Editor's Introduction to Current Musicology Issue 95: Experimental Writing About Music (original) (raw)

The Antropology of Music (Alan Merriam)

2 0 1 0 3 10 9 8 7 6 5 I S B N 0 -8 1 0 1 -0 6 0 7 -8 T h e paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence o f P a p e r for Printed L i b r a r y Materials, A N S I Z . 3 9 . 4 8 -1 9 9 2 . Benin bronze statue on cover and title page courtesy of the M u s e u m of Natural History, Chicago. Photograph by Justine Cordwell and Edward D a m s . Material from the following has been quoted with the permission of the publisher: Louis Harap, Social Roots

Alan P. Merriam - The anthropology of music

Chapter 2 Root , leaf , blossom , or bole : Concerning the origin and adaptive function of music

2014

In an earlier survey of ideas about the adaptive function of art (Dissanayake 1994), I invoked the old analogy of blind men examining an elephant to describe what kind of creature it is. The concept of art, I said, is similarly composed of a variety of features, some as different from one another as the elephant's trunk from its ear or tail. Yet to discuss the subject of art's function (or origin) cogently, we need to know what it is that we are referring to-we need to have an idea of the larger whole. It is the same with 'music', which-like 'art'-is not a word or concept in many human societies, even ones that conspicuously engage in what we would call music or art. Like the editors and other contributors to the present volume, my subject here is music as a component of communicative musicality, a term that offers a new way of thinking about that complex, manyfaceted entity that we call music. As the essays in this volume seek to demonstrate, musicality is a...

Davies2021Evolutionin Oxford Hbook Music Philosophy

The Oxcford Hanbook of Western Music and Philosophy, 2021

Making or listening to music is pan-cultural, nearly universal, and highly valued. Musical behaviors probably appeared between 500,000 and 60,000 years ago. The more recent date captures the era when H. sapiens spread globally from Africa. The older date corresponds with a time when song might have produced individual or social benefits and the physiological and cognitive conditions for its production were present (in our predecessor, H. heidelbergensis). Music is so multi-functional, however, that it is not clear if it was an evolutionary adaptation (as opposed to a byproduct or non-biological technology) or, if so, what it was an adaptation for.