It was not until late in the 20th century that several teams of scholars including Charles Lumsden and Edward O.
Light music hindi songs series#
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). 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:
These principles apply equally to biological and cultural evolution (Mesoudi, 2011).Įvolution did often come to be defined in purely genetic terms during the twentieth century. 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). 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. 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.Īlthough 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. 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. 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. However, the musicologists displayed concern and some confusion over the concept of cultural evolution. 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. 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. 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). This absence has been especially prominent in ethnomusicology, but is also observable in historical musicology and other subfields of musicology Footnote 1. 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. 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). 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). The concept of evolution played a central role during the formation of academic musicology in the late nineteenth century (Adler, 1885/ 1981 Rehding, 2000).
0 kommentar(er)
