Music's role in the development of the human capacity for abstract thinking is persuasively traced through an original and virtuosic interdisciplinary narrative. -- Ingrid Monson, Quincy Jones Professor of African American Music, Harvard University To have modern philosophical conundrums about music traced back to their aboriginal origins is simply breathtaking, and Tomlinson crosses disciplines with such deep knowledge of so many, and such fearlessness, as to give new meaning to the idea of intellectual synergy -- Carolyn Abbate, Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser University Professor, Harvard University 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
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.
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 Magazine
The 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 Association
Expertly interweaving humanities and science, Tomlinson
demonstrates how the answers to philosophical questions surrounding
modern music can be discovered in their ancient origins.—Nature
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