Title: The Origins of Musicality. Ed. by Henkjan Honing
Abstract: The Origins of Musicality asks the sorts of questions that fascinate students and the general public, but that more traditional musicologists have, in recent years, rarely ventured answers to: what is music, where does it come from, and why do we do it? Analysts, historians, theorists, and ethnomusicologists have, understandably enough, become hesitant regarding the broad and universalizing approaches explored by the generation of John Blacking, Deryck Cooke, Leonard B. Meyer, and Alan Lomax since musicology’s cultural and critical turn, with only Christopher Small’s Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Hanover and London, 1998) tackling the biggest questions head on and becoming influential for doing so. For better or worse, these questions are left to psychologists and biologists, who, when they seem to answer them, can pack out lecture theatres or even appear in the news. Traditional musicology, meanwhile, is rightly suspicious of broad conclusions drawn from small, ahistorical, and culturally specific studies, and of the sorts of essentialisms and determinisms that can haunt them.