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Cultural Evolution of Music 1 Cultural Evolution of Music 2 Patrick E. Savage 3 Keio University, Shonan Fujisawa Campua 4 Abstract. The concept of cultural evolution was fundamental to the foundation of 5 academic musicology and the subfield of comparative musicology, but largely 6 disappeared from discussion after World War II, despite a recent resurgence of 7 interest in cultural evolution in other fields. In this article, I draw on recent advances 8 in the scientific understanding of cultural evolution to clarify persistent 9 misconceptions about the roles of genes and progress in musical evolution and 10 review literature relevant to musical evolution ranging from macroevolution of 11 global song-style to microevolution of tune families. I also address criticisms 12 regarding issues of musical agency, meaning, and reductionism, and highlight 13 potential applications including music copyright, education, and sustainability. 14 While cultural evolution will never explain all aspects of music in culture, it offers 15 a useful theoretical framework for understanding diversity and change in the 16 world’s music. 17 ----------- 18 The concept of evolution played a central role during the formation of academic 19 musicology in the late nineteenth century (Adler 1885/1981; Rehding 2000). 20 During the twentieth century, theoretical and political implications of evolution 21 were heavily debated, leading evolution to go out of favor in musicology and 22 cultural anthropology (Carneiro 2003). In the twenty first century, refined concepts 23 of biological evolution were reintroduced to musicology through the work of 24 psychologists of music to the extent that the biological evolution of the capacity to 25 make and experience music ("evolution of musicality") has returned as an important 26 topic of contemporary musicological research (Wallin, Merker, and Brown 2000; 27 Huron 2006; Patel 2008; Lawson 2012; Tomlinson 2013; Honing 2018). Yet the 28 concept of cultural evolution of music itself ("musical evolution") remains largely 29 undeveloped by musicologists, despite an explosion of recent research on cultural 30 evolution in related fields such as linguistics. This absence has been especially 31 prominent in ethnomusicology, but is also observable in historical musicology and 32 other subfields of musicology1. 33 One major exception was the two-volume special edition of The World of 34 Music devoted to critical analysis of Victor Grauer's (2006) essay entitled "Echoes 35 of Our Forgotten Ancestors" (later expanded into book form in Grauer 2011). 36 Grauer proposed that the evolution and global dispersal of human song-style 37 parallels the evolution and dispersal of anatomically modern humans out of Africa, 38 and that certain groups of contemporary African hunter-gatherers retain the 39 ancestral singing style shared by all humans tens of thousands of years ago. The 40 two evolutionary biologists contributing to this publication found the concept of 41 musical evolution self-evident enough that they simply opened their contribution 42 by stating: "Songs, like genes and languages, evolve" (Leroi and Swire 2006:43). 43 However, the musicologists displayed much concern and some confusion over the 44 concept of cultural evolution. 45 My goal in this article is to clarify some of these issues in terms of the 46 definitions, assumptions, and implications involved in studying the cultural 47 evolution of music to show how cultural evolutionary theory can benefit 48 musicology in a variety of ways. I will begin with a brief overview of cultural 49 evolution in general, move to cultural evolution of music in particular, and then end 50 by addressing some potential applications and criticisms. Because this article is 51 aimed both at musicologists with limited knowledge of cultural evolution and at 52 cultural evolutionists with limited knowledge of music, I have included some 53 discussion that may seem obvious to some readers but not others. 54 What is “evolution”? 55 Although the term “evolution” is often assumed to refer to directional 56 progress and/or to require a genetic basis, neither genes nor progress are included 57 in contemporary definitions of evolution. Furthermore, while it is true that the 58 discovery of genes and the precise molecular mechanisms by which they change 59 revolutionized evolutionary biology, Darwin formulated his theory of evolution 60 without the concept of genes. 61 Instead of genes, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection 62 contained three key requirements: 1) there must be variation among individuals; 2) 63 variation must be inherited via intergenerational transmission; 3) certain variants 64 must be more likely to be inherited than others due to competitive selection (Darwin 65 1859). These principles apply equally to biological and cultural evolution (Mesoudi 66 2011). 67 Evolution did often come to be defined in purely genetic terms during the 68 twentieth century, but recent advances in our understanding of cultural evolution, 69 epigenetics, and ecology have led to a new inclusive definition of evolution as: 70 'the process by which the frequencies of variants in a population change 71 over time', where the word ‘variants’ replaces the word ‘genes’ in order to 72 include any inherited information….In particular, this…should include 73 cultural inheritance. (Danchin et al. 2011:483-484) 2 74 Note that there is nothing about progress or direction contained in Danchin et al.'s 75 scholarly definition quoted above: evolution simply refers to changes in the 76 frequencies of heritable variants. These changes can be in the direction of simple 77 to complex - and it is possible that there may be a general trend towards complexity 78 (McShea and Brandon 2010; Currie and Mace 2011) - but the reverse is also 79 possible, as are non-directional changes with little or no functional consequences 80 (Nei, Suzuki, and Nozawa 2010). 81 Does culture “evolve”? 82 From the time Darwin (1859) first proposed that his theory of evolution 83 explained “The Origin of Species”, scholars immediately tried to apply it to explain 84 the origin of culture. Indeed, Darwin himself explicitly argued that language and 85 species evolution were "curiously parallel…the survival or preservation of certain 86 favoured words in the struggle for existence is natural selection" (Darwin 1871:89- 87 90). Scholars of cultural evolution have tabulated a number of such curious 88 parallels, to which I have added musical examples (Table 1). 89 3 90 Table 1. A simplified comparison of biological, linguistic, and musical 91 evolution. Biological evolution and linguistic evolution columns are adapted 92 from Atkinson and Gray (2005:514) and Pagel (2016:2). Biological evolution Linguistic Musical evolution evolution Discrete heritable units (e.g., Discrete heritable Discrete heritable amino acids, genes) units (e.g., units (e.g., notes, phonemes, words) phrases) DNA copying Teaching, learning Teaching, learning and imitation and imitation Mutation Mistakes, sound Mistakes, changes embellishment, composition Homology Lexical cognates, Melodic cognates, language families tune families Natural selection Social selection Selection by and trends audience, performers, judges, consumers, etc. Hybridization (e.g., horse Creoles (e.g., Syncretic music (e.g., with zebra) Surinamese) Métis fiddle music) Fossils Ancient texts Ancient notation, audio/video recordings Extinction Language death Repertoire loss 93 94 Theories about cultural evolution quickly adopted assumptions about 95 progress (e.g., Spencer 1875) linked with attempts to legitimize ideologies of 96 Western superiority and justify the oppression of the weak by the powerful as 97 survival of the fittest (Hofstadter 1955; Laland and Brown 2011; Stocking 1982)2. 98 It is no accident that Zallinger's famous March of Progress drawing showed a 99 gradual lightening of the skin from dark-skinned, ape-like ancestors to light- 100 skinned humans: evolution was used to justify scientific racism by eugenicists 4 101 (Gould 1989). Although both the lightening of skin and the linear progression from 102 ape to man are inaccurate (Gould 1989), this image unfortunately remains 103 extremely enduring and is commonly adapted to represent all kinds of evolution, 104 including musical evolution (see Figure 1). 105 106 Figure 1. An example of an inaccurate but widespread representation of 107 evolution as a linear march of progress. Source: 108 http://www.mandolincafe.com/archives/spoof.html (retrieved October 14, 109 2016) 110 Ideas of linear progress through a series of fixed stages continued to 111 dominate cultural evolution for over a century (see Carneiro 2003 for an in-depth 112 review). For example, Morgan (1877) proposed a universal set of stages of cultural 113 evolution, beginning with different gradations of “savagery” and “barbarism” until 114 societies reached “civilization”. Around the 1930s, scholars of biological evolution 115 such as Sewall Wright and Ronald Fisher began to develop more sophisticated 116 concepts based on careful modeling and measurement of changing gene frequencies, 117 which became known as the “Modern Synthesis”. However, cultural evolution 118 maintained an emphasis on theories of progress for many decades after the Modern 119 Synthesis (e.g., White 1959; Sahlins and Service 1960), even as contradictory 120 evidence was mounting from ethnographic fieldwork pioneered by Franz Boas 121 (1940) and his disciples. 5 122 It was not until late in the 20th century that several teams of scholars
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