What do you think?
Rate this book
A Million Years of Music: The Emergence of Human Modernity
What is the origin of music? In the last few decades this centuries-old puzzle has been reinvigorated by new archaeological evidence and developments in the fields of cognitive science, linguistics, and evolutionary theory. In this path-breaking book, renowned musicologist Gary Tomlinson draws from these areas to construct a new narrative for the emergence of human music.
Starting at a period of human pre_history long before Homo sapiens or music existed, Tomlinson describes the incremental attainments that, by changing the communication and society of prehuman species, laid the foundation for musical behaviors in more recent times. He traces in Neanderthals and early sapiens the accumulation and development of these capacities, and he details their coalescence into modern musical behavior across the last hundred millennia.
But A Million Years of Music is not about music alone. Tomlinson builds a model of human evolution that revises our understanding of the interaction of biology and culture across evolutionary time-scales, challenging and enriching current models of our deep history. As he tells his story, he draws in other emerging human language, symbolism, a metaphysical imagination and the ritual it gives rise to, complex social structure, and the use of advanced technologies. Tomlinson’s model of evolution allows him to account for much of what makes us a unique species in the world today and provides a new way of understanding the appearance of humanity in its modern form.
Starting at a period of human pre_history long before Homo sapiens or music existed, Tomlinson describes the incremental attainments that, by changing the communication and society of prehuman species, laid the foundation for musical behaviors in more recent times. He traces in Neanderthals and early sapiens the accumulation and development of these capacities, and he details their coalescence into modern musical behavior across the last hundred millennia.
But A Million Years of Music is not about music alone. Tomlinson builds a model of human evolution that revises our understanding of the interaction of biology and culture across evolutionary time-scales, challenging and enriching current models of our deep history. As he tells his story, he draws in other emerging human language, symbolism, a metaphysical imagination and the ritual it gives rise to, complex social structure, and the use of advanced technologies. Tomlinson’s model of evolution allows him to account for much of what makes us a unique species in the world today and provides a new way of understanding the appearance of humanity in its modern form.
368 pages, Hardcover
First published March 27, 2015
19 people are currently reading
332 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 12, 2019
A somewhat misleading title--this is less a work concerning music per se than an evolutionary theoretical treatise on technicity with music as a distant guidepost. Tomlinson offers a sweeping and convincing emergentist account of the early hominid developments which ultimately--though, as he contends, gradually and piecemeal--led to the practices of symbolic communication and music-making. His background as a professional musicologist serves as a novel position to critique the likes of Steven Pinker and his accolades, for whom music is not seen for its complex matrix of technical, social, behavioral and cognitive singularities, but as mere byproduct of language.
"A Million Years" serves too as a scientific engagement with the trajectory of technic-phenomenological philosophy brought to bear in Bernard Stiegler's "Technics and Time", incidentally furthering that work's general thesis ("the history of man is the history of technics") while bolstering some of its empirical shortcomings.
Stiegler argues that man as such (read: Dasein) does not exist prior to his externalization into technical objects, for temporality is constituted by the arrival of technicity. His line of argumentation is couched in terms of Husserlian time-consciousness: technology qua externalization marks the ability for future-oriented thought in "protention", or what Tomlinson calls "thinking-at-a-distance". Prior to protention, there is only the experience of a succession of now-moments, with no faculty for abstraction. Hence, the capacity to create primitive carving tools should then imply the presence of a protentive faculty, as following Gilbert Simondon, a technical object's abstract manifestation in an inventor's mind is pre-requisite for concretization.
What this phenomenological line of thinking neglects, however, is non-intentional technical behavior. Tomlinson argues with a dynamic-systems model that the chain of operations producing bilateral flint tools may well be ascribed to sedimented patterns of mimetic motor activity reinforced by an epicycle of socio-material interactions ("social" here understood as describing non-transcendental, nonsymbolically-mediated face-to-face interactions) over the longue durée. One then arrives at an even more radical contention vis-a-vis Stiegler: that technics precedes temporality.
"A Million Years" serves too as a scientific engagement with the trajectory of technic-phenomenological philosophy brought to bear in Bernard Stiegler's "Technics and Time", incidentally furthering that work's general thesis ("the history of man is the history of technics") while bolstering some of its empirical shortcomings.
Stiegler argues that man as such (read: Dasein) does not exist prior to his externalization into technical objects, for temporality is constituted by the arrival of technicity. His line of argumentation is couched in terms of Husserlian time-consciousness: technology qua externalization marks the ability for future-oriented thought in "protention", or what Tomlinson calls "thinking-at-a-distance". Prior to protention, there is only the experience of a succession of now-moments, with no faculty for abstraction. Hence, the capacity to create primitive carving tools should then imply the presence of a protentive faculty, as following Gilbert Simondon, a technical object's abstract manifestation in an inventor's mind is pre-requisite for concretization.
What this phenomenological line of thinking neglects, however, is non-intentional technical behavior. Tomlinson argues with a dynamic-systems model that the chain of operations producing bilateral flint tools may well be ascribed to sedimented patterns of mimetic motor activity reinforced by an epicycle of socio-material interactions ("social" here understood as describing non-transcendental, nonsymbolically-mediated face-to-face interactions) over the longue durée. One then arrives at an even more radical contention vis-a-vis Stiegler: that technics precedes temporality.
January 7, 2021
This is a peculiar book. As the other reviews say, the book is heavier on evolutionary theory than on music, which makes sense because his history ends as soon as bone flutes provide us actual evidence of music. Instead, it's a reevaluation of what various scientists have to say about the course of human development. The first few chapters discuss how various sorts of cognitive capacities needed for music---hierarchy, thinking in symbols, certain sorts of memory, etc---arose in evolution, and the last chapters hypothesize how these might have congealed into what we now call music.
A paradox of the book is why it needed the author it has. The author, Gary Tomlinson, was until this book better known a historical musicologist focusing on 16th (+-) century Europe. So, what benefit do we get from this book being written from his perspective, rather than from an evolutionist or a music psychologist? That's not entirely clear to me. Certainly he approaches the matter with a different set of priorities, and writes his literature review with a less rigorously-"scientific" audience in mind, which may well be contribution enough.
A paradox of the book is why it needed the author it has. The author, Gary Tomlinson, was until this book better known a historical musicologist focusing on 16th (+-) century Europe. So, what benefit do we get from this book being written from his perspective, rather than from an evolutionist or a music psychologist? That's not entirely clear to me. Certainly he approaches the matter with a different set of priorities, and writes his literature review with a less rigorously-"scientific" audience in mind, which may well be contribution enough.
December 20, 2020
One of the best books I have read all year.
I had to read this for post-graduate research. The hypothesis is convincing and bonds you to a more visceral, and primordial connection to music as a biological necessity; a dialectical opposition to the more often attribution of aesthetic appreciation of forms and symmetry’s. With such a reading the symmetry seems to be a serendipitous discovery, or a forced reading when enlightenment ideals came to reflect themself in the Viennese classism of German traditions.
It is one of those texts one would feel compelled to return to time and again to ponder what other responses might be cultivated toward the music we interact with every day.
I had to read this for post-graduate research. The hypothesis is convincing and bonds you to a more visceral, and primordial connection to music as a biological necessity; a dialectical opposition to the more often attribution of aesthetic appreciation of forms and symmetry’s. With such a reading the symmetry seems to be a serendipitous discovery, or a forced reading when enlightenment ideals came to reflect themself in the Viennese classism of German traditions.
It is one of those texts one would feel compelled to return to time and again to ponder what other responses might be cultivated toward the music we interact with every day.
June 1, 2015
This book's subtitle really should be the title. It's much less about music and much more about the general emergence of human modernity, which the author wishes to dive into in order to describe the emergence of music.
As an undergraduate, the book was challenging but also quite clear and relatively understandable. He presents his ideas well, typically defines his terms in a clear manner, and does not assume a large amount of outside knowledge for most of the book except when he gets a little excited when discussing other peoples' work.
I personally felt like his model was a little too emergent-ist, though I did like the way he thinks.
As an undergraduate, the book was challenging but also quite clear and relatively understandable. He presents his ideas well, typically defines his terms in a clear manner, and does not assume a large amount of outside knowledge for most of the book except when he gets a little excited when discussing other peoples' work.
I personally felt like his model was a little too emergent-ist, though I did like the way he thinks.
Read
November 28, 20251st of a trilogy on meaning. PURCHASE KINDLE.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews