The Enigma of Music, the Voice of Reason: "Music," "Language," and Becoming Human

"Music is an enigma."

Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works ¹

Evolutionary psychologist Pinker, musing on How the Mind Works, comes to the startling conclusion that "music is an enigma." What does music mean? Where did it come from? Is it an adaptation, or merely "auditory cheesecake" (534), a wonderful but purely accidental side effect of the adaptation that really matters, language? Pinker concludes that music is not essential to life as we know it; he confidently asserts that "music could vanish from our species and the rest of our lifestyle would be virtually unchanged" (528). Others, such as Geoffrey Miller, find the enigma of music less perplexing, proposing that music arose in the context of sexual selection, and hence evolved as a marker of reproductive fitness, making it among our most "useful" adaptations. ²

Whether "useless" or essential to human life, music's presence in contemporary evolutionary theories signals that it is deeply implicated in Western understandings of human uniqueness and claims to knowledge. Although music is tangential to the larger evolutionary debates, it is often offered as "proof" of the evolutionary continuity and/or discontinuity between humans and other animals, and is likely to be conceptualized as a missing link between animal communication and human language proper. Music's intermediary status between animal and human is mirrored in its ambiguous status as an adaptation, and hence its ascriptions as alternatively "useful" or "useless."

Music's equivocal status is also evident in its association with the emotional, the bodily, and the immediate, as opposed to the rational and cognitive character of language, a position which finds eloquent expression in poststructuralist characterizations of music as the feminine excess which spills beyond the contained masculinity of language. For example, Roland Barthes's rhapsodies on the "grain of the voice" grant a meaning to music that transcends the referentiality of language. ³ Similarly, Kristeva pairs music with the nonsignifying "geno-text," tying it to the prelinguistic infantile experience of the maternal voice. ⁴ Not surprisingly, the tensions between male/female, mind/body, reason/emotion, and human/animal are echoed in the inessential yet essential role of music in contemporary Western culture.

Indeed, and despite explicit claims to the contrary, the "music" invoked in most contemporary evolutionary theories is precisely the music described above, in other words, a music either coincident with or defined in reference to Western classical music dating from roughly 1750-1900, as practiced and understood in largely Euro-American contexts at the turn of the twenty-first century. This music, indeed all music, carries with it an ideology that consists of "[r]epresentations, whether explicit or implicit, that construe the intersection of [music] and human beings in a social world," ⁵ and therefore likely extends to domains of sociocultural knowledge and practice beyond music per se. In particular, it is proposed here that contemporary ideologies of Western classical music are implicated in evolutionary accounts of the emergence of human language. Susan Gal, although writing about language rather than music ideologies, gives a hint as to how this might be the case, noting that "ideologies that appear to be about language [and/or music], when carefully reread, are revealed to be coded stories about political, religious, or scientific conflicts; ideologies that seem to be about, say, religion, political theory, human subjectivity, or science invite reinterpretation as implicit entailments of language [and/or music] ideologies or as the precipitates of widespread linguistic [and/or musical] practices." ⁶ Reformulating Gal's comments to encompass both music and language, the principal task of this paper is to examine how stories about the relationships between music and language may be understood as "coded stories" about other areas of knowledge, and in addition, how scientific narratives about the emergence of human representational abilities are framed as "implicit entailments" of music/language ideologies. To begin to unravel the music/language knot in these contemporary evolutionary...