Toward a New Comparative Musicology. Steven Brown, McMaster University

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1 Toward a New Comparative Musicology Steven Brown, McMaster University Comparative musicology is the scientific discipline devoted to the cross-cultural study of music. It looks at music in all of its forms across all world cultures and throughout historical time. As with its sister discipline of comparative linguistics, comparative musicology seeks to classify the musics of the world into stylistic families, to describe the geographic distribution of these styles, to elucidate universal trends in musics across cultures, and to understand the causes and mechanisms shaping the biological and cultural evolution of music. The 5 Key Issues of Comparative Musicology 1. Classification, clustering, and maps of music Classification procedures attempt to characterize the degree of similarity among elements of a set. Because musical systems are complex combinations of features (e.g., pitch, rhythm, instruments, performance style), the classification of music is strongly tied in with a cognitive understanding of the basic sub-systems that comprise music. As a result, classification schemes vary depending upon which musical features are included for consideration, and how the included features are measured and quantified. Stylistic clusters and musical maps. While classification procedures are able to quantify the musical similarity between any two songs, the more important objective of classification is to create stylistic clusters of entire repertoires. These clusters can be thought of as music families, analogous to language families in linguistics. In the most general application of this approach,

2 these stylistic groupings can be mapped onto geographic and/or ethnographic groupings so as to generate a musical map of the world as well as to elucidate the historical study of human population movements and interactions, as mentioned in Issue 4 below. 2. Cultural evolution of music What are the mechanisms of musical change and stasis? How do musical forms emerge or become extinct over time? How does one musical style give rise to another? By what processes have musics diversified over time and location to create the geographic distribution of musical styles that currently exists? Sometimes similar musical features will emerge independently in musics that are historically unrelated, whereas in other cases closely related musics will have very different musical features. As with the discussion of classification in Issue 1, an analysis of music s cultural evolution requires first and foremost a cognitive commitment to a theory of the sub-systems that make up music. With such an understanding in mind, the issue becomes how musical systems undergo change over time and location. This can be applied diachronically to individual cultures (e.g., changes in musical style over generations), but the more challenging task is to characterize the processes of musical change that occur as cultures come into contact, either directly or through mass-media exposure. A frequent result of this contact is the creation of musical fusions (syncretisms, hybrids, admixtures). The study of music s cultural evolution also considers such issues as the emergence and extinction of musical forms, and the degree of musical diversity within and between cultures. For example, cultures differ with regard to the musical genres that their repertoires contain. Cultures 2

3 can change musically by acquiring or losing genres, for example through cultural contact (e.g., conquest can lead to suppression of native forms and imposition of the conqueror s forms). 3. Musical universals Which musical features are found most universally across cultures, and which are more variable and culture-specific? Any approach to musical universals is critically dependent upon how we choose to describe music, as explained in Issue 1 above. Therefore, the study of universals requires a commitment to some notion of classification. This touches upon a cognitive understanding of the sub-systems of music. In addition, it touches upon notions of invariant features in music that may have their roots in specificity for these sub-systems in the human brain and ultimately human genome. An understanding of musical universals is one of the key objectives of comparative musicology, one that can contribute to our anthropological understanding of music. While many different types of evidence can be presented to bolster arguments about universals, the study of musical universals must be based, first and foremost, on a comparative analysis of musics crossculturally. The basic evidence must come from synthesizing information from the musics of as many cultures as possible. 4. Music and human migration A number of biological and cultural features have been successfully used as markers of human population movements having occurred over the course of tens of thousands of years. These features include not only genes (such as mitochondrial and Y chromosome DNA) but cultural 3

4 features such as languages and physical artifacts. Music has an amazing, but untapped, potential to serve as a marker of human migrations. Music is a universal feature of human cultures but shows a large amount of diversity both between and within cultures. Geographic patterns of musical diversity can be used to enlighten the history of population movements and interactions. Not surprisingly, migrational analysis is the most synthetic of the issues discussed on this page, as it requires 1) a detailed cross-cultural analysis of musics, 2) classification of musics into groupings, 3) geographic mapping of musical styles, 4) cultural-evolutionary models of musical diversification and admixture in cases of cultural contact, and at its best 5) cross-domain comparisons between musical diversity and diversity in areas such as linguistics and genetics. 5. Biological evolution of music Structural or phylogenetic approaches consider the evolutionary history of the human species, and how music emerged in anatomically modern humans perhaps millions of years ago. Many phylogenetic models deal with the evolutionary relationship between music and language: are their evolutions intertwined or did they evolve independently? Phylogenetic approaches often look to primate models of human behavioural evolution for ideas about precursor capacities that may have underlain musical evolution, including social features related to group structure and interaction. Functional or Darwinian approaches consider the functional consequences of music for the individuals and groups that make it, and how music may have supported the survival of our ancestors. In other words, they look for the adaptive properties of music in terms of music s benefits and costs. These approaches typically consider the three major Darwinian mechanisms 4

5 of natural selection, sexual selection, and group selection. Some theorists reject the biological adaptiveness of music and argue instead that music is an offshoot of language evolution or that it is a cultural creation lacking biological specificity. 5

SOCI 421: Social Anthropology

SOCI 421: Social Anthropology Session 5 Founding Fathers I Lecturer: Dr. Kodzovi Akpabli-Honu, UG Contact Information: kodzovi@ug.edu.gh College of Education School of Continuing and Distance Education