essay on development of music

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The evolution of music and human social capability

Jay schulkin.

1 Department of Neuroscience, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA

Greta B. Raglan

2 Department of Research, American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, Washington, DC, USA

Music is a core human experience and generative processes reflect cognitive capabilities. Music is often functional because it is something that can promote human well-being by facilitating human contact, human meaning, and human imagination of possibilities, tying it to our social instincts. Cognitive systems also underlie musical performance and sensibilities. Music is one of those things that we do spontaneously, reflecting brain machinery linked to communicative functions, enlarged and diversified across a broad array of human activities. Music cuts across diverse cognitive capabilities and resources, including numeracy, language, and space perception. In the same way, music intersects with cultural boundaries, facilitating our “social self” by linking our shared experiences and intentions. This paper focuses on the intersection between the neuroscience of music, and human social functioning to illustrate the importance of music to human behaviors.

Music is a fundamental part of our evolution; we probably sang before we spoke in syntactically guided sentences. Song is represented across animal worlds; birds and whales produce sounds, though not always melodic to our ears, but still rich in semantically communicative functions. Song is not surprisingly tied to a vast array of semiotics that pervade nature: calling attention to oneself, expanding oneself, selling oneself, deceiving others, reaching out to others and calling on others. The creative capability so inherent in music is a unique human trait.

Music is strongly linked to motivation and to human social contact. Only a portion of people may play music, but all can, and do, at least sing or hum a tune. Music is like breathing—all pervasive. Music is a core human experience and a generative process that reflects cognitive capabilities. It is intertwined with many basic human needs and is the result of thousands of years of neurobiological development. Music, as it has evolved in humankind, allows for unique expressions of social ties and the strengthening of relational connectedness.

Underlying the behavior of what we might call a basic proclivity to sing and to express music are appetitive urges, consummatory expression, drive and satisfaction (Dewey, 1925/1989 ). Music, like food ingestion, is rooted in biology. Appetitive expression is the buildup of need, and consummatory experiences are its release and reward. Appetitive and consummatory musical experiences are embedded in culturally rich symbols of meaning.

Music is linked to learning, and humans have a strong pedagogical predilection. Learning not only takes place in the development of direct musical skills, but in the connections between music and emotional experiences. Darwin understood both music and consideration of emotion to be human core capabilities. Emotional systems are forms of adaptation allowing us to, for instance, note danger through the immediate detection of facial expressions.

This essay examines the biological and cognitive context for musical expression. In addition, it looks at how the predilection for music among humans has helped to foster the social connectedness so unique and vital to our species, and how our cephalic capabilities underlie music. This paper suggests that the importance of music to our socialization and well-being as a species is reflected in the cognitive and neural connections underpinning it.

The social functions of music

Music is often functional because it is something that can promote human well-being by facilitating human contact, human meaning, and human imagination of possibilities. We came quite easily, one might surmise, to the cephalic state of enjoying music for itself, its expanding melodic and harmonic features, its endless diverse expression of sound, moving through space, and within our power to self-generate it (Koelsch, 2010 ). On the voyage that conceptualized an important idea already circulating in Victorian culture—adaptation and natural selection—Darwin spent quite a bit of time studying the phenomenon of song. He was keen to understand song as a biological feature: “It is probable that the progenitors of man, either the males or females or both sexes before acquiring the power of expressing mutual love in articulate speech, endeavored to charm each other with musical notes and rhythm (Darwin, 1871/1874 ).” Darwin posited that song evolved with communicative capabilities, which extended for some species (e.g., song birds and humans) with great variation.

Musical sensibility is tied to our social instincts. Darwin noted as early as 1859 that social instincts, including song, are the prelude for much of what governs our social evolution (Darwin, 1859/1958 ).

Darwin and the ethologist Tinbergen understood that functions can change over time and be put to novel uses (Tinbergen, 1951 ). Musical expression requires a wide range of such functions: respiratory control, fine motor control, and other preadaptive features. This figures into song production, an evolution tied to speech and the diversification of our communicative competence.

Musical sensibility is surely just as fundamental to the human species as, for instance, language. From a simple adaptation there emerges lively expression in almost any culture. Music is indeed generative, structurally recursive, and knotted to grouping (Diderot, 1755/1964 ; Spencer, 1852 ).

Music is a binding factor in our social milieu; it is a feature with and about us, a universal still shrouded in endless mystery. How music came into being is, like most other features in our evolution, hard to pinpoint. Evolutionary evidence over a wide range of cultural groups reveals diversity of song and instrument, yet gaps and speculative considerations remain: some cultures sing a lot, some sing less, but most do sing and perhaps Neanderthals sang more than Sapiens (Mithen, 2006 ). Music is typically something shared, something social; we may sing in the shower or on a solitary walk (Whitehead, 1938/1967 ; Rousseau, 1966 ), but music is most of the time social, communicative, expressive, and oriented toward others.

Music cuts across diverse cognitive capabilities and resources, including numeracy, language, and spacial perception. In the same way, music intersects with cultural boundaries, facilitating our “social self” by linking our shared experiences and intentions. Perhaps one primordial influence is the social interaction of parental attachments, which are fundamental to gaining a foothold in the social milieu, learning, and surviving; music and song are conduits for forging links across barriers, for making contact with others, and for being indoctrinated with the social milieu.

Ian Cross (Cross and Morley, 2008 ; Cross, 2010 ), has pointed out the floating, fluid expression of music. There is little doubt that the fundamental link that music provides for us is about emotion and communicative expression, in which the prediction of events is tied to diverse appraisal systems expressed in music (Meyer, 1956 ; Sloboda, 1985/2000 ; Huron, 2006 ). Music is fundamental to our social roots (Cross, 2010 ). Coordinated rituals allow us to resonate with others in chorus (Brown, 2003 ), for which shared intentional movements and actions are bound to one another.

Culture-bound music is a shared resource that is tied to diverse actions, including sexual function (Darwin, 1872/1998 ). Music permeates the way in which we coordinate with one another in rhythmic patterns, reflecting self-generative cephalic expression (Temperley, 2001 ; Jackendoff and Lerdahl, 2006 ) tied to a rich sense of diverse musical semiotics and rhythms (Peirce, 1903 -1912/1977; Myers, 1905 ). Music is embedded in the rhythmic patterns (Myers, 1905 ; Sacks, 2008 ; Cross, 2010 ) of all societies. Our repertoire of expression has incurred a crucial advantage: the ability to reach others and to communicate affectively laden messages.

The social communicative bonding of the wolf chorus is one example from nature that comes to mind (Brown et al., 2004 ); a great chorus of rhythmic sounds in a social setting. A common theme noted by many inquirers is the social synchrony of musical sensibility (Sloboda, 1985/2000 ; Temperley, 2001 ; Huron, 2006 ; Cross, 2010 ). The motor sense is tied directly to the sounds, synchrony and movement. Sometimes the actual motor side of singing is underappreciated (Brown, 2006 ). Neurotransmitters, which are vital for movement, are tethered to syntax and perhaps to sound production. The communicative social affective bonding is just that: affective. This draws us together and, as a social species, remains essential to us; a chorus of expression in being with others, that fundamental feature of our life and of our evolutionary ascent. Music is indeed, as Timothy Blanning noted, a grand “triumph” of the human condition, spanning across cultures to reach the greatest of heights in the pantheon of human expression, communication, and well-being. It is in everything (Cross, 1999 ; Huron, 2001 ).

We are a species bound by evolution and diverse forms of change, both symbolic and social. Language and music are as much a part of our evolutionary development as the tool making and the cognitive skills that we traditionally focus on when we think about evolution. As social animals, we are oriented toward sundry expressions of our con-specifics that root us in the social world (Humphrey, 1976 ), a world of acceptance and rejection, approach and avoidance, which features objects rich with significance and meaning (Marler, 1961 , 2000 ). Music inherently procures the detection of intention and emotion, as well as whether to approach or avoid (Juslin and Sloboda, 2001 ; Juslin and Vastfjall, 2008 ).

Social behavior is a premium cognitive adaptation, reaching greater depths in humans than in any other species. The orientation of the human child, for example, to a physical domain of objects, can appear quite similar in the performance of some tasks to the chimpanzee or orangutan in the first few years of development (Herman et al., 2007 ). What becomes quite evident early on in ontogeny is the link to the vastness of the social world in which the human neonate is trying to gain a foothold for action (Tomasello and Carpenter, 2007 ). Music is social in nature; we inherently feel the social value of reaching others in music or by moving others in song across the broad social milieu.

Social and musical contact and cortical expansion

Music is replete with social contact. In fact, its origins are in contact with others. Mothers making contact, calls to others, and rhythmic patterns with others in the social group are all ways of keeping track of others, staying in touch with others, or playing with others. Indeed, exposure to music in young children is known to promote prosocial behavior in children. Studies suggest joint singing or drumming, for instance, when controlling for diverse intellectual and personality factors, promotes prosocial behaviors (See Figure ​ Figure1) 1 ) (Kirschner and Tomasello, 2009 , 2010 ).

Joint social action and music making; musical priming leads to an increase in the number of cooperative players (Kirschner and Tomasello, 2009 , 2010 ) .

Importantly, the greater the degree of social contact and social organization experienced by a human, the greater the trend toward cortical expansion (See Figure ​ Figure2) 2 ) (Dunbar, 1996 , 1998 , 2003 ; Barton, 2006 ; Dunbar and Shultz, 2007 ).

Neocortex size and social cooperation (Dunbar and Shultz, 2007 ) .

In other words, group size and social contact is linked to neocortical expansion in hominids, as is longevity. The pressure of coming into contact with others, creating alliances, and tracking them no doubt required more cortical mass (Byrne and Corp, 2004 ; Cheney and Seyfarth, 2007 ).

Interesting correlations have been suggested between neocortical size and social cognitive skills (Byrne, 1995 ; Reader and Laland, 2002 ), and this extends to musical calls. It is the also the expansion of cephalic functions that underlie the tool use that make musical instrumentalism possible. An expanded cortical/motor system with diverse cognitive capacities is no doubt pivotal to our evolutionary ascent and to the musical instruments that we developed to facilitate social interaction (Reader and Laland, 2002 ; Barton, 2004 ; Schulkin, 2007 ). A broad based set of findings in non-primates has also linked social complexity to larger brain size (Byrne and Corp, 2004 ). Technology, including musical objects, is an extension of ourselves that expands what we explore (Heelan and Schulkin, 1998 ; Lakoff and Johnson, 1999 ), facilitating plasticity of expression and long term social bonds.

Two important pathways in the central nervous system underlie how we ascertain where an object is located and what it may be (Ungerleider and Mishkin, 1982 ). This segmentation is tied to sound and song (Rauschecker and Scott, 2009 ). Moreover, neurons in the premotor region, located within the frontal lobe are contained to a large extent within Brodmann's area 6. This region is importantly involved in the direction of action (Kakei et al., 2001 ; Passingham, 2008 ) including musical expression and auditory input (Zatorre et al., 2002 ; Rauschecker and Scott, 2009 ). Moreover, diverse regions of the temporal lobe have long been linked to social perception, eye gaze, and tracking the vector of visual systems of others, and would also underlie musical expression (Rolls and Treves, 1998 ; Emery, 2000 ).

Williams syndrome, music and pro-social behaviors

Williams Syndrome is a genetic exaggerated pro-social orientation to the world, linked to the dysregulation of oxytocin that is tied to diverse forms of pro-social behaviors (Dai et al., 2012 ). As an example of the interrelatedness of musicality and sociality, individuals with Williams syndrome share a common genomic marker and other common features. Their full scale IQ is usually much lower than the general population, and they have great difficulty with numbers and math. Their spatial capability is quite poor, although their linguistic capability is often good (Landau and Hoffman, 2005 ). Interestingly, motion processing in individuals with Williams syndrome is not perfect but remains fairly good (Reiss et al., 2005 ), suggesting that the ventral stream linked to motion and agency is operative. But the hypersociality associated with Williams syndrome is its most marked feature.

Often described as having “cocktail party” personalities, individuals with Williams syndrome are exceedingly cheerful, associate easily with strangers, and hyper-focus on eye contact when socially engaged. Thus, while expressing deficits in some intellectual capabilities, individuals with Williams syndrome nevertheless have intact and highly evolved human expression, including a greater liking of music, and may have much greater than average expression of perfect pitch (See Table ​ Table1 1 ).

Various features of Autistic and Williams patients .

Source: (Levitin, 2005 ) .

Children with Williams syndrome show a general decrease in brain volume (Galaburda et al., 2001 ). Regions of the temporal lobe are, however, actually greater in Williams syndrome than in controls (Reiss et al., 2005 ), while the amygdala is decreased (Galaburda et al., 2001 ). The amygdala of such children seems to be more reactive than controls to diverse social events (Haas et al., 2009 ).

Preserved musical sensibility in individuals with Williams syndrome is remarkable. Several studies have shown a greater liking of music in these individuals than age-matched controls (Don et al., 1999 ; Levitin et al., 2004 ). Williams patients more readily engage in music than controls, while autistic patients show decreased perception of emotion in music (Levitin and Bellugi, 2006 ; Bhatara et al., 2010 ). The hyper-social feature overlaps with a tendency toward hyper-musical engagement (Huron, 2001 ; Levitin et al., 2004 ). This engagement includes increased frequency in looking for music, playing music, and expressing emotional responses to music. A sensibility for and a sensitivity to sound seem to be features of these individuals (Levitin and Bellugi, 2006 ).

The temporal activation to music in controls vs. Williams syndrome individuals demonstrates activation of the temporal gyrus and Heschl's gyrus, while also showing a more diverse and diffuse activation that includes the amygdala and cerebellum (Levitin et al., 2003 ). Moreover, oxytocin, a prosocial facilitating peptide, may be elevated in Williams syndrome, and like dopamine, may be elevated when listening to music.

Individuals with Williams syndrome have also been reported to have an expanded activation of the visual cortex. In a study using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain activity, individuals with Williams syndrome displayed greater visual cortex activation in response to music (Thompson et al., 1997 ). In addition, they showed diminished responses to anxiety associated with music (Dykins et al., 2005 ).

Cognitive/emotional context

Music is an affectively opulent activity, whether it is being created or consumed. Moreover, music is rich in information processing as we work to appreciate the subtleties of beat, form, melody, and harmony. The affective and intellectual complexity of the musical experience speaks to the underlying neurological structures in place to ensure human appreciation for, and creation of, novel music.

We come prepared with a cognitive toolbox that allows us to readily recognize animate objects, to sense time and space, to use language, and to discern agency in others (See Figure ​ Figure3 3 ).

A depiction of a toolbox as a metaphor for diverse cephalic capacities (Schulkin, 2009 ) .

Gibson ( 1979 ) suggested that there is direct cephalic access to environmental sources of information and practices in the organization of action. Thus, some questions are: what are the conditions for adaptation and what are the factors in the environment that allow for readily available resources? This view of cognitive resources is linked to the ecological/social milieu, to what is available, what is dependable, what is utilizable, as well as the ability to use and unload information into environments that expand, enable, and bolster memory function as core cognitive events (Donald, 2001 ; Hatten, 2004 ; Clarke, 2008 ).

Context helps to facilitate performance, musical and otherwise. Our ways of hearing and responding to music are steeped in the direct ecological exposure to and expectations about sound and meaning, as well as music and context (Clarke and Cook, 2004 ). It is this sense of grounding that makes features stand out so easily in music and enables the mutualism between the perception, action, and external events that are quite palpable in music sensibilities (Clarke and Cook, 2004 ). The events are always relative to a framework of understanding—a social context rich in practice, style and history.

As well as providing a basis for understanding musical expression, context also affords an anchor with which to develop memories and future expectancies about music (Donald, 1991 ; Noe, 2004 ). The expansion of memory facilitates the wide array of what we do, including music. The emphasis is on action and perception knotted together and coupled with musical events.

The study of music emphasizes its independence from language while tying it, like all of our cognitive functions, to a diverse set of cognitive capabilities. Moreover, common forms of mental representations underlie action and perception in musical performance and musical sensibility (Deutsch, 1999 ; Pfordresher, 2006 ). Music is not only linked to cognitive actions, but also to emotional responsivity and memory formation.

Adaptation, evolution, and music

From simple percusives to facile musical instruments, the tools of music represent a small leap for humankind. Diverse forms of art, tools, and probably music emerged in early Homo sapiens , and are evident in remains that date back at least 40,000 years (See Figure ​ Figure4) 4 ) (Mellars, 1996 , 2004 ).

Bone and ivory flute fragments from the Hohle Fels and Vogelherd caves in southwestern Germany (Conard et al., 2009 ) .

One cognitive adaptation is the capacity for the basic discernment of inanimate objects from animate objects. We represent animate objects, often giving them divine-like status, which infuses them with specific and transcendental meaning.

Musical instruments ultimately derive from this expanded cognitive approach to objects. A key artifact is something that is sometimes called a “sound tool” or “lithophone.” The oldest date back to some 40,000 years ago from sites in Europe, Asia, and Africa (Blake and Cross, 2008 ). Sound tools are simple stones that resonate when struck, as shown in Figure ​ Figure5 5 .

Flint sound tool, known as a lithophone, from the Victorian Era (Blake and Cross, 2008 ) .

While song is the earliest form of music, the cognitive and motor capabilities necessary for the invention of musical instruments are embedded in evolutionary cognitive development over time (Cross and Morley, 2008 ; Cross, 2009 ). After all, making objects, musical, and otherwise is a cephalic extension of the world beyond ourselves (Donald, 2001 ).

Darwin was prepared to believe that musical expression, as a particular universal human expression, is a feature of natural selection, linked to communicative function and sexual selection (Darwin, 1871/1874 ). Perhaps it is tentatively tied in origins to basic functions, but surely one wants to be respectful of these simple origins without being reduced to them.

Evolutionary trends are not necessarily unidirectional, as Darwin had suggested and had penned in one of his rather unaesthetic drawings. Evolutionary trends may be more like jumps and starts, punctuated by sudden changes (Gould and Eldridge, 1977 ; Foley, 1996 ; Wood, 2000 ).

One view of evolution is the hypothesis that language and speech emerged between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago (Lieberman and McCarthy, 2007 ), and artistic representation can be traced back to 30,000–40,000 years ago (Mellars, 1996 ).

Music, while frequently considered an art, captures the sciences in its generative process, and draws on human expectations. The cognitive architecture, the generative processes, the diverse variation and embodiment of human meaning within almost all spheres of human expression, are rich fields of discovery for both the arts and the sciences (Dewey, 1896 ; Meyer, 1967 ; Premack, 1990 ; Schulkin, 2009 ). This development of art and music was an important evolutionary step in forming the communicative scaffolding for social interactions that have become so crucial or our species.

Art, like science, is embedded in discovery, testing, experimentation, and expansion through technique. There is no divide between the scientific and artistic. They intersect quite readily and naturally as they expand the human experience.

Action, music, and the brain

Given the key role that music plays in our social world, it is perhaps not surprising that music activates broad neurological systems, and that cognitive structures are in place for receiving, understanding, and producing music. Important biologically derived cognitive systems are not divorced from action or perception, but are endemic to them (Peirce, 1878 ; Barton, 2004 ; Schulkin, 2007 ).

Lakoff and Johnson ( 1999 ) depict relationships between perception and action, which underlie all of music, with thinking, perceiving, communicating, imagining, etc. Music is an action, but can also permeate our imagination, whether it is heard by someone, or simply imprints on neural systems. Music plays inside our heads, and as we shall see, common neural circuits underlie the action of playing and hearing music, as well as imagining music in reverberation (See Table ​ Table2) 2 ) (Myers, 1905 ).

Relationships that underlie all aspects of musical experience .

Music is fundamental to humans as a species. Most of the expectations we have may not be explicit, since the vast array of the cognitive systems are not conscious (Rozin, 1976 ); imagine playing an instrument while being explicitly conscious of all that we have to do. Impossible (Sloboda, 2000 , 2005 )! Cognitive systems are vastly unconscious and underlie action as well as music. The inferences, expectations, and prediction of auditory events are not particularly part of our awareness, and certainly the mechanisms are not (Helmholtz, 1873 ; Temperley, 2001 ).

A core anatomy that includes a larynx (Lieberman, 1984 ) tied to systems which orchestrate movement featuring statistically related acoustical harmonics and periodicity is responsible for song production. These are bound to preferences for ratios and intervals between sounds via the modulation of the larynx (Ross et al., 2007 ). The expansion of the larynx, along with the development of cognitive/motor capability and “recursive thinking,” underlies speech, song, music, and other social communicative cephalic expressions (Corballis, 2007 ). These features figure in key adaptive responses that underlie our social capability (See Figure ​ Figure6 6 ).

Key features in the vocal capability of a chimpanzee (center) vs. a human (left, right) (Lieberman and McCarthy, 2007 ) .

Access to pre-adaptive systems makes a difference in diversity of expression (Rozin, 1998 ; Fitch, 2006 ; Lieberman and McCarthy, 2007 ). As one investigator put it: “The larynx is a source of acoustic energy, not unlike the reed in a wind instrument (Lieberman, 1984 , p. 317).” Communicative capabilities are endlessly opportunistic in the exploitation of existing resources with diverse and expanding uses.

More generally, auditory perceptual systems code and structure events for music within contexts of semiotic systems, which then further expand our capabilities for song. The evolving motor cortex, united with cognition and perception, underpin the production and appreciation of song (Lieberman, 1984 , 2002 ). Music as we know it could not have existed without cognition or the motor skills to create musical sounds.

Diverse forms of cognitive systems reflect brain evolution (Rozin, 1976 , 1998 ) with musical sensibility distributed across a wide array of neural sites, something that Leonard Meyer, an early exponent of a cognitive/ biological perspective, appreciated.

Imagining and music

Positron Emission Tomography (PET) measures blood flow and is used as a marker of brain activation. In studies that used neuromagnetic methods to measure cortical activity, the primary motor cortex is active both when subjects observed simple movements and when the subjects performed them (Hari et al., 1998 ). Of course the motor cortex is activated in a wide array of human cognitive/motor activities. Importantly, motor imagery is replete with cognitive structure and is reflected in the activation of neural circuitry (Rizzolatti and Arbib, 1998 ), and so auditory imagery is reflected in different regions of the brain, including anticipatory musical imagery (Rauschecker and Scott, 2009 ).

In another study focusing specifically on sensory events in a fMRI scanner, subjects were presented with spoken words via headphones. Then, in a second experiment the same individuals were asked to identify the words with silent lip-reading (Calvert et al., 1997 ). Not surprisingly, many of the same cortical regions were activated. In other words, hearing sounds is like imagining them.

Not surprisingly, hearing music activates many of the regions linked to auditory perception. However, regions of the auditory cortex are also activated when subjects are asked to imagine music or other auditory stimuli (Figure ​ (Figure7) 7 ) (Zatorre et al., 2002 ; Zatorre and Halpern, 2005 ).

A neuroimaging scan revealing that even in silence the auditory cortex, pictured here in the posterior portion of the right superior temporal gyrus, is activated (Zatorre and Halpern, 2005 ) .

Thus, despite the difficulty of knowing what people are actually imagining, one can dissociate hearing something from seeing it through diverse regions of the brain. Perhaps one is now in a better position to understand the genius of Beethoven; deaf for years, he must have heard music imaginatively to compose the way he did. Think of the cognitive complexity, the richness of the later parts of Beethoven's life. In fact, we now know that musical hallucinations are often a feature of acquired deafness such as Beethoven's (Zatorre et al., 2002 ). In addition, the links between audition and premotor cortex functioning mean that there is mutual activation, even in the absence of one or the other sensation (Baumann et al., 2007 ; Jäncke et al., 2012 ).

Of course, it also makes it somewhat easier to understand that the same “music to one's ears” may not be heard by one's neighbor. Beethoven is one thing, the rest of us quite another. Yet, the recruitment of cortical regions is generic.

Dopamine, neural circuits, and music

Dopamine is a central organizer of drives and rewards and is tied to music sensibilities imagined, acted, and expected (Zatorre and Salimpoor, 2013 ). The regulation of dopamine is, for behavior, a fundamental event. It is an ancient molecule dating back millions of years in evolutionary history and plays a critical role in the motor control of the nervous systems of all vertebrates.

Dopamine levels are linked to diverse motivated behaviors (Kelley, 1999 ). These links have led a number of investigators to connect dopamine to reward. However, dopamine neurons are activated under a number of conditions, including duress or excitement. The pain of performance rituals through rehearsal and the expected excitement of the musical experience in context with others, for instance, activate dopamine.

Dopamine underlies the feeling of effort (practice, practice, practice, and yet more practice), and the rational prioritizing of our goals. Dopamine is active, we suggest, under both positive and negative conditions. For instance, either when one approaches something wanted or needed or when avoiding something aversive, dopamine is involved. In addition, dopamine is uniquely activated by the musical experience (Salimpoor et al., 2011 ).

Diverse cognitive resources are embedded in musical performance to reach out to the audience: the social milieu. Of course, musicians have to balance a sense of reward with the pain that they might be experiencing. They have to withstand short-term discomfort and set their sights on anticipatory, longer-term satisfaction (Sterling, 2004 ).

Music is action oriented, whether literally in the movement or the virtuosity of a Liszt, or in the controlled building up to a crescendo and release as in “The Lark Ascending” by the 20th century composer Vaughan Williams (Kennedy, 1964 ). Action permeates music and dopamine underlies the action of thought and the diverse cognitive systems that orchestrate the embodied expression of music.

An interesting set of studies on dopamine neurons in the brains of macaques has suggested that one function of this neurotransmitter is the prediction of rewarding events (such as hearing music) (Zatorre, 2001 ); dopamine neurons tend to fire more in anticipation of rewarding events.

Interestingly, using fMRI as a measure of brain activity shows that the activation of the nucleus accumbens is a predictive factor in the ratings of music (Blood et al., 1999 ; Menon and Levitin, 2005 ; Zatorre and Salimpoor, 2013 ). In fact, greater activation has been linked to a higher likelihood of purchasing of popular music in the United States (see Figure ​ Figure8; 8 ; Berns and Moore, 2012 ). Dopamine is not simply a neurotransmitter underlying the brain mechanisms linked to reward. It is much more complex and context-specific, such that even when dopamine is blocked, animals can still “like” things (e.g., sucrose). Indeed, dopamine is more tightly linked to the motivational component of pleasure-related events, and can be separated from the predictive reward components, while some of the endorphins are linked to the ingestion of a reward.

The number of albums sold with the correlating activation of the nucleus accumbens (Berns and Moore, 2012 ) .

Musical experience and changing the brain

Evidence suggests that the brains of musicians and non-musicians are different (Münte et al., 2002 ; Jäncke, 2009 ). Music shapes the cephalic encoding of information processing across different levels of the brain, from brainstem to cortex (Satoh et al., 2001 ; Patel, 2007 ; Wong et al., 2007 ; Cohen et al., 2011 ). Indeed, early musical training affects children's linguistic expression, and perhaps they are more sensitive in neonatal development (Marin, 2009 ) and on multisensory functioning (Stegemoller et al., 2008 ). Moreover, musical training enhances auditory capability more generally by impacting cortical and subcortical regions (Tramo et al., 2002 ; Kraus and Chandrasekaran, 2010 ).

In one study, for instance, gray matter differed between the two groups in the motor, visual and auditory cortex (Gaser and Schlaug, 2003 ). This may be due to enhanced neural connectivity. One set of studies suggests that in the corpus callosum, the main commissures between the two cortical hemispheres are greater in musicians vs. non-musicians (Schlaug et al., 1995 ).

In addition, intra-temporal lobe connectivity is increased in musicians with absolute pitch (Loui et al., 2010 ; Jäncke et al., 2012 ). This means that hearing tones more acutely is associated with greater inter-temporal neural connectivity. Based on this information, it would appear that several regions of the brain are altered and/or expanded by the hours of musical practice typically exercised by musicians. In fact, the actual extent of regular musical rehearsal practice is positively correlated to the degree of neural connectivity. The auditory cortex and the auditory systems more generally are intimately tied to music and hearing, including speech and song (Zatorre et al., 2002 ).

Music is richly organized into lexical networks of musical meaning (Peretz et al., 2009 ). One suggestion is that the left hemisphere, especially the superior region and surface of the temporal lobe (Heschl's gyrus), is tied to speech, and the right side is tied more to tone (Peretz et al., 2009 ). In two studies, for instance, the gray matter in the right cortical area was significantly greater in musicians (Keenan et al., 2001 ; Schneider et al., 2002 ; Zatorre and Halpern, 2005 ) than in non-musicians in several areas, including the precentral gyrus and the superior parietal cortex (See Figure ​ Figure9 9 ).

Variations in Heschl's gyrus in the left and right hemispheres across three different groups (Schneider et al., 2002 ) .

The premotor regions and the anticipatory cephalic organization of human action are linked throughout to musical expression. Neural action between premotor regions, auditory systems, and motor output are pervasive in musical expression and the organization of action (Zatorre, 2001 ; Patel, 2007 ; Koelsch, 2011 ). The dorsal premotor region in particular is knotted to metrical musical sensibilities (Zatorre, 2001 ). Regions of the premotor cortex may be particularly activated in experienced musicians during the execution of musical actions (See Figure ​ Figure10) 10 ) (Bangert et al., 2006 ; Baumann et al., 2007 ).

(Left) Interaction of the auditory and motor systems during musical performance, and (right) associated premotor region changes in trained vs. non-trained musicians (Zatorre et al., 2007 ) .

The neural correlates of musical exposure and practice indicate that music affects a broad array of human functioning, and that our cortex is built to receive music, process it, and change based on this exposure. These changes occur across neurological domains such that music affects pathways of audition, speech, language, memory, motor expression, and more. These neuronal changes demonstrate the importance of music to human functioning and how broadly it impacts our structural anatomy, as well as our behavior and social functioning in the world.

Conclusions

Music makes clear that there is no mind-body separation. The rhythmicity of the brain, along with the development of cognitive capabilities, illustrates clear how inherent music is to our evolutionary and social success. This social link demonstrates that biological and cultural evolution are intertwined in music.

Based on this, we can predict that imagining music and listening to music would activate many of the same brain regions, which indeed it does. Additionally, music facilitates social contact and would therefore be linked to an expanding cortex, which indeed, cortical expansion it. We could further predict that music would contribute to social cooperative behaviors, and that genetic syndromes like Williams syndrome, with exaggerated social approach behaviors, would also reveal a greater propensity for music, a fundamental prosocial feature. Biologically, oxytocin, a prosocial facilitating peptide, may be elevated in Williams syndrome. Like dopamine, oxytocin may be elevated in listening to music.

Music emerged as part of communicative capability, a universal feature long noted and discussed (Juslin and Sloboda, 2001 ; Cross, 2009 ). Indeed Rousseau goes so far as to suggest “that the first language of the human race was song and many good musical people have hence imagined that man may well have learned that song from the birds (Rousseau, 1966 , p.136).”

Like language, the roots of music may be in the inherent shared features of our social brain, allowing us to communicate with others. Since its development, music has filled many other important roles for humans.

Music is a fundamental part of our evolution; we probably sang before we spoke in syntactically guided sentences (Mithen, 1999 , 2009 ; c.f. Pinker, 1994 ). Song is represented across animal worlds; birds and whales produce sounds, though not always melodic to our ears, but still rich in semantically communicative functions. Song is not surprisingly tied to a vast array of semiotics that pervade nature: calling attention to oneself, expanding oneself, selling oneself, deceiving others, reaching out to others, and calling on others. The creative capability so inherent in music is a unique human trait.

Ian Cross, a professor at the faculty of music at Cambridge University, has noted that facilitating the transmission of information across shared social intentional space is the pervasive social milieu; evolutionary factors are critical in understanding musical sensibility (Cross, 2009 ), specifying diverse social contexts in relationships. We use music because it expands our communicative social contact with one another. We also enjoy music even without obvious instrumental features. Music, like other features about us, became a worthy end for its own sake.

Music is about communication; our evolutionary ascent is the scaling of communicative competence, tracing constants of musical sensibilities to common points of origins of humanity and expansion of musical expression from this common source in prehistorical times (Grauer, 2006 ). But musical expression is about much more than that. Musical sensibility pervades our social space and our origins in synchrony with our interactions with others that are built on core biological propensities (Brown et al., 2004 ; Merker, 2005 ).

A series of steps set the condition for this core capability in our species. A change in the vocal apparatus, leading to a larynx of a certain size, shape, and flexibility, is but one example. A vocal capability tied to social awareness along with other cephalic capabilities, converged together in behavioral coherence.

The evolutionary record suggests that musical instruments were perhaps well expressed over 50,000 years ago in simple flutes and pipes (Cross, 1999 ; Morley, 2003 ) and were depicted in our art (e.g., on bison horn). What began as an extension of communication in a social context became something greater, which was enjoyed in itself. Our evolution is tightly bound to music and to the body as an instrument (e.g., clapping). Music, amongst other things, helps to facilitate social cooperative and coordinated behaviors (Brown, 2006 ).

Music permeates the brain as a core feature, from pitch and rhythm to tempo and affect (Patel, 2007 ). The melodies dance across our brain, memory guides them through our lives, and the tension and release, or resolution, form an outstanding aspect of the experience of many forms of music and neural processing of events (Steinbeis and Koelsch, 2007 ).

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare 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

This manuscript is adapted from my recent book: Reflections on the Musical Mind (2013) Princeton University Press.

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EDITORIAL article

Editorial: the impact of music on human development and well-being.

• 1 Department of Culture, Communication and Media, University College London, London, United Kingdom
• 2 Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Education and Applied Psychology, University of Padua, Padua, Italy
• 3 School of Humanities and Communication Arts, Western Sydney University, Penrith, NSW, Australia
• 4 Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Editorial on the Research Topic The Impact of Music on Human Development and Well-Being

Music is one of the most universal ways of expression and communication for humankind and is present in the everyday lives of people of all ages and from all cultures around the world ( Mehr et al., 2019 ). Hence, it seems more appropriate to talk about musics (plural) rather than in the singular ( Goble, 2015 ). Furthermore, research by anthropologists as well as ethnomusicologists suggests that music has been a characteristic of the human condition for millennia (cf. Blacking, 1976 ; Brown, 1999 ; Mithen, 2005 ; Dissanayake, 2012 ; Higham et al., 2012 ; Cross, 2016 ). Nevertheless, whilst the potential for musical behavior is a characteristic of all human beings, its realization is shaped by the environment and the experiences of individuals, often within groups ( North and Hargreaves, 2008 ; Welch and McPherson, 2018 ). Listening to music, singing, playing (informally, formally), creating (exploring, composing, improvising), whether individually and collectively, are common activities for the vast majority of people. Music represents an enjoyable activity in and of itself, but its influence goes beyond simple amusement.

These activities not only allow the expression of personal inner states and feelings, but also can bring about many positive effects in those who engage in them. There is an increasing body of empirical and experimental studies concerning the wider benefits of musical activity, and research in the sciences associated with music suggests that there are many dimensions of human life—including physical, social, educational, psychological (cognitive and emotional)—which can be affected positively by successful engagement in music ( Biasutti and Concina, 2013 ). Learning in and through music is something that can happen formally (such as part of structured lessons in school), as well as in other-than-formal situations, such as in the home with family and friends, often non-sequentially and not necessarily intentional, and where participation in music learning is voluntary, rather than mandated, such as in a community setting (cf. Green, 2002 ; Folkestad, 2006 ; Saether, 2016 ; Welch and McPherson, 2018 ).

Such benefits are evidenced across the lifespan, including early childhood ( Gerry et al., 2012 ; Williams et al., 2015 ; Linnavalli et al., 2018 ), adolescence ( McFerran et al., 2018 ), and older adulthood ( Lindblad and de Boise, 2020 ). Within these lifespan perspectives, research into music's contribution to health and well-being provides evidence of physical and psychological impacts ( MacDonald et al., 2013 ; Fancourt and Finn, 2019 ; van den Elzen et al., 2019 ). Benefits are also reported in terms of young people's educational outcomes ( Guhn et al., 2019 ), and successful musical activity can enhance an individual's sense of social inclusion ( Welch et al., 2014 ) and social cohesion ( Elvers et al., 2017 ).

This special issue provides a collection of 21, new research articles that deepen and develop our understanding of the ways and means that music can impact positively on human development and well-being. The collection draws on the work of 88 researchers from 17 different countries across the world, with each article offering an illustration of how music can relate to other important aspects of human functioning. In addition, the articles collectively illustrate a wide range of contemporary research approaches. These provide evidence of how different research aims concerning the wider benefits of music require sensitive and appropriate methodologies.

In terms of childhood and adolescence, for example, Putkinen et al. demonstrate how musical training is likely to foster enhanced sound encoding in 9 to 15-year-olds and thus be related to reading skills. A separate Finnish study by Saarikallio et al. provides evidence of how musical listening influences adolescents' perceived sense of agency and emotional well-being, whilst demonstrating how this impact is particularly nuanced by context and individuality. Aspects of mental health are the focus for an Australian study by Stewart et al. of young people with tendencies to depression. The article explores how, despite existing literature on the positive use of music for mood regulation, music listening can be double-edged and could actually sustain or intensify a negative mood.

A Portuguese study by Martins et al. shifts the center of attention from mental to physical benefits in their study of how learning music can support children's coordination. They provide empirical data on how a sustained, 24-week programme of Orff-based music education, which included the playing of simple tuned percussion instruments, significantly enhanced the manual dexterity and bimanual coordination in participant 8-year-olds compared to their active control (sports) and passive control peers. A related study by Loui et al. in the USA offers insights into the neurological impact of sustained musical instrument practice. Eight-year-old children who play one or more musical instruments for at least 0.5 h per week had higher scores on verbal ability and intellectual ability, and these correlated with greater measurable connections between particular regions of the brain related to both auditory-motor and bi-hemispheric connectivity.

Younger, pre-school children can also benefit from musical activities, with associations being reported between informal musical experiences in the home and specific aspects of language development. A UK-led study by Politimou et al. found that rhythm perception and production were the best predictors of young children's phonological awareness, whilst melody perception was the best predictor of grammar acquisition, a novel association not previously observed in developmental research. In another pre-school study, Barrett et al. explored the beliefs and values held by Australian early childhood and care practitioners concerning the value of music in young children's learning. Despite having limited formal qualifications and experience of personal music learning, practitioners tended overall to have positive attitudes to music, although this was biased toward music as a recreational and fun activity, with limited support for the notion of how music might be used to support wider aspects of children's learning and development.

Engaging in music to support a positive sense of personal agency is an integral feature of several articles in the collection. In addition to the Saarikallio team's research mentioned above, Moors et al. provide a novel example of how engaging in collective beatboxing can be life-enhancing for throat cancer patients in the UK who have undergone laryngectomy, both in terms of supporting their voice rehabilitation and alaryngeal phonation, as well as patients' sense of social inclusion and emotional well-being.

One potential reason for these positive findings is examined in an Australian study by Krause et al. . They apply the lens of self-determination theory to examine musical participation and well-being in a large group of 17 to 85-year-olds. Respondents to an online questionnaire signaled the importance of active music making in their lives in meeting three basic psychological needs embracing a sense of competency, relatedness and autonomy.

The use of public performance in music therapy is the subject of a US study by Vaudreuil et al. concerning the social transformation and reintegration of US military service members. Two example case studies are reported of service members who received music therapy as part of their treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injury, and other psychological health concerns. The participants wrote, learned, and refined songs over multiple music therapy sessions and created song introductions to share with audiences. Subsequent interviews provide positive evidence of the beneficial psychological effects of this programme of audience-focused musical activity.

Relatedly, McFerran et al. in Australia examined the ways in which music and trauma have been reported in selected music therapy literature from the past 10 years. The team's critical interpretive synthesis of 36 related articles led them to identify four different ways in which music has been used beneficially to support those who have experienced trauma. These approaches embrace the use of music for stabilizing (the modulation of physiological processes) and entrainment (the synchronization of music and movement), as well as for expressive and performative purposes—the fostering of emotional and social well-being.

The therapeutic potential of music is also explored in a detailed case study by Fachner et al. . Their research focuses on the nature of critical moments in a guided imagery and music session between a music therapist and a client, and evidences how these moments relate to underlying neurological function in the mechanics of music therapy.

At the other end of the age span, and also related to therapy, an Australian study by Brancatisano et al. reports on a new Music, Mind, and Movement programme for people in their eighties with mild to moderate dementia. Participants involved in the programme tended to show an improvement in aspects of cognition, particularly verbal fluency and attention. Similarly, Wilson and MacDonald report on a 10-week group music programme for young Scottish adults with learning difficulties. The research data suggest that participants enjoyed the programme and tended to sustain participation, with benefits evidenced in increased social engagement, interaction and communication.

The role of technology in facilitating access to music and supporting a sense of agency in older people is the focus for a major literature review by Creech , now based in Canada. Although this is a relatively under-researched field, the available evidence suggests that that older people, even those with complex needs, are capable of engaging with and using technology in a variety of ways that support their musical perception, learning and participation and wider quality of life.

Related to the particular needs of the young, children's general behavior can also improve through music, as exampled in an innovative, school-based, intensive 3-month orchestral programme in Italy with 8 to 10-year-olds. Fasano et al. report that the programme was particularly beneficial in reducing hyperactivity, inattention and impulsivity, whilst enhancing inhibitory control. These benefits are in line with research findings concerning successful music education with specific cases of young people with ADHD whose behavior is characterized by these same disruptive symptoms (hyperactivity, inattention, and impulsivity).

Extra-musical benefits are also reported in a study of college students (Bachelors and Masters) and amateur musicians in a joint Swiss-UK study. Antonini Philippe et al. suggest that, whilst music making can offer some health protective effects, there is a need for greater health awareness and promotion among advanced music students. Compared to the amateur musicians, the college music students evaluated their overall quality of life and general and physical health more negatively, as did females in terms of their psychological health. Somewhat paradoxically, the college students who had taken part in judged performances reported higher psychological health ratings. This may have been because this sub-group were slightly older and more experienced musicians.

Music appears to be a common accompaniment to exercise, whether in the gym, park or street. Nikol et al. in South East Asia explore the potential physical benefits of synchronous exercise to music, especially in hot and humid conditions. Their randomized cross-over study (2019) reports that “time-to-exhaustion” under the synchronous music condition was 2/3 longer compared to the no-music condition for the same participants. In addition, perceived exertion was significantly lower, by an average of 22% during the synchronous condition.

Comparisons between music and sport are often evidenced in the body of existing Frontiers research literature related to performance and group behaviors. Our new collection contains a contribution to this literature in a study by Habe et al. . The authors investigated elite musicians and top athletes in Slovenia in terms of their perceptions of flow in performance and satisfaction with life. The questionnaire data analyses suggest that the experience of flow appears to influence satisfaction with life in these high-functioning individuals, albeit with some variations related to discipline, participant sex and whether considering team or individual performance.

A more formal link between music and movement is the focus of an exploratory case study by Cirelli and Trehub . They investigated a 19-month-old infant's dance-like, motorically-complex responses to familiar and unfamiliar songs, presented at different speeds. Movements were faster for the more familiar items at their original tempo. The child had been observed previously as moving to music at the age of 6 months.

Finally, a novel UK-based study by Waddington-Jones et al. evaluated the impact of two professional composers who were tasked, individually, to lead a 4-month programme of group composing in two separate and diverse community settings—one with a choral group and the other in a residential home, both funded as part of a music programme for the Hull City of Culture in 2017. In addition to the two composers, the participants were older adults, with the residential group being joined by schoolchildren from a local Primary school to collaborate in a final performance. Qualitative data analyses provide evidence of multi-dimensional psychological benefits arising from the successful, group-focused music-making activities.

In summary, these studies demonstrate that engaging in musical activity can have a positive impact on health and well-being in a variety of ways and in a diverse range of contexts across the lifespan. Musical activities, whether focused on listening, being creative or re-creative, individual or collective, are infused with the potential to be therapeutic, developmental, enriching, and educational, with the caveat provided that such musical experiences are perceived to be engaging, meaningful and successful by those who participate.

Collectively, these studies also celebrate the multiplicity of ways in which music can be experienced. Reading across the articles might raise a question as to whether or not any particular type of musical experience is seen to be more beneficial compared with another. The answer, at least in part, is that the empirical evidence suggests that musical engagement comes in myriad forms along a continuum of more or less overt activity, embracing learning, performing, composing and improvising, as well as listening and appreciating. Furthermore, given the multidimensional neurological processing of musical experience, it seems reasonable to hypothesize that it is perhaps the level of emotional engagement in the activity that drives its degree of health and well-being efficacy as much as the activity's overt musical features. And therein are opportunities for further research!

Author Contributions

The editorial was drafted by GW and approved by the topic Co-editors. All authors listed have made a substantial, direct and intellectual contribution to the Edited Collection, and have approved this editorial for publication.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare 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

We are very grateful to all the contributing authors and their participants for their positive engagement with this Frontiers Research Topic, and also for the Frontiers staff for their commitment and support in bringing this topic to press.

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Keywords: music, wider benefits, lifespan, health, well-being

Citation: Welch GF, Biasutti M, MacRitchie J, McPherson GE and Himonides E (2020) Editorial: The Impact of Music on Human Development and Well-Being. Front. Psychol. 11:1246. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01246

Received: 12 January 2020; Accepted: 13 May 2020; Published: 17 June 2020.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2020 Welch, Biasutti, MacRitchie, McPherson and Himonides. 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) and the copyright owner(s) 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: Graham F. Welch, graham.welch@ucl.ac.uk ; Michele Biasutti, michele.biasutti@unipd.it

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.

Visiting Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion?

You must join the virtual exhibition queue when you arrive. We may not admit visitors near the end of the day.

Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

Music in the renaissance.

ex "Kurtz" Violin

Andrea Amati

Double Virginal

Hans Ruckers the Elder

Cornetto in A

possibly Georg Voll

Sixtus Rauchwolff

Claviorganum

Lorenz Hauslaib

Tenor Recorder

Rectangular Octave Virginal

Rebecca Arkenberg Department of Education, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2002

Music was an essential part of civic, religious, and courtly life in the Renaissance. The rich interchange of ideas in Europe, as well as political, economic, and religious events in the period 1400–1600 led to major changes in styles of composing, methods of disseminating music, new musical genres, and the development of musical instruments. The most important music of the early Renaissance was composed for use by the church—polyphonic (made up of several simultaneous melodies) masses and motets in Latin for important churches and court chapels. By the end of the sixteenth century, however, patronage had broadened to include the Catholic Church, Protestant churches and courts, wealthy amateurs, and music printing—all were sources of income for composers.

The early fifteenth century was dominated initially by English and then Northern European composers. The Burgundian court was especially influential, and it attracted composers and musicians from all over Europe. The most important of these was Guillaume Du Fay (1397–1474), whose varied musical offerings included motets and masses for church and chapel services, many of whose large musical structures were based on existing Gregorian chant. His many small settings of French poetry display a sweet melodic lyricism unknown until his era. With his command of large-scale musical form, as well as his attention to secular text-setting, Du Fay set the stage for the next generations of Renaissance composers.

By about 1500, European art music was dominated by Franco-Flemish composers, the most prominent of whom was Josquin des Prez (ca. 1450–1521). Like many leading composers of his era, Josquin traveled widely throughout Europe, working for patrons in Aix-en-Provence, Paris, Milan, Rome, Ferrara, and Condé-sur-L’Escaut. The exchange of musical ideas among the Low Countries, France, and Italy led to what could be considered an international European style. On the one hand, polyphony or multivoiced music, with its horizontal contrapuntal style, continued to develop in complexity. At the same time, harmony based on a vertical arrangement of intervals, including thirds and sixths, was explored for its full textures and suitability for accompanying a vocal line. Josquin’s music epitomized these trends, with Northern-style intricate polyphony using canons, preexisting melodies, and other compositional structures smoothly amalgamated with the Italian bent for artfully setting words with melodies that highlight the poetry rather than masking it with complexity. Josquin, like Du Fay, composed primarily Latin masses and motets, but in a seemingly endless variety of styles. His secular output included settings of courtly French poetry, like Du Fay, but also arrangements of French popular songs, instrumental music, and Italian frottole.

With the beginning of the sixteenth century, European music saw a number of momentous changes. In 1501, a Venetian printer named Ottaviano Petrucci published the first significant collection of polyphonic music, the Harmonice Musices Odhecaton A . Petrucci’s success led eventually to music printing in France, Germany, England, and elsewhere. Prior to 1501, all music had to be copied by hand or learned by ear; music books were owned exclusively by religious establishments or extremely wealthy courts and households. After Petrucci, while these books were not inexpensive, it became possible for far greater numbers of people to own them and to learn to read music.

At about the same period, musical instrument technology led to the development of the viola da gamba , a fretted, bowed string instrument. Amateur European musicians of means eagerly took up the viol, as well as the lute , the recorder , the harpsichord (in various guises, including the spinet and virginal), the organ , and other instruments. The viola da gamba and recorder were played together in consorts or ensembles and often were produced in families or sets, with different sizes playing the different lines. Publications by Petrucci and others supplied these players for the first time with notated music (as opposed to the improvised music performed by professional instrumentalists). The sixteenth century saw the development of instrumental music such as the canzona, ricercare, fantasia, variations, and contrapuntal dance-inspired compositions, for both soloists and ensembles, as a truly distinct and independent genre with its own idioms separate from vocal forms and practical dance accompaniment.

The musical instruments depicted in the studiolo of Duke Federigo da Montefeltro of Urbino (ca. 1479–82; 39.153 ) represent both his personal interest in music and the role of music in the intellectual life of an educated Renaissance man. The musical instruments are placed alongside various scientific instruments, books, and weapons, and they include a portative organ, lutes, fiddle, and cornetti; a hunting horn; a pipe and tabor; a harp and jingle ring; a rebec; and a cittern .

From about 1520 through the end of the sixteenth century, composers throughout Europe employed the polyphonic language of Josquin’s generation in exploring musical expression through the French chanson, the Italian madrigal, the German tenorlieder, the Spanish villancico, and the English song, as well as in sacred music. The Reformation and Counter-Reformation directly affected the sacred polyphony of these countries. The Protestant revolutions (mainly in Northern Europe) varied in their attitudes toward sacred music, bringing such musical changes as the introduction of relatively simple German-language hymns (or chorales) sung by the congregation in Lutheran services. Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525/26–1594), maestro di cappella at the Cappella Giulia at Saint Peter’s in Rome, is seen by many as the iconic High Renaissance composer of Counter-Reformation sacred music, which features clear lines, a variety of textures, and a musically expressive reverence for its sacred texts. The English (and Catholic) composer William Byrd (1540–1623) straddled both worlds, composing Latin-texted works for the Catholic Church, as well as English-texted service music for use at Elizabeth I ‘s Chapel Royal.

Sixteenth-century humanists studied ancient Greek treatises on music , which discussed the close relationship between music and poetry and how music could stir the listener’s emotions. Inspired by the classical world, Renaissance composers fit words and music together in an increasingly dramatic fashion, as seen in the development of the Italian madrigal and later the operatic works of Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643). The Renaissance adaptation of a musician singing and accompanying himself on a stringed instrument, a variation on the theme of Orpheus, appears in Renaissance artworks like Caravaggio’s Musicians ( 52.81 ) and Titian ‘s Venus and the Lute Player ( 36.29 ).

Arkenberg, Rebecca. “Music in the Renaissance.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/renm/hd_renm.htm (October 2002)

Additional Essays by Rebecca Arkenberg

• Arkenberg, Rebecca. “ Renaissance Violins .” (October 2002)
• Arkenberg, Rebecca. “ Renaissance Keyboards .” (October 2002)
• Arkenberg, Rebecca. “ Renaissance Organs .” (October 2002)

Related Essays

• Painting in Italian Choir Books, 1300–1500
• Renaissance Keyboards
• Renaissance Organs
• Art and Love in the Italian Renaissance
• Burgundian Netherlands: Court Life and Patronage
• Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi) (1571–1610) and His Followers
• Courtship and Betrothal in the Italian Renaissance
• The Development of the Recorder
• Elizabethan England
• Flemish Harpsichords and Virginals
• Food and Drink in European Painting, 1400–1800
• Gardens in the French Renaissance
• Joachim Tielke (1641–1719)
• Music in Ancient Greece
• Northern Italian Renaissance Painting
• The Printed Image in the West: History and Techniques
• The Reformation
• Renaissance Violins
• Sixteenth-Century Painting in Venice and the Veneto
• The Spanish Guitar
• Titian (ca. 1485/90?–1576)
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• Woodcut Book Illustration in Renaissance Italy: Venice in the Sixteenth Century

List of Rulers

• List of Rulers of Europe
• Central Europe (including Germany), 1400–1600 A.D.
• Florence and Central Italy, 1400–1600 A.D.
• France, 1400–1600 A.D.
• Great Britain and Ireland, 1400–1600 A.D.
• Iberian Peninsula, 1400–1600 A.D.
• Low Countries, 1400–1600 A.D.
• Rome and Southern Italy, 1400–1600 A.D.
• Venice and Northern Italy, 1400–1600 A.D.
• 15th Century A.D.
• European Decorative Arts
• High Renaissance
• Musical Instrument
• Northern Renaissance
• Percussion Instrument
• Plucked String Instrument
• Renaissance Art
• String Instrument
• Wind Instrument

Artist or Maker

• Amati, Andrea
• Amati, Nicolò
• Beham, Hans Sebald
• Cuntz, Steffan
• Hauslaib, Lorenz
• Rauchwolff, Sixtus
• Ruckers, Hans, the Elder
• Vell, Georg

Online Features

• The Artist Project: “Cory Arcangel on the harpischord”
• MetMedia: “Double” from the Sarabande of Partita no. 1 in B minor by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) and Gigue from Partita No. 2 in D minor by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)

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• 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

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• 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.

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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).

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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.

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The story of music is the story of humans

Where did music come from recent article discusses how music arose and developed.

How did music begin? Did our early ancestors first start by beating things together to create rhythm, or use their voices to sing? What types of instruments did they use? Has music always been important in human society, and if so, why? These are some of the questions explored in a recent Hypothesis and Theory article published in Frontiers in Sociology . The answers reveal that the story of music is, in many ways, the story of humans.

So, what is music? This is difficult to answer, as everyone has their own idea. "Sound that conveys emotion," is what Jeremy Montagu, of the University of Oxford and author of the article, describes as his. A mother humming or crooning to calm her baby would probably count as music, using this definition, and this simple music probably predated speech.

But where do we draw the line between music and speech? You might think that rhythm, pattern and controlling pitch are important in music, but these things can also apply when someone recites a sonnet or speaks with heightened emotion. Montagu concludes that "each of us in our own way can say 'Yes, this is music', and 'No, that is speech'."

So, when did our ancestors begin making music? If we take singing, then controlling pitch is important. Scientists have studied the fossilized skulls and jaws of early apes, to see if they were able to vocalize and control pitch. About a million years ago, the common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans had the vocal anatomy to "sing" like us, but it's impossible to know if they did.

Another important component of music is rhythm. Our early ancestors may have created rhythmic music by clapping their hands. This may be linked to the earliest musical instruments, when somebody realized that smacking stones or sticks together doesn't hurt your hands as much. Many of these instruments are likely to have been made from soft materials like wood or reeds, and so haven't survived. What have survived are bone pipes. Some of the earliest ever found are made from swan and vulture wing bones and are between 39,000 and 43,000 years old. Other ancient instruments have been found in surprising places. For example, there is evidence that people struck stalactites or "rock gongs" in caves dating from 12,000 years ago, with the caves themselves acting as resonators for the sound.

So, we know that music is old, and may have been with us from when humans first evolved. But why did it arise and why has it persisted? There are many possible functions for music. One is dancing. It is unknown if the first dancers created a musical accompaniment, or if music led to people moving rhythmically. Another obvious reason for music is entertainment, which can be personal or communal. Music can also be used for communication, often over large distances, using instruments such as drums or horns. Yet another reason for music is ritual, and virtually every religion uses music.

However, the major reason that music arose and persists may be that it brings people together. "Music leads to bonding, such as bonding between mother and child or bonding between groups," explains Montagu. "Music keeps workers happy when doing repetitive and otherwise boring work, and helps everyone to move together, increasing the force of their work. Dancing or singing together before a hunt or warfare binds participants into a cohesive group." He concludes: "It has even been suggested that music, in causing such bonding, created not only the family but society itself, bringing individuals together who might otherwise have led solitary lives."

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Guide on How to Write a Music Essay: Topics and Examples

Let's Understand What is Music Essay

You know how some school assignments are fun to write by default, right? When students see them on the course syllabus, they feel less like a burden and more like a guaranteed pleasure. They are about our interests and hobbies and therefore feel innate and intuitive to write. They are easy to navigate, and interesting topic ideas just pop into your head without much trouble.

Music essays belong to the category of fun essay writing. What is music essay? Anything from in-depth analysis to personal thoughts put into words and then to paper can fall into a music essay category. An essay about music can cover a wide range of topics, including music history, theory, social impact, significance, and musical review. It can be an analytical essay about any music genre, musical instruments, or today's music industry.

Don't get us wrong, you will still need to do extensive research to connect your opinions to a broader context, and you can't step out of academic writing standards, but the essay writing process will be fun.

In this article, our custom essay writing service is going to guide you through every step of writing an excellent music essay. You can draw inspiration from the list of music essay topics that our team prepared, and later on, you will learn what an outstanding essay on music is by an example of a music review essay.

What are Some Music Topics to Write About

There are so many exciting music topics to write about. We would have trouble choosing one. You can write about various music genres, be it country music or classical music; you can research music therapy or how music production happens.

Okay, forgive us for getting carried away; music makes us enthusiastic. Below you will find a list of various music essay topics prepared from our thesis writing service . Choose one and write a memorable essay about everyone's favorite art form.

Music Argumentative Essay Topics

Music essays can be written about an infinite number of themes. You can even write about performance or media comparison.

Here is a list of music argumentative essay topics. These edge-cutting topics will challenge your readers and get you an easy A+.

• Exploring the evolution of modern music styles of the 21st century
• Is it ethical to own and play rare musical instruments?
• Is music therapy an effective mental health treatment?
• Exploring the Intersection of Technology and Creativity in electronic music
• The Relevance of traditional music theory in modern music production
• The Role of musical pieces in the Transmission of cultural identity
• The value of historical analysis in understanding the significance of music in society
• How does exposing listeners to different genres of music break down barriers
• Exploring the cognitive effects of music on human brain development
• The therapeutic potential of music in treating mental disorders

Why is Music Important Essay Topics

Do you know which essay thrills our team the most? The importance of music in life essay. We put our minds together and came up with a list of topics about why music is so central to human life. Start writing why is music important essay, and we guarantee you that you will be surprised by how much fun you had crafting it.  

• Popular Music and its Role in shaping cultural trends
• Music as a metaphorical language for expressing emotions and thoughts
• How music changes and influences social and political movements
• How the music of different countries translates their history to outsiders
• The innate connection between music and human beings
• How music helps us understand feelings we have never experienced
• Does music affect our everyday life and the way we think?
• Examining the cross-cultural significance of music in society
• How rock music influenced 70's political ideologies
• How rap music closes gaps between different racial groups in the US

Consider delegating your ' write my essay ' request to our expert writers for crafting a perfect paper on any music topic!

Why I Love Music Essay Topics

We want to know what is music to you, and the best way to tell us is to write a why I love music essay. Below you will find a list of music essay topics that will help you express your love for music.

• I love how certain songs and artists evoke Memories and Emotions
• I love the diversity of music genres and how different styles enrich my love for music
• I love how music connects me with people of different backgrounds
• How the music of Linkin Park helped me through life's toughest challenges
• What does my love for popular music say about me?
• How the unique sounds of string instruments fuel my love for music
• How music provides a temporary Release from the stresses of daily life
• How music motivates me to chase my dreams
• How the raw energy of rock music gets me through my daily life
• Why my favorite song is more than just music to me

Need a Music Essay ASAP?

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Music Therapy Essay Topics

One of the most interesting topics about music for an essay is music therapy. We are sure you have heard all the stories of how music cures not only mental but also physical pains. Below you can find a list of topics that will help you craft a compelling music therapy essay. And don't forget that you can always rely on our assistance for fulfilling your ' write my paper ' requests!

• The effectiveness of music therapy in reducing stress and pain for cancer patients
• Does pop music have the same effects on music therapy as classical music?
• Exploring the benefits of music therapy with other genres beyond classical music
• The potential of music therapy in aiding substance abuse treatment and recovery
• The Role of music therapy in Addressing PTSD and Trauma in military veterans
• The impact of music therapy on enhancing social interaction and emotional expression in individuals with developmental disabilities
• The use of music therapy in managing chronic pain
• Does musical therapy help depression?
• Does music reduce anxiety levels?
• Is music therapy better than traditional medicine?

History of Music Essay Topics

If you love analytical essays and prefer to see the bigger picture, you can always write a music description essay. Below you can find some of the most interesting topics for the history of music essay.

• The Significance of natural instruments in music production and performance
• Tracing the historical development of Western music theory
• How electronic music traces its roots back to classical music
• How the music industry evolved from sheet music to streaming services
• How modern producers relate to classical composers
• The Origins and Influence of Jazz Music
• How folk music saved the Stories of unnamed heroes
• Do we know what the music of ancient civilizations sounded like?
• Where does your favorite bandstand in the line of music evolve?
• The Influence of African American Music on modern pop culture

Benefits of Music Essay Topics

If you are someone who wonders what are some of the values that music brings to our daily life, you should write the benefits of music essay. The music essay titles below can inspire you to write a captivating essay:

• How music can be used to promote cultural awareness and understanding
• The benefits of music education in promoting creativity and innovation
• The social benefits of participating in music groups
• The Impact of Music on Memory and Learning
• The cognitive benefits of music education in early childhood development
• The effects of music on mood and behavior
• How learning to play an instrument improves cognitive functions.
• How music connects people distanced by thousands of miles
• The benefits of listening to music while exercising
• How music can express the feelings words fail to do so 

Music Analysis Essay Example

Reading other people's papers is a great way to scale yours. There are many music essay examples, but the one crafted by our expert writers stands out in every possible way. You can learn what a great thesis statement looks like, how to write an engaging introduction, and what comprehensive body paragraphs should look like. 

Click on the sample below to see the music analysis essay example. 

How to Write a Music Essay with Steps

Writing music essays is definitely not rocket science, so don't be afraid. It's just like writing any other paper, and a music essay outline looks like any other essay structure.

• Start by choosing a music essay topic. You can use our list above to get inspired. Choose a topic about music that feels more relevant and less researched so you can add brand-new insights. As we discussed, your music essay can be just about anything; it can be a concert report or an analytical paper about the evolution of music.
• Continue by researching the topic. Gather all the relevant materials and information for your essay on music and start taking notes. You can use these notes as building blocks for the paper. Be prepared; even for short essays, you may need to read books and long articles.
• Once you have all the necessary information, the ideas in your head will start to take shape. The next step is to develop a thesis statement out of all the ideas you have in your head. A thesis statement is a must as it informs readers what the entire music essay is about. Don't be afraid to be bold in your statement; new outlooks are always appreciated.
• Next, you'll need a music essay introduction. Here you introduce the readers to the context and background information about the research topic. It should be clear, brief, and engaging. You should set the tone of your essay from the very beginning. Don't forget the introduction is where the thesis statement goes.
• One of the most important parts of essay writing is crafting a central body paragraph about music. This is where you elaborate on your thesis, make main points, and support them with the evidence you gathered beforehand. Remember, your music essay should be well structured and depict a clear picture of your ideas.
• Next, you will need to come up with an ideal closing paragraph. Here you will need to once again revisit the main points in your music essay, restate them in a logical manner and give the readers your final thoughts.
• Don't forget to proofread your college essay. Whether you write a long or short essay on music, there will be grammatical and factual errors. Revise and look through your writing with a critical mind. You may find that some parts need rewriting.

Key Takeaways

Music essays are a pleasure to write and read. There are so many topics and themes to choose from, and if you follow our How to Write a Music Essay guide, you are guaranteed to craft a top-notch essay every time.

Be bold when selecting a subject even when unsure what is research essay topic on music, take the writing process easy, follow the academic standards, and you are good to go. Use our music essay sample to challenge yourself and write a professional paper. 

If you feel stuck and have no time our team of expert writers is always ready to give you help from all subject ( medical school personal statement school help ). Visit our website, submit your ' write my research paper ' request and a guaranteed A+ essay will be on your way in just one click.

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FAQs on Writing a Music Essay

Though music essay writing is not the hardest job on the planet, there are still some questions that often pop up. Now that you have a writing guide and a list of essay topics about music, it's time to address the remaining inquiries. Keep reading to find the answers to the frequently asked questions. 

Should Artists' Music be Used in Advertising?

What type of music is best for writing an essay, why do people love music, related articles.

The evolution of music: How genres rise and fall over time

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Our understanding of the cultural shifts in popular music have largely been reliant on anecdote and history -- memories of journalists who attended Woodstock or fans who followed hip-hop from the start. Until now .

Working with digitized music files, a team of scientists led by Matthias Mauch at Queen Mary University of London analyzed roughly 17,000 songs that charted on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 between 1960 and 2010. Taking note of digital elements in the songs known to correspond with certain chord patterns, rhythms and tonal characteristics -- think "no chords," "dominant 7th chords," or "calm, quiet, mellow" -- they were able to organize the songs into 13 different categories, which roughly correspond with musical genres.

Related: Scientists make surprising discovery about pop music's evolutionary history

The chart below shows the popularity of the 13 computer-generated categories over time. Greater thickness indicates a larger number of songs in a category in a given year. Descriptive labels, which give an idea of the genres the categories represent, were compiled from descriptions users of the music discovery tool Last.fm assigned to songs in each category.

Interactive: See how 50 years of pop music have evolved

Hip-hop, rap, gangsta rap, old school

Easy listening, country, love songs, piano

Love songs, slow jams, soul, folk

Country, classic country, folk, rockabilly

Classic rock, country, rock, singer-songwriter

Rock, classic rock, pop, new wave

Rock, hard rock, alternative, classic rock

Female vocal, pop, R&B, Motown

Funk, blues, jazz, soul

Dance, new wave, pop, electronic

Funk, blues, dance, blues rock

Northern soul, soul, hip-hop, dance

Soul, R&B, funk, disco

Source: “The Evolution of Popular Music: USA 1960-2010,” by researchers at Queen Mary University of London, in Royal Society Open Science

Follow @kyleykim on Twitter.

Kyle Kim worked as a graphics and data journalist for the Los Angeles Times from 2014 to 2020. His work won top awards from the Society for News Design, Malofiej and the Los Angeles Press Club and is published in an edition of “The Best American Infographics.”

Music and Its Impact on Our Lives Essay (Critical Writing)

No one can even imagine our life without music. For centuries it was an integral part of our everyday life, our traditions and culture. Listening to the charming sounds of nature, man could not help trying to reproduce it in order to enjoy music at any time. That was the reason for the first primitive musical instruments to appear. Since that time music and mankind were never torn apart. With the development of the society the instruments and the whole music changed. The mankind and music were always at the same stage of development. Starting with the mysterious melodies of the ancient cults and ending with the energetic military marches. Music follows humanity step by step, working its magic on it, showing its power. The ability of music to influence human consciousness was known from the earliest stages of development of the society.

Relaxing and calming at the beginning, it can become energetic and aggressive just in a moment, causing great changes in your mood. “Without even thinking about it, we use music to create desired moods- to make us happy, to enjoy movement and dance, to energize, to bring back powerful memories, to help us relax and focus. Music is a powerful tool for our personal expression within our daily lives– it helps “set the scene” for many important experiences” (Brewer, n.d., para. 2). Music can even serve as a basis for peoples segregation, dividing them into the different social groups according to their preferences or abilities to understand a certain type of music. Nothing could create the appropriate atmosphere better than music. The church music can serve as an ideal example of it. Religions all over the world use the music in the rituals in order to maximize the influence on people and help them to achieve eupathy and humility. Nowadays, with an unrestricted access to the sources, music has conquered the world, sounding from everywhere, suggesting the great variety of genres for any demands. Everyone could find something up to his or her taste.

Talking about my life it is impossible not to mention music. It is a huge part of my everyday routine. My day starts and ends with it. Early in the morning it is quite vital for me to listen to a portion of a good energetic music in order to get up and have a charge for a long day. But it is not enough of course. Like a real melomaniac, I always take my player with me. I have noticed the great growth of my productivity if I do something with music in background. The type of chosen music depends on the type of the job I have to do. If there is some kind of a physical activity I need some fast and energetic music. However, when some sort of mental activity is demanded, I need some calm, not very loud music playing somewhere in the background. This is by no means a panacea for everyone who wants to raise their productivity , but I cannot imagine me working without music

Having come home late at evening, it is just necessary for me to listen to another portion of music in order to relax and forget about all the stresses of the outside world. I even go to bed with the headphones in my ears, listening to my special “good night” song.

Taking into account the fact that I am a great admirer of rock music, it is not difficult to guess that all my friends are great admirers of it to. I am more than sure that common tastes in music are the good basis for friendly relations. This is not only the question of having something to discuss or to listen to together. If a person has the same preferences in music that means that he has something in common with your inner world and with your soul. Of course, there is that type of music that you will never listen with your friends. It is that kind of music which affects the deepest parts of your soul and you can only listen to it while keeping to yourself. At that moments no one is allowed to trouble you.

Music also has a great impact on the way we communicate within our company. The excessive tension or some miscommunication in relations can be easily dispersed by means of music. The sounds of the familiar song cool heads and return friendly atmosphere.

There is one more aspect of music which is worth mentioning. It is its lyrics. Being not less ancient part of our culture than music, the word has even more influence on peoples hearts and minds. The combination of such powerful remedies gives a marvelous results. This combination of sounds and words affects all your senses, penetrating deep inside your soul. Looking through the lyrics of my favorite songs, I can say that the text is of the same importance as music in the song. While listening to it for the first time you pay special attention to lyrics, especially if it resonates with your mood. The song runs in your head and you repeat it over and over, enjoining the harmony of the words and your soul.

The most common topic for all songs is, of course, relations of any kind. It is the basis of human life and music, as an integral part of it, cannot stand off. Love and hatred, faith and betrayal, and all others shades of human feelings are praised in thousands of songs. The mans attempts to find his reason to live should also be mentioned. The great number of songs is devoted to that problem, making people think or helping them to find an answer. One of my favorite songs “ The Show Must Go On ” by Queen (Queen 1990) is also one of the best compositions touching the problem of self-determination. While listening to it you cannot but feel the great suffering of a man who realizes the duality of his inner world and necessity of playing the annoying part. The Freddie Mercurys heart cry makes the great effect on the listener, making you think about your own place in the world, the way you live and spend your lifetime and reconsider your values and priorities.

The love theme is also one of the especially beloved by lyrics authors. Everyone on this planet has its own favorite love song and I am not an exception. The great song “ Not Strong Enough ” by Apocalyptica (Warren 2010) tells us about the pangs of the love-crossed man who cannot be with his darling. The most dramatic moments of the lyrics are wonderfully emphasized by music, the most powerful beats comes with the most bitter worlds, projecting the singers and the authors mood on you, making you feel the same. That great interplay of words and music makes you shiver. Especially strong effect is achieved if the song correlates with your mood or life experience. In that case the song becomes a some kind of an anchor, which evokes certain memories and feelings connected with a certain life period. No matter where you are and what your feel, from the first beats of the song you will remember the first time you have listened to it and your emotions at that moment.

The love theme is a part of a bigger theme of gender relations, which is also quite popular in music. According to the generally accepted tradition there is some stereotypical pattern of behavior for both genders which is praised in the songs. Historically, man always strives for womens love, trying to overcome all the obstacles on his way. He fights the injustice, erases the boundaries of social or race segregation just to reunite with his beloved one. Music is a reflection of the mans thoughts that is why all this issues are blended in it, The artists want to share their feelings and experience with us, to warn and protect from the mistakes they made, to show that all the prejudices are only in our heads and we have to overcome it.

Summing it up, we should say that music is not just part of our lives, it is something bigger, and that determines our mood and emotions. It helps us to forget everything and enjoy one of the greatest gifts of nature – the sound.

Reference List

Brewer, B. (n.d.). Music and Learning: Integrating Music in the Classroom . Web.

Queen, (1990). The show must go on [Reordered by Queen]. Innuendo [7″, 12″, CD]. London, England: Metropolis Studios.

Warren, D. (2010). Not strong enough [Reordered by Apocalyptica]. 7th Symphony [CD]. Germany: Sony Music.

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IvyPanda. (2022, January 24). Music and Its Impact on Our Lives. https://ivypanda.com/essays/music-and-its-impact-on-our-lives/

"Music and Its Impact on Our Lives." IvyPanda , 24 Jan. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/music-and-its-impact-on-our-lives/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'Music and Its Impact on Our Lives'. 24 January.

IvyPanda . 2022. "Music and Its Impact on Our Lives." January 24, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/music-and-its-impact-on-our-lives/.

1. IvyPanda . "Music and Its Impact on Our Lives." January 24, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/music-and-its-impact-on-our-lives/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Music and Its Impact on Our Lives." January 24, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/music-and-its-impact-on-our-lives/.

• Chicano Music and Lyrics
• Listening to Good Music
• Lyric Essays: Structure and Content
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• Jay-Z and His Book Overview and Analysis
• Conductor Observation: Carlos Kleiber

• Area of Study E Playlist
• 1712 – Corelli Concerto Grosso
• 1750 Stamitz Op. 3 No. 2
• 1758 Stamitz Trio Symphony in E major
• 1759 C.P.E. Bach in E minor
• 1760 Filtz Sinfonia a 8
• 1760 Haydn No. 2
• 1765 Haydn No. 31
• 1768 Haydn No. 26
• 1770 J.C. Bach Op. 18 No. 4
• 1772 Haydn No. 47
• 1773 Mozart No. 25
• 1788 Mozart No. 40
• 1788 Mozart No. 41
• 1791 Haydn No. 94
• 1804 – Beethoven Symphony No. 3

1808 – Beethoven Symphony No. 5

1808 – Beethoven Symphony No. 6 (Pastoral)

• 1812 – Beethoven Symphony No. 8

1815 – Schubert Symphony No. 3

1816 – Schubert Symphony No. 5

• 1824 – Beethoven Symphony No. 9
• 1830 Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique
• 1834 – Berlioz, Harold in Italy

1850 – Schumann Symphony No. 3 (Rhenish)

1854 – Liszt, Les Preludes, No. 3

• 1874 Bruckner, Symphony No. 4
• 1875 – Smetana, ‘Vltava’ from Ma Vlast

1883 – Brahms Symphony No. 3

1885 – Brahms Symphony No. 4

• 1888 – Strauss, Don Juan

1888 – Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 5

• 1889 Dvorak – Symphony No. 8
• 1893 – Dvorak Symphony No. 9
• 1893 Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 6

1894 – Mahler Symphony No. 2

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Home » A Level Links & Resources » Development of the symphony

Development of the symphony

These pages offer a selective listening guide to some key milestones in the development of the symphony from 1750 to 1900 for the purposes of the Eduqas A level Area of Study A and in particular for writing the 15-mark essay. It is not a comprehensive history but a brief summary of works that can be used as examples for discussing the development of the symphony in the Classical and Romantic eras (a very short history of the symphony – external link ). Key Symphonic Repertoire Spotify Playlist

At the bottom of this page are a list of broad essay topics outlined in the specification and referred to in the detailed notes on each symphony.

Early Classical

The Galant style originated in France. In comparison to the late Baroque (Bach, Telemann, Handel etc.) textures and harmony were simpler and phrasing more regular. The style strongly influenced composers such as Johann Stamitz, C.P.E Bach and Haydn.

Johann Stamitz (study guide p. 47) was also the leading composer and conductor at the court of Mannheim , which became famous for its energetic rhythms, strong thematic material and powerful use of the orchestra. The influence of this sort of writing can still be seen in Haydn’s Symphony 104 (the driving tonic filler material after the first subject in the opening movement, for example).

• (1712 – Corelli – Concerto Grosso Op. 6 No. 4 )
• 1750 – Stamitz Op. 3 No. 2
• 1758 – Stamitz Trio Symphony in E major
• 1760 – Filtz Sinfonie Periodique No. 2
• 1760 – Haydn Symphony No. 2
• 1765 – Haydn Symphony No. 31 (Horn Signal)
• 1770 – J.C Bach Symphony Op. 18 No. 4

The Empfindsamer Stil  or ‘senstitive style’) is another early Classical movement, but one which made greater use of dramatic contrasts and chromaticism in order to provoke a strong emotional reaction in the listener.

• 1759 – C.P.E. Bach Symphony in E minor

Mature Classical 

Mature Classical is the term used to describe the music typical of Haydn , Mozart and early Beethoven . In this repertoire the Classical orchestra is established as is the four-movement pattern starting with a movement in sonata form followed by a slower movement, a Minuet and a lively finale. The relative predictability of the well-established patterns of Classical music allow composers to play humorous (or sometimes dramatic) games with the listener ( click here for some Haydn humour ).

Whilst Haydn’s earliest symphonies had tended to be relatively light-hearted showpieces, he started to incorporate more complexity and drama into his works as the symphony as a genre began to be taken more seriously. Influences of the literary Sturm und drang (storm and stress) movement can be found in certain works of Haydn, Mozart and  others around 1770. The music tends to be in stormy minor keys and use syncopated rhythms (it is worth noting that although this has been part of music history books for a long time, the dates don’t really add up for the literary style to have directly influenced the musical one as they emerged at pretty much the same time).

• 1768 – Haydn Symphony No. 26 (Lamentatione)
• 1773 – Mozart Symphony No. 25

In their later symphonies, Haydn and Mozart both added more instruments (in particular Clarinets, trumpets and timpani) and their harmony, use of contrapuntal devices and handling of symphonic structure became ever more bold and sophisticated.

• 1772 – Haydn Symphony No. 47
• 1778 – Mozart Symphony No. 40
• 1788 – Mozart Symphony No. 41
• 1791 – Haydn Symphony No. 94
• Haydn Symphony 104 Revision Video  Movement 1
• Haydn Symphony 104 Revision Video Movement 2 (Andante)
• Haydn Symphony 104 Revision Video Movement 3 (Minuet)
• Haydn Symphony 104 Revision Video Movement 4 (finale)
• [Haydn notes on Moodle ]
• Haydn 104 (with Paul Risman)

The works of Beethoven straddle the mature Classical and Early Romantic periods. Starting in the early 1800s Beethoven began to break new ground in several ways: length of movements, complexity, size of orchestra, increased energy and drama, and a dramatic narrative style. His symphonies were extremely influential, with composers taking their lead from different aspects of his works as discussed below.

One aspect of Beethoven’s music was the way it took the basics of the Classical style (simple diatonic themes, clear structures and emphatic cadences) and made them both monumental and dramatic (mostly by increasing the volume and the scale). This is seen particularly clearly in his third symphony, the ‘Eroica’ which begins with a simple theme based on arpeggios and turns it into a powerful drama. Beethoven’s famous fifth symphony is similarly monumental and the composer makes the blazing C major last movement the culminating triumph of a work that starts in a stormy C minor.

1804 – Beethoven Symphony No. 3 (Eroica)

Two other Beethoven symphonies that had a particular impact on later composers were his sixth and ninth. The ‘pastoral’ programme of the sixth symphony with its bubbling stream, storm and dancing shepherds inspired and helped justify those who wanted to bring more concrete drama and story telling into the symphony. The famous Ninth, on the other hand, was such a monumental work (ending with a huge choral finale) that many composers felt quite intimidated by the task of writing symphonies that could match up to it. It is also worth mentioning Beethoven’s Eighth symphony (1812) for its gentler minuet movement.

1823 – Beethoven Symphony No. 9 (Choral)

Early Romantic 

Early Romantic (up to around 1830 – discussed on p. 60 of study guide). Schubert and Mendelssohn are early Romantic composers who continued to develop the symphony, using a similar sized orchestra to Beethoven and continuing to compose within the conventional classical forms and styles. However, they were a bit more adventurous (particularly in harmony and structure) and both were masters of writing attractive, lyrical melodies. Mendelssohn’s symphonies often have an overall program but it tends to be quite vague (e.g. ‘Scottish’, ‘Italian’, ‘Reformation’)

1833 – Mendelssohn Symphony No, 4 (Italian) [see notes here: Mendelssohn Italian Revision Notes ]

1842 – Mendelssohn Symphony No. 3 (Scottish)

Later Romantic 

Later Romantic (1830 onwards – p. 62 of study guide). Berlioz , Liszt and later Strauss all pushed the boundaries of the traditional symphony with much increased programmatic content and development of the orchestra – in the case of the second two they largely abandoned the symphony in favour of the tone poem , which offered a freer form within which to unfold their ideas. Schumann and Brahms , on the other hand, largely developed their ideas within a more traditional symphonic framework as did the later Tchaikovsky . Some later Romantic composers took inspiration from the folk music of their countries, using dance rhythms and folk-like melodies ( Dvorak’s symphonies and Smetana’s tone poems are good examples). Bruckner and, slightly later, Mahler vastly increased the scale and proportion of their symphonies, with Mahler’s third, for example, weighing in at nearly 1 ½ hours, compared to a bit more than twenty minutes for a typical Mozart or Haydn symphony.

1830 – Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique

1834 – Berlioz Harold in Italy

1874 – Bruckner Symphony No. 4 (Romantic)

1875 – Smetana Ma Vlast

1888 –  Strauss Don Juan

1888 – Mahler Symphony No. 1

1889 – Dvorak Symphony No. 8

1893 – Dvorak Symphony No. 9 (New World)

1893 – Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 6 (Pathetique)

The detailed notes on symphonies are organised according to the following broad topics:

A) Overall form ( Revision video on Overall Form ) B) First movements / Sonata form C) Second movements / slow movements D) Third movements / Minuets E) Fourth movements / Finales ( Video Part 1 / Video Part 2 ) F) Development of the orchestra G) Development of harmony and tonality ( Video Introduction ) H) Humour, drama, narrative and programme I) Melody and theme J) Texture K) Rhythm L) Dance, folk and national styles M) Patronage and Commissioning

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