What is the origin of music?

The study of the origins and purpose of music has been an active pursuit of musicologists and biologists for well over a century. Musicology, the loosely applied and broadly used term for the scholarly study of music, has evolved over the last 70 years to produce several new subfields of study.

In 1991, a Swedish biologist named Nils L. Wallin, coined the term Biomusicology, and the school of science that deals with the study of music from a biological point of view was born. The three main branches of Biomusicology are evolutionary musicology, neuromusicology, and comparative musicology. The subfield of Evolutionary Musicology contains the study of musical origins, and significant strides have been made in recent decades under this new field of study.

Darwin's theories of musical origin rested in his observations of the gibbon-apes use of musical cadence as a part of the mating ritual to attract the opposite sex. Darwin concluded that early man, therefore, must have first used music for the same purpose.

Edward MacDowell, internationally-trained composer, author, and the Chair of Music at Columbia University, considered Darwin's theory as "inadequate and untenable". In a speech given at Columbia, later published in 1912, MacDowell found more plausibility in the theory of Theophrastus, the successor of Aristotle, in which the origin of music is attributed to the whole range of human emotion.

In 1948, the German musicologist, Curt Sachs, declared that all mythological, scientific, and historical attempts to discover the origins of music are all wrong! He blasted the many theories then presented on a more or less scientific basis, which Sachs referred to as "speculative hypothesis" - the theories that "man has imitated the warbling of birds, the he wanted to please the opposite sex, that his singing derived from drawn-out signaling shouts, [and] that he arrived at music via some coordinated, rhythmical teamwork". If these theories were true, he asserts, "some of the most primitive survivors of early mankind would have preserved a warbling style of song, or love songs, or signal-like melodies". Science, Sachs admits, would prefer "the more substantial, indeed irrefutable proofs of prehistorians, who excavate the tombs and dwelling places of races bygone. But not even the earliest civilizations that have left their traces in the depths of the earth are old enough to betray the secret of the origins of music." While the archeological views of Sachs may ultimately prove true, the quest to unearth the origins of music continues.

In 1995, Ivan Turk, a researcher at the Divje Babe archeological site in Slovenia, uncovered a flute, pierced by spaced holes, made from the femur bone of a young cave bear. Similar prehistoric bone flutes have been found at various sites around the world, but the Divje Babe bone flute, or Neanderthal Flute, as called by Turk, is approximately 43,100 years old, and is claimed to be the world's oldest musical instrument.

-Travis Hiland
http://www.travishiland.com/music/origins-of-music.htm

its been made by everyone dating back further then the cavemen. it wasnt actually a discovery.

First answer by ID1074310909. Last edit by Travis Hiland. Contributor trust: 0 [recommend contributor]. Question popularity: 6 [recommend question]