9. Is Music a Neutral Marker?

Or, more accurately: can we regard certain musical styles or characteristics as neutral markers? Before trying to answer that question, let me explain what a neutral marker is and why it's important. For anthropological geneticists, certain types of DNA, such as mitochondrial DNA or Y chromosome DNA, are especially useful because 1. they don't recombine in each new organism, as does most DNA, so the information contained in them remains essentially intact from one generation to the next; 2. the only way they can change is through random mutation, a rare event that can be used as a marker to identify different lines of inheritance, or lineages; 3. they are not, apparently, affected by natural selection, i.e., they are not thought to be associated with any diseases or other inherited traits that could provide an advantage or disadvantage of the sort that would cause certain types to survive while others die out, due to environmental, biological or social conditions. It is due to point 3, above, that the term "neutral marker" has been applied to them. In other words, because these types of DNA seem neutral with respect to any evolutionaly process other than random mutation, they can be used to trace ancestry with considerable accuracy. There are those, by the way, who dispute this, claiming they can indeed, under certain circumstances, be affected by selection, but that controversy need not concern us at the moment.

The question of the changeability of music over time has an interesting history in the field of Ethnomusicology. Initially, many of the pioneers seem to have uncritically assumed that all "primitive" peoples could be regarded as stone-age "relics" or, indeed, "living fossils," whose cultural practices, including music, could automatically be regarded as survivals, if not from the beginning, then certainly the very distant past. Various theories of musical evolution arose that focused on certain kinds of music from such groups, especially melodies that appeared especially "primitive," e.g., one or two note chants, sung solo or in unison, or else "pathogenic" outcries based on "tumbling strains," expressing primal emotional states. It was assumed that music must have begun with something more or less that "primitive," among the ancestors of "primitive" peoples and then developed over time, to add more notes to the scale, more sophisticated types of melodic structure and, ultimately, with the advent of Western Civilization, harmony and counterpoint.

As it became increasingly clear that little or no evidence existed to support such claims, that, indeed, both harmony and counterpoint could be found among so-called "primitive" peoples in many parts of the world, and especially when ethnomusicologists began thinking more critically about the whole process of tradition and change in music generally, there was a strong reaction against such thinking, to the point that the entire field of musical evolution, and much of comparative musicology, became highly suspect. When Alan Lomax presented Cantometrics during the mid-Sixties, he already had two strikes against him, because of the many years of pent-up resentment against an earlier generation that had become so focused on what looked like a hopeless task. I won't go into the history of Cantometrics here, but its rejection was at least in part due to a general movement away from comparative studies of any kind, in favor of so-called "contextual studies," where the primary focus was on the function of music and musicians, both traditional and non-traditional, within an individual, currently active, social group. From this viewpoint, music would not have been regarded as a neutral marker, because it was now assumed that musical practices would "naturally" change as living conditions changed, due to environmental factors, contact with other groups, the innovations of especially creative individuals, etc.

As I see it, this "new" (actually, no longer new) movement in Ethnomusicology, while valid in many respects, represented a serious over-reaction to what had come before, to the extent that the field seems to have lost much of its relevance for anthropology and social science generally. The contributions of ethnomusicologists have been all but completely ignored, not only by anthropologists and geneticists but cognitive scientists interested in the nature of music and its origins. As now seems evident, both the "old school" of comparative musicology and the "new school" of contextual studies suffered from more or less the same problem: unwarranted assumptions, based largely on intuition with little recourse to either evidence or logical inference.

To be continued . . .