A Million Years of Music: The Emergence of Human Modernity (Zone Books)
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Music
A Million Years of Music: The Emergence of Human Modernity (Zone Books) Details
Review This is interdisciplinarity at the deepest level, not merely a surface-level engagement with passing trends in other fields. … A Million Years of Music is a crucial work which provides a fresh perspective on an old problem. It is, in many ways, the ultimate rebuttal of Steven Pinker's glib dismissal of music as a disposable pleasure stimulus. … Written with passion and great erudition, it demonstrates music's role as an essential part of human identity, rivaling speech.―MAKE Literary MagazineThe past two decades have…seen the development of a “biocultural” hypothesis for the origins and nature of the musical mind that looks beyond the traditional nature-culture dichotomy. … Here the origin of music is not understood within a strict adaptationist framework. Rather, it is explained as an emergent phenomenon involving cycles of (embodied) interactivity with the social and material environment. … Tomlinson's … approach … represents the current state of the art in the field.―Frontiers in Neuroscience…written in dialogue with evolutionary biology, cognitive science, palaeoarchaeology, and palaeoanthropology, [this] book is hardly a work of musicology at all, and many of its central claims will demand careful consideration from a wide and diverse academic community. Nevertheless, A Million Years of Music may be the most important contribution to musicology in its short history: in his historical purview and methodological blend of hard science and historiography, Tomlinson sketches a map of the future terrain which every musicologist will one day be obliged to explore.―Journal of the Royal Musical AssociationExpertly interweaving humanities and science, Tomlinson demonstrates how the answers to philosophical questions surrounding modern music can be discovered in their ancient origins.―Nature Read more Review This brilliant book offers the most convincing argument I have seen for how music came to be. If the model of biocultural coevolution proposed here is right, the explanation for music lies not in a simple adaptationist logic―that it was 'good' for us in some way. Instead, music arises from a beautiful spiraling dance between culture and biology extending across the deep history of humanity. In developing this complex and compelling argument, Tomlinson synthesizes a literature that spans both science and the humanities. A Million Years of Music is a model for how scholarship in the twenty-first century can be done.―Daniel Lord Smail, author of On Deep History and the Brain Read more About the Author Gary Tomlinson is John Hay Whitney Professor of Music and Humanities at Yale University, where he directs the Whitney Humanities Center. His books include Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others; Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera; and The Singing of the New World: Indigenous Voice in the Era of European Contact. Read more
Reviews
Erudite discussion. Magnificent
