Brief History of Music: An Introduction
In all probability, music has played an important role in the lifecycle of humans perhaps even before we could speak. Significant evidence has been discovered that very early man developed primitive flutes from animal bones and used stones and wood as percussion.
Voice would have been the first and most natural means of expression in our distant ancestors, used to bond socially or comfort a sleepless child. It is from these humble beginnings that the music we enjoy today evolved.
As we move further through the history of music we find increasing evidence of its key role in sacred and secular settings, although the division into these categories was not defined in this way until many years later.
History of Music
Influences from the west to the east merged into the pre-Christian music of the Greeks and later the Romans. Musical practices and conventions perhaps conveyed by travelling musicians brought a wealth of diversity and invention.
Surviving Greek notation from this period of musical history has given scientists and musicologists alike a vital clue to the way that the music of the time might have sounded. It certainly indicates remarkable links to the music that would follow, perhaps most notably through the use of modality in Greek music.
In the frescoes and in some written accounts, including the Bible, we have learned about the instruments that featured in the Roman and Greek times and their significance to the cultures. The trumpet as an instrument of announcement and splendid ceremony, or the lyre as an integral player in the songs of poets.
Across Europe from the early part of the first century, the monasteries and abbeys became the places where music became embedded into the lives of those devoted to God and their followers.
Christianity had established itself and with it came a new liturgy that demanded a new music. Although early Christian music had its roots in the practices and beliefs of the Hebrew people, what emerged from this was to become the basis for sacred music for centuries to come. The chants that were composed devoutly followed the sacred Latin texts in a fashion that was tightly controlled and given only to the glory of God. Music was very much subservient to the words, without flourish or frivolity.
It was Pope Gregory (540-604 AD), who is credited with moving the progress of sacred music forward and developing what is now called Gregorian Chant, characterises by the haunting sound of the open, perfect fifth.
Some controversy surrounds this claim, but the name has stuck and the music remains distinct and vitally important as it moves away from plainchant towards polyphony. This, in turn, looked back to earlier times and customs, particularly in the music of the Jewish people where the idea of a static drone commonly underpinned a second vocal line.
Medieval Period
As we move forward in musical time, we begin to enter the Medieval Period of music which can be generally agreed to span the period from around 500AD up until the mid-fifteenth century. By this time music was a dominant art in taverns to cathedrals, practised by kings to paupers alike. It was during this extended period of music that the sound of music becomes increasingly familiar. This is partly due to the development of musical notation, much of which has survived, that allows us a window back into this fascinating time.
From the written music that survives from the monasteries and other important accounts of musical practices, it’s possible to assemble an image of a vibrant culture that ranges from the sacred to the secular. Throughout the Medieval period, the music slowly began to adopt ever more elaborate structures and devices that produced works of immense beauty and devotion.
Hildegard von Bingen and Perotin pioneered many of the musical forms we still recognise today including the motet and the sacred Mass. Alongside these important forms came the madrigal that often reflects the moods and feelings of the people of the time. It’s wonderfully polyphonic form is both mesmerising and delightful.
Renaissance Period
Instruments developed in accordance with the composer’s imaginations. A full gamut of wind, brass and percussion instruments accompanied the Medieval music, although it is still the human voice that dominates many of the compositions. Towards the close of the high medieval period, we find the emergence of instrumental pieces in their own right which in turn paves the way for many musical forms in the following period: The Renaissance .
Before leaving this period of music it is important to mention the Troubadours and the Trouveres. These travelling storytellers and musicians covered vast distances on their journeys across Europe and further afield into Asia. They told stories, sung ballads and perhaps most importantly, brought with them influences from far and wide that seamlessly blended with the western musical cultures.
The Renaissance (1450 – 1600) was a golden period in music history. Freed from the constraints of Medieval musical conventions the composers of the Renaissance forged a new way forward. Josquin des Prez is considered to be one of the early Renaissance composers to be a great master of the polyphonic style, often combining many voices to create elaborate musical textures.
Later Palestrina, Thomas Tallis and William Byrd build on the ideas of des Pres composing some of the most stunning motets, masses, chansons and instrumental works in their own right. Modality was firmly established as a basis for all harmony, and although strict rules governing the use of dissonance, the expressive qualities of Renaissance music is virtually unparalleled.
As instrumental pieces became accepted into the repertoire, we find the development of instruments like the bassoon and the trombone giving rise to larger and more elaborate instrumental groupings.
This gave composers far more scope to explore and express their creative ideas than before. The viol family developed to provide a very particular, haunted quality to much of the music of the time alongside the establishment of each recognisable family of instruments comprising, percussion, strings, woodwind and brass.
Keyboard instruments also became increasingly common and the advent of the sonata followed in due course. Other popular forms for instrumental music included the toccata, canzona and ricercar to name but a few, emanating from the Courtly dance.
Towards the end of the Renaissance, what was called the Church Modes began to dissolve in favour of what is now considered to be functional harmony or tonality based on a system of keys rather than modes.
Baroque Period
The Baroque Period (1600-1760), houses some of the most famous composers and pieces that we have in Western Classical Music. It also sees some of the most important musical and instrumental developments. Italy, Germany, England and France continue from the Renaissance to dominate the musical landscape, each influencing the other with conventions and style.
Amongst the many celebrated composers of the time, G F Handel, Bach, Vivaldi and Purcell provide a substantial introduction to the music of this era. It is during this glittering span of time that Handel composes his oratorio “The Messiah”, Vivaldi the “Four Seasons”, Bach his six “Brandenburg Concertos” and the “48 Preludes and Fugues”, together with Purcell’s opera “Dido and Aeneas”.
Instrumental music was composed and performed in tandem with vocal works, each of equal importance in the Baroque. The virtuosity that began amongst the elite Renaissance performers flourished in the Baroque. Consider the keyboard Sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti or the Concertos that Vivaldi composed for his student performers. This, in turn, leads to significant instrumental developments, and thanks to the aristocratic support of Catherine Medici, the birth of the Violin.
Common musical forms were established founded on the Renaissance composers principles but extended and developed in ways that they would have probably found unimaginable. The Suite became a Baroque favourite, comprising contrasting fast slow movements like the Prelude; Allemande, Gigue, Courante and the Sarabande. Concertos became ever more popular, giving instrumentalists the opportunity to display their technical and expressive powers.
Vocal music continued to include the Mass but now also the Oratorio and Cantata alongside anthems and chorales. Opera appears in earnest in the Baroque period and becomes an established musical form and vehicle for astonishing expression and diversity.
Increasingly, the preferred harmony is tonal and the system of keys (major and minor), is accepted in favour of modality. This lifts the limitations of modes and offers composers the chance to create ever more complex and expressive pieces that combine exciting polyphonic textures and dynamics.
Notation accompanies these developments and steadily we find that the accuracy of composers works becomes more precise and detailed giving us a better possibility of realising their intentions in performances of today.
Classical Period
From the Baroque, we step into the Classical Period (1730-1820). Here Haydn and Mozart dominate the musical landscape and Germany and Austria sit at the creative heart of the period. From the ornate Baroque composers of the Classical period moved away from the polyphonic towards the homophonic, writing music that was, on the surface of it at least, simple, sleek and measured.
One key development is that of the Piano. The Baroque harpsichord is replaced by the early piano which was a more reliable and expressive instrument. Mozart and Haydn each wrote a large number of works for the Piano which allowed for this instrument to develop significantly during this period.
Chamber music alongside orchestral music was a feature of the Classical Era with particular attention drawn towards the String Quartet. The orchestra itself was firmly established and towards the latter end of the period began to include clarinets, trombones, and timpani.
The rise of the virtuoso performer continued throughout this period of music as demonstrated by the many of the concertos and sonatas composed during this time. Opera flourished in these decades and became a fully-fledged musical form of entertainment that extended way beyond the dreams of the Baroque composers.
Romantic Period
As the Classical era closed Beethoven is the most notable composer who made such a huge contribution to the change into the Romantic Era (1780 – 1880). Beethoven’s immense genius shaped the next few decades with his substantial redefining of many of the established musical conventions of the Classical era. His work on Sonata form in his concertos, symphonies, string quartets and sonatas, goes almost unmatched by any other composer.
The Romantic era saw huge developments in the quality and range of many instruments that naturally encouraged ever more expressive and diverse music from the composers. Musical forms like the Romantic orchestra became expansive landscapes where composers gave full and unbridled reign to their deepest emotions and dreams.
Berlioz in his “Symphonie Fantastique” is a fine example of this, or later Wagner in his immense operas. The symphonies of Gustav Mahler stand like stone pillars of achievement at the end of the Romantic period alongside the tone poems of Richard Strauss. The Romantic period presents us with a vast array of rich music that only towards the end of the 19 th Century began to fade.
It is hard to conceive of what could follow such a triumphant, heroic time in musical history but as we push forward into the 20 th Century the musical landscape takes a dramatic turn. Echoes of the Romantic Era still thread through the next century in the works of Elgar, Shostakovich and Arthur Bliss, but it is the music from France we have title impressionism that sparkles its way into our musical consciences.
Debussy and Ravel are key exponents of this colourful movement that parallels the artwork of Monet and Manet. What we hear in the music of the impressionists harks back to many of the popular forms of the Baroque but in ways that Bach is unlikely to have foreseen. The tonal system transforms to include a wider range of scales and influences from the Orient allowing composers to write some of the most stunning works ever heard.
Both Ravel and Debussy composed extensively for the piano using poetry for inspiration. Their orchestral works are amongst some of the most beautiful and evocative pieces ever written.
In parallel, the Teutonic world began to undergo its own revolution in the form of the second Viennese school, led by Arnold Schoenberg. Disillusioned with the confines of tonality Schoenberg threw out the tonal system in favour of a new twelve-tone serial system giving each step of the chromatic scale equal musical validity. The result was serial music that was completely atonal and transformed the musical landscape almost beyond anything that had happened before.
Read: Brief History of Classical Music Periods
4 thoughts on “Brief History of Music: An Introduction”
This is great piece. What I wonder the Greek Scholars who invented the G clef and C Clef with tone of Letters A-G and 5 lines. They say it happened in late BC
I adored this text. Thank you for the informations. The music is the better art humankind ever did. It is a pleasure to know people don’t yet let the classics die.
Isn’t this more of a history of western art music then Music
There are mainly six periods of music and each period has a particular style. Music is an expression of feelings, emotions through specific sounds. We listen to music everywhere like in the singing of birds, whistling of a person and impressive sounds by a live band. All these are the simplest form of music. Thanks for sharing the information.
Leave a Comment
HYPOTHESIS AND THEORY article
How music and instruments began: a brief overview of the origin and entire development of music, from its earliest stages.
- University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom
Music must first be defined and distinguished from speech, and from animal and bird cries. We discuss the stages of hominid anatomy that permit music to be perceived and created, with the likelihood of both Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens both being capable. The earlier hominid ability to emit sounds of variable pitch with some meaning shows that music at its simplest level must have predated speech. The possibilities of anthropoid motor impulse suggest that rhythm may have preceded melody, though full control of rhythm may well not have come any earlier than the perception of music above. There are four evident purposes for music: dance, ritual, entertainment personal, and communal, and above all social cohesion, again on both personal and communal levels. We then proceed to how instruments began, with a brief survey of the surviving examples from the Mousterian period onward, including the possible Neanderthal evidence and the extent to which they showed “artistic” potential in other fields. We warn that our performance on replicas of surviving instruments may bear little or no resemblance to that of the original players. We continue with how later instruments, strings, and skin-drums began and developed into instruments we know in worldwide cultures today. The sound of music is then discussed, scales and intervals, and the lack of any consistency of consonant tonality around the world. This is followed by iconographic evidence of the instruments of later antiquity into the European Middle Ages, and finally, the history of public performance, again from the possibilities of early humanity into more modern times. This paper draws the ethnomusicological perspective on the entire development of music, instruments, and performance, from the times of H. neanderthalensis and H. sapiens into those of modern musical history, and it is written with the deliberate intention of informing readers who are without special education in music, and providing necessary information for inquiries into the origin of music by cognitive scientists.
How Did Music Begin? Was it via Vocalization or was it through Motor Impulse?
But even those elementary questions are a step too far, because first we have to ask “What is music?” and this is a question that is almost impossible to answer. Your idea of music may be very different from mine, and our next-door neighbor’s will almost certainly be different again. Each of us can only answer for ourselves.
Mine is that it is “Sound that conveys emotion.”
We can probably most of us agree that it is sound; yes, silence is a part of that sound, but can there be any music without sound of some sort? For me, that sound has to do something—it cannot just be random noises meaning nothing. There must be some purpose to it, so I use the phrase “that conveys emotion.” What that emotion may be is largely irrelevant to the definition; there is an infinite range of possibilities. An obvious one is pleasure. But equally another could be fear or revulsion.
How do we distinguish that sound from speech, for speech can also convey emotion? It would seem that musical sound must have some sort of controlled variation of pitch, controlled because speech can also vary in pitch, especially when under overt emotion. So music should also have some element of rhythm, at least of pattern. But so has the recital of a sonnet, and this is why I said above that the question of “What is music?” is impossible to answer. Perhaps the answer is that each of us in our own way can say “Yes, this is music,” and “No, that is speech.”
Must the sound be organized? I have thought that it must be, and yet an unorganized series of sounds can create a sense of fear or of warning. Here, again, I must insert a personal explanation: I am what is called an ethno-organologist; my work is the study of musical instruments (organology) and worldwide (hence the ethno-, as in ethnomusicology, the study of music worldwide). So to take just one example of an instrument, the ratchet or rattle, a blade, usually of wood, striking against the teeth of a cogwheel as the blade rotates round the handle that holds the cogwheel. This instrument is used by crowds at sporting matches of all sorts; it is used by farmers to scare the birds from the crops; it was and still is used by the Roman Catholic church in Holy Week when the bells “go to Rome to be blessed” (they do not of course actually go but they are silenced for that week); it was scored by Beethoven to represent musketry in his so-called Battle Symphony, a work more formally called Wellingtons Sieg oder die Schlacht bei Vittoria , Op.91, that was written originally for Maelzel’s giant musical box, the Panharmonicon. Beethoven also scored it out for live performance by orchestras and it is now often heard in our concert halls “with cannon and mortar effects” to attract people to popular concerts. And it was also, during the Second World War, used in Britain by Air-Raid Precaution wardens to warn of a gas attack, thus producing an emotion of fear. If it was scored by Beethoven, it must be regarded as a musical instrument, and there are many other noise-makers that, like it, which must be regarded as musical instruments.
And so, to return to our definition of music, organization may be regarded as desirable for musical sound, but that it cannot be deemed essential, and thus my definition remains “Sound that conveys emotion.”
So Now We Can Ask Again, “How Did Music Begin?”
But then another question arises: is music only ours? We can, I think, now agree that two elements of music are melody, i.e., variation of pitch, plus rhythmic impulse. But almost all animals can produce sounds that vary in pitch, and every animal has a heart beat. Can we regard bird song as music? It certainly conveys musical pleasure for us, it is copied musically (Beethoven again, in his Pastoral Symphony , no.6, op. 68, and in many works by other composers), and it conveys distinct signals for that bird and for other birds and, as a warning, for other animals also. Animal cries also convey signals, and both birds and animals have been observed moving apparently rhythmically. But here, we, as musicologists and ethnomusicologists alike, are generally agreed to ignore bird song, animal cries, and rhythmic movement as music even if, later, we may regard it as important when we are discussing origins below. We ignore these sounds, partly because they seem only to be signals, for example alarms etc, or “this is my territory,” and partly, although they are frequently parts of a mating display, this does not seem to impinge on society as a whole, a feature that, as we shall see, can be of prime importance in human music. Perhaps, too, we should admit to a prejudice: that we are human and animals are not…
So now, we can turn to the questions of vocalization versus motor impulse: which came first, singing or percussive rhythms? At least we can have no doubt whatsoever that for melody, singing must long have preceded instrumental performance, but did physical movement have the accompaniment of hand- or body-clapping and perhaps its amplification with clappers of sticks or stones, and which of them came first?
Here, we turn first to the study of the potentials of the human body. There is a large literature on this, but it has recently been summarized by Iain Morley in his The Prehistory of Music ( Morley, 2013 ). So far as vocalization is concerned, at what point in our evolution was the vocal tract able to control the production of a range of musical pitch? For although my initial definition of music did not include the question of pitch, nor of rhythm, once we begin to discuss and amplify our ideas of music, one or other of these, does seem to be an essential—a single sound with no variation of pitch nor with any variation in time can hardly be described as musical.
Studies based on fossil remains of the cranium and jaw formation of the early species of homo suggest that while Homo ergaster from between two million and a million and a half years ago could produce some variation of pitch but perhaps without much breath control, Homo erectus may have had greater ability, and Homo heidelbergensis , and certainly its later development from around a million years ago into the common ancestor of Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens , could certainly “sing” as well as we can, though of course we can have no evidence of whether they could control such ability, whether they used it, and if so to what extent. So we can say that vocalization, while absent from the capability of our cousins the great apes and of the early forms of Homo , could be as old as at least a million years. It would seem that Homo heidelbergensis had the muscular abilities, but perhaps not the full mental capacities and that it was not until H. sapiens arrived that all the requirements for vocalization were in place, both exported and imported, and possibly not even in the earliest stages of the evolution of H. sapiens . It is here that there is controversy over the relative musical abilities of H. neanderthalensis and H. sapiens , to which in due course we shall return.
Much of this work also discusses the origins of speech as well as that of music. The two processes seem to have much the same physiological requirements, the ability to produce the various consonants and vowels that enable speech, and the ability to control discrete musical pitches. But this capacity goes far beyond the ability to produce sounds.
All animals have the ability to produce sounds, and most of these sounds have meanings, at least to their ears. Surely, this is true also of the earliest hominims. If a mother emits sounds to soothe a baby, and if such sound inflects somewhat in pitch, however vaguely, is this song? An ethnomusicologist, those who study the music of exotic peoples, would probably say “yes,” while trying to analyze and record the pitches concerned. A biologist would also regard mother–infant vocalizations as prototypical of music ( Fitch, 2006 ). There are peoples (or have been before the ever-contaminating influence of the electronic profusion of musical reproduction) whose music has consisted only of two or three pitches, and those pitches not always consistent, and these have always been accepted as music by ethnomusicologists. So we have to admit that vocal music of some sort may have existed from the earliest traces of humanity, long before the proper anatomical and physiological developments enabled the use of both speech and what we might call “music proper,” with control and appreciation of pitch.
In this context, it is clear also that “music” in this earliest form must surely have preceded speech. The ability to produce something melodic, a murmuration of sound, something between humming and crooning to a baby, must have long preceded the ability to form the consonants and vowels that are the essential constituents of speech. A meaning, yes: “Mama looks after you, darling,” “Oy, look out!” and other non-verbal signals convey meaning, but they are not speech.
The possibilities of motor impulse are also complex. Here, again, we need to look at the animal kingdom. Both animals and birds have been observed making movements that, if they were humans, would certainly be described as dance, especially for courtship, but also, with the higher apes in groups. Accompaniment for the latter can include foot-slapping, making more sound than is necessary just for locomotion, and also body-slapping ( Williams, 1967 ). Can we regard such sounds as music? If they were humans, yes without doubt. So how far back in the evolutionary tree can we suggest that motor impulse and its sonorous accompaniment might go? I have already postulated in my Origins and Development of Musical Instruments ( Montagu, 2007 , p. 1) that this could go back as far as the earliest flint tools, that striking two stones together as a rhythmic accompaniment to movement might have produced the first flakes that were used as tools, or alternatively that interaction between two or more flint-knappers may have led to rhythms and counter-rhythms, such as we still hear between smiths and mortar-and-pestle millers of grains and coffee beans. This, of course, was kite-flying rather than a wholly serious suggestion, but the possibilities remain. At what stage did a hominim realize that it could make more sound, or could alleviate painful palms, by striking two sticks or stones together, rather than by simple clapping? Again we turn to Morley and to the capability of the physiological and neurological expression of rhythm.
The physiological must be presumed from the above animal observations. The neurological would again, at its simplest, seem to be pre-human. There is plenty of evidence for gorillas drumming their chests and for chimpanzees to move rhythmically in groups. However, apes’ capacity for keeping steady rhythm is very limited ( Geissmann, 2000 ), suggesting that it constitutes a later evolutionary development in hominins. Perceptions of more detailed appreciation of rhythm, particularly of rhythmic variation, can only be hypothesized by studies of modern humans, especially of course of infantile behavior and perception.
From all this, it would seem that motor impulse, leading to rhythmic music and to dance could be at least as early as the simplest vocal inflection of sounds. Indeed, it could be earlier. We said above that animals have hearts, and certainly, all anthropoids have a heartbeat slow enough, and perceptible enough, to form some basis for rhythmic movement at a reasonable speed. Could this have been a basis for rhythmic movement such as we have just mentioned? This can only be a hypothesis, for there is no way to check it, but it does seem to me that almost all creatures seem to have an innate tendency to move together in the same rhythm when moving in groups, and this without any audible signal, so that some form of rhythmic movement may have preceded vocalization.
But Why Does Music Develop from Such Beginnings? What is the Purpose of Music?
There are four obvious purposes: dance, personal or communal entertainment, communication, and ritual.
Dance we have already mentioned, though we can never know whether rhythmic motion led to the use of accompaniment, or whether the use of rhythm for any work led to people moving rhythmically in a way that became dance. It is well accepted in anthropology that when people are working, or moving together, their movements fall into a rhythm, that people may grunt and make other noises into that rhythm. The grunts may move into something that verges on or morphs into song; the other noises may be claps or beating pairs of objects together (concussive) or beating one object on another (percussive). Such objects can only be idiophonic, such as sticks, stones, and other solid objects that require no additional features to help them make a sound, in the classificatory system for instruments ( Hornbostel and Sachs, 1914 ). This is simply because to create a drum with a skin (membranophones) is a complex process, because a skin will not produce sound unless it is under tension.
There is no doubt whatsoever that rhythmic sound without any melodic input must be regarded as music. It appears in many cultures, even if rarely, and we have Varèse’s Ionization to take as an example from our modern orchestral repertoire.
Our second purpose was personal or communal entertainment. Communal entertainment, to some extent, overlaps with dance and with rhythmic work; personal entertainment overlaps for the mother and baby, mentioned above, with communication, as does the traveler using an instrument to indicate to people or villages that he passes that his purpose is peaceful and that he is not a robber intent on purloining their property, a well-known practice anthropologically but one that we can have no way to measure its antiquity.
Our third purpose, communication by musical means is again widespread. We have the “bush telegraph” in Africa and other parts of the world with slit drums and other instruments, the alphorn in Switzerland and in other mountainous or marshy regions, the conch in Papua New Guinea, as random examples of the use of an instrument to pass messages. We have the whistling language of the Canary Islands ( silbo ) and many other parts of the world, and the high vocal calls of other peoples as examples of non-instrumental music for the same purpose.
Our fourth purpose, ritual, is a well-known trap in archeology and anthropology. Any object, any practice that cannot otherwise be explained, is assigned as “ritual.” But there seems to be no form of religion, to use that word in its widest sense, that does not attract music to its practices. And here, we have another conflict, again that between music and speech. Schönberg’s “invention” of Sprechgesang , an interface between speech and music, was nothing new. Many forms of ritual chants would be difficult to notate precisely in pitch; the words are spoken but they are inflected up and down quasi-melodically. Some bardic narrative is also an example of this, while often breaking intermittently into song. In both cases, the musical inflection renders the text less boring and helps the speaker with his or her memory of the text. It is undoubtedly speech, for the meaning of the words is the essential part, but there is also the element of pitch variation that would make an ethnomusicologist claim it to be music even while the practitioner would often vehemently deny any such claim, especially within the stricter forms of Islam, those in which music is forbidden.
Seemingly more important than these fairly obvious reasons for why music developed is one for why music began in the first place. This is something that Steven Mithen mentions again and again in his book, The Singing Neanderthals ( Mithen, 2005 ): that music is not only cohesive on society but almost adhesive. Music leads to bonding, bonding between mother and child, bonding between groups who are working together or who are together for any other purpose. Work songs are a cohesive element in most pre-industrial societies, for they mean that everyone of the group moves together and thus increases the force of their work. Even today “Music while you Work” has a strong element of keeping workers happy when doing repetitive and otherwise boring work. Dancing or singing together before a hunt or warfare binds the participants into a cohesive group, and we all know how walking or marching in step helps to keep one going. It is even suggested that it was music, in causing such bonding, that created not only the family but society itself, bringing individuals together who might otherwise have led solitary lives, scattered at random over the landscape.
Thus, it may be that the whole purpose of music was cohesion, cohesion between parent and child, cohesion between father and mother, cohesion between one family and the next, and thus the creation of the whole organization of society.
Much of this above can only be theoretical—we know of much of its existence in our own time but we have no way of estimating its antiquity other than by the often-derided “evidence” of the anthropological records of isolated, pre-literate peoples. So let us now turn to the hard evidence of early musical practice, that of the surviving musical instruments. 1
This can only be comparatively late in time, for it would seem to be obvious that sound makers of soft vegetal origin should have preceded those of harder materials that are more difficult to work, whereas it is only the hard materials that can survive through the millennia. Surely natural materials such as grasses, reeds, and wood preceded bone? That this is so is strongly supported by the advanced state of many early bone pipes—the makers clearly knew exactly what they were doing in making musical instruments, with years or generations of experiment behind them on the softer materials. For example, some end-blown and notch-blown flutes, the earliest undoubted ones that we have, from Geissenklösterle and Hohle Fels in Swabia, Germany, made from swan, vulture wing (radius) bones, and ivory in the earliest Aurignacian period (between 43,000 and 39,000 years BP), have their fingerholes recessed by thinning an area around the hole to ensure an airtight seal when the finger closes them. This can only be the result of long experience of flute making.
So how did musical instruments begin? First a warning: with archeological material, we have what has been found; we do not have what has not been found. A site can be found and excavated, but if another site has not been found, then it will not have been excavated. Thus, absence of material does not mean that it did not exist, only that it has not been found yet. Geography is relevant too. Archeology has been a much older science in Europe than elsewhere, so that most of our evidence is European, whereas in Africa, where all species of Homo seem to have originated, site archeology is in its infancy. Also, we have much evidence of bone pipes simply because a piece of bone with a number of holes along its length is fairly obviously a probable musical instrument, whereas how can we tell whether some bone tubes without fingerholes might have been held together as panpipes? Or whether a number of pieces of bone found together might or might not have been struck together as idiophones? We shall find one complex of these later on here which certainly were instruments. And what about bullroarers, those blades of bone, with a hole or a constriction at one end for a cord, which were whirled around the player’s head to create a noise-like thunder or the bellowing of a bull, or if small and whirled faster sounded like the scream of a devil? We have many such bones, but how many were bullroarers, how many were used for some other purpose?
So how did pipes begin? Did someone hear the wind whistle over the top of a broken reed and then try to emulate that sound with his own breath? Did he or his successors eventually realize that a shorter piece of reed produced a higher pitch and a longer segment a lower one? Did he ever combine these into a group of tubes, either disjunctly, each played by a separate player, as among the Venda of South Africa and in Lithuania, or conjointly lashed together to form a panpipe for a single player? Did, over the generations, someone find that these grouped pipes could be replaced with a single tube by boring holes in it, with each hole representing the length of one of that group? All this is speculation, of course, but something like it must have happened.
Or were instruments first made to imitate cries? The idea of the hunting lure, the device to imitate an animal’s cry and so lure it within reach, is of unknown age. Or were they first made to imitate the animal in a ritual to call for the success of tomorrow’s hunt? Some cries can be imitated by the mouth; others need a tool, a short piece of cane, bits of reed or grass or bone blown across the end like a key or a pen-top. Others are made from a piece of bark held between the tongue and the lip (I have heard a credit card used in this way!). The piece of cane or bone would only produce a single sound, but the bark, or in Romania a carp scale, can produce the most beautiful music as well as being used as a hunting call. The softer materials will not have survived and with the many small segments of bone that we have, there is no way to tell whether they might have been used in this way or whether they are merely the detritus from the dining table.
We have many whistles made from an animal phalange or toe bone, blown between a pair of protrusions at one end, across a sound hole near the center. Two of them come from the Mousterian period of the Middle Paleolithic, over 50,000 years ago, and there are many from the Aurignacian down to the Magdalenian and later; most, but not all, are reindeer phalanges. D’Errico has warned us, though, that the “sound hole” on many of these look as though they were made from a carnivore bite ( D’Errico et al., 2003 ). It was in the Mousterian period that the Neanderthals co-existed with Homo Sapiens ; the latter arrived in Europe between fifty and forty thousand years ago (though far earlier in the Near East), whereas Neanderthals had long been established in Europe, perhaps as long as 200,000 years before. Whether any that were blown by humans were used for signaling, or whether they were also used for music we cannot know, but whistles are certainly regarded as musical instruments.
More controversially in this Mousterian period, and certainly associated with other Neanderthal remains, is the young cave bear femur from the Divje Babe cave in Slovenia, dated to around 60,000 years Before the Present (BP). This has two holes in it and what might be three others at the broken-off ends, two on one side and one on the other. The fragment of bone is just over 10 cm long and while many people have claimed it as a flute, for it can certainly produce several pitches when reproductions of it are blown, many others have claimed that the holes are the result of other carnivores gnawing it, especially at the ends. As for the two complete holes, some writers have claimed that they are just the right size, shape, and spacing to have been produced by bears, for whose presence in the cave there is ample evidence, nor does there seem to be any trace of any possible human work on the bone. There is a very considerable literature on this possible instrument, well summed up and cited by Morley and by D’Errico et al., and the general consensus had been that it was not a musical instrument but simply the result of animal action. Nevertheless, the original discoverers have returned to the attack with a recent publication ( Turk, 2014 ) which goes to show that human agency not only could have but did pierce those holes. For now, we can only leave this question open, with all the problems of an unicum; there are convincing conclusions on both sides of the argument, with at present rather greater weight on the “yes” side, partly due to this recent publication, and partly to the evidence in the following paragraph. What we really need are more examples from the Mousterian period.
This bone does raise the whole question of whether H. neanderthalensis knew of or practised music in any form. For rhythm, we can only say surely, as above—if earlier hominids could have, so could H. neanderthalensis . Could they have sung? A critical anatomical feature is the position of the larynx ( Morley, 2013 , 135ff); the lower the larynx in the throat the longer the vocal cords and thus the greater flexibility of pitch variation and of vowel sounds (to put it at its simplest). It would seem to have been that with H. heidelbergensis and its successors that the larynx was lower and thus that singing, as distinct from humming, could have been possible, but “seems to have been” is necessary because, as is so often, this is still the subject of controversy. However, it does seem fairly clear that H. neanderthalensis could indeed have sung. It follows, too, that while the Divje Babe “pipe” may or may not have been an instrument, others may yet be found that were instruments. There is evidence that the Neanderthals had at least artistic sensibilities, for there are bones with scratch marks on them that may have been some form of art, and certainly there is a number of small pierced objects, pieces of shell, animal teeth, and so forth, found in various excavations that can only have served as beads for a necklace or other ornamentation – or just possibly as rattles. There have also been found pieces of pigments of various colors, some of them showing wear marks and thus that they had been used to color something, and at least one that had been shaped into the form of a crayon, indicating that some reasonably delicate pigmentation had been desired. Burials have been found, with some small deposits of grave goods, though whether these reveal sensibilities or forms of ritual or belief, we cannot know ( D’Errico et al., 2003 , 19ff). There have also been found many bone awls, including some very delicate ones which, we may presume, had been used to pierce skins so that they could be sewn together. All this leads us to the conclusion that the Neanderthals had at least some artistic and other feelings, were capable of some musical practices, even if only vocal, and were clothed, rather than being the grunting, naked savages that have been assumed in the past.
It is in the Middle and Upper Paleolithic, from the Aurignacian period, which starts around 43,000 BP in eastern Europe and around 40,000 in the west, to the Magdalenian and later, ending around 10,000 BP, which we have a very considerable number of instruments, plus a few representations. Many of them, like those from Geissenklösterle above, are end-blown flutes made of bone, most commonly of large birds such as vultures and swans. Some of them are blown via a notch; some appear to be duct flutes, similar to our recorders, though of course the block made of wood, pith, or fiber has not survived—more probably, they are likely to have been tongue-duct flutes, using the tongue in the end instead of a block, and some are listed as such in Morley’s tables—and others may have been plain-end blown, diagonally across the top, like the Arab nay . With these last, though, it is possible that a reed was used as the sound generator, either a double reed like that of our oboe or a split-cane single reed like that of many Arab instruments, or possibly even lip-blown (trumpeted), though the narrowness of the bore makes this seem less likely. It is, therefore, probably better to refer to this last group as pipes, rather than as flutes.
Reproductions of many can be and have been played, but there is little to be learnt from this practice. We know what pitches and sounds we can get out of them, but unless we know their playing techniques, which of course we do not know, we cannot tell what sort of pitches and tone qualities they would have obtained in antiquity. Every recorder and tin-whistle player knows of a number of ways to inflect the pitch and the tone; every Arab nay player knows even more, and ethnomusicologists have produced evidence for even more, and our experimental musicians have shown that quite extraordinary pitches and sounds can be obtained from many of our orchestral instruments, sounds that their makers or normal players never conceived. Thus the archeologists (who are seldom trained musicians), who publish the scales and pitches of the pipes that they have found, can give us no more than conjecture and the experience of their own musicality. I have a collection of musical instruments from all over the world; I know the sounds that I can get out of them, but without the presence of the original player, or a field recording of the original player on that very instrument, I have no way to tell what sounds or pitches he or she produced. So much less can we have any idea what sounds and pitches were heard in the Paleolithic times.
However, there is one salient point, emphasized by D’Errico: a significant number of these pipes has varied spacing of finger holes. While, it would seem that the majority have the finger holes evenly spaced along the tube, there are certainly some that have a wider gap between the second and third holes. There are two fairly obvious possible reasons for this: one is that their “scale” of pitches had intervals similar to wholetones and minor thirds; the other that it was convenient or comfortable to have a wider gap between the two hands. This latter suggestion is raised because it was a standard feature of our flutes from the later Middle Ages right through into the early nineteenth century, and this was not only because from around 1700 the middle joint of the Baroque flute was divided into an upper and lower joint at this point – the earlier one-piece flutes also showed this gap. There are also some Aurignacian flutes or pipes that have one hole closer to another, showing that a semitone or a small wholetone was desired. Thus, these details emphasize that not only were these well-developed instruments, with the bodies well-scraped and smoothed, the finger holes with secure seating for the fingers, a certain amount of incised decoration, but that also there was a desire for precise tuning, and that they were not just made to produce fairly random pitches.
In addition, there is the point that many of these features appear both in Geissenklösterle in Germany, in Isturitz in France, in Spain, and also elsewhere, and over long periods of time, strongly suggesting that populations were not isolated but that there were links between them. This is not so surprising. If H. sapiens had traveled across Africa and into Europe, surely they could also travel between these areas and elsewhere.
There is little point in listing all these pipes; all the Paleolithic examples from Europe, or close by, found before 2013 are listed by Morley in his Appendices.
Were there other instruments? There is at least one conch trumpet, found in the Marsoulas cave, in the Haute-Garonne area of southern France, dating from around 20,000 years BP. Shell is a hard material that survives the ages, and although we have so far only this one example from the Upper Paleolithic, we have a very considerable number from the Neolithic times, some of them much further from the sea, so it is fair to assume a continuous use (Montagu, in press). 2 So what about animal horns? Here the material is soft, and only in very dry conditions such as desert sands do any survive; none of those that I have heard of or seen were blowing horns, but it seems likely that they existed. For blowing, the horn must be naturally hollow, such as those of the cow family, sheep and goats, antelopes, elephant tusks, hollow wood, gourds, and wide-bore bamboo, with the tip broken or cut off, or a hole bored in the side; such were surely blown in high antiquity ( Montagu, 2014 ). There are several bullroarers from the Magdalenian period that we can be certain were instruments. There are many phalange whistles later than the Mousterian ones noted above. There are rasps, usually bones notched along their length, which would have been scraped with another bone or a stone for rhythmic music.
There is the complex of mammoth bones dating from around 20,000 BP, found in the Ukraine and published by Bibikov (1981) . Many of the bones show signs of wear, almost certainly from repeated striking, and others, though this is not mentioned in the English summary, have striations similar to those of rasps, suggesting that some were scraped whereas others were struck. It is claimed that this was an ensemble, and although it would be difficult to prove that this was so, it would be even more difficult to show that each of these bones was struck only singly as an individual solo instrument. So here perhaps we have the first evidence of an “orchestra.”
There are from the Magdalenian period, some 12,000 years BP, the caves themselves, where not only were stalactites struck but the caves themselves were used as resonators for sounds; both Lucie Rault and Lya Dams have brought together a number of convincing reports of this ( Dams, 1985 ; Rault, 2000 ). Resonant stones must also have been struck outside the caves, the so-called rock gongs, boulders struck on resonant points, and these are of unknown antiquity but many bear well-worn cup marks on their surfaces. Rock gongs were first reported by Bernard Fagg in Nigeria, and following his article ( Fagg, 1956 ), many more have been reported from around the world ( Fagg, 1997 ).
There is no evidence in the Paleolithic period for stringed instruments nor for skin drums.
At what point in history did someone discover that by cupping the hands together and blowing between the knuckles of the thumbs produced a sound? This is a vessel flute or ocarina whose pitch is varied by moving the fingers to alter the area of open hole. Many peoples have long used gourds and other hollow vegetal objects, and today pottery, to play music in this way, also with the hands as hunting lures, but since there are no animal bones of such a shape, we can have no evidence of vessel flutes earlier than the Neolithic, in which period pottery first came into use.
Did voice changers precede instruments? Did someone sing into a hollow object to change his voice from that of a human into that of a spirit or a deity? Was a shell sung into before ever a shell was blown? This precedence is something that has at times been suggested, but it can never be more than a hypothesis for we have no evidence to prove it. We do know that certain Greek statues had voice changers built in, usually a tube with a skin over one end, our kazoo, and there are many African masks with such a device.
Stringed instruments probably originated by the Mesolithic period, and certainly by the Neolithic, for it is in those periods that we begin to find flint arrow-heads, and the archer’s bow and the musical bow are symbiotic as we shall see below ( Balfour, 1899 ).
Skin drums (membranophones), as we said above, need the skin to be under tension to function. At what stage could there have been frames to which a skin could have been fastened securely enough to be tight enough to play? One can only say as early as skins were dressed, wetted, and dried on a frame, but since neither skins nor wooden frames, nor hollow logs, can ever have survived, this is simply an unknown; ceramic bodies rigid enough to support the skins can only have been available in or shortly before the Neolithic period.
So far, we have been discussing instruments only from Europe or its immediate environment. Simply, this is because where the evidence is. Archeology has been going on longer in Europe than elsewhere, as we have said. Much is being found now in China, but since most of it has been published in Chinese, much of this information is inaccessible, at least to me.
All the instruments that we have discussed above continued through the Neolithic and, with archery and pottery available, many others have joined them.
The earliest stringed instrument is undoubtedly the musical bow ( Balfour, 1899 ). The one string instrument that might possibly be earlier is one that is identical with an animal trap—a noosed cord, presumably gut or sinew, running from a bent stick or branch to a peg in the ground. When an animal puts its head or leg into the noose, the cord is jerked from the peg and the stick or branch springs up and traps the animal. It has been suggested by Sachs, Balfour, and others that the hunter may also have plucked the string, so creating the ground bow, varying the tension of the cord, and thus the pitch, by bending the stick or branch. The ground harp is of unknown antiquity—our only evidence for the existence of the instrument is nineteenth-century reports from anthropologists.
Bows themselves, of course, never survive, but the presence of arrowheads in the lithic evidence proves their existence. Whether the archer’s bow preceded the musician’s or vice versa is arguable, but man’s addiction to warfare, and even more to hunting, makes the archer’s the more likely. We have ethnographic evidence for the use of the same bow for both purposes by the same person, but each developed in different ways, the archer’s for strength and the musician’s for producing musical sounds in different ways. The string of the musical bow is most commonly tapped by a light stick, initially presumably by an arrow, and is held to the player’s mouth where, by changing the shape of the mouth, different overtones are sounded as with the jews harp (better and less prejudiciously called trump, which is the earlier English name). By dividing the string with a loop of cord linking the string to the stave, or by shortening the string at one end by the thumb of the holding hand, two fundamentals, each with their own overtones, makes a much greater range of pitches available. Attaching a gourd resonator to the stave creates greater volume, and opening or closing the mouth of the gourd against the player’s chest will again elicit overtones. Both these forms survive to the present day in various modifications and many parts of the world, especially in Africa south of the Sahara ( Kirby, 1934 ). A third form consists of attaching several bows to one resonator to form a pluriarc, as is still found in Central Africa.
One can postulate developments from both the gourd bow and the pluriarc. The gourd, eventually of wood, can be built on to one end of the stave to create both the category of instruments called lutes, with a straight stave as the neck, and of harps, with a curved stave. If the two outermost bows of the pluriarc become rigid, with a cross bar running between them to hold the distal ends of the strings of the inner bows, which then become redundant, the instrument is then much more stable and is called a lyre. Whether such developments took place, or whether lutes, harps, and lyres were independently invented, we can never know, but my own guess, based partly on various intermediate forms in various cultures, is for this process of development.
As for drums, frame drums are still ubiquitous around the world today, not only with our own tambourine, but a wooden or pottery body of manifold shapes exists almost everywhere. One possible early source for another type of drum is created by fixing the skin of the animal just eaten, over the top of the pot in which it had been cooked, so creating the instrument very appropriately called the kettledrum, using the word kettle in the sense of a caldron.
Another very common use of pottery is to create a rattle, a vessel containing seeds, pebbles, or nodules of pottery. Such vessel rattles must have been long preceded by gourds or woven leaves or baskets, all of which are still common today.
Once humanity entered the metal ages, the potentialities of instruments becomes infinite.
We can never know to what extent any groups of instruments or voices played together in high antiquity, though the existence of the group of mammoth bones above, does strongly suggest an ensemble. Not until the days of representational iconography, as in Mesopotamia and Egypt, or with the introduction of literacy, such as our Bible, do we have any real evidence. We have plenty of information from these sources.
What then did music sound like? We have early notations from Sumeria ( Galpin, 1936 ) and Ancient Greece, the well-known hymn to Apollo, covering a wide range of pitches; Hickmann tried to derive a notation from hand-signals, called cheironomy, portrayed in Egyptian paintings and carvings ( Hickmann, 1961 ). It has been thought by ethnomusicologists that less-advanced cultures than those, used pentatonic scales (five steps to the octave) such as we can still hear today in some areas, and perhaps even fewer steps with or without knowledge of the octave. But for these, naturally there is no evidence. Even with Sumerian, Greek, and Egyptian systems, the various transcriptions of which are all controversial, we cannot know the actual sounds, for not until the later classical Greek period do we have written evidence of the sizes of scalar steps.
We do know, from the transcription of cuneiform tablets, that it was the Babylonians, and very possibly the Sumerians before them, who cataloged the skies and their constellations, establishing thus the basics of the calendar and of time that we use today, and who invented the hexadecimal system of mathematics. They turned their attention to sound also, and the Sumerians developed a system of diatonic scales based on alternating fourths and fifths. The Greeks, who took such knowledge from them, devised a diatonic scale based on the ratios of the harmonic series, starting from the eighth partial, a scale today called Just Temperament, one that is still used today by unaccompanied voices and sometimes by bowed string players or wind instruments playing without keyboards. For other instruments, such as lyres and harps, Just Temperament could also serve well, but only and until the players wished to change key; as soon as they did so, for reasons more complex than are needed here but are discussed below, chaos would ensue. Nevertheless, despite the purity of such a scale, we know that even the Greeks used other and more complex scales ( Barbour, 1951 ) as, from the anthropological record, did many other peoples. Therefore, despite such transcriptions as we have of the ancient texts above, we can have no certain knowledge of what the music sounded like, for we do not know the exact sizes of the steps of the scales.
Even within Europe the 13th partial, the so-called alphorn fa, halfway between F and F-sharp appears in vocal music and on bagpipes as well as on natural horns and trumpets; the neutral third, between E and E-flat also appears, and as we shall see, the third is the most mutable interval in our classical music. In the Balkans, people sing in close seconds rather than wider intervals or unisons.
One thing that the ethnomusicologists can tell us is that either humanity has no inbuilt sense of consonant tonality, or that other people’s sense of consonance is different from ours. The musical bow will by its nature produce the pitches of Just Temperament, for all its pitches are the overtones of the harmonic series, but despite this some peoples, who use the bow, will sing in seven equal steps to the octave. The one interval that does seem to be common to almost all peoples is the octave; this most probably originates with men and women singing in “unison” together, for women’s voices tend to be an octave higher than men’s. It is also a natural step to recognize when any piece of music extends beyond the range of one octave, and this repetition of scalar steps beyond the octave is built into many woodwind fingering systems.
We have many other examples of other scales that do not use what we, in our culture, may consider to be pure tuning. Let us take just one example that may be familiar to many of us today, the Javanese gamelan. This uses two different scales, slendro and pelog . Both employ the octave, but neither uses a pure fifth or third, the notes that make up our “common chord.” Slendro has five almost equal steps to the octave; pelog has seven rather less equal steps. Not one of the steps of slendro is the same as those of pelog . Nor were the slendro or pelog in Java exactly the same between one gamelan and another, though similar, before the recent days when almost all gamelans are tuned to the pitches used by Radio Yogyakarta.
Nor are the scales of the Near and Middle East compatible with ours ( Wizārat al-Tarbiyah wa-al-Ta‘līm, 1934 ). Nor even, save for the octave, are the pitches of Just Intonation the same as those of the Equal Temperament that we use on our pianos today. Each culture develops the tuning system that best suits its ideas of musicality. It is up to the cognitive scientists to determine why this should be so, but they have to admit, if they are willing to listen to the exotic musics of the world, that these differences exist.
Let us now return to the history of music and of the instruments on which it was played.
At least we do know what instruments some peoples used in the later millennia BCE, for not only do we have a few survivals in our museums from the Sumerian, Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, Etruscan, and Roman periods, and also from the Orient, but we also have a wealth of iconography, much of it published in the Musikgeschichte in Bildern series by the Deutsche Verlag für Musik in Leipzig from the 1960s onward. This series is, alas, incomplete, for its publication ceased with the reunification of Germany.
We see among the Sumerians and Babylonians lyres and harps of various kinds, the latter quite small, a horizontal or vertical sound box with, at the distal end, a forepillar standing up at 90°, whereas in Egypt harps were normally curved, some of them as tall as the player, others, called the bow harp, were small enough to be held on the shoulder, and these last gradually passed into Central Africa where they are still found today. We see also lutes, a hollowed sound box like a small trough, with the open top covered with a skin to form the belly. A rod acts as the neck and passes through slits in the skin to hold it in place. These also still appear in Africa today. All these instruments were plucked, either with the fingers or a plectrum—the bow, such as we use on our fiddles, was as yet far in the future. There were pipes, usually double, held one in each hand, though sometimes, especially later in Egypt, lashed together so that the fingers of each hand could reach across both pipes. There were occasional drums, some very large, and many forms of rattles. We also see many of these instruments combined into what appear to be ensembles. This use of bands of instruments is confirmed in literature, for example in chapter 3 of the book of Daniel in our Bible where, when all the instruments play together, all those present bow down to the deity. Again in the Bible (II Samuel 6), a band of instruments escorts the Ark of the Covenant to David’s city, with David dancing before them to the scorn of his queen. 3 Beware, however, of the huge choirs and groups of instruments in the two books of Chronicles; this is a late account, written long after any of the events it records, and smacks strongly of a child’s playground exaggeration: “my brother is bigger and better than yours.”
In ancient Greece, the lyre and the double pipe, the aulos , predominated. Lyres came in three forms. The simplest, the chelys or lyra , had a tortoise-shell body with two vertical curved wooden rods or horns, set in the shell with a third rod running horizontally as the cross bar. The strings were attached at one end to the bottom of the shell and at the other were twisted with kollopes , strips of skin, and wound round the horizontal bar. These kollopes set firmly enough on the bar to hold a tuning, but could be turned on the bar to retune. This type of lyre was taught to, and used for after-dinner symposia, by all educated people. It traveled up the Nile to the Meroitic people, probably in the Hellenistic period, and eventually throughout East Africa, where it is still used today, with the skin kollopes replaced with strips of cloth and the tortoise-shell with a gourd or wooden body as the resonator, and a skin belly. A more elegant form of Greek lyre, with longer curved arms, was called the barbiton . The professional musician’s version, the kithara , was much more elaborate, with a wooden box-body and with what appears to be some form of semi-mechanized tuning devices. All three had gut strings that were normally plucked with a plectrum of wood, bone, or ivory, and all three are seen on many Greek vases and statues.
The aulos was a reed-pipe, shorter and somewhat stouter than the Sumerian and Egyptian; whether with a double reed like that of the oboe or a single reed like that of early folk clarinets as in the Near East today, is much argued, but Schlesinger’s illustrations clearly show both types, though probably more often with the double reed ( Schlesinger, 1939 ). The aulos passed on to Rome, where it was known as the tibia , to which quite elaborate tuning mechanisms were applied, with rings that could be turned to close off one hole and open another slightly differently placed, so as to play in a different key or mode. There was also a single pipe, the monaulos , and that is still found today, with a large double reed, all down the Silk Road, from Turkey, Kurdistan, and Armenia to China, Korea, and Japan. Whether it traveled east from Greece, or whether it originated in Central Asia like a number of other instruments and then traveled both east and west, is debatable.
That several instruments originated in Central Asia, probably somewhere between Persia and the Caspian Sea, is undoubted. The gong started there and was known in the Near East by St Paul (I Corinthians 13:1) as chalkos ēchon ( Montagu, 2001 , 123). The Chinese encyclopedias said that they got the gong from the West, which also suggests a Central Asian origin. The long trumpet seems to have started there also and it spread across the whole of Asia and to Greece, Etruria, and Rome, and in the Middle Ages through to North Africa as alnafir and, with the Moors, up into Spain as the añafil , and thence into the rest of Europe, and with the Hausa down into Ghana and Nigeria as the kakaki .
According to Al Farabi the Arab ’ud , that became the lute in medieval Europe, also originated there, and so, around the eighth century CE, did the fiddle bow ( Bachmann, 1969 ). Initially, this was a rough stick or reed scraping the string, but it was not long before it was modified with the strands of horsehair that we still use today.
This at last allowed stringed instruments to produce a sustained sound, something that could emulate the human voice, as all wind instruments had been able to do ever since their introduction.
In the early thirteenth century, and probably a little earlier, there came a revolution of the instruments we used in Europe. This seems to have been due to the often-interrupted symbiosis of Moorish, Jewish, and Christian cultures in Spain, and possibly also with some effect from returning Crusaders from the Holy Land. A flood of new instruments appeared, as can be seen in the many miniatures of the Cántigas de Santa Maria , a series of poems written by Alfonso X, called El Sabio, the wise. 4 We see there the Arab ’ud which became our lute, the small bowed fiddle, the rebab , which became our rebec, the reed-blown pipe the zamr , which became our shawm, the ancestor of our oboe, several types of bagpipe, harps with a forepillar, various zithers such as the qanun that became our canon and then the psaltery, the transverse flute, other types of lute that became our gitterns and eventually citterns and guitars, alnafir that became the Spanish añafil and our long trumpet, pipe and tabor, the pipe played with one hand and the tabor struck with the other, which became a standard one-man band from the Middle Ages into the sixteenth century, the timbre, a frame drum that became our tambourine, and the naqqere , two small kettledrums, our nakers, that hung low from the belt in front of the player, and eventually became our timpani. Within the ensuing century, these spread all over western Europe and can be seen in a great many medieval manuscripts, church carvings, and other sources.
We know little of the extent that these played together. There are some group scenes in the Cántigas , but mostly, the miniatures show either one instrument or two of the same sort tuning or playing to each other. We do see large groups of instruments in manuscripts of the following centuries, but these are mostly portrayals of biblical scenes or of texts such as psalm 150 and may not represent anything that actually happened in the Middle Ages.
Then, in the fourteenth century, came another revolution, this time an industrial one ( Gimpel, 1988 ). All over Europe, there had been windmills and watermills, primarily for grinding grain, but often also for minor industrial purposes. Now came the idea of siting watermills under the arches of bridges on major rivers, where the flow of water, restricted by the pillars of the bridge, thus produced far greater force. This powered mills for working metals and, for our purposes, of drawing brass and iron wire to standard quality and in much finer gages than had been available earlier except in softer, and more costly, metals such as silver and gold. The result was strings for harps, psalteries, and dulcimers and thence to keyboard instruments, first the clavichord, which was a keyed development of the monochord, and then the harpsichord. All, as can be seen in the manuscript of Arnault de Zwolle from around 1440, were established by that date ( Le Cerf and Labande, 1932 ).
The use of keyboards led to a revision of musical pitch and tuning. Just Temperament had served well for unaccompanied voices and some solo instruments, but its inadequacies had now become more apparent. If one depends on the partials of the harmonic series, their ratios makes it obvious that the step from 8 to 9 is greater than that of 9 to 10. To avoid using sharps and flats, let us take these pitches as C for 8, D for 9, and E for 10. And for clarity let us use the musicologist’s interval-measuring system of cents, analogous to the general use of millimeters for linear measurement. The major tone of 8–9 is 204 cents; the minor tone of 9–10 is 182 cents, and together these make up the third, C to E, of 386 cents. Now if we want to play in C major, all is well, but if instead, we want to start a scale on D, we are in trouble, for where we need a major tone we have only a minor tone. Voices have no trouble with this for they simply shift the D and the E, but for any instrument with strings such as those of a lyre, a harp, or keyboards, the player has to stop and retune all his strings. The problem was already recognized by the ancient Greeks, and it was allegedly Pythagoras who solved the problem and who decided to make all the wholetones the same size, with 204 cents for each. However, adding those together produces a wildly sharp third of 408 cents from C to E, which when used in a common chord with C and G was so intolerable that in the Middle Ages it was regarded as a dissonance. Thus the Pythagorean Temperament was intolerable on the new keyboard instruments, and the music theorist Pietro Aron devised a new temperament in 1523. He returned to the natural third of 386 cents and, taking its mean or average of 193 cents for each whole tone, created the Quarter-comma Meantone Temperament. To the modern ear, accustomed to the Equal Temperament of our piano, with its wholetones of 200 cents and semitones of 100 cents, these differences may seem small, but if one listens to music played in other temperaments, it really does sound different—even today a 400-cent third still sounds quite badly out of tune. This whole subject is quite complex and Barbour, 1951 , or the article on Temperaments in the New Grove Dictionary of Music , will give fuller details. 5 The basic problem is that the natural fifth of 702 cents is incompatible with the octave of 1200 cents; if one piles up a sequence of fifths, C to G, G to D, D to A and so on, the series will never return to C, only to a B-sharp 22 cents higher than C. Somehow those 22 cents, called a comma, have to be brought back into the octave, and this is done, with greater or lesser success, by using one of the various so-called irregular temperaments.
We have been neglecting vocal music. This has continued unchecked through the ages. When and how choral music, in our modern sense of song, evolved we do not know, but it had certainly appeared by biblical times and by that of the Greek dramatists. While we have mentioned some early suggested musical notations, music was normally taught by rote or simply by listening to others and joining in. What, if any, types of harmony were used, other than singing in octaves, we cannot know for we have no notation system, other than those early ones mentioned above for a basic melody, until we reach the early church chants. Here, we meet Gregorian and other church chants. These appear initially to have been purely monophonic, with everyone singing in unison. The earliest notation, called neumes, shows musical movement rather than precise pitches, and can only have served as a reminder of how music, already learned by rote, was to proceed. What pitch the music started on would depend on the preferred vocal range of the singers. Not until the thirteenth century do we start to see music written on a staff, then usually on only four lines rather than our present five-line stave, and with a symbol to tell us which line is C, similarly to our own alto or tenor clefs.
By the end of the twelfth century, we have composers such as Perotin writing organum, two or more parallel lines a fifth, fourth, or octave apart, with some slight freedom for each line to ornament a little. Organum probably derives from the organ itself, for while the first organs, which appeared in Alexandria in the second century BCE, were purely monophonic, though with the ability to play a chord, the larger church organs of the ninth or tenth centuries CE, used a system called Blockwerk . This meant that each key, when depressed, sounded a chord, a group of fourths or fifths and octaves. We have vivid descriptions of the tenth-century organ of Winchester Cathedral in Britain ( Perrot, 1971 ), and we have surviving pipes from the organ of Bethlehem from the eleventh century of the Latin Kingdom of the Crusaders; the groups of lengths of these pipes show that this organ must also have used Blockwerk ( Montagu, 2005 ).
What about secular music? Here, our earliest manuscripts seem to be from the thirteenth century with Adam de la Halle and his contemporaries writing motets for singers, and with anonymous, usually monophonic, dance music. Early polyphony, music in more than one part, was normally based on a cantus firmus, or tenor, often derived from a church chant, around which other, more elaborate parts, were woven. Polyphony of this sort seems to have been a purely European development; other cultures then, and in many cases still, prefer a single line or monophony, or if singing in groups or a single line with accompaniment, using heterophony, people all singing much, but by no means exactly, the same. Later motets might have three or four independent lines, sometimes each with their own text, woven together. These, in the early Renaissance, led to the madrigals and thence to our various styles of choral music today.
How do we define public performance, and how far back does it go? If one defines it as making music where other people can hear you, it must be as early as music ever existed. Any dance, whether Australian corroborees, war or hunting dances, people dancing on the village green, or any other similar occasions, must have involved music of some sort—how else could people keep their movement together? Here, we return to the use of rhythm, and surely to that of concussion or percussion of some sort, whether just body or hand clapping or that of instruments.
The shaman has always used music of some sort, often to help to throw him- or herself into the necessary trance. The bard has always been a valued member of society—and has always chanted and sung his lays, and always to self-accompaniment on an instrument. All these were “public” performances, either deliberately or at the very least where other people could hear them. At what stage was music deliberately performed to a public? Dance again, of course, and in religious ceremonies. The Christian church could be considered to be the first concert hall, with all free to enter and to hear the chant and, as time went on, listening to the deliberately composed music for the Mass. The medieval mystery plays were enacted in front of or within the church, and these always included music and were designed deliberately to draw in the public and to show them aspects of their religion.
When did people pay to hear music? Surely, this is part of our definition of public performance. Bards were certainly paid, domestic ones with board and lodging and presumably some cash, and itinerant ones certainly with cash or its portable equivalent, and shamans and medicine-men or -women always with cash or its equivalent, for that was the only way to be sure of a cure rather than a curse.
Formal concerts are said to have begun in Italy with the Accademia , meetings of intellectuals and musicians, in the fifteenth century, and private groups of musicians and musically interested people proliferated in many places, coming together to hear their own members playing and/or singing, for example the German Collegia . Aristocratic courts had their own orchestras, often merely for prestige, but sometimes, because the prince was himself a composer and musician. All these were private occasions, with admission confined to their members, their friends, and their guests.
Public concerts, with people paying for admission, began first in England perhaps as extensions of the Elizabethan theaters, where again people paid for admission, and which had often included musical performances along with the plays. England had no princely courts such as were common in continental Europe, and it was the first country to grow a middle class educated enough at the many grammar schools to appreciate musical culture and wealthy enough to pay for its pleasures. John Banister, himself a musician, was the first to invite the public to come, pay, and hear his concerts in 1673, and he was famously followed by Thomas Britton, “the small coal man,” who opened a room above his shop to paying customers in 1678 and continued to provide weekly concerts for 36 years. Very shortly afterward, the first hall designed for musical performance was opened in London. It seems that in other countries such public performances did not take place until into the eighteenth century, and then in theaters and other improvised places, or out of doors. It was not until 1781 that the Leipzig Gewandhaus was built, the first public concert hall on the Continent.
A more elaborate form of music, the opera, began also as a court entertainment, but it rapidly became a public entertainment for which people paid for admission, probably because the costs of mounting an opera are far greater than chamber or orchestral concerts, and the first public opera house opened in Venice in 1637.
This is as far as we need to go for Europe, but what of the rest of the world? We have historical records and encyclopedias of music for the high cultures of China and India. We have, through archeology, surviving instruments such as the great assembly of Marquis Yi of Zeng in Suizhou, Hubei Province of China ( Falkenhausen, 1993 ; So, 2000 ). 6 This was found in his tomb of around 433 BCE and elsewhere a Chinese set of Neolithic period bone flutes was found and published widely. Through the treasures of the great Depository of the Shōsōin in Nara ( Shōsōin Office, 1967 ), we know how the instruments of the Chinese Tang court passed to Japan, and through the work of Laurence Picken and his successors how the music of that court changed in Japan ( Picken et al., 1981 ff). All this tells us nothing further of how music began, but it does tell us that music progressed and developed, analogously with our own, in the high cultures of the world.
But, we have little knowledge of how, or even whether, music developed and changed in the rest of the world. We have glimpses, patchily, through the ages due to the iconographical records of some areas that we have mentioned above. We know much that goes on today, thanks to those ethnomusicologists who have been working around the world since the latter part of the nineteenth century, and we are dependent on their work for evidence of any possible sort simply because much of the music and the performances they recorded or described has vanished within our own lifetimes due to the globalized transmission of music. But even with that evidence, to what extent can we project any of it back in time? We could suggest that before the days of European exploration of the rest of the world, from the fifteenth century onward, peoples in sub-Saharan Africa were so isolated within their individual areas that their musics never changed from one generation to another. But that is a nineteenth-century attitude, of the time when Europeans refused to believe that sites such as Great Zimbabwe could ever have been built by African peoples, before the recognition of the great metal workers of West Africa and the high artistic levels of the Nok people or of Benin. I believe that any form of back-projection would be dangerous, whether in Africa or anywhere else in the world. I think that we simply have to say that we do not know and to admit that if H. sapiens could progress to such an extent as we know that it did in Europe and the Middle and Far East, so it could have done elsewhere.
We do have to say that much traditional music is dying out around the world, driven out by the perceived “superiority” of so-called “Western” music. Throughout the world now, there are symphony orchestras, even more widely there are all the manifestations of pop and other such musics. Yes, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Stravinsky, and others produced great works of music, but so did those of other cultures, and those musics are vanishing and their cultural contexts are dying out and treasures are being lost. And yet tradition manages to cling on, especially in the areas of pop music. West African versions of all the manifold varieties of popular musics do not sound the same as the New York versions. What we hear as “World Music,” although heavily influenced by Western instruments and practices, still retains its local connotations and styles. The Soviet idea was that the individual solo performer from the eastern provinces should be replaced with groups on a concert platform with orchestras of alto, tenor, and bass versions of his or her instrument, still played their own musics in modified versions of their own styles. Music is and always has been created by people. It changes with time, and the ease of travel from the days of trains and steamships, and especially now globalization, has accelerated the rate of change from the nineteenth century onward. But travel, even on foot and in log canoes, has been with us since the Paleolithic and so has inventiveness. Change in music and change in instruments will always be with us, but traditions, however changed, will always survive.
Author Contributions
The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and approved it for publication.
Conflict of Interest Statement
The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Acknowledgments
The author is grateful to the reviewers for their insightful comments.
Supplementary Material
The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fsoc.2017.00008/full#supplementary-material .
- ^ All the known archaeological instruments that we have, up to the end of the Neolithic period, are listed in tables by Morley (2013) , and many are illustrated and described in his text.
- ^ Montagu, J. (in press). The Conch Horn .
- ^ For descriptions of all the instruments, see Montagu (2001) .
- ^ Escorial Library, Madrid, Ms. T I 1 (sometimes T. J. 1).
- ^ There is also a comparatively simple explanation available on my website, jeremymontagu.co.uk , as a download: Montagu (1990) .
- ^ This was published fairly briefly as So (2000) , and in much greater detail as Falkenhausen (1993) .
Bachmann, W. (1969). The Origins of Bowing and the Development of Bowed Instruments up to the Thirteenth Century (Transl. Norma Deane) . London: Oxford University Press.
Google Scholar
Balfour, H. (1899). The Natural History of the Musical Bow: A Chapter in the Developmental History of Stringed Instruments of Music . Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Barbour, J. M. (1951). Tunings and Temperaments: A Historical Survey . East Lansing; New York: Michigan State University Press; Reprinted Da Capo Press, 1972.
Bibikov, S. N. (1981). The Oldest Musical Complex Made of Mammoth Bones [in Russian with English and French Summaries] . Ukrainian SSR: Institute of Archaeology, Academy of Science.
Dams, L. (1985). Palaeolithic idiophones: descriptions and comparisons. Oxf. J. Archaeol. 4, 31–46. doi: 10.1111/j.1468-0092.1985.tb00229.x
CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar
D’Errico, F., Henshilwood, C., Lawson, G., Vanhaeren, M., Tillier, A. M., Soressi, M., et al. (2003). Archaeological evidence for the emergence of language, symbolism, and music? An alternative multidisciplinary perspective. J. World Prehist. 17, 1–70. doi:10.1023/A:1023980201043
Fagg, B. (1956). The discovery of multiple rock gongs in Nigeria. Man 56, 17–18. reprinted in African Music 13 (1956). doi:10.2307/2794038
Fagg, M. C. (1997). Rock Music . Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum, Occasional Paper on Technology, 14.
Falkenhausen, L. (1993). Suspended Music: Chime Bells in the Culture of Bronze Age China . Berkeley: University of California Press.
Fitch, W. T. (2006). The biology and evolution of music: a comparative perspective. Cognition 100, 173–215. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2005.11.009
PubMed Abstract | CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar
Galpin, F. W. (1936). The Music of the Sumerians and Their Immediate Successors the Babylonians and Assyrians . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955. reprinted Strasbourg: University Press, Librairie Heitz.
Geissmann, T. (2000). “Gibbon song and human music from an evolutionary perspective,” in The Origins of Music , eds N. L. Wallin, B. Merker, and S. Brown (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press), 103–123.
Gimpel, J. (1988). The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages , 2nd Edn. Aldershot: Wildwood House.
Hickmann, H. (1961). Musikgeschichte in Bildern II/1 . Ägypten: Deutscher Verlag für Musik.
Hornbostel, E., and Sachs, C. (1914). Systematik der Musikinstrumente: ein Versuch. Z. Ethnol. 4/5, 553–590. Available at: http://network.icom.museum/fileadmin/user_upload/minisites/cimcim/documents/H-S_20classification_20final_20version_20_282013_29_20without_20editorial_20markings-2.pdf
Kirby, P. (1934). The Musical Instruments of the Native Races of South Africa . London: Oxford University Press.
Le Cerf, G., and Labande, E. R. (eds) (1932). Les Traités d’Henri-Arnault de Zwolle et de divers anonymes (MS. B. N. Latin 7295) . Paris: Auguste Picard. repr. Bärenreiter.
Mithen, S. (2005). The Singing Neanderthals . Cambridge, MA: Weidenfeld & Nicholson.
Montagu, J. (1990). Tuning and Tempering . Available at: http://www.jeremymontagu.co.uk
Montagu, J. (2001). Musical Instruments of the Bible . Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.
Montagu, J. (2005). The Oldest Organ in Christendom . Available at: http://www.jeremymontagu.co.uk
Montagu, J. (2007). Origins and Development of Musical Instruments . Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.
Montagu, J. (2014). Horns and Trumpets of the World . Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Morley, I. (2013). The Prehistory of Music: Human Evolution, Archaeology, & the Origins of Musicality . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Perrot, J. (1971). The Organ from its Invention in the Hellenistic Period to the End of the Thirteenth Century (Transl. Norma Deane) . London: Oxford University Press.
Picken, L., et al. (1981). Music from the Tang Court . Oxford and Cambridge: Oxford University Press.
Rault, L. (2000). Musical Instruments. A Worldwide Survey of Traditional Music-Making . London: Thames & Hudson.
Schlesinger, K. (1939). The Greek Aulos . London: Methuen.
Shōsōin Office. (ed.) (1967). Musical Instruments in the Shōsōin . Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Shimbun Sha.
So, J. (ed.) (2000). Music in the Age of Confucius . Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution.
Turk, I. (ed.) (2014). Divje Babe I. Paleolitsko najdišče mlajšega pleistocena v Sloveniji II. del: Arheologija (Upper Pleistocene Palaeolithic site in Slovenia Part II: Archaeology) . Ljubliana: Opera Instituti archaeologici Sloveniae, 29.
Williams, L. (1967). The Dancing Chimpanzee: A Study of the Origins of Primitive Music . London: André Deutsch.
Wizārat al-Tarbiyah wa-al-Ta‘līm. (1934). Recueil des travaux du Congrès de musique arabe . Boulac: Imprimerie Nationale.
Keywords: music, rhythm, dance, instruments, development, social cohesion, performance, tonality
Citation: Montagu J (2017) How Music and Instruments Began: A Brief Overview of the Origin and Entire Development of Music, from Its Earliest Stages. Front. Sociol. 2:8. doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2017.00008
Received: 01 March 2017; Accepted: 23 May 2017; Published: 20 June 2017
Reviewed by:
Copyright: © 2017 Montagu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Jeremy Montagu, amVyZW15bW9udGFndSYjeDAwMDQwO2dtYWlsLmNvbQ==
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.
Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.
- View all journals
- My Account Login
- Explore content
- About the journal
- Publish with us
- Sign up for alerts
- Review Article
- Open access
- Published: 12 February 2019
Cultural evolution of music
- Patrick E. Savage ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6996-7496 1
Palgrave Communications volume 5 , Article number: 16 ( 2019 ) Cite this article
69k Accesses
41 Citations
44 Altmetric
Metrics details
- Cultural and media studies
- Social anthropology
The concept of cultural evolution was fundamental to the foundation of academic musicology and the subfield of comparative musicology, but largely disappeared from discussion after World War II despite a recent resurgence of interest in cultural evolution in other fields. I draw on recent advances in the scientific understanding of cultural evolution to clarify persistent misconceptions about the roles of genes and progress in musical evolution, and review literature relevant to musical evolution ranging from macroevolution of global song-style to microevolution of tune families. I also address criticisms regarding issues of musical agency, meaning, and reductionism, and highlight potential applications including music education and copyright. While cultural evolution will never explain all aspects of music, it offers a useful theoretical framework for understanding diversity and change in the world’s music.
Similar content being viewed by others
Global musical diversity is largely independent of linguistic and genetic histories
Cultural macroevolution of musical instruments in South America
The pace of modern culture
Introduction.
The concept of evolution played a central role during the formation of academic musicology in the late nineteenth century (Adler, 1885 / 1981 ; Rehding, 2000 ). During the twentieth century, theoretical and political implications of evolution were heavily debated, leading evolution to go out of favor in musicology and cultural anthropology (Carneiro, 2003 ). In the twenty first century, refined concepts of biological evolution were reintroduced to musicology through the work of psychologists of music to the extent that the biological evolution of the capacity to make and experience music ("evolution of musicality") has returned as an important topic of contemporary musicological research (Wallin et al., 2000 ; Huron, 2006 ; Patel, 2008 ; Lawson, 2012 ; Tomlinson, 2013 , 2015 ; Honing, 2018 ). Yet the concept of cultural evolution of music itself ("musical evolution") remains largely undeveloped by musicologists, despite an explosion of recent research on cultural evolution in related fields such as linguistics. This absence has been especially prominent in ethnomusicology, but is also observable in historical musicology and other subfields of musicology Footnote 1 .
One major exception was the two-volume special edition of The World of Music devoted to critical analysis of Victor Grauer's ( 2006 ) essay entitled "Echoes of Our Forgotten Ancestors" (later expanded into book form in Grauer, 2011 ). Grauer proposed that the evolution and global dispersal of human song-style parallels the evolution and dispersal of anatomically modern humans out of Africa, and that certain groups of contemporary African hunter-gatherers retain the ancestral singing style shared by all humans tens of thousands of years ago. The two evolutionary biologists contributing to this publication found the concept of musical evolution self-evident enough that they simply opened their contribution by stating: "Songs, like genes and languages, evolve" (Leroi and Swire, 2006 , p. 43). However, the musicologists displayed concern and some confusion over the concept of cultural evolution.
My goal in this article is to clarify some of these issues in terms of the definitions, assumptions, and implications involved in studying the cultural evolution of music to show how cultural evolutionary theory can benefit musicology in a variety of ways. I will begin with a brief overview of cultural evolution in general, move to cultural evolution of music in particular, and then end by addressing some potential applications and criticisms. Because this article is aimed both at musicologists with limited knowledge of cultural evolution and at cultural evolutionists with limited knowledge of music, I have included some discussion that may seem obvious to some readers but not others.
What is “evolution”?
Although the term “evolution” is often assumed to refer to directional progress and/or to require a genetic basis, neither genes nor progress are included in some contemporary general definitions of evolution. Furthermore, while it is true that the discovery of genes and the precise molecular mechanisms by which they change revolutionized evolutionary biology, Darwin formulated his theory of evolution without the concept of genes.
Instead of genes, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection contained three key requirements: (1) there must be variation among individuals; (2) variation must be inherited via intergenerational transmission; (3) certain variants must be more likely to be inherited than others due to competitive selection (Darwin, 1859 ). These principles apply equally to biological and cultural evolution (Mesoudi, 2011 ).
Evolution did often come to be defined in purely genetic terms during the twentieth century. However, recent advances in our understanding of areas such as cultural evolution, epigenetics, and ecology (Bonduriansky and Day, 2018 ) have led to new inclusive definitions of evolution such as:
'the process by which the frequencies of variants in a population change over time', where the word ‘variants’ replaces the word ‘genes’ in order to include any inherited information….In particular, this…should include cultural inheritance. (Danchin et al., 2011 , p. 483–484)
While there remains some debate about how central a role genes should play in evolutionary theory (Laland et al., 2014 ), few scientists today would insist that the term evolution applies only to genes. Note also that there is nothing about progress or direction contained in the above definition: evolution simply refers to changes in the frequencies of heritable variants. These changes can be in the direction of simple to complex—and it is possible that there may be a general trend towards complexity (McShea and Brandon, 2010 ; Currie and Mace, 2011 )—but the reverse is also possible (Allen et al., 2018 ), as are non-directional changes with little or no functional consequences (Nei et al., 2010 ).
Does culture “evolve”?
From the time Darwin ( 1859 ) first proposed that his theory of evolution explained “The Origin of Species”, scholars immediately tried to apply it to explain the origin of culture. Indeed, Darwin himself explicitly argued that language and species evolution were "curiously parallel…the survival or preservation of certain favored words in the struggle for existence is natural selection" (Darwin, 1871 , p. 89–90). Scholars of cultural evolution have tabulated a number of such “curious parallels”, to which I have added musical examples (Table 1 ).
Theories about cultural evolution quickly adopted assumptions about progress (e.g., Spencer, 1875 ) linked with attempts to legitimize ideologies of Western superiority and justify the oppression of the weak by the powerful as survival of the fittest (Hofstadter, 1955 ; Laland and Brown, 2011 ; Stocking, 1982 ) Footnote 2 . It is no accident that Zallinger's iconic “March of Progress” illustration (Fig. 1 ) showed a gradual lightening of the skin from dark-skinned, ape-like ancestors to light-skinned humans: evolution was used to justify scientific racism by eugenicists (Gould, 1989 ). Although both the lightening of skin and the linear progression from ape to man are inaccurate (Gould, 1989 ), this image unfortunately remains extremely enduring and is commonly adapted to represent all kinds of evolution, including musical evolution (e.g., http://www.mandolincafe.com/archives/spoof.html ).
The classic example of an inaccurate but widespread representation of evolution as a linear “march of progress” (from Howell, 1965 )
Ideas of linear progress through a series of fixed stages continued to dominate cultural evolution for over a century (see Carneiro, 2003 for an in-depth review). It was not until late in the 20th century that several teams of scholars including Charles Lumsden and Edward O. Wilson ( 1981 ), L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Marcus Feldman ( 1981 ), and Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson ( 1985 ) began making attempts to model and measure changing frequencies of cultural variants (aka “memes”; Dawkins, 1976 ), as scientists such as Sewall Wright and Ronald Fisher had done for gene frequencies since the 1930s.
The theoretical and empirical work of cultural evolutionary scholars that emerged from this tradition has been crucial in demonstrating that evolution occurs "Not by Genes Alone" (Richerson and Boyd, 2005 ). Scholars have applied theory and methods from evolutionary biology to help understand complex cultural evolutionary processes in a variety of domains including languages, folklore, archeology, religion, social structure, and politics (Mesoudi, 2011 ; Levinson and Gray, 2012 ; Whiten et al., 2012 ; Fuentes and Wiessner, 2016 ; Henrich, 2016 ; Bortolini et al., 2017 ; Turchin et al., 2018 ; Whitehouse et al., In press ). The field has now blossomed to the extent that researchers founded a dedicated academic society: the Cultural Evolution Society (Brewer et al., 2017 ; Youngblood and Lahti, 2018 ). Its inaugural conference in September 2017 at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History was attended by 300 researchers from 40 countries (Savage, 2017 ) Footnote 3 .
Language has proven to be particularly amenable to evolutionary analysis. For example, applying phylogenetic methods from evolutionary biology to standardized lists of 200 of the most universal and slowest-changing words (e.g., numbers, body parts, kinship terminology) from hundreds of existing and ancient languages has allowed researchers to reconstruct the timing, geography, and specific mechanisms of change by which the descendants of proto-languages such as Proto-Indo-European or Proto-Austronesian evolved to become languages such as English, Hindi, Javanese, and Maori that are spoken today (Levinson and Gray, 2012 ). These evolutionary relationships can be represented as phylogenetic trees or networks (with some caveats, c.f. Doolittle, 1999 ; Gray et al., 2010 ; Le Bomin et al., 2016 ; Tëmkin and Eldredge, 2007 ). Such phylogenies can in turn be useful for exploring more complicated evolutionary questions, such as regarding the existence of cross-cultural universals (including universal aspects of music, cf. Savage et al., 2015 ]) or gene-culture coevolution (e.g., the coevolution of lactose tolerance and dairy farming, Mace and Holden, 2005 ).
Although modern cultural evolutionary theories have made many of the earlier criticisms about cultural evolution obsolete (e.g., assumptions of progress or of memetic replicators directly analogous to genes; cf. Henrich et al., 2008 ), there is still an active debate about the value of cultural evolution, with critics coming from both the sciences and the humanities. For example, evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker ( 2012 ) still maintains that cultural evolution is simply a “loose metaphor” that “adds little to what we have always called ‘history’", echoing similar criticisms made by historian Joseph Fracchia and geneticist Richard Lewontin ( 1999 , 2005 ). Biological anthropologist Jonathan Marks has also strongly criticized cultural evolution as being based on “false premises” (Marks, 2012 , p. 40) and adding little value beyond traditional explanations from cultural anthropology. It seems fair to say that, while cultural evolution is making a comeback and the basic idea that culture changes over time is beyond dispute, the idea that evolutionary theory and its methods can enhance our understanding of cultural change and diversity has yet to unambiguously prove its value. Perhaps music might be one area that could help?
Musical evolution and early comparative musicology
I have previously outlined some modern cultural evolutionary theory as part of one of five major themes in a "new comparative musicology" (Savage and Brown, 2013 ), including the relationships between cultural evolution and the other four themes (classification, human history, universals, and biological evolution) Footnote 4 . Early comparative musicologists, however, relied on Spencer's notion of progressive evolution rather than Darwin's of phylogenetic diversification (Rehding, 2000 ) Footnote 5 . Two assumptions were fundamental to much of the work of the founding figures of comparative musicology:
1. Cultures evolved from simple to complex, and as they do so they move from primitive to civilized.
2. Music evolves from simple to complex within societies as they progress. (Stone, 2008 , p. 25)
For example, in The Origins of Music , Carl Stumpf wrote of "the most primitive songs, e.g., those of the Vedda of Ceylon…. One may label them as mere preliminary stages or even as the origins of music." (Stumpf, 1911/ 2012 , p. 49). As late as 1943, Curt Sachs wrote of "the plain truth that the singsong of Pygmies and Pygmoids stands infinitely closer to the beginnings of music than Beethoven’s symphonies and Schubert’s lieder…the only working hypothesis admissible is that the earliest music must be found among the most primitive peoples" (Sachs, 1943 , p. 20–21). Scholars from the “Berlin school” of comparative musicology such as Stumpf, Sachs, and Erich von Hornbostel created the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv, the first archive of traditional music recordings from around the world, motivated in part by the belief that they could use these recordings to reconstruct the cultural evolution of complex Western art music from the simpler music of hunter-gatherers (Nettl and Bohlman, 1991 ; Nettl, 2006 ).
As the previous section made clear, old assumptions about the roles of progress and genes in evolution have been discarded by modern cultural evolutionary scholars. Nevertheless, ethnomusicologists still often equate ideas about the cultural evolution of music with those of the early comparative musicologists. Rahaim opens his response to Grauer by noting that his use of “the unfashionable language of human genetics and evolutionary biology” would lead many ethnomusicologists to be suspicious:
Would the "echoes of forgotten ancestors" turn out to be echoes of Social Darwinism? Was this to be a retelling of the story of modern Europe's heroic musical ascent above the rest of the world? (Rahaim, 2006 , p. 29)
Similarly, Mundy’s response to Grauer states that "the conception of progress inherent in evolution creates its own hierarchies" (Mundy, 2006 , p. 22). Elsewhere, Kartomi ( 2001 , p. 306) rejected the application of evolutionary theory in classifying musical instruments because "the concepts of evolution and lineage are not applicable to anything but animate beings, which are able to inherit genes from their forebears" Footnote 6 . Overall, since changing its name from comparative musicology to ethnomusicology during the middle of the 20th century, the field has largely avoided discussion of musical evolution, and recent advances in our understanding of cultural evolution have yet to make a substantial impact on musicology.
Macroevolution and Cantometrics
One striking exception to the general tendency to avoid theories of musical evolution in the second half of the twentieth century was Alan Lomax's Cantometrics Project (Lomax, 1968 , 1989 ; Lomax and Berkowitz, 1972 ). Although mostly (in)famous for its claims for a functional relationship between song style and social structure, another controversial aspect was Lomax's evolutionary interpretation of the global distribution of song style itself (for detailed critical review of the Cantometrics Project, see Savage, 2018 and Wood, 2018 a, 2018 b).
Through standardized classification and statistical analysis of 36 stylistic features from approximately 1800 traditional songs from 148 societies Footnote 7 , Lomax classified the world's musical diversity into 10 regional styles. Although this classification was not itself based on any evolutionary assumptions, Lomax proceeded to organize and interpret these 10 styles in the form of a crude phylogenetic tree:
This tree of performance style appears to have two roots: (1) in Siberia and (2) among African Gatherers. The Siberian root has two branches: one into the Circum-Pacific and Nuclear America, thence into Oceania through Melanesia and into East Africa, the second branch to Central Asia and thence into Europe and Asian High Culture... the main facts of style evolution may be accounted for by the elaboration of two contrastive traditions…. As their cultural base became more complex, these two root traditions became more specialized: the Siberian producing the virtuosic solo, highly articulated, elaborated, and alienated style of Eurasian high culture, the Early Agriculture tradition developing more and more cohesive and complexly integrated choruses and orchestras. West Europe and Oceania, flowering late on the borders of these two ancient specializations, show kinship to both. (Lomax, 1980 , p. 39–40)
Although this tree retains some aspects of progressivism (e.g., contemporary African gatherers occupying the "roots" while other traditions "became more complex", West Europe "flowering late"), it also shows more sophisticated concepts such as the possibility of multiple ancestors (polygenesis) and of borrowing/merging between lineages (horizontal transmission). With some modifications, it can be converted into a phylogenetic model as a working hypothesis for future testing/refinement (see Fig. 2 ) Footnote 8 .
A simplified phylogenetic model of global macroevolution of 10 song-style regions. Adapted from Fig. 2 of Lomax ( 1980 , p. 39), which is based on an analysis of ~1800 songs from 148 cultural groups using 36 Cantometric features. Lomax originally placed cultures at different stages along the vertical axis, but here all cultures are represented at the present time and the distance along the phylogenetic branches instead represents approximate time since diverging from a shared ancestral musical style. Dashed arrows represent horizontal transmission (borrowing/fusion) between lineages. Lomax's song-style region names varied—here I chose the most geographically descriptive names from Lomax's 1980 and 1989 publications (e.g., "Eurasian High Culture" instead of "Old High Culture")
Cantometrics provided the major point of departure both for Grauer's essay Footnote 9 and for a series of recent scientific studies exploring parallels in musical and genetic evolution. Some of these studies have directly compared patterns of musical and genetic diversity among populations of certain regions (e.g., Sub-Saharan Africa [Callaway, 2007 ], Eurasia [Pamjav et al., 2012 ], Taiwan [Brown et al., 2014 ], Northeast Asia [Savage et al., 2015 ]). All of these studies found that musical similarities between populations tend to be moderately correlated with genetic similarities, suggesting that both music and genes preserve histories of human migration and cultural contact.
Others have analyzed musical change using theories and methods from evolutionary biology. For example, Zivic et al. ( 2013 ) linked traditional periodization boundaries in Western classical music (Baroque, Classical, Romantic, 20 th century) to changes in pitch distribution patterns, while Serrà et al. ( 2012 ) and Mauch et al. ( 2015 ) both quantified the evolution of diversity in Western popular music, with the former concluding that musical diversity was decreasing while the latter rejected this conclusion in favor of a more complex “punctuated evolution” model (see further discussion below in the section on “Reductionism”). Although the details differ greatly, these studies share a common thread in arguing that musical evolution follows patterns and processes that can be usefully understood using theories and methods adapted from the study of biological evolution (see also Bentley et al., 2007 ; Interiano et al., 2018 ; Brand et al., 2019 ).
Like Cantometrics, most of these studies are more interested in the macroevolutionary relationships between cultures/genres than in microevolutionary relationships among songs within cultures/genres Footnote 10 . This makes them more amenable to broad cross-cultural comparison with domains such as population genetics and linguistics, as focusing on ethnolinguistically defined populations has proved useful in other fields of cultural and biological evolution. However, one drawback to such studies is that it is difficult to reconstruct the precise sequence of small microevolutionary changes that may have given rise to these large cross-cultural musical differences (Stock, 2006 ).
Microevolution and tune family research
One area of research strikingly absent from the discussion of musical evolution surrounding Grauer's essay was the extensive research on microevolution of tune families (groups of melodies sharing descent from a common ancestor or ancestors). Tune family research was particularly influenced by the realization in the early twentieth century that many traditional ballads that had become moribund or extinct in England were flourishing in modified forms far away in the US Appalachian mountains (Sharp, 1932 ). Cecil Sharp's folk song collecting led him to formulate a theory of musical evolution incorporating essentially the same three key mechanisms recognized by modern evolutionary theory: (1) continuity, (2) variation, and (3) selection (Sharp, 1907 ; note that Sharp used the term “continuity” rather than the modern term “inheritance” discussed above). These three principles were later developed by Sharp’s disciple, Maud Karpeles, who helped draft an official definition of folk music adopted in 1955 by the International Folk Music Council (the ancestor of today's International Council for Traditional Music Footnote 11 ) that explicitly invoked evolutionary theory:
Folk music is the product of a musical tradition that has been evolved through the process of oral transmission. The factors that shape the tradition are: (i) continuity which links the present with the past; (ii) variation which springs from the creative impulse of the individual or the group; and (iii) selection by the community, which determines the form or forms in which the music survives. (International Folk Music Council, 1955 , p. 23, emphasis added)
The general mechanisms proposed by Sharp and Karpeles for British-American tune family evolution were explored more thoroughly by scholars such as Bertrand Bronson ( 1959 –72, 1969 , 1976 ), Samuel Bayard ( 1950 , 1954 ), Charles Seeger ( 1966 ), Anne Shapiro ( 1975 ) Footnote 12 , Jeff Titon ( 1977 ), and James Cowdery ( 1984 ; 2009 ). In some cases, the melodic parallels were made explicit by aligning notes thought to share descent from a common ancestor and by verbally reconstructing the historical process of evolutionary changes. For example, Bayard used a series of melodic alignments to illustrate the "process, often conceived but seldom actually observed... of a tune's having material added onto its end and also losing material from its beginning", giving "evolution of one air out of another by variation, deletion, and addition" (Bayard, 1954 , p. 25). Charles Boilès ( 1973 ) even proposed a formal method for reconstructing ancestral proto-melodies, based on the linguistic comparative method for reconstructing proto-languages. Bronson attempted to automate such attempts on a vast scale. His attempts to use punch-cards to mechanically sort thousands of melodic variants of Child ballads and other traditional British-American folk melodies into tune families (Bronson, 1959– 72 , 1969 ) represented one of the first uses of computers in musicology, even preceding Lomax’s Cantometrics Project Footnote 13 .
During my own studies in Japan, I learned that scholars of Japanese music had developed similar approaches based on alignment of related melodies to understand musical evolution, although without explicit reference to tune family research. For example, Kashō Machida and Tsutomu Takeuchi ( 1965 ) traced the evolution of the famous folk songs Esashi Oiwake and Sado Okesa from their simpler, unaccompanied beginnings in the work songs of distant prefectures, and Atsumi Kaneshiro ( 1990 ) developed a quantitative method that he used to test proposed relationships within Esashi Oiwake 's tune family. Meanwhile, Laurence Picken and colleagues traced the evolution of modern Japanese gagaku melodies for flute and reed-pipe back over a thousand years to the simpler and faster ancient melodies of China's Tang court (Picken et al., 1981 –2000; Marett, 1985 ).
Tune family scholarship has not been limited to British-American and Japanese music—those just happen to be the two traditions I am most familiar with. Elsewhere, scholars such as Béla Bartók ( 1931 ) and Walter Wiora ( 1953 ) studied tune family evolution in European folk songs, Steven Jan ( 2007 ) studied the evolution of melodic motives in Western classical music, and Joep Bor ( 1975 ) and Wim van der Meer ( 1975 ) made detailed arguments for treating North Indian ragas as evolving "melodic species" (Bor, 1975 , p. 17).
Recently, scientists have attempted to apply microevolutionary methods to a variety of Western and non-Western genres in the form of sequence alignment techniques adapted from molecular biology (Mongeau and Sankoff, 1990 ; van Kranenburg et al. 2009 ; Toussaint, 2013 ; Windram et al., 2014 ; Savage and Atkinson, 2015 ). Such techniques make it possible to automate things like quantifying melodic similarities and identifying boundaries between tune families (Savage and Atkinson 2015 ; Jan, 2018 ), making analysis possible on vast scales that would be impossible to perform manually.
In addition, some scientists have explored musical microevolution in the laboratory, using techniques originally designed to explore controlled evolution of organisms and languages. Thus, one group mimicked sexual reproduction by having short audio loops recombine and mutate, then used an online survey to allow listeners to mimic the process of natural selection on the resulting music, finding that esthetically pleasing music evolved from nearly random noise over the course of several thousand generations solely under the influence of listener selection (MacCallum et al., 2012 ) Footnote 14 . Using a different experimental paradigm similar to the children's game Telephone, other groups found that melodies and rhythms became simpler and more structured in the course of transmission, paralleling findings from experimental language evolution (Ravignani et al., 2016 ; Jacoby and McDermott, 2017 ; Lumaca and Baggio, 2017 ). Like biological evolution and language evolution, our knowledge of musical evolution can be enhanced by combining ecologically valid studies of musical evolution in the wild (i.e., in its cultural context) with controlled laboratory experiments.
So far, the microevolution of tune families has been investigated largely independently in a variety of cultures and genres, without much attempt at comparing them to explore general patterns of musical evolution. One reason for this is that a broader cross-cultural comparison would require standardized methods for analyzing and measuring musical evolution in different contexts. I proposed such a method and applied it to several of the cases studies discussed above (Savage and Atkinson, 2015 ; Savage, 2017 ). Figure 3 shows an example of this method using an example of melodic microevolution in a well-known folk song: Scarborough Fair .
An example of analyzing tune family microevolution through melodic sequence alignment. The opening two phrases of Simon and Garfunkel's phenomenally successful 1966 version of Scarborough Fair (bottom melody) and its immediate ancestor, Martin Carthy's 1965 version (top melody) are shown, transposed to the common tonic of C (cf. Kloss, 2012 for a detailed discussion of the historical evolution of this ballad). In b , the melodies are shown using standard staff notation, while in c they are shown as aligned note sequences, with letters corresponding to notes as shown in a (following Savage and Atkinson, 2015 ). See Savage ( 2017 ) for a detailed explanation of how this evolution can be quantified (percent melodic identity = 81%; mutation rate = 0.25 per note per year) and discussion of the mechanisms of note substitutions (red arrows) and deletions (blue arrows) shown here
By demonstrating consistent cross-cultural and cross-genre trends in the rates and mechanisms of melodic evolution, I showed that musical evolution, like biological evolution, follows some general rules (Savage, 2017 ). For example, notes with stronger structural function are more resistant to change (e.g., rhythmically accented notes more stable than ornamental notes), and notes are more likely to change to melodically neighboring notes (e.g., 2nds) than to distant ones (e.g., 7ths; cf. Fig. 3 ). This suggests that a general theory of evolution may prove a helpful unifying theory in musicology, as it has in biology.
Musical evolution applications: education and copyright
All musicology is in some sense applied through our research, teaching, and outreach, but some is more explicitly applied for the benefit of those outside of academia (Titon, 1992 ). In this article, I argue that cultural evolutionary theory can provide a useful unifying theoretical framework to apply to research on understanding and reconstructing musical change at multiple levels (both macro and micro) across cultures, genres, and time periods. I now briefly discuss two other ways it can be more directly applied: education and copyright.
The world's musical diversity is woefully underrepresented at all levels of education. Often the job of correcting this falls to ethnomusicologists teaching survey courses on "World Music". As Rahaim ( 2006 , p. 32) notes, "as teachers, we often find ourselves in situations that require us to say something in short-hand about [musical] origins, and have few models at hand apart from evolution". Evolutionary models like Lomax's world phylogenetic tree of regional song style (Fig. 2 ) provide a simple and convenient starting point for teaching about similarities and differences in the world's music, and are flexible enough to adapt to diverse contexts such as conservatory classrooms, instrument museums, or pop music recommendation websites. Such coarse models can be further improved and/or nuanced by following them with microevolutionary case studies of musical change in specific cultures. An evolutionary approach further provides the chance to teach about connections beyond music to other domains in order to understand the ways in which the global distribution of music may be related to the distributions of the people who make it and to other aspects of their culture such as language or social structure (Lomax, 1968 ; Savage and Brown, 2013 ; Grauer, 2006 ).
Since almost all music is influenced by the past in at least some way, whether such influence is within norms of creativity and tradition or amounts to plagiarism is connected to an understanding of processes of musical evolution. US copyright law resembles concepts of tune family evolution in that the core copyrightable essence of a song consists of its representation in musical notation, and that the degree of overall melodic correspondence at structurally significant places between two tunes is a primary criterion for deciding whether the level of similarity constitutes plagiarism (Cronin, 2015 ; Fruehwald, 1992 ; Müllensiefen and Pendzich, 2009 ; Fishman, 2018 ) Footnote 15 . Thus, one famous case concluded that the melody of George Harrison's My Sweet Lord (1970) was similar enough to the Chiffons' He's So Fine (1962) as to constitute subconscious plagiarism (Judge Owen, 1976 ). I used new evolutionary methods involving sequence alignment of melodies to confirm that not only do the two tunes share over 50% identical notes, but the differences that do exist are consistent with the most common types of melodic change (e.g., insertion/deletion of ornamental notes, substitution to melodically neighboring notes; Savage, 2017 , cf. Fig. 3 ). Using a sample of 20 court cases, including He’s So Fine , I showed that this melodic sequence alignment method is a strong predictor of copyright infringement decisions, accurately predicting 16 out of the 20 cases (Savage et al., 2018 ).
However, the concept of individual ownership by composers in copyright law differs from concepts of folk song tune families, where traditional tunes are usually considered to be general property of the community. They are also different from conceptions in many non-Western cultures in which the essence of song ownership may be considered to lie not in its notated melody but in the performance style, performance context, or other extra-melodic features (A. Seeger, 1992 ). Even within US copyright law the question of what types and degrees of copying should be regarded as legitimate borrowing versus copyright infringement is hotly debated and dynamically interpreted, with musicians and lawyers commonly invoking evolutionary principles of continuity and variation to argue for the legitimacy of certain degrees of borrowing, as well as the principle of selection to argue against the deleterious effects on musical creativity if certain types of inspiration are overly restricted (Fishman, 2018 ).
The interpretation of copyright law can dramatically affect the livelihoods of musicians and communities around the world. Thus, a holistic understanding of general dynamics of musical evolution (including the many aspects beyond melodic evolution) and their specific manifestations in various musical cultures and genres may prove crucial to a more cross-culturally principled interpretation of concepts of creativity and ownership.
Objections to musical evolution: agency, meaning, and reductionism
Musical evolution has been and continues to be of interest to musicologists and non-musicologists alike. In fact, many of the processes I discuss are immediately recognizable to many under the terminology of musical change, for which musicologists have long sought a rigorous theory. Merriam ( 1964 , p. 307) argued that ethnomusicology "needs a theory of change". Over a half century later, Nettl ( 2015 , p. 292) summarizes that "there have been many attempts to generalize about change but no generally accepted theory". Why have musicologists interested in general theories of change not adopted the framework of evolution (which is, simply put, a formal theory of change)?
I have presented versions of this argument at international musicology conferences in the USA and Japan, receiving a variety of responses. Most objections to the use of evolutionary theory focused on three issues: implications of progress, individual agency, and reductionism. Since I have already clarified misconceptions about progress at length above Footnote 16 , I will focus here on agency and reductionism.
Building on arguments against cultural evolution by the evolutionary biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, Rahaim ( 2006 , p. 36) argues: "Perhaps most importantly for ethnomusicologists, metaphors of both situated and progressive evolution turn attention away from the agency of individuals". But does the concept of musical evolution negate the agency of individuals to create their own music any more than the concept of biological evolution negates individual free will? In each case, our cultural/genetic inheritances are the product of long evolutionary processes shaped by historical factors, but cannot be simply reduced to or wholly explained by such factors.
Musicians are often free to compose their own music or modify the existing repertoire in whatever ways they see fit (within the physical limits imposed by acoustics, neurobiology, etc.). But whether their creations will appeal to others and be passed on through the generations depends on a variety of factors beyond their control, including the sociopolitical context and the perceptual capacities of the audience. Thus, the role of the individual musicians in this process and their relationships with other actors (audiences, composers, accompanists, producers, judges, etc.) are in fact central to understanding the cultural evolution of music. As Seeger put it:
musical traditions depend on transmission, continuity, change, and interested audiences, but…these take place in a context of emerging mass media, the involvement of outsiders, and the often unpredictable actions of local and national governments. (Anthony Seeger, foreword to Grant, 2014 , p. 9)
Seeger's summary succinctly captures the three key evolutionary mechanisms of "continuity [inheritance], change [variation], and interested audiences [selection]", as well as their dynamic relationships with individual agency and cultural context.
My research has focused on identifying general constraints that apply across many individuals, but this does not mean that other studies must do so. For example, one potentially productive area for exploring the role of individual agency in musical evolution might involve comparing different performers attempting to create their own signature versions of music originally composed and/or performed by others. This could easily apply to a variety of cultures and genres, including art (e.g., the same symphony performed by different orchestras), popular (e.g., cover songs, hip-hop sampling; Youngblood, 2018 ), and folk (e.g., folk song variants; cf. the Scarborough Fair example in Fig. 3 ).
In fact, the presence of human agency and the intentional innovation that comes with it is one of the most interesting aspects about studying cultural evolution. In genetic evolution, natural selection provides the major explanatory mechanism due to the fact that genetic variation is arbitrary (i.e., genetic mutations are not directed towards particular evolutionary goals). However, in cultural evolution, both selection and variation can be directed consciously and unconsciously through a much broader range of mechanisms than typically found in genetic evolution. To accommodate this complexity, cultural evolutionary theorists have proposed a dizzying array of mechanisms to expand the terminological framework of evolutionary biology to cultural evolution (e.g., transmission biases based on prestige, aesthetics, or conformity/anti-conformity; guided variation driven by cognition and/or emotion; cultural attraction through processes of reconstructive rather than replicative transmission; Richerson and Boyd, 2005 ; Mesoudi, 2011 ; Claidière et al., 2014 ; Fogarty et al., 2015 ). The relative strengths of these different types of evolutionary mechanisms and their implications for musical evolution in particular and cultural evolution in general are hotly debated (Claidière et al., 2012 ; Leroi et al., 2012 ). Thus, this is an area where musicologists and cultural evolutionary theorists could both learn much from one another.
An anonymous reviewer of an earlier iteration of this article flatly stated that my cultural evolutionary approach “is not compatible with an anthropological understanding of culture, and seems instead to describe changes in the surface structures of music (tune families and the like)…”. This criticism seems to echo Rahaim’s concerns about agency discussed above, but also goes even further into the longstanding debate regarding the roles of sound vs. behavior, process vs. product, etc. in musicology (Merriam, 1964 ; Rice, 1987 ; Solis, 2012 ). In particular, it follows criticisms by Blacking ( 1977 ) and Feld ( 1984 ) of Lomax’s attempts to use Cantometrics to understand cultural evolution. As Blacking ( 1977 , p. 10) puts it: “Lomax compares the surface structures of music without questioning whether the same musical sounds always have the same "deep structure" and the same meaning”.
Unlike language, music generally lacks clear referential semantic meaning (Meyer, 1956 ; Patel, 2008 ), and this crucial difference is one reason we must be cautious about uncritically borrowing linguistic concepts wholesale to apply to music (Feld, 1974 ). While I agree that a full understanding of the cultural evolution of music will require integrating understanding of both sound structures and their meanings, I can not accept the implication that the study of musical structures such as tune families are not an appropriate subject of musicological inquiry. Here I can only respond by quoting the final sentence published by Alan Merriam ( 1982 ): “ethnomusicology for me is the study of music as culture, and that does not preclude the study of form; indeed we cannot proceed without it.".
Reductionism
Another critique I would like to mention is a broader but related one regarding reductionism and science. This criticism was levelled at cultural evolution in general by Fracchia and Lewontin ( 1999 , p. 507): "the demand for a theory of cultural evolution is really a demand that cultural anthropology be included in the grand twentieth-century movement to scientize all aspects of the study of society, to become validated as a part of ‘social science'".
One version of this criticism appeared in response to one of the studies cited in this review entitled “Measuring the Evolution of Contemporary Western Popular Music” (Serrà et al., 2012 ). In response, Fink ( 2013 ) made a persuasive refutation of the paper’s central finding of decreasing musical diversity and the newspaper headlines touting it (“Modern Music too Loud, All Sounds the Same”), pointing out that the analyses failed to detect increasing rhythmic diversity because the methods ignored rhythm. Or, as Fink put it: "Music isn’t getting stupider, it’s getting funkier.”
Nevertheless, Fink argues that the same reductionistic science that made the study’s conclusion misleading was also a reason it made headlines:
as reporters rush to assure us, they are newsworthy because, for the first time, the conclusions are backed with hard data, not squishy aesthetic theorizing. The numbers do not lie. But research can only be as good as the encoded data it’s based on; look under the surface of recently reported computer-enabled analyses of pop music and you’ll find that the old programmer’s dictum—“garbage in, garbage out”—is still the last word. (Fink, 2013 )
Not long after Serrà et al. published their study, Mauch et al. ( 2015 ) also measured the evolution of Western popular music over a similar time period, but using less reductionistic methods that importantly included rhythmic features. Mauch et al. came to the opposite conclusion: musical diversity actually increased after a brief decline during the 1980s. This provides quantitative support for Fink’s criticism above. Overall, this case highlights both the value of quantifying the cultural evolution of music and the importance of critical thinking in interpreting the reductionism inherent in such studies. Although science does generally require some level of reductionism, the goal is to be “as simple as possible, but not simpler” Footnote 17 .
Charges of reductionism were also leveled directly at my own (Savage and Brown, 2013 ) proposal that included cultural evolution as one of five major themes in a new comparative musicology. In a thorough and nuanced review entitled "On Not Losing Heart", David Clarke approved of the call for more cross-cultural comparison, but worried about its "strongly empiricist paradigm":
Lomax's particular mode of integration "between the humanistic and the scientific" [was] fueled by a politics that had an emancipatory motive. In the metrics and technics of the new comparative musicology proposed by Savage and Brown, traces of any such informing polity melt into air….A political neutrality that is the correlate of an unalloyed empiricism is problematic….My own predilections here are perhaps more attuned to ethnomusicologists who are interested in the particularities of a culture and the actual experience of encounter in the field. By contrast, Savage, Brown, et al. advocate different epistemological values with a different ethos, based on the abstraction of music and people into data. To characterize that ethos as a recapitulation of Lomax, only without the heart, might be an unfair caricature. For the various statistical representations and correlations emerging from their research may well be sublimating a lot of passion, and Savage and Brown’s own day-to-day dealings with musicians and musicking may be no less affective than anyone else’s (it’s just that they exclude this from their research) Footnote 18 . (Clarke, 2014 , 6, pp. 11–12)
While Clarke argues that a "political neutrality that is the correlate of an unalloyed empiricism is problematic", I believe it may be valuable to maintain a relatively neutral political stance, in large part to avoid the problems of confirmation bias that were leveled at Lomax. With Cantometrics, Lomax sought to scientifically validate his strong political views regarding "cultural equity" (Lomax, 1977 ). One of the concerns that doomed Cantometrics was that Lomax's analyses were viewed as being too strongly biased by his political views (Savage, 2018 ; Szwed, 2010 ; Wood, 2018a , 2018b ). Personally, I strongly share Lomax's views about the value of cultural equity, and I, too, see quantitative data as a helpful tool in arguing for the value of all of the world's music. However, I believe it is legitimate to try to limit political aspects in one's published work, and it may well be a more effective long-term strategy for the types of applications described in the previous section Footnote 19 .
Certainly, neither a purely qualitative, ethnographic approach nor a purely quantitative, scientific approach alone will succeed in advancing our knowledge of how and why music evolves. But by combining the two approaches through cross-cultural comparative study, we can achieve a better understanding of the forces governing the world's musical diversity and their real-world implications (Savage and Brown, 2013 ). For instance, the My Sweet Lord plagiarism case mentioned above gives a clear example where quantitative measurements of the degree of melodic similarity (56%) between two tunes and its qualitative interpretation in the context of copyright law has major practical implications in which millions of dollars are at stake. Although perhaps less easily quantified in terms of dollar values, an understanding of the mechanisms of evolution of traditional folk songs may be just as valuable to traditional musicians struggling to protect their intangible cultural heritage.
Music evolves, through mechanisms that are both similar to and distinct from biological evolution. Cultural evolutionary theory has been developed to the point that it shows promise for providing explanatory power from the broad levels of macroevolution of global musical styles to the minute microevolutionary details of individual performers and performances. Musical evolution shows potential for applications beyond research to such disparate domains as education and copyright.
However, I am aware that my review is inevitably incomplete and I have only been able to highlight a tiny fraction of the types of situations and methodologies through which the evolutionary framework can be fruitfully applied to music. To me, that incompleteness highlights the broad explanatory power of evolutionary theory, and broad explanatory theory is something that musicologists such as Timothy Rice ( 2010 ) have argued is sorely needed.
Scientific interest in musical evolution is already growing rapidly, and will continue with or without the involvement of musicologists. Here again, we can learn from language evolution. Several high-profile articles on language evolution were published by teams of scientists without close collaboration with linguists, resulting in bitter disputes and accusations of "naïve arrogance" (Campbell, 2013 , p. 472) that have limited what could have been mutually beneficial collaboration (Marris, 2008 ). A similar pattern seems to be playing out in the recent controversy regarding a team of Harvard scientists analyzing ethnographic recordings around the world to construct a “Natural History of Song” (Mehr et al. 2018 a, 2018 b; Marshall, 2018 ; Yong, 2018 ). I share concerns about scientists studying music and evolution without collaborating with musicologists, but I believe that ultimately both musicology and cultural evolution stand to benefit from productive interdisciplinary collaboration. I have chosen to try to avoid such pitfalls by being proactive in initiating collaborations on musical evolution with cultural evolutionary scientists to combine our knowledge and skills (e.g., Savage et al. 2015 ; Savage and Atkinson, 2015 ).
I do not intend by any means to imply that the predominantly quantitative approach I have presented here—strongly informed by my collaborations with scientists studying cultural and biological evolution, as well as my own earlier training in psychology and biochemistry - is the only way to study musical evolution. One reason I focused in my dissertation on a rigorously quantitative approach modeled on molecular genetics is that such quantitative approaches have shown success in rehabilitating cultural evolutionary theory after much criticism of earlier incarnations such as memetics as lacking in empirical rigor (Laland and Brown, 2011 ; Mesoudi, 2011 ). But I believe that one of the strengths of evolutionary theory is that it is flexible enough to be usefully adapted to a variety of scientific and humanistic methodologies, with plenty of room to coexist productively with non-evolutionary theories. As Ruth Stone ( 2008 , p. 225) has noted, "there is no such thing as a best theory. Some theories are simply more suited for answering certain kinds of questions than others" (emphasis in original). Even if the concept of cultural evolution cannot provide all the answers, I believe it helps to answer enough musical questions of abiding interest that it should be ignored no more.
Data availability
Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analyzed during the current study.
For reasons of space and expertise, I will focus here primarily on the ethnomusicological literature, but the concept of cultural evolution of music should also be applicable to other sub-fields, not least the evolution of contemporary Western classical music from medieval Gregorian chant over the course of the second millennium AD.
Although this movement came to be known as “Social Darwinism”, it was in fact not very reflective of Darwin′s ideas, but rather the ideas of Herbert Spencer ( 1875 ), who coined the term "survival of the fittest". While the historical relationship between evolutionary theory and Social Darwinism is debated, today′s scholars of cultural evolution unequivocally reject such political misappropriation of evolutionary theory (Laland and Brown, 2011 ; Mesoudi, 2011 ; Richerson and Boyd, 2005 ; Wilson and Johnson, 2015 ).
Two of these presentations were about music: my own about the evolution of British-American and Japanese folk song melodies and one by Aurélie Helmlinger
about the evolution of steelpan instrumental layouts in Trinidad and Tobago. The 2018 Cultural Evolution Society conference featured an entire panel with four presentations devoted to music.
Due to space limitations this article will not delve into the areas of biological evolution and gene-culture evolution of musicality (Honing, 2018 ; Tomlinson, 2013 , 2015 ; Patel, 2018 ; Savage et al., In prep.).
Of the musicologists responding to Grauer′s essay, only Rahaim ( 2006 , p. 29) carefully distinguished between these two, using the terms "progressive" and "situated" evolution, respectively.
Kartomi has since changed her views, writing "I now think that music has evolved in a measurable way, as long as ′evolved′ is not defined as ′improved′" (personal communication, June 10th 2016 email to the author).
Discrepancies in published numbers and further details are explained by Savage ( 2018 ).
Although not shown here, finer-scale relationships within and among groups can also be modeled using evolutionary methods (cf. Fig. 3 of Lomax, 1980 , p. 41; Rzeszutek et al., 2012 ; Savage and Brown, 2014 ).
Grauer was heavily involved in the Cantometrics Project as both the co-inventor of the Cantometric classification scheme and primary coder of the Cantometric data.
Macroevolution generally refers to changes among populations (e.g., species, cultural groups), while microevolution generally refers to changes within populations.
Lineages of organizations, composers, performers, etc. are a potentially productive area of studying musical evolution, but I will not discuss them in detail here due to limitations of space and expertise.
Unfortunately, Shapiro′s dissertation was never published and is not available for interlibrary loan.
The research leading to the articles republished in book form in Bronson ( 1969 ) was begun several decades earlier, with one article laying out the basic idea of “Mechanical Help in the Study of Folk Song” published as early as 1949.
Note that this finding is conceptually distinct from the “sound-to-music illusion” (Simchy-Gross and Margulis, 2018 ). The sound-to-music illusion involves the same sound being perceived as more musical after repeated listening by a single listener, whereas MacCallum et al.′s study experimentally evolved new and more pleasing music over time.
Note, however, that Fishman ( 2018 ) in particular has argued that the traditional emphasis on melody may be changing, as evidenced by recent high-profile cases such as the dispute over Blurred Lines .
Unfortunately, the association of evolution with progress is particularly entrenched where I live in Japan, where the characters used to translate evolution (進化 [ shinka ]) literally mean "progressive change" (the English word evolution itself evolved from the Latin evolutio , meaning "unfolding"). In my opinion, those avoiding the term "evolution" because of misconceptions about its meaning are contributing to this popular misconception. Instead I believe concerted effort to correct this misconception for future generations is in order.
Anonymous quote attributed to Einstein (cf. Anonymous, 2011 ).
Personally, I do feel a lot of passion for the world′s musicians and see one of my life′s goals as being advocating for their value. My interest in folk song evolution was motivated not only by theoretical concerns about mechanisms of cultural microevolution, but on my own experiences learning and performing British-American and Japanese folk songs and my hopes that my (Japanese-New Zealand-American) children will be able to sing these songs that have been handed down to them over the course of hundreds of years from their ancestors on opposite sides of the world. I have won trophies in a number of Japanese folk song competitions, so questions about agency in performance and what types of musical (and extra-musical) variation are selected for or against are not merely academic but affect me personally. Do I think that all of these factors can be perfectly quantified? Absolutely not. But I do believe that theories of musical evolution informed by quantitative data could have a positive influence on musicology and beyond. As Clarke ( 2014 , p. 12) later admits: “in fairness, the empirical and the metric have as much potential as any other paradigm to work to humanistic ends”.
Language evolution provides another good analogy. Much work in language evolution focuses on the evolution of basic vocabulary due to its resistance to change and amenability to evolutionary analysis (Pagel, 2017 ). However, broader theories of language evolution incorporate many complex cognitive and social factors, including race, gender and class (Labov, 1994 –2010).
Adler G (1885) The scope, method, and aim of musicology. (Trans: Mugglestone E). Yearb Tradit Music 13(1–21):1981
Google Scholar
Allen JA, Garland EC, Dunlop RA, Noad MJ (2018) Cultural revolutions reduce complexity in the songs of humpback whales. Proc R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 285(20182088):1–6. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2018.2088
Article Google Scholar
Anonymous [Einstein, A.] (2011) Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. https://Quoteinvestigator.Com/2011/05/13/Einstein-Simple/ , Accessed 20 Aug 2018
Atkinson QD, Gray RD (2005) Curious parallels and curious connections: phylogenetic thinking in biology and historical linguistics. Syst Biol 54(4):513–526
Article PubMed Google Scholar
Bartók B (1931) Hungarian folk music. Oxford University Press, London
Bayard SP (1950) Prolegomena to a study of the principal melodic families of British-American folk song. J Am Folk 63(247):1–44
Bayard SP (1954) Two representative tune families of British tradition. Midwest Folk 4(1):13–33
Bentley RA, Lipo CP, Herzog HA, Hahn MW (2007) Regular rates of popular culture change reflect random copying. Evol Human Behav 28(3):151–158
Blacking J (1977) Some problems of theory and method in the study of musical change. Yearb Int Folk Music Counc 9:1–26
Boilès CL (1973) Reconstruction of proto-melody. Anu Interam De Invest Musica 9:45–63
Bonduriansky R, Day T (2018) Extended heredity: a new understanding of inheritance and evolution.. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ
Book Google Scholar
Bor J (1975) Raga, species and evolution. Sangeet Natak 35:17–48
Bortolini E, Pagani L, Crema ER, Sarno S, Barbieri C, Boattini A et al. (2017) Inferring patterns of folktale diffusion using genomic data. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 114(34):9140–9145
Article CAS PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar
Boyd R, Richerson PJ (1985) Culture and the evolutionary process.. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Brand CO, Acerbi A, Mesoudi A (2019) Cultural evolution of emotional expression in 50 years of song lyrics. SocArXiv preprint. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/3j6wx
Brewer J, Gelfand M, Jackson JC, MacDonald IF, Peregrine PN, Richerson PJ et al. (2017) Grand challenges for the study of cultural evolution. Nat Ecol Evol 1(0070):1–3. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-017-0070
Bronson BH (1969) The ballad as song.. University of California Press, Berkeley
Bronson BH (1959) The traditional tunes of the Child ballads: with their texts, according to the extant records of Great Britain and America [4 volumes]. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1972
Bronson BH (1976) The singing tradition of Child’s popular ballads. Princeton University Press, Princeton
Brown S, Savage PE, Ko AM-S, Stoneking M, Ko Y-C, Loo J-H, Trejaut JA (2014) Correlations in the population structure of music, genes and language. Proc R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 281(1774):1–7. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2013.2072
Callaway E (2007) Music is in our genes. Nat News https://doi.org/10.1038/news.2007.359
Campbell L (2013) Historical linguistics: an introduction, 3rd edn. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh
Carneiro RL (2003) Evolutionism in cultural anthropology: a critical history. Westview Press, Boulder, CO
Cavalli-Sforza LL, Feldman MW (1981) Cultural transmission and evolution: a quantitative approach.. Princeton University Press, Princeton
MATH Google Scholar
Claidière N, Kirby S, Sperber D (2012) Effect of psychological bias separates cultural from biological evolution. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 109(51):E3526. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1213320109
Article ADS PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar
Claidière N, Scott-Phillips TC, Sperber D (2014) How Darwinian is cultural evolution? Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 369(20130368):1–8. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2013.0368
Clarke D (2014) On not losing heart: a response to Savage and Brown’s “Toward a new comparative musicology.” Anal Approaches World Music 3(2):1–14
Cowdery JR (1984) A fresh look at the concept of tune family. Ethnomusicology 28(3):495–504
Cowdery JR (2009) The melodic tradition of Ireland, 2nd edn. Kent State University Press, Kent
Cronin C (2015) I hear America suing: Music copyright infringement in the era of electronic sound. Hastings Law J 66(5):1187–1254
Currie TE, Mace R (2011) Mode and tempo in the evolution of socio-political organization: reconciling “Darwinian” and “Spencerian” evolutionary approaches in anthropology. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 366:1108–1117
Article PubMed Central PubMed Google Scholar
Danchin E, Charmantier A, Champagne FA, Mesoudi A, Pujol B, Blanchet S (2011) Beyond DNA: integrating inclusive inheritance into an extended theory of evolution. Nat Rev Genet 12:475–486
Article CAS PubMed Google Scholar
Darwin C (1859) The origin of species by means of natural selection.. John Murray, London
Darwin C (1871) The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex.. John Murray, London
Dawkins R (1976) The selfish gene.. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Doolittle WF (1999) Phylogenetic classification and the universal tree. Science 284(5423):2124–2128
Feld S (1974) Linguistic models in ethnomusicology. Ethnomusicology 18(2):197–217
Feld S (1984) Sound structure as social structure. Ethnomusicology 28(3):383–409
Fink R (2013, August 25) Big (bad) data. Musicology Now. http://musicologynow.ams-net.org/2013/08/big-baddata.html
Fishman JP (2018) Music as a matter of law. Harv Law Rev 131(7):1861–1923
Fogarty L, Creanza N, Feldman MW (2015) Cultural evolutionary perspectives on creativity and human innovation. Trends Ecol Evol 30(12):736–754
Fracchia J, Lewontin RC (1999) Does culture evolve? Hist Theory 8:52–78
Fracchia J, Lewontin RC (2005) The price of metaphor. Hist Theory 44:14–29. February
Fruehwald ES (1992) Copyright infringement of musical compositions: a systematic approach. Akron Law Rev 26(1):15–44
Fuentes A, Wiessner P (2016) Reintegrating anthropology: from inside out - an introduction to. Curr Anthropol 57(S13):S3–S12. https://doi.org/10.1086/685694
Gould SJ (1989) Wonderful life: The Burgess Shale and the nature of history.. Norton, New York
Grauer VA (2011) Sounding the depths: tradition and the voices of history. CreateSpace: http://soundingthedepths.blogspot.com/
Grauer VA (2006) Echoes of our forgotten ancestors. World Music 48(2):5–58
MathSciNet Google Scholar
Grant C (2014) Music endangerment: How language maintenance can help.. Oxford University Press, New York
Gray RD, Bryant D, Greenhill SJ (2010) On the shape and fabric of human history. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 365:3923–3933
Henrich J (2016) The secret of our success: how culture is driving human evolution, domesticating our species, and making us smarter.. Princeton University Press, Princeton
Henrich J, Boyd R, Richerson PJ (2008) Five misunderstandings about cultural evolution. Hum Nat 19(2):119–137
Hofstadter R (1955) Social Darwinism in American thought.. Beacon Press, Boston
Honing H (ed) (2018) The origins of musicality. MIT Press, Cambridge
Howell FC (1965) Early man. Time-Life International, Amsterdam
Huron D (2006) Sweet anticipation: music and the psychology of expectation.. MIT Press, Cambridge
Interiano M, Kazemi K, Wang L, Yang J, Yu Z, Komarova NL (2018) Musical trends and predictability of success in contemporary songs in and out of the top charts. R Soc Open Sci 5(171274):1–16. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.171274
International Folk Music Council (1955) Resolutions: definition of folk music. J Int Folk Music Counc 7:23
Jacoby N, McDermott JH (2017) Integer ratio priors on musical rhythm revealed cross-culturally by iterated reproduction. Curr Biol 27:359–370
Jan S (2007) The memetics of music: a neo-Darwinian view of musical structure and culture. Ashgate, Hants
Jan S (2018) The Two Brothers: reconciling perceptual-cognitive and statistical models of musical evolution. Front Psychol 9(344):1–15. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00344
Judge Owen (1976) Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music 420 F. Supp. 177 (S.D.N.Y. 1976). http://mcir.usc.edu/cases/1970-1979/Pages/brightharrisongs.html
Kaneshiro A (1990) [Comparison of Oiwake melodies through lyric-note alignment]. Minzoku Ongaku 5(1):30–36
Kartomi M (2001) The classification of musical instruments: changing trends in research from the late nineteenth century, with special reference to the 1990s. Ethnomusicology 45(2):283–314
Kloss J (2012) “... Tell Her To Make Me A Cambric Shirt”: from the “Elfin Knight” to “Scarborough Fair.” http://www.justanothertune.com/html/cambricshirt.html
Labov W (1994) Principles of linguistic change [3 vols].. Blackwell, Oxford, 2010
Laland KN, Brown GR (2011) Sense and nonsense, 2nd edn. Oxford University Press, New York
Laland K, Uller T, Feldman M, Sterelny K, Müller GB, Moczek A et al (2014) Does evolutionary theory need a rethink? Researchers are divided over what processes should be considered fundamental Nature 514:161–164
Article ADS CAS PubMed Google Scholar
Lawson FRS (2012) Consilience revisited: musical and scientific approaches to Chinese performance. Ethnomusicology 56(1):86–111
Le Bomin S, Lecointre G, Heyer E (2016) The evolution of musical diversity: the key role of vertical transmission. PLoS ONE 11(3):1–17. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0151570
Article CAS Google Scholar
Leroi AM, MacCallum RM, Mauch M, Burt A (2012) Reply to Claidière et al.: role of psychological bias in evolution depends on the kind of culture. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 109(51):E3527. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1214445109
Article ADS PubMed Central Google Scholar
Leroi AM, Swire J (2006) The recovery of the past. World Music 48(3):43–54
Levinson SC, Gray RD (2012) Tools from evolutionary biology shed new light on the diversification of languages. Trends Cogn Sci 16(3):167–173
Lomax A (1977) Appeal for cultural equity. J Commun 27(2):125–138
Lomax A (1980) Factors of musical style. In: Diamond S (ed) Theory and practice: essays presented to Gene Weltfish. Mouton, The Hague, p 29–58
Chapter Google Scholar
Lomax A (1989) Cantometrics. In:Barnouw E (ed) International encyclopedia of communications, 1st edn Oxford University Press, New York, p 230–233
Lomax A, Berkowitz N (1972) The evolutionary taxonomy of culture. Science 177(4045):228–239
Lomax A (ed) (1968) Folk song style and culture. American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, DC
Lumaca M, Baggio G (2017) Cultural transmission and evolution of melodic structures in multi-generational signaling games. Artif Life 23:406–423
Lumsden CJ, Wilson EO (1981) Genes, mind and culture: the coevolutionary process.. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
MacCallum RM, Mauch M, Burt A, Leroi AM (2012) Evolution of music by public choice. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 109(30):12081–12086
Article ADS CAS PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar
Mace R, Holden CJ (2005) A phylogenetic approach to cultural evolution. Trends Ecol Evol 20(3):116–121
Machida K, Takeuchi T (eds) (1965) [Folk song genealogies: Esashi Oiwake and Sado Okesa]; 4 LPs. Kawasaki, Columbia. AL-5047/50
Marett A (1985) Togaku: where have the Tang melodies gone, and where have the new melodies come from? Ethnomusicology 29(3):409–431
Marks J (2012) Recent advances in culturomics. Evol Anthropol 21(1):38–42
Marris E (2008) The language barrier. Nature 453:446–448
Marshall A (2018, January 25) Can you tell a lullaby from a love song? Find out now. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/01/25/arts/music/history-of-song.html
Mauch M, MacCallum RM, Levy M, Leroi AM (2015) The evolution of popular music: USA 1960–2010. R Soc Open Sci 2(5):1–10. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.150081
McShea DW, Brandon RN (2010) Biology’s first law: the tendency for diversity and complexity to increase in evolutionary systems.. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Mehr SA, Singh M, Knox D, Lucas C, Ketter DM, Pickens-Jones D, Glowacki, L (2018) A natural history of song. PsyArXiv preprint https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/emq8r
Mehr SA, Singh M, York H, Glowacki L, Krasnow MM (2018) Form and function in human song. Curr Biol 28:356–368
Article CAS PubMed Central PubMed Google Scholar
Merriam AP (1964) The anthropology of music.. Northwestern University Press, Evanston
Merriam AP (1982) On objections to comparison in ethnomusicology. In: Falck R, Rice T (eds) Cross-cultural perspectives on music.. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, p 175–189
Mesoudi A (2011) Cultural evolution: how Darwinian theory can explain human culture and synthesize the social sciences.. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Meyer LB (1956) Emotion and meaning in music.. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Mongeau M, Sankoff D (1990) Comparison of musical sequences. Comput Hum 24:161–175
Müllensiefen D, Pendzich M (2009) Court decisions on music plagiarism and the predictive value of similarity algorithms. Musica Sci 13(1 Suppl):257–295
Mundy R (2006) Musical evolution and the making of hierarchy. World Music 48(3):13–27
Nei M, Suzuki Y, Nozawa M (2010) The neutral theory of molecular evolution in the genomic era. Annu Rev Genom. Hum Genet 11(1):265–289
CAS Google Scholar
Nettl B (2006) Response to Victor Grauer: on the concept of evolution in the history of ethnomusicology. World Music 48(2):59–72
Nettl B (2015) The study of ethnomusicology: thirty-three discussions, 3rd edn.. University of Illinois Press, Champaign
Nettl B, Bohlman PV (eds) (1991) Comparative musicology and anthropology of music: essays on the history of ethnomusicology.. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Pagel M (2017) Darwinian perspectives on the evolution of human languages. Psychon Bull Rev 24(1):151–157
Pamjav H, Juhász Z, Zalán A, Németh E, Damdin B (2012) A comparative phylogenetic study of genetics and folk music. Mol Genet Genom 287(4):337–349
Patel AD (2008) Music, language and the brain.. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Patel AD (2018) Music as a transformative technology of the mind: an update. In: Honing H (ed) The origins of musicality.. MIT Press, Cambridge, p 113–126
Picken LER, Wolpert RF, Nickson NJ (eds) (1981) Music from the Tang court [7 volumes]. Oxford/Cambridge University Press, London, p 2000
Pinker S (2012, June 18) The false allure of group selection. Edge. https://www.edge.org/conversation/steven_pinker-the-false-allure-of-group-selection
Ravignani A, Delgado T, Kirby S (2016) Musical evolution in the lab exhibits rhythmic universals. Nat Human Behav 1(0007):1–7. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-016-0007
Rahaim M (2006) What else do we say when we say “music evolves?”. World Music 48(3):29–41
Rehding A (2000) The quest for the origins of music in Germany circa 1900. J Am Musicol Soc 53(2):345–385
Rice T (1987) Toward the remodeling of ethnomusicology. Ethnomusicology 31(3):469–488
Rice T (2010) Disciplining ethnomusicology: a call for a new approach. Ethnomusicology 54(2):318–325
Richerson PJ, Boyd R (2005) Not by genes alone: How culture transformed human evolution.. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Rzeszutek T, Savage PE, Brown S (2012) The structure of cross-cultural musical diversity. Proc R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 279(1733):1606–1612
Sachs C (1943) The rise of music in the ancient world: east and West. Norton, New York
Savage PE (2017) [Measuring the cultural evolution of music: with case studies of British-American and Japanese folk, art, and popular music]. Ph.D. dissertation, Tokyo University of the Arts. https://tinyurl.com/SavagePhD
Savage PE (2017, September 25) ”Deep diversity” and other reflections on the inaugural Cultural Evolution Society conference. Seshat blog. http://seshatdatabank.info/cultural_evolution_society/
Savage PE (2018) Alan Lomax’s Cantometrics Project: a comprehensive review. Music & Sci 1:1–19. https://doi.org/10.1177/2059204318786084
Article ADS Google Scholar
Savage PE, Atkinson QD (2015) Automatic tune family identification by musical sequence alignment. In: Müller M, Wiering F (eds) Proceedings of the 16th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2015). Málaga, Spain, p 162–168
Savage PE, Brown S (2013) Toward a new comparative musicology. Anal Approaches World Music 2(2):148–197
Savage PE, Brown S (2014) Mapping music: cluster analysis of song-type frequencies within and between cultures. Ethnomusicology 58(1):133–155
Savage PE, Brown S, Sakai E, Currie TE (2015) Statistical universals reveal the structures and functions of human music. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 112(29):8987–8992
Savage PE, Cronin C, Müllensiefen D, Atkinson QD (2018) Quantitative evaluation of music copyright infringement. In: Holzapfel A, Pikrakis A (eds) Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Folk Music Analysis (FMA2018). Thessaloniki, Greece, p 61–66
Savage PE, Loui P, Glowacki L, Schachner A, Tarr B, Mithen S, Fitch, WT (In preparation). Music as a coevolved system for social bonding.
Savage PE, Matsumae H, Oota H, Stoneking M, Currie TE, Tajima A, Brown S (2015) How “circumpolar” is Ainu music? Musical and genetic perspectives on the history of the Japanese archipelago. Ethnomusicol Forum 24(3):443–467
Seeger A (1992) Ethnomusicology and music law. Ethnomusicology 36(3):345–359
Seeger C (Ed.) (1966) Versions and variants of the tunes of Barbara Allen [1 casette]. Archive of American Folk Song, Library of Congress. AFS L 54, Washington, DC
Serrà J, Corral Á, Boguñá M, Haro M, Arcos JL (2012) Measuring the evolution of contemporary western popular music. Sci Rep 2(521):1–6. https://doi.org/10.1038/srep00521
Shapiro AD (1975) The tune-family concept in British-American folk-song scholarship. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University
Sharp CJ (1907) English folk song: some conclusions. Simpkin, London
Sharp CJ (1932) English folk songs from the southern Appalachians. Oxford University Press, London
Simchy-Gross R, Margulis EH (2018) The sound-to-music illusion: repetition can musicalize nonspeech sounds. Music & Sci 1:1–6. https://doi.org/10.1177/2059204317731992
Solis G (2012) Thoughts on an interdiscipline: music theory, analysis, and social theory in ethnomusicology. Ethnomusicology 56(3):530–554
Spencer H (1875) Progress: Its law and cause. In: Spencer H (ed) Illustrations of universal progress: a series of discussions. D. Appleton & Company, New York, p 1–60
Stock JPJ (2006) Clues from our present peers? A response to Victor Grauer. World Music 48(2):73–91
Stocking GWJ (1982) Race, culture, and evolution: essays in the history of anthropology (New Edition). University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Stone R (2008) Theory for ethnomusicology. Pearson/Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle
Stumpf C (1911) The origins of music. (Trans. Trippett D). Oxford University Press, Oxford, p 2012
Szwed J (2010) Alan Lomax: The man who recorded the world. Viking, New York
Tëmkin I, Eldredge N (2007) Phylogenetics and material cultural evolution. Curr Anthropol 48(1):146–154
Titon JT (1977) Early downhome blues: a musical and cultural analysis. University of Illinois Press, Urbana
Titon JT (1992) Music, the public interest, and the practice of ethnomusicology. Ethnomusicology 36(3):315–322
Tomlinson G (2013) Evolutionary studies in the humanities: the case of music. Crit Inq 39(4):647–675
Tomlinson G (2015) A million years of music: the emergence of human modernity.. MIT Press, Cambridge
Toussaint G (2013) The geometry of musical rhythm: what makes a “good” rhythm good? CRC Press, Boca Raton
Turchin P, Currie TE, Whitehouse H, François P, Feeney K, Mullins D et al. (2018) Quantitative historical analysis uncovers a single dimension of complexity that structures global variation in human social organization. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 115(2):E144–E151. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1708800115
van der Meer W (1975) Cultural evolution: a case study of Indian music. Sangeet Natak 35:49–65
van Kranenburg P, Volk A, Wiering F, Veltkamp RC (2009) Musical models for folk-song melody alignment. In: Hirata K, Tzanetakis G, Yoshii K (eds) Proceedings of the 10th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR) (p. 507–512)
Wallin NL, Merker B, Brown S (Eds) (2000) The origins of music.. MIT Press, Cambridge
Whitehouse H, François P, Savage PE, Currie TE, Feeney KC, Cioni E, et al. (In press) Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history. Nature
Whiten A, Hinde RA, Stringer CB, Laland KN (Eds) (2012) Culture evolves.. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Wilson DS, Johnson EM (2015) Truth and reconciliation for social Darwinism. https://evolution-institute.org/truthand-reconciliation-for-social-darwinism/
Windram HF, Charlston T, Howe CJ (2014) A phylogenetic analysis of Orlando Gibbons’s Prelude in G. Early Music 42(4):515–528
Wiora W (1953) Europäischer Volksegesang: Gemeinsame formen in charakteristischen abwandlungen. Arno Volk, Cologne
Wood ALC (2018a) Like a cry from the heart: an insider’s view on the genesis of Alan Lomax’s ideas and the legacy of his research: Part I. Ethnomusicology 62(2):230–264
Article MathSciNet Google Scholar
Wood ALC (2018b) Like a cry from the heart: an insider’s view on the genesis of Alan Lomax’s ideas and the legacy of his research: Part II. Ethnomusicology 62(3):403–438
Yong E (2018, January 25) A study suggests that people can hear universal traits in music: but some music scholars have doubts. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/01/the-search-for-universalqualities-in-music-heats-up/551447
Youngblood M (2018) Cultural transmission modes of music sampling traditions remain stable despite delocalization in the digital age. ArXiv preprint. http://arxiv.org/abs/1810.11900
Youngblood M, Lahti D (2018) A bibliometric analysis of the interdisciplinary field of cultural evolution. Palgrave Commun 4(120):1–9. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-018-0175-8
Zivic PHR, Shifres F, Cecchi GA (2013) Perceptual basis of evolving Western musical styles. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 110(24):10034–10038
Article MathSciNet CAS Google Scholar
Download references
Acknowledgements
I thank my PhD supervisory committee (Yukio Uemura, Yasuko Tsukahara, Atsushi Marui, and Hugh de Ferranti) for guidance and feedback on this article and my dissertation, and thank Steven Brown, Victor Grauer, Thomas Currie, Quentin Atkinson, Andrea Ravignani, and Jamshid Tehrani for comments on earlier versions of this article. This research was supported by a Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) scholarship, a Keio Research Institute at SFC Startup Grant, and a Keio Gijuku Academic Development Fund Individual Grant.
Author information
Authors and affiliations.
Faculty of Environment and Information Studies, Keio University, Fujisawa, Japan
Patrick E. Savage
You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar
Corresponding author
Correspondence to Patrick E. Savage .
Ethics declarations
Competing interests.
The author declares no competing interests.
Additional information
Publisher’s note: Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .
Reprints and permissions
About this article
Cite this article.
Savage, P.E. Cultural evolution of music. Palgrave Commun 5 , 16 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-019-0221-1
Download citation
Received : 20 August 2018
Accepted : 10 January 2019
Published : 12 February 2019
DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-019-0221-1
Share this article
Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:
Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.
Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative
This article is cited by
Universality, domain-specificity and development of psychological responses to music.
- Manvir Singh
- Samuel A. Mehr
Nature Reviews Psychology (2023)
Quick links
- Explore articles by subject
- Guide to authors
- Editorial policies
IMAGES
VIDEO
COMMENTS
Music History from Primary Sources The Art of Musical Notation. In its primary sources, music merges with the representational arts. Oral tradition has played a fundamental role in all ages, but in its formal sense, history--and the history of music--begins with the visual record.
Introduction and the brief history of music. Get to know the music periods and history of medieval, renaissance, baroque, classical, romantic era music. Through the history of music, we find increasing evidence of its key role in sacred and secular settings.
Most cultures have their own mythical origins concerning the invention of music, generally rooted in their respective mythological, religious or philosophical beliefs.
In this article I provide an overview of recent research and a sketch of music’s evolutionary career. I identify avenues for future research, including work in the evolution of the emotions, and the application of signalling theory to music archaeology.
Music, art concerned with combining vocal or instrumental sounds for beauty of form or emotional expression, usually according to cultural standards of rhythm, melody, and, in most Western music, harmony. Learn about the history of music and about theories of musical meaning since the 19th century.
Music must first be defined and distinguished from speech, and from animal and bird cries. We discuss the stages of hominid anatomy that permit music to be perceived and created, with the likelihood of both Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens both being capable.
Here are some resources for you to better understand the history of music. (Estrella 2001) Music is traced back as far as “ancient Israel” a thousand years before Christ; King David composed and sang hundreds of songs called psalms.
While cultural evolution will never explain all aspects of music, it offers a useful theoretical framework for understanding diversity and change in the world’s music.
* A review essay of Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, translated by J. Bradford Rob-inson (Berkeley, 1989); Leonard B. Meyer, Style and Music: Theory, History, and Ideology (Phila-delphia, 1989); and Leo Treitler, Music and the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., 1989).
Charles Burney (1726–1814), was the foremost music historian of his day. The General History, his most famous work, was published in four volumes between 1776 and 1789 and is still of great value today.