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| A fish only discovers its need for water when it is no longer in it. Our own culture is like water to a fish. It sustains us. We live and breathe through it. (Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner. Riding the Waves of Culture. New York: McGraw-Hill Publishing, 1997.) |
| The three great mysteries: air to a bird, water to a fish, humankind to itself. (Hindu proverb) |
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| What is music? What is the relationship between
music and culture? What are the bio-evolutionary origins of music?
From a biological perspective, what is the adaptive importance
of music? What are the models for music? What does music mean?
How does music mean? |
Purposes
To develop a cognitive framework and language describing the relationship between music and culture. |
Goal
To discover some of the ways cultural background and context shape how we think about music. |
Essay Question
If we are genetically predisposed to reproduce and
If the survival of our species depends upon the fittest replicating their DNA through natural selection, then
Why do we spend so much time and energy making music? |
Class Presentation
Select an example of music, bring it to class, and explain...
1. What this example represents for you and
2. How this example might represent you? |
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| Sources |
| Attenborough, David. 2002. "Song of the Earth." In Attenborough in Paradise. London: BBC. [DVD QH 45.5 A883 2007] |
| Blacking, John. "The Biology of Music-Making." In Ethnomusicology: An Introduction (Edited by Helen Myers): 301-314. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992. |
| Huron, David. "An Instinct for Music: Is Music an Evolutionary Adaptation?" The 1999 Ernest Bloch Lectures. University of California, Berkeley: Department of Music. <http://www.musiccog.ohio-state.edu/Music220/Bloch.lectures/2.Origins.html> |
| Nettl, Bruno. "The Art of Combining Tones." In The Study of Ethnomusicology: Twenty-nine Issues and Concepts (15-25). University of Illinois Press, 1983. |
| Wade, Nicholas. "Can It Be? The End of Evolution. The New
York Times (24 August 2003). |
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| Benzon, William. "Stages in the Evolution of Music." In Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems 16(3): 273-296, 1993. |
| Clynes, Manfred. "Generalized Emotion How it May be Produced, and Sentic Cycle Therapy." In Emotions and Psychopathology (edited by Manfred Clynes and Jaak Panksepp). Springer, 1988. |
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14 February, 2011
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