Toward a new comparative musicology

Abstract

We propose a return to the forgotten agenda of comparative musicology, one that is updated with the paradigms of modern evolutionary theory and scientific methodology. Ever since the field of comparative musicology became redefined as ethnomusicology in the mid-20th century, its original research agenda has been all but abandoned by musicologists, not least the overarching goal of cross-cultural musical comparison. We outline here five major themes that underlie the re-establishment of comparative musicology: (1) classification, (2) cultural evolution, (3) human history, (4) universals, and (5) biological evolution. Throughout the article, we clarify key ideological, methodological and terminological objections that have been levied against musical comparison. Ultimately, we argue for an inclusive, constructive, and multidisciplinary field that analyzes the world’s musical diversity, from the broadest of generalities to the most culture-specific particulars, with the aim of synthesizing the full range of theoretical perspectives and research methodologies available.

Cultural evolution of music

“…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).…”

“…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 crosscultural 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.…”

“…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.…”

“…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) 4 . Early comparative musicologists, however, relied on Spencer's notion of progressive evolution rather than Darwin's of phylogenetic diversification (Rehding, 2000) 5 .…”

Automatic comparison of global children’s and adult songs supports a sensorimotor hypothesis for the origin of musical scales

“…In recent years, researchers have increasingly used large cross-cultural music corpora to address the relationship between human capacities and musical systems, as opposed to analyses that focus on specific musical cultures [14]. Thus, in the present study, we conduct automatic analyses to directly compare children's and adult's songs objectively using a matched global sample to examine the relationship between human vocal mistuning and musical scale structure.…”