies and the Idea of Culture—Richard Middleton
• PART 1 When? Musical Histories
• PART 2 Where? Locations of Music
• PART 3 How? Processes, Practices, and Institutions of Music
• PART 4 Whose? Social Forces and Musical Belongings
• PART 5 Who? Musical Subjectivities
• Reference
• Index