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 Origins of Dance

“Whosever danceth not, knoweth not the way of life.”              - Christ in a Gnostic Hymn, 2nd Century

13th century BC Mycenean clay painting

 Origins of Music

“If I knew where songs came from, I’d go there every day!”      - songwriter Malvina Reynolds

   “The dance is the mother of the arts. Music and poetry exist in time; painting and architecture in space. But the dance lives at once in time and space. The creator and the thing created, the artist and the work are one and the same thing. Rhythmical patterns of movement, the plastic sense of space, the vivid representation of a world seen and imagined - these things man creates in his own body in the dance before he uses substance and stone and word to give expression to his inner experiences.

   The word art does not altogether express this idea. Indeed, one almost fears to use the word, for its present-day significance, exaggerated and at the same time circumscribed, is not sufficient to explain what the dance in all its richness really is. The dance breaks down the distinctions of body and soul, of abandoned expression of the emotions and controlled behavior, of social life and the expression of individuality, of play, religion, battle, and drama - all the distinctions that a more advanced civilization has established. The body, which in ecstasy is conquered and forgotten and which becomes merely a receptacle for the super-human power of the soul, and the soul, which achieves happiness and bliss in the accelerated movements of a body freed of its own weight; the need to dance, because an effervescent zest for life forces the limbs from sloth, and the desire to dance, because the dancer gains magic powers, which bring victory, health, life; a mystic tie binding the tribe when it joins hands in the choral dance, and the unconstrained dance of the individual in utter devotion to self - there is no ‘art’ which includes so much......

   .....In the ecstacy of the dance man bridges the chasm between this and the other world, to the realm of demons, spirits and God. Captivated and entranced he bursts his earthly chains and trembling feels himself in tune with all the world. “Whosever knoweth the power of the dance, dwelleth in God,” cries the Persian dervish poet Rumi impulsively. The dance, inherited from savage ancestors as an ordered expression in motion of the exhilaration of the soul, develops and broadens into the search for God, into conscious effort to become a part of those powers beyond the might of man which control our destinies. The dance becomes a sacrificial rite, a charm, a prayer, and a prophetic vision. It summons and dispels the forces of nature, heals the sick, links the dead to the chain of their descendants; it assures sustenance, luck in the chase, victory in battle; it blesses the fields and the tribe. It is creator, preserver, steward, and guardian.

   From its deep and far-reaching influence it will be apparent that in the life of primitive peoples and of ancient civilizations scarcely anything approaches the dance in importance. It is no art that disregards bread; on the contrary, it provides bread and everything else that is needed to sustain life. It is not a sin, proscribed by the priest or at best merely accepted by him, but rather a sacred act and priestly office; not a pastime to be tolerated only, but a very serious activity of the entire tribe. On no occasion in the life of primitive peoples could the dance be dispensed with. Birth, circumcision, and the conscecration of maidens, marriage and death, planting and harvest, the celebrations of chieftains, hunting, war, and feasts, the changes of the moon and sickness - for all of these the dance is needed. But it is not a question here of display and festivity in our sense. We know that in New Caledonia the merchants in the market ouse dance out in turn to show off their wares, and that the inhabitants of North Queensland pick lice off one another in a festive round dance. We read that the American Indian divorces his wife in the dance and when he is ill, dances himself to dispel the disease; further, that a chieftain in the Cameroons, condemned to death for revolt, walked up to the gallows singing and dancing, and that once, children danced the old romaiika as they threw themselves one after another into an abyss. Only when we take into account such examples do we begin to comprehend that the dance in its essence is simply life on a higher level............

........This is still not art in the usual sense. But art is included in this concept, provided it means the re-creating of things seen and heard, the giving of form and substance to the intangible and irrational perceptions of the half conscious, and the experiencing in the creative process of the divine rapture of another world and of self-forgetfulness. As early as the Stone Age, dances become works of art; and on the threshold of the Metal Ages, legend seizes the dance and raises it into drama. But when in [later] cultures it becomes art in the narrower sense, when it becomes a spectacle, when it seeks to influence men rather than spirits, then its universal power is broken. It disintegrates. Play and physical exercise renounce rhythm and break away, the drama itself denies its father, and the new religions become estranged from rounds and dances. What was left to higher civilizations, especially to the Eurpoean, was divided between guild art and social enjoyment. To pray with the feet like Gottfried Keller’s littla Musa, like the beautiful gypsy Preciosa of Cervantes, and like the old juggler who knew no Latin quotation to say to the Mother of God - all that is lost to us. But every high culture still has as a spirtual inheritance from a distant past, the lofty conception that all supermundane and superhuman motion is dance. Turning about in divine rhythm, Siva creates the world; for the Chinese, cosmic harmony originates in the dance; and late Jewish theology, indeed even Christianity, ever hostile to the dance, cannot visualize the lot of the redeemed except in a picture of an ethereal round about the shining throne of God.”  - Curt Sachs, World History of Dance

http://www.exoticindiaart.com/article/dance

   Any investigation into the origins of music will also involve ideas about human evolution, both biological and cultural, as well as music’s relationship to language. In the first half of the 20th century, this was certainly the case with the so-called Berlin School of comparative musicology represented by such great figures as Carl Stumpf, Robert Lach, Erich von Hornbostel, Otto Abraham, Curt Sachs, and Marius Schneider. But after the 40s the evolutionary approach fell into disrepute in a new age of ‘political correctness’ and a concern, however well-intentioned, to preserve the unique nature of diverse cultures. Musicologists and ethnomusicologists were walking on eggshells whenever trying to classify or compare musical styles and draw correlations to biological or cultural evolution. It was true enough that racial undertones and chauvinist attitudes needed to be purged from academia. It was a case however of the baby being thrown out with the bathwater. Unable to do its job, the entire field has been slipping into irrelevancy ever since.

   It is not only musicology that suffered either. Just as the study of the development of language has contributed so much to our overall understanding of human evolution, neurobiology, and cultural history, music has just as much to offer, perhaps more when we consider the broad spectrum of functions music performs in various cultures around the world and throughout history. While some comparisons between music and language are inevitable, there is much we still do not understand about the relationship. Because language can be traced to some extent in the archaeological record, we can draw parallels between an increase in brain capacity for example, and the rapid development of language. It’s not been as easy to trace music’s development through those same time periods however. Music does not fossilize as well. But we know now how extensively music involves many locations in the brain and can enhance learning. The editors of The Origins of Music explain how applying a “biomusicological” approach will not only enhance our understanding of music, but of our own evolution and cultural development as well.   - T.M.

In their own words;

“...it is time to take music seriously as an essential and abundant source of information about human nature, human evolution, and human cultural history.”

The Origins of Music edited by Steven Brown, Bjorn Merker, Nils L. Wallin, MIT Press (2000)

Below are excerpts from the Introduction by the editors of The Origins of Music along with some personal commentary;

“Music offers important insight into the study of human origins and human history in at least three principal areas.

First, it is a universal and multifunctional cultural behavior, and no account of human evolution is complete without an understanding of how music and dance rituals evolved. Even the most cursory glance at life in traditional cultures is sufficient to demonstrate that music and dance are essential components of most social behaviors, everything from hunting and herding to story telling and playing; from washing and eating to praying and meditating; and from courting and marrying to healing and burying. Therefore the study of music origins is central to the evolutionary study of human cultural behavior generally.

Second, to the extent that language evolution is now viewed as being a central issue in the study of human evolution, parallel consideration of music will assume a role of emerging importance in the investigation of this issue as it becomes increasingly apparent that music and language share many underlying features. Therefore, the study of language evolution has much to gain from a joint consideration of music. This includes such important issues as evolution of the human vocal tract, the hominid brain expansion, human brain asymmetry, lateralization of cognitive function, the evolution of syntax, evolution of symbolic gesturing, and the many parallel neural and cognitive mechanisms that appear to underlie music and language processing.

Third, music has much to contribute to a study of human migration patterns and the history of cultural contacts. In the same way that genes and languages have been used successfully as markers for human migrations (Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi, and Piazza 1994), so too music has great potential to serve as a hitherto untapped source of information for the study of human evolution. This is because musics have the capacity to blend and therefore to retain stable traces of cultural contact in a way that languages do only inefficiently; languages tend to undergo total replacement rather than blending after cultural contact, and thus tend to lose remnants of cultural interaction.”

The Science of Biomusicology

“The term “biomusicology” was coined by Wallin (1991). It comprises three principal branches, as described in the text: evolutionary musicology, neuromusicology, and comparative musicology. The synthetic questions that biomusicology addresses incorporate all three branches, as elaborated in the rest of the chapter. [There are as well] more practical concerns that fall under the purview of applied biomusicology (see text).”

“...each of these three major branches [of biomusicology] has practical aspects that contribute to what could be referred to as applied biomusicology, which attempts to provide biological insight into such things as the therapeutic uses of music in medical and psychological treatment; widespread use of music in the audiovisual media such as film and television; the ubiquitous presence of music in public places and its role in influencing mass behavior; and the potential use of music to function as a general enhancer of learning.””

Some Other Examples;

Reflecting on this brings to mind so many cases in music, as in art, where the composer/artist pushes the boundaries of the experience eventually punching through into an entirely new realm. From Charles Ives in the 1920s to Phillip Glass in the 1990s, there are countless examples of music that asks us to listen in an entirely new way. From Edgar Varese and his ‘musique concrete’ to the electronic synthesizers and the performance artists of the late 20th century. Even in other musical forms such as folk music and jazz, there is tradition and there is innovation. There is constant interplay between the two, at times an uneasy alliance such as when Bob Dylan took his folk audience into the clashing timbres of rock ‘n roll, or when Bruce Cockburn took his peaceful christian-folk audience into the dissident political activism of “If I Had a Rocket Launcher” and “Nicaragua”. Jazz is nothing if not experimental. Styles abound and its improvisational nature allows for all kinds of approaches to the musical experience. One would be hard pressed to come up with a definition of jazz that would embrace Dixieland, Sun Ra, Scott Joplin and Oscar Peterson.  

   Then moving to other cultures where there is not even a word for ‘artist’ or ‘musician’, where art and music are simply a part of the natural life, as obligatory and essential as fishing or farming, where the notion of a ‘professional musician’ would be unheard of. Or the chanting and drumming of ritual and meditation, the musician as priest, shaman, teacher, healer. There is such a range to the many forms of music that arriving at universals is indeed a challenging proposition. But a universal theory is exactly what the editors and contributors to “The Origins of Music” are after in order to better understand the biomusicological aspects of this amazing art and the many ways it affects human consciousness, evolution and cultural history.      - T.M.

“There are at least three possible interactive theories for the evolution of music and speech: that music evolved from speech, that speech evolved from music, or that both evolved from a common ancestor.”

“As a preview to a universal theory, let us just mention that octaves are perceived as equivalent in almost all cultures, that virtually all scales of the world consist of seven or fewer pitches (per octave), that most of the world’s rhythmic patterns are based on divisive patterns of twos and threes, and that emotional excitement in music is universally expressed through loud, fast, accelerating, and high-registered sound patterns.

There is clearly fertile ground for a discussion of structural and expressive universals in music (see Arom, Mche, and Nettl, this volume; Brown, submitted). It is simply wrong to say that a demonstration of musical universals denies anything of the uniqueness or richness of any culture’s particular forms of musical expression. If anything, it protects this uniqueness against ethnocentric claims that some cultures’ musics are “more evolved” than those of other cultures, claims frequently heard even in contemporary times.”

It’s not so much a question of ‘What does it sound like?’, but rather ‘What does it do?’

“The question what is music? is one that has no agreed-upon answer. For every structural feature that can be claimed as being a defining feature of music, one can always find (or dream up) a musical style that lacks this property. John Cage’s composition 4’33”, composed in 1952, is probably only the most extreme and postmodern example of this. (For those who do not know this piece, it consists of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of uninterrupted silence, to be performed by “any instrument or combination of instruments.”) Because of these problems in defining music in purely structural terms, ethnomusicologists have usually preferred to focus on functional contexts and roles: music as an organized cultural activity. However, this easily leads to the conclusion that music is simply whatever people consider it to be. Clearly, such a definition is too open-ended and culture-specific to be useful, which is why a consideration of musical universals (discussed below) is going to assume a role of increasing importance in biomusicology. Musical universals place the focus on what music tends to be like in order to be considered music, even if not every example has all the features of the majority of musics(properties such as sound in the case of 4’33”!).”

“Modernist classical music aside, the important biological question of how music evolved remains. Biomusicology is a discipline defined in part by its commitment to exploring the relevance of modern biological knowledge about the evolution and functions of animal behavior to the question of the origins of human music and dance, and this includes the rich treasure of theory and observation provided by behavioral biology on topics such as animal vocalization, communication, emotive expression, and display. Just as the lack of a clear definition has not prevented musicologists from advancing our understanding of music, so too lack of a categorical means of sorting animal “songs” from animal “calls” has not prevented biologists from learning much about the more structurally complex forms of animal vocal displays—whether called song or not—that might in fact be relevant to our attempts to understand the beginnings and foundations of music in the course of anthropogenesis. Since singing behavior emerged independently, and in a variety of forms, on several occasions in the animal kingdom (see Marler, Slater, Jerison, and Geissmann, this volume), the question arises as to whether any of these instances of animal song is capable of shedding light on the genesis of singing and music in our own species.There is no a priori way of excluding the possibility, for example, that our distant forebears might have been singing hominids before they became talking humans, and if so, that hypothetical fact would surely have some bearing on the way we approach the question of the origins of music.”

“As Erich von Hornbostel wrote in 1905: “The close correlation between language, music, and dance has already occupied the attention of earlier theoreticians. Spencer (1857) considered singing to be emotionally intensified speaking; for Darwin (1871), it was the inherited and mellowed remnant of the courting periods of our animal ancestors, from which language derived at a later stage; Richard Wagner (1852) believed that language and music issued from a common source, that of speech-music”(p. 270).

 Unfortunately, despite the age of this issue, it is still too early to predict its resolution. However, we suggest that a consideration of music will be central to any study of speech and language evolution in the future.”

‘Selection Pressures’ - in biomusicological terms, those forces, whether biological or cultural that contribute to determining how music will function in any given instance.

When we consider the broad spectrum of functions music plays in various cultures, past and present, we have to acknowledge that an equally wide range of ‘selection pressures’ must be responsible for the evolution of music in different times at different places. For example, the role music plays in courtship rituals in many societies, often compared to a similar role animal song performs in the animal kingdom, is an entirely different selection pressure from those that influence the rhythms of worksongs, or the way learning and survival is enhanced by the musical and vocal interplay that occurs between a mother and infant.      - T.M.