Stages in the evolution of music

Benzon, William L.

doi:10.1016/1061-7361(93)90036-q

Cited by 8 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Regarding musical language, the discovery of harmony has often regarded as a key stage in the development of music (e.g., Spencer, 1890 ; Gilbert, 1920 ; Benzon, 1993 ), enabling wholly new domains of aesthetic experience. We might also listen to those composers and musicologists who have seen progress in terms of the development of a musical language, or in the way of thinking through music , as the addressing of certain “technical puzzles” ( Adorno, 2020 ).…”

Section: Does Music Improve Over Time?mentioning

confidence: 99%

From Beethoven to Beyoncé: Do Changing Aesthetic Cultures Amount to “Cumulative Cultural Evolution?”

et al. 2022

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Culture can be defined as “group typical behaviour patterns shared by members of a community that rely on socially learned and transmitted information” (Laland and Hoppitt, 2003, p. 151). Once thought to be a distinguishing characteristic of humans relative to other animals (Dean et al., 2014) it is now generally accepted to exist more widely, with especially abundant evidence in non-human primates, cetaceans, and birds (Rendell and Whitehead, 2001; Aplin, 2019; Whiten, 2021). More recently, cumulative cultural evolution (CCE) has taken on this distinguishing role (Henrich, 2015; Laland, 2018). CCE, it is argued, allows humans, uniquely, to ratchet up the complexity or efficiency of cultural traits over time. This “ratchet effect” (Tomasello, 1994) gives the capacity to accumulate beneficial modifications over time beyond the capacities of a single individual (Sasaki and Biro, 2017). Mesoudi and Thornton (2018) define a core set of criteria for identifying CCE in humans and non-human animals that places emphasis on some performance measure of traits increasing over time. They suggest this emphasis is also pertinent to cultural products in the aesthetic domain, but is this the case? Music, art and dance evolve over time (Savage, 2019), but can we say they gain beneficial modifications that increase their aesthetic value? Here we bring together perspectives from philosophy, musicology and biology to build a conceptual analysis of this question. We summarise current thinking on cumulative culture and aesthetics across fields to determine how aesthetic culture fits into the concept of CCE. We argue that this concept is problematic to reconcile with dominant views of aesthetics in philosophical analysis and struggles to characterise aesthetic cultures that evolve over time. We suggest that a tension arises from fundamental differences between cultural evolution in aesthetic and technological domains. Furthermore, this tension contributes to current debates between reconstructive and preservative theories of cultural evolution.

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Section: Does Music Improve Over Time?mentioning

confidence: 99%

From Beethoven to Beyoncé: Do Changing Aesthetic Cultures Amount to “Cumulative Cultural Evolution?”

et al. 2022

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“…Despite the famous claim made by Jelly Roll Morton (1890-194 1) to have invented jazz in 1902 (Berendt, 1983, p.8), unrecorded musicians such as Buddy Bolden (1877-193 1) and Jack Laine (1873Laine ( -1966 were active in the late 19th century, playing a brass marching bandbased style in which the instrumentation was very similar to the later jazz bands, and many jazz elements such as improvisation may have figured prominently. This phase of largely pre-literate expressive culture is what William Benzon (1993Benzon ( , 1997 has described as Rank 1.…”

Section: Stylistic Progression In African-american Musicmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Benzon's theory of Ranks is designed to apply to culture as a whole and not just to music (Benzon & Hays 1990;Benzon, 1993;Benzon 1996Benzon , 1997. Rank 3 is regarded as the level at which "Art" as a self-conscious process emerges, as opposed to the basic emotional expression of Rank 1, and the entertainment function of Rank 2.…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%