| The history of music | |
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| Topic Started: Jul 9 2012, 04:46 PM (462 Views) | |
| faintsmile1992 | Jul 9 2012, 04:46 PM Post #1 |
A cat of a different coat
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I found this online, its interesting. http://music000001.blogspot.co.uk/2007/05/12-phylogenetic-tree.html "I'm going way out on a limb (no pun intended) in this post, offering a phylogenetic tree, representing my own best thinking so far, based to some extent on the Cantometric data, but also on other aspects of musical style that I'm aware of -- and some personal, though IMO well informed, inferences. It represents, I suppose, a rough summary of the hypothesis presented in my "Echoes" essay. There are many years of research behind this, so I do think it's meaningful -- but it is also somewhat subjective, i.e., not automatically produced by the raw data. I've been working on this for several months, tweaking it from time to time as new wrinkles occur to me. I've been reluctant to submit it anywhere for publication, 1. because I'm not completely sure how accurate it is and 2. because I may be one of the very few capable of fully understanding (and appreciating) it. Few ethnomusicologists alive today have paid much attention to such issues."  "Note the column on the right, a listing of various musical characteristics, mostly drawn from Cantometrics but not all. In the map I treat these as analogous to what geneticists call "haplotypes," grouped together by analogy with "haplogroups." [Correction (as of July 29, 2007): I now believe my terminology to be in error. The musical characteristics in this column are analogous to genetic markers, i.e., mutations, not haplotypes.] All "haplogroups" beginning with the letter A represent styles or style variants originating in Africa and surviving more or less intact in other parts of the world to this day. All those beginning with "B" represent styles that appear to have originated as the result of a major bottleneck, both genetic and cultural, that occurred during an early phase of the Out of Africa migration. (Bottlenecks are severe reductions in population, due to the splintering off of certain groups or some form of mass destruction due to a catastrophe of some sort, a famine, flood, war, etc.) For more on this, see my essay." "In the first little map, titled "Out of Africa," all the arrows are red, representing the five variants of the original "Pygmy/Bushmen" style (A1 - 5 on the Phylogenetic Tree) that, as I see it, must have spread along with the original "out of Africa" migrants, following Oppenheimer's coastal route, all the way to Sundaland and beyond, turning the corner around the Moluccas, I guess and then continuing north along the SE Asiatic coast. Mini-map 2, "Bottleneck Event," is an attempt to picture a catastrophic event that could account for the musical gap we find between Yemen and Myanmar, where little or no evidence of Pygmy/Bushmen style can be found today. According to Oppenheimer, there is a very similar gap in the genetic evidence, though, as I understand, not everyone agrees about this. As I see it, only some sort of catastrophe at some point from, say, 75,000 to 50,000 years ago, can explain all the very different musical styles we find in the world today, especially the styles represented in the phylogenetic tree as B2 and B3 and their derivatives. So this map, unlike any other I've ever seen, is not based solely on continuity, but contains an abrupt break, representing the effects of the bottleneck on the various surviving groups. Oppenheimer seems convinced that the Toba explosion can account for the bottleneck, but since that theory is controversial, I decided to present an alternative possibility that could have had a very similar effect, a Tsunami centered somewhere south of the "point" of India, occurring sometime between, say, 80,000 and 50,000 years ago. If in fact "Out of Africa" was a coast-oriented culture, then such an event could have wiped out all or almost all the various colonies strewn along the coast of the Indian Ocean -- but spared those who had already made it around the corner, to the coast of E. Asia and some of the Islands to the East of Sundaland. As I see it, this would explain a great deal about a lot of things, not just music." 
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Scientist - My findings are pointless when taken out of context. Media - Scientist claims "findings are pointless"  
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| Nam | Jul 10 2012, 05:16 AM Post #2 |
Senior Member
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What about the earliest flute with a full octave ?? |
FucЖeveriwon ..maybe like sun too, as if these tiny beings loved sunlight so much, they imitated the radiating sun, created their own architecture of sun worship. | |
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| Robert | Jul 10 2012, 05:23 AM Post #3 |
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Some of the worst cultural music I've ever heard. I can't think of anything worse. Obviously some bottleneck (and some manic hysteria/psychosis) caused something this terrible to form. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnPh3GGykaI[/youtube][youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1qPwHZ-Dqo[/youtube] And here is some of the best I've heard. Seems as though in the far east they began to experiment outside what seems natural for a human throat. It seems more like an insect almost but it's incredible melodic at the same time. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DY1pcEtHI_w[/youtube] Just a couple of cultural extremes that aren't prominent in any other cultures. Edited by Robert, Jul 10 2012, 05:35 AM.
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| Dewd | Jul 10 2012, 05:34 AM Post #4 |
Advanced Member
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Ah I thought this would go into music from ancient and classical times, not prehistoric. But very interesting nonetheless. Never thought of its spread that way. inuit throat singing mongolian throat singing tuvan throat singing |
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| faintsmile1992 | Jul 10 2012, 12:49 PM Post #5 |
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A cat of a different coat
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This .pdf has information about the flute. Worldwide history of the transverse flute Roger Blench http://www.rogerblench.info/Ethnomusicology/Papers/Worldwide/The%20worldwide%20distribution%20of%20the%20transverse%20flute.pdf Ethnomusicology of Africa. http://www.rogerblench.info/Ethnomusicology/Papers/Africa/Africa%20Ethnomusicology%20papers%20Roger%20Blench.htm Ethnomusicology of Asia http://www.rogerblench.info/Ethnomusicology/Papers/Asia/Asia%20Ethnomusicology%20papers%20Roger%20Blench.htm |
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Scientist - My findings are pointless when taken out of context. Media - Scientist claims "findings are pointless"
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| faintsmile1992 | Jul 10 2012, 03:19 PM Post #6 |
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A cat of a different coat
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The author of the dendrogram admits its speculative but its still interesting, look at B2a2 (Strophic song) is pan-European including the British Isles and also includes Central Asia, where the Indo-Iranians used to be a substrate. Its like strophic form correlates with the IE expansion, was handed down to Central Asian successor cultures, but lost wherever IE or post-IE nomads invaded somewhere like India or Persia where strophic form is not indigenous for the ethnic majority. Its sister group in B2a, defined as Phrased Solo, is B2a1 (Elaborate Solo). ts found in east and southeast Asia as well as India, West Asia, North Africa and Eastern Europe. Together they're a clade within B2 ("Breathless" Solo), with Siberia and Ainu outside B2a. I'm sure some of the clades here are through convergence, or through more recent acculturation (European influence etc). Its still surprising though archaic Old European(?) and Caucasus music is. Its also really interesting that A2 (Interlocked Hocket) is a subclade within A1 (Shouted Hocket), but A1 is essentially non-African. If this pans out, ethnomusicology doesn't strongly support OOA at all. |
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Scientist - My findings are pointless when taken out of context. Media - Scientist claims "findings are pointless"
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| faintsmile1992 | Aug 8 2012, 03:05 AM Post #7 |
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A cat of a different coat
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German Dziebel has more about this and about language origins. http://anthropogenesis.kinshipstudies.org/2012/08/the-evolution-of-language-and-music/ "Lomax clustered human populations into geographic regions showing strong similarities in their musical styles as defined by cantometrics (see below, Fig. 2, from Lomax, Alan. “Factors of Musical Style,” Theory and Practice: Essays Presented to Gene Weltfish, edited by Stanley Diamond. The Hague: Mouton, 1980, p. 39)."  "He interpreted it as a tree with two roots. One root in Siberia/Patagonia, with immediate offshoots into a) Nuclear America and Circum-Pacific (South America, North America, Australia, Melanesia) and thence into Oceania and Melanesia and into East Africa; b) Central Asia and thence to Europe and Asian High culture. The other root in African hunter-gatherers (Pygmies and Bushmen) with an offshoot in Early Agriculture. The Siberian-Patagonian style and its derivatives is characterized by “male-dominated solos or rough unison choralizing, by free or irregular rhythms and by a steadily increasing information load in various parameters – in glottal, then other ornaments, in long phrases and complex melodic form, in increasingly explicit texts and in complexly organized orchestral accompaniment” (Lomax 1980, 39-40). The Pygmy-Bushmen style and its derivatives are polyphonic, interlocked, more feminized (or at least with a balance of men and women in the ensemble), regular in rhythm, repetitious, melodically brief, cohesive and well-integrated, without ornamentation, with meaningless vocables and frequent yodeling. The world of traditional music is, therefore, sharply divided along the axes of male vs. female, monophonic vs. polyphonic, rhythmically regular vs. irregular, solo vs. multi-part, language-friendly vs. meaningless. But the macroareas defined by the Siberian-Patagonian and Pygmy-Bushmen roots are overlapping, with examples of Pygmy-Bushmen vocalizing popping up sporadically in Lithuania, Georgia, Vietnam, Papua New Guinea and Amazonia. One gets an impression that the Pygmy-Bushmen style is a relic survival in poorly accessible geographic areas such as the Ethiopian Highlands (Dorze), the Caucasus (Svan), Papua New Guinea and the Amazonian rainforest." "Victor Grauer, Alan Lomax’s one-time student and research assistant, has recently returned to active ethnomusicological research and decided to convert Lomax’s two-root tree of musical styles into a single-root tree which would reflect the population genetic trees produced in support of recent out-of-Africa model of human dispersals. He started off by re-arranging Lomax’s diagram above into a more clearly bifurcating tree and by renaming Lomax’s musical styles into a mix of descriptive labels (the Siberian-Patagonian root became “breathless solo,” Australian style “iterative one-beat,” the Amazonian version of the Pygmy-Bushmen style “canonic-echoic,” etc.) and number-letter combinations inspired by the “haplotypes” of population geneticists."  "The resulting single-root tree mimicked genetic phylogenies by showing a) the radical divergence of the Pygmy-Bushmen style of vocalizing from the rest of human musical styles; and b) the progressive loss of the rich properties of the Pygmy-Bushmen style (polyphony, open-throated singing, interlock, yodeling, etc.) as consequence of serial founder effects befalling humans on their journey out of Africa and into the Americas." "Primitive polyphony turned into monophony, multi-part singing into solo and unison, open-throats yielded to breathless, constricted and coarse vocalizing, etc. At the same time, new properties emerged (from Jordania’s point of view, under the influence of growing and positively selected speech) where previously there were none: for example, meaningless vocables turned into long phrases. As with Jordania, Grauer’s model makes sense but doesn’t have a proving power. At closer examination, it begins to conjure doubts. First, the compatibility between genetic trees and Graeur’s musical tree is far from perfect: in genetic trees, Pygmies and Bushmen don’t share a clade. Instead, as in Y-DNA, Pygmies fall into the same clade (BT) with the rest of humans, while Bushmen are outliers. If genes and music mapped well onto each other, we would expect Pygmies to share more cantometric properties with the rest of humans but not with Bushmen. But Grauer (“Concept, Style, and Structure in the Music of the African Pygmies and Bushmen: A Study in Cross-Cultural Analysis,” Ethnomusicology 53 (3), 2009) insists that Pygmies and Bushmen belong to the same musical tradition. Second, in most genetic trees, American Indians occupy downstream clades and it’s widely believed that the New World was colonized much later than other continents. But on Grauer’s tree we have American Indians represented in all clades (from shouted hocket in Hupa to breathless solo in Patagonia to iterative one-beat in North America). Third, Pygmy-Bushmen style has clear parallels in Papua New Guinea and South America, but genetic trees do not document any haplotype sharing between Sub-Saharan Africa, Papua New Guinea and Amazonia or the Andes. Finally, since the publication of Grauer’s tree of musical styles, new genetic evidence (Denosovan and Neandertal admixture in modern humans) has falsified the recent out-of-Africa with serial founder effects model of modern human evolution, thus leaving Grauer without the solid foundation in “hard data” that his theory once enjoyed. Genetics aside, there is nothing in ethnomusicological data per se that necessitates an out-of-Africa reading of the distribution of modern human musical traditions. First, the derived nature of monophony cannot be clearly documented. Australia is completely monophonic without any trace of polyphony. The fact that Pygmy-Bushmen style tends to survive in isolated pockets and geographic refugia does not mean that more wide-spread styles are all derived from it. It only suggests that Pygmy-Bushmen style may have been more prominent in the past. Just like “breathless solo” or “iterative one-beat,” also confined to relic areas, could have been. Second, although both Jordania and Grauer claim to have walked away from the old-fashioned evolutionary model of musical evolution from simple to complex, the subjugation of the whole of human musical history to one single trend of disintegration of a bundle of properties attested in African foragers sounds like the revival of evolutionism in its most primitive form. Third, if, as Fitch argues, music and language share the same kin communication base, then monophony cannot be a derived trait because lullabies (presumably primordial among humans) are of necessity monophonic. Hence, monophony and polyphony can both be ancestral because confined to different domains of human life. Fourth, many archaic monophonic traditions (such as “iterative one-beat” found in Australia and North America or breathless solo – the other root in Lomax’s model) are tightly linked to drumming, and drumming is an ancestral trait in humans homological with drumming in chimpanzees (Fitch 2006, 194-195). At the same time, polyphonic singing is often associated with complex musical instruments such as panpipes (again, attested from Sub-Saharan Africa to the Andes). Archaeologically, the earliest attested instruments (flutes dated at 36,000 years in Europe) are naturally simple. This may indicate that both vocal and instrumental polyphony must have undergone considerable progressive evolution since the Late Pleistocene. Fifth, it’s unclear if monophony and polyphony are as starkly differentiated as Grauer often portrays them. For instance, meaningless vocables are widely found in North America (tribes there were even known to outsiders by their most popular nonsense words) but solo and unison vocalizing dominate there. The loose and flexible structure of Amazonian “canonic-echoic” (from Grauer’s A clade) echoes the “free or irregular rhythms” of “breathless solo” (Grauer’s B clade). In fact Grauer acknowledges that there is a crossover between the two divergent musical styles taking place not in Africa, but in the Circumpolar region." "Sixth, the change from a more loose and flexible structure of “canonic-echoic” toward more regimented Pygmy-Bushmen style seems to be more natural than the change in the opposite direction." |
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Scientist - My findings are pointless when taken out of context. Media - Scientist claims "findings are pointless"
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