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

Abstract

Evolutionary psychologist Pinker, musing on How the Mind Works, comes to the startling conclusion that 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 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 knowl edge. 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 femi nine 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