Abstract

What and how does music mean? I suggest that the conditions of representation that allow for music to be apprehended as socially and emotionally meaningful are biologically grounded in our evolutionary history. Specifically, I propose that music emerged from the evolution of the human capacity for culture (Tomasello 1999, 2005), and is a means of creating joint attentions and intentions in order to achieve social goals. The evolution of a uniquely human form of social intelligence resulted in human symbolic systems such as music and language that give rise to an inherent phonocentrism (Derrida 1976), a perceived immediacy of vocally communicative sound. Although decades of ethnomusicological research have debunked the myth of music’s literal unmediatedness, I maintain that the experience of music’s immediacy, indeed the experienced immediacy of any symbolic communication, is what allows it to be intelligible in the first place.​

About the Speaker

Elizabeth is Professor of Ethnomusicology at the Peabody Conservatory of the Johns Hopkins University with a joint appointment in the Department of Anthropology. She is currently a Research Affiliate at the Centre for Music and Science and a Visiting Scholar at the Faculty of Music, Cambridge University, and a Visiting Fellow at Wolfson College. Her interdisciplinary theoretical interests and publications cover a broad range of topics, including music and evolution, feminist theory and gender, music and language ideologies, ritual, and music cognition.