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• Published: 12 February 2019

Cultural evolution of music

• Patrick E. Savage   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6996-7496 1  

Palgrave Communications volume  5 , Article number:  16 ( 2019 ) Cite this article

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• Cultural and media studies
• Social anthropology

The concept of cultural evolution was fundamental to the foundation of academic musicology and the subfield of comparative musicology, but largely disappeared from discussion after World War II despite a recent resurgence of interest in cultural evolution in other fields. I draw on recent advances in the scientific understanding of cultural evolution to clarify persistent misconceptions about the roles of genes and progress in musical evolution, and review literature relevant to musical evolution ranging from macroevolution of global song-style to microevolution of tune families. I also address criticisms regarding issues of musical agency, meaning, and reductionism, and highlight potential applications including music education and copyright. While cultural evolution will never explain all aspects of music, it offers a useful theoretical framework for understanding diversity and change in the world’s music.

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Global musical diversity is largely independent of linguistic and genetic histories

Cultural macroevolution of musical instruments in South America

The pace of modern culture

Introduction.

The concept of evolution played a central role during the formation of academic musicology in the late nineteenth century (Adler, 1885 / 1981 ; Rehding, 2000 ). During the twentieth century, theoretical and political implications of evolution were heavily debated, leading evolution to go out of favor in musicology and cultural anthropology (Carneiro, 2003 ). In the twenty first century, refined concepts of biological evolution were reintroduced to musicology through the work of psychologists of music to the extent that the biological evolution of the capacity to make and experience music ("evolution of musicality") has returned as an important topic of contemporary musicological research (Wallin et al., 2000 ; Huron, 2006 ; Patel, 2008 ; Lawson, 2012 ; Tomlinson, 2013 , 2015 ; Honing, 2018 ). Yet the concept of cultural evolution of music itself ("musical evolution") remains largely undeveloped by musicologists, despite an explosion of recent research on cultural evolution in related fields such as linguistics. This absence has been especially prominent in ethnomusicology, but is also observable in historical musicology and other subfields of musicology Footnote 1 .

One major exception was the two-volume special edition of The World of Music devoted to critical analysis of Victor Grauer's ( 2006 ) essay entitled "Echoes of Our Forgotten Ancestors" (later expanded into book form in Grauer, 2011 ). Grauer proposed that the evolution and global dispersal of human song-style parallels the evolution and dispersal of anatomically modern humans out of Africa, and that certain groups of contemporary African hunter-gatherers retain the ancestral singing style shared by all humans tens of thousands of years ago. The two evolutionary biologists contributing to this publication found the concept of musical evolution self-evident enough that they simply opened their contribution by stating: "Songs, like genes and languages, evolve" (Leroi and Swire, 2006 , p. 43). However, the musicologists displayed concern and some confusion over the concept of cultural evolution.

My goal in this article is to clarify some of these issues in terms of the definitions, assumptions, and implications involved in studying the cultural evolution of music to show how cultural evolutionary theory can benefit musicology in a variety of ways. I will begin with a brief overview of cultural evolution in general, move to cultural evolution of music in particular, and then end by addressing some potential applications and criticisms. Because this article is aimed both at musicologists with limited knowledge of cultural evolution and at cultural evolutionists with limited knowledge of music, I have included some discussion that may seem obvious to some readers but not others.

What is “evolution”?

Although the term “evolution” is often assumed to refer to directional progress and/or to require a genetic basis, neither genes nor progress are included in some contemporary general definitions of evolution. Furthermore, while it is true that the discovery of genes and the precise molecular mechanisms by which they change revolutionized evolutionary biology, Darwin formulated his theory of evolution without the concept of genes.

Instead of genes, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection contained three key requirements: (1) there must be variation among individuals; (2) variation must be inherited via intergenerational transmission; (3) certain variants must be more likely to be inherited than others due to competitive selection (Darwin, 1859 ). These principles apply equally to biological and cultural evolution (Mesoudi, 2011 ).

Evolution did often come to be defined in purely genetic terms during the twentieth century. However, recent advances in our understanding of areas such as cultural evolution, epigenetics, and ecology (Bonduriansky and Day, 2018 ) have led to new inclusive definitions of evolution such as:

'the process by which the frequencies of variants in a population change over time', where the word ‘variants’ replaces the word ‘genes’ in order to include any inherited information….In particular, this…should include cultural inheritance. (Danchin et al., 2011 , p. 483–484)

While there remains some debate about how central a role genes should play in evolutionary theory (Laland et al., 2014 ), few scientists today would insist that the term evolution applies only to genes. Note also that there is nothing about progress or direction contained in the above definition: evolution simply refers to changes in the frequencies of heritable variants. These changes can be in the direction of simple to complex—and it is possible that there may be a general trend towards complexity (McShea and Brandon, 2010 ; Currie and Mace, 2011 )—but the reverse is also possible (Allen et al., 2018 ), as are non-directional changes with little or no functional consequences (Nei et al., 2010 ).

Does culture “evolve”?

From the time Darwin ( 1859 ) first proposed that his theory of evolution explained “The Origin of Species”, scholars immediately tried to apply it to explain the origin of culture. Indeed, Darwin himself explicitly argued that language and species evolution were "curiously parallel…the survival or preservation of certain favored words in the struggle for existence is natural selection" (Darwin, 1871 , p. 89–90). Scholars of cultural evolution have tabulated a number of such “curious parallels”, to which I have added musical examples (Table 1 ).

Theories about cultural evolution quickly adopted assumptions about progress (e.g., Spencer, 1875 ) linked with attempts to legitimize ideologies of Western superiority and justify the oppression of the weak by the powerful as survival of the fittest (Hofstadter, 1955 ; Laland and Brown, 2011 ; Stocking, 1982 ) Footnote 2 . It is no accident that Zallinger's iconic “March of Progress” illustration (Fig. 1 ) showed a gradual lightening of the skin from dark-skinned, ape-like ancestors to light-skinned humans: evolution was used to justify scientific racism by eugenicists (Gould, 1989 ). Although both the lightening of skin and the linear progression from ape to man are inaccurate (Gould, 1989 ), this image unfortunately remains extremely enduring and is commonly adapted to represent all kinds of evolution, including musical evolution (e.g., http://www.mandolincafe.com/archives/spoof.html ).

The classic example of an inaccurate but widespread representation of evolution as a linear “march of progress” (from Howell, 1965 )

Ideas of linear progress through a series of fixed stages continued to dominate cultural evolution for over a century (see Carneiro, 2003 for an in-depth review). It was not until late in the 20th century that several teams of scholars including Charles Lumsden and Edward O. Wilson ( 1981 ), L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Marcus Feldman ( 1981 ), and Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson ( 1985 ) began making attempts to model and measure changing frequencies of cultural variants (aka “memes”; Dawkins, 1976 ), as scientists such as Sewall Wright and Ronald Fisher had done for gene frequencies since the 1930s.

The theoretical and empirical work of cultural evolutionary scholars that emerged from this tradition has been crucial in demonstrating that evolution occurs "Not by Genes Alone" (Richerson and Boyd, 2005 ). Scholars have applied theory and methods from evolutionary biology to help understand complex cultural evolutionary processes in a variety of domains including languages, folklore, archeology, religion, social structure, and politics (Mesoudi, 2011 ; Levinson and Gray, 2012 ; Whiten et al., 2012 ; Fuentes and Wiessner, 2016 ; Henrich, 2016 ; Bortolini et al., 2017 ; Turchin et al., 2018 ; Whitehouse et al., In press ). The field has now blossomed to the extent that researchers founded a dedicated academic society: the Cultural Evolution Society (Brewer et al., 2017 ; Youngblood and Lahti, 2018 ). Its inaugural conference in September 2017 at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History was attended by 300 researchers from 40 countries (Savage, 2017 ) Footnote 3 .

Language has proven to be particularly amenable to evolutionary analysis. For example, applying phylogenetic methods from evolutionary biology to standardized lists of 200 of the most universal and slowest-changing words (e.g., numbers, body parts, kinship terminology) from hundreds of existing and ancient languages has allowed researchers to reconstruct the timing, geography, and specific mechanisms of change by which the descendants of proto-languages such as Proto-Indo-European or Proto-Austronesian evolved to become languages such as English, Hindi, Javanese, and Maori that are spoken today (Levinson and Gray, 2012 ). These evolutionary relationships can be represented as phylogenetic trees or networks (with some caveats, c.f. Doolittle, 1999 ; Gray et al., 2010 ; Le Bomin et al., 2016 ; Tëmkin and Eldredge, 2007 ). Such phylogenies can in turn be useful for exploring more complicated evolutionary questions, such as regarding the existence of cross-cultural universals (including universal aspects of music, cf. Savage et al., 2015 ]) or gene-culture coevolution (e.g., the coevolution of lactose tolerance and dairy farming, Mace and Holden, 2005 ).

Although modern cultural evolutionary theories have made many of the earlier criticisms about cultural evolution obsolete (e.g., assumptions of progress or of memetic replicators directly analogous to genes; cf. Henrich et al., 2008 ), there is still an active debate about the value of cultural evolution, with critics coming from both the sciences and the humanities. For example, evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker ( 2012 ) still maintains that cultural evolution is simply a “loose metaphor” that “adds little to what we have always called ‘history’", echoing similar criticisms made by historian Joseph Fracchia and geneticist Richard Lewontin ( 1999 , 2005 ). Biological anthropologist Jonathan Marks has also strongly criticized cultural evolution as being based on “false premises” (Marks, 2012 , p. 40) and adding little value beyond traditional explanations from cultural anthropology. It seems fair to say that, while cultural evolution is making a comeback and the basic idea that culture changes over time is beyond dispute, the idea that evolutionary theory and its methods can enhance our understanding of cultural change and diversity has yet to unambiguously prove its value. Perhaps music might be one area that could help?

Musical evolution and early comparative musicology

I have previously outlined some modern cultural evolutionary theory as part of one of five major themes in a "new comparative musicology" (Savage and Brown, 2013 ), including the relationships between cultural evolution and the other four themes (classification, human history, universals, and biological evolution) Footnote 4 . Early comparative musicologists, however, relied on Spencer's notion of progressive evolution rather than Darwin's of phylogenetic diversification (Rehding, 2000 ) Footnote 5 . Two assumptions were fundamental to much of the work of the founding figures of comparative musicology:

1. Cultures evolved from simple to complex, and as they do so they move from primitive to civilized.

2. Music evolves from simple to complex within societies as they progress. (Stone, 2008 , p. 25)

For example, in The Origins of Music , Carl Stumpf wrote of "the most primitive songs, e.g., those of the Vedda of Ceylon…. One may label them as mere preliminary stages or even as the origins of music." (Stumpf, 1911/ 2012 , p. 49). As late as 1943, Curt Sachs wrote of "the plain truth that the singsong of Pygmies and Pygmoids stands infinitely closer to the beginnings of music than Beethoven’s symphonies and Schubert’s lieder…the only working hypothesis admissible is that the earliest music must be found among the most primitive peoples" (Sachs, 1943 , p. 20–21). Scholars from the “Berlin school” of comparative musicology such as Stumpf, Sachs, and Erich von Hornbostel created the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv, the first archive of traditional music recordings from around the world, motivated in part by the belief that they could use these recordings to reconstruct the cultural evolution of complex Western art music from the simpler music of hunter-gatherers (Nettl and Bohlman, 1991 ; Nettl, 2006 ).

As the previous section made clear, old assumptions about the roles of progress and genes in evolution have been discarded by modern cultural evolutionary scholars. Nevertheless, ethnomusicologists still often equate ideas about the cultural evolution of music with those of the early comparative musicologists. Rahaim opens his response to Grauer by noting that his use of “the unfashionable language of human genetics and evolutionary biology” would lead many ethnomusicologists to be suspicious:

Would the "echoes of forgotten ancestors" turn out to be echoes of Social Darwinism? Was this to be a retelling of the story of modern Europe's heroic musical ascent above the rest of the world? (Rahaim, 2006 , p. 29)

Similarly, Mundy’s response to Grauer states that "the conception of progress inherent in evolution creates its own hierarchies" (Mundy, 2006 , p. 22). Elsewhere, Kartomi ( 2001 , p. 306) rejected the application of evolutionary theory in classifying musical instruments because "the concepts of evolution and lineage are not applicable to anything but animate beings, which are able to inherit genes from their forebears" Footnote 6 . Overall, since changing its name from comparative musicology to ethnomusicology during the middle of the 20th century, the field has largely avoided discussion of musical evolution, and recent advances in our understanding of cultural evolution have yet to make a substantial impact on musicology.

Macroevolution and Cantometrics

One striking exception to the general tendency to avoid theories of musical evolution in the second half of the twentieth century was Alan Lomax's Cantometrics Project (Lomax, 1968 , 1989 ; Lomax and Berkowitz, 1972 ). Although mostly (in)famous for its claims for a functional relationship between song style and social structure, another controversial aspect was Lomax's evolutionary interpretation of the global distribution of song style itself (for detailed critical review of the Cantometrics Project, see Savage, 2018 and Wood, 2018 a, 2018 b).

Through standardized classification and statistical analysis of 36 stylistic features from approximately 1800 traditional songs from 148 societies Footnote 7 , Lomax classified the world's musical diversity into 10 regional styles. Although this classification was not itself based on any evolutionary assumptions, Lomax proceeded to organize and interpret these 10 styles in the form of a crude phylogenetic tree:

This tree of performance style appears to have two roots: (1) in Siberia and (2) among African Gatherers. The Siberian root has two branches: one into the Circum-Pacific and Nuclear America, thence into Oceania through Melanesia and into East Africa, the second branch to Central Asia and thence into Europe and Asian High Culture... the main facts of style evolution may be accounted for by the elaboration of two contrastive traditions…. As their cultural base became more complex, these two root traditions became more specialized: the Siberian producing the virtuosic solo, highly articulated, elaborated, and alienated style of Eurasian high culture, the Early Agriculture tradition developing more and more cohesive and complexly integrated choruses and orchestras. West Europe and Oceania, flowering late on the borders of these two ancient specializations, show kinship to both. (Lomax, 1980 , p. 39–40)

Although this tree retains some aspects of progressivism (e.g., contemporary African gatherers occupying the "roots" while other traditions "became more complex", West Europe "flowering late"), it also shows more sophisticated concepts such as the possibility of multiple ancestors (polygenesis) and of borrowing/merging between lineages (horizontal transmission). With some modifications, it can be converted into a phylogenetic model as a working hypothesis for future testing/refinement (see Fig. 2 ) Footnote 8 .

A simplified phylogenetic model of global macroevolution of 10 song-style regions. Adapted from Fig. 2 of Lomax ( 1980 , p. 39), which is based on an analysis of ~1800 songs from 148 cultural groups using 36 Cantometric features. Lomax originally placed cultures at different stages along the vertical axis, but here all cultures are represented at the present time and the distance along the phylogenetic branches instead represents approximate time since diverging from a shared ancestral musical style. Dashed arrows represent horizontal transmission (borrowing/fusion) between lineages. Lomax's song-style region names varied—here I chose the most geographically descriptive names from Lomax's 1980 and 1989 publications (e.g., "Eurasian High Culture" instead of "Old High Culture")

Cantometrics provided the major point of departure both for Grauer's essay Footnote 9 and for a series of recent scientific studies exploring parallels in musical and genetic evolution. Some of these studies have directly compared patterns of musical and genetic diversity among populations of certain regions (e.g., Sub-Saharan Africa [Callaway, 2007 ], Eurasia [Pamjav et al., 2012 ], Taiwan [Brown et al., 2014 ], Northeast Asia [Savage et al., 2015 ]). All of these studies found that musical similarities between populations tend to be moderately correlated with genetic similarities, suggesting that both music and genes preserve histories of human migration and cultural contact.

Others have analyzed musical change using theories and methods from evolutionary biology. For example, Zivic et al. ( 2013 ) linked traditional periodization boundaries in Western classical music (Baroque, Classical, Romantic, 20 th century) to changes in pitch distribution patterns, while Serrà et al. ( 2012 ) and Mauch et al. ( 2015 ) both quantified the evolution of diversity in Western popular music, with the former concluding that musical diversity was decreasing while the latter rejected this conclusion in favor of a more complex “punctuated evolution” model (see further discussion below in the section on “Reductionism”). Although the details differ greatly, these studies share a common thread in arguing that musical evolution follows patterns and processes that can be usefully understood using theories and methods adapted from the study of biological evolution (see also Bentley et al., 2007 ; Interiano et al., 2018 ; Brand et al., 2019 ).

Like Cantometrics, most of these studies are more interested in the macroevolutionary relationships between cultures/genres than in microevolutionary relationships among songs within cultures/genres Footnote 10 . This makes them more amenable to broad cross-cultural comparison with domains such as population genetics and linguistics, as focusing on ethnolinguistically defined populations has proved useful in other fields of cultural and biological evolution. However, one drawback to such studies is that it is difficult to reconstruct the precise sequence of small microevolutionary changes that may have given rise to these large cross-cultural musical differences (Stock, 2006 ).

Microevolution and tune family research

One area of research strikingly absent from the discussion of musical evolution surrounding Grauer's essay was the extensive research on microevolution of tune families (groups of melodies sharing descent from a common ancestor or ancestors). Tune family research was particularly influenced by the realization in the early twentieth century that many traditional ballads that had become moribund or extinct in England were flourishing in modified forms far away in the US Appalachian mountains (Sharp, 1932 ). Cecil Sharp's folk song collecting led him to formulate a theory of musical evolution incorporating essentially the same three key mechanisms recognized by modern evolutionary theory: (1) continuity, (2) variation, and (3) selection (Sharp, 1907 ; note that Sharp used the term “continuity” rather than the modern term “inheritance” discussed above). These three principles were later developed by Sharp’s disciple, Maud Karpeles, who helped draft an official definition of folk music adopted in 1955 by the International Folk Music Council (the ancestor of today's International Council for Traditional Music Footnote 11 ) that explicitly invoked evolutionary theory:

Folk music is the product of a musical tradition that has been evolved through the process of oral transmission. The factors that shape the tradition are: (i) continuity which links the present with the past; (ii) variation which springs from the creative impulse of the individual or the group; and (iii) selection by the community, which determines the form or forms in which the music survives. (International Folk Music Council, 1955 , p. 23, emphasis added)

The general mechanisms proposed by Sharp and Karpeles for British-American tune family evolution were explored more thoroughly by scholars such as Bertrand Bronson ( 1959 –72, 1969 , 1976 ), Samuel Bayard ( 1950 , 1954 ), Charles Seeger ( 1966 ), Anne Shapiro ( 1975 ) Footnote 12 , Jeff Titon ( 1977 ), and James Cowdery ( 1984 ; 2009 ). In some cases, the melodic parallels were made explicit by aligning notes thought to share descent from a common ancestor and by verbally reconstructing the historical process of evolutionary changes. For example, Bayard used a series of melodic alignments to illustrate the "process, often conceived but seldom actually observed... of a tune's having material added onto its end and also losing material from its beginning", giving "evolution of one air out of another by variation, deletion, and addition" (Bayard, 1954 , p. 25). Charles Boilès ( 1973 ) even proposed a formal method for reconstructing ancestral proto-melodies, based on the linguistic comparative method for reconstructing proto-languages. Bronson attempted to automate such attempts on a vast scale. His attempts to use punch-cards to mechanically sort thousands of melodic variants of Child ballads and other traditional British-American folk melodies into tune families (Bronson, 1959– 72 , 1969 ) represented one of the first uses of computers in musicology, even preceding Lomax’s Cantometrics Project Footnote 13 .

During my own studies in Japan, I learned that scholars of Japanese music had developed similar approaches based on alignment of related melodies to understand musical evolution, although without explicit reference to tune family research. For example, Kashō Machida and Tsutomu Takeuchi ( 1965 ) traced the evolution of the famous folk songs Esashi Oiwake and Sado Okesa from their simpler, unaccompanied beginnings in the work songs of distant prefectures, and Atsumi Kaneshiro ( 1990 ) developed a quantitative method that he used to test proposed relationships within Esashi Oiwake 's tune family. Meanwhile, Laurence Picken and colleagues traced the evolution of modern Japanese gagaku melodies for flute and reed-pipe back over a thousand years to the simpler and faster ancient melodies of China's Tang court (Picken et al., 1981 –2000; Marett, 1985 ).

Tune family scholarship has not been limited to British-American and Japanese music—those just happen to be the two traditions I am most familiar with. Elsewhere, scholars such as Béla Bartók ( 1931 ) and Walter Wiora ( 1953 ) studied tune family evolution in European folk songs, Steven Jan ( 2007 ) studied the evolution of melodic motives in Western classical music, and Joep Bor ( 1975 ) and Wim van der Meer ( 1975 ) made detailed arguments for treating North Indian ragas as evolving "melodic species" (Bor, 1975 , p. 17).

Recently, scientists have attempted to apply microevolutionary methods to a variety of Western and non-Western genres in the form of sequence alignment techniques adapted from molecular biology (Mongeau and Sankoff, 1990 ; van Kranenburg et al. 2009 ; Toussaint, 2013 ; Windram et al., 2014 ; Savage and Atkinson, 2015 ). Such techniques make it possible to automate things like quantifying melodic similarities and identifying boundaries between tune families (Savage and Atkinson 2015 ; Jan, 2018 ), making analysis possible on vast scales that would be impossible to perform manually.

In addition, some scientists have explored musical microevolution in the laboratory, using techniques originally designed to explore controlled evolution of organisms and languages. Thus, one group mimicked sexual reproduction by having short audio loops recombine and mutate, then used an online survey to allow listeners to mimic the process of natural selection on the resulting music, finding that esthetically pleasing music evolved from nearly random noise over the course of several thousand generations solely under the influence of listener selection (MacCallum et al., 2012 ) Footnote 14 . Using a different experimental paradigm similar to the children's game Telephone, other groups found that melodies and rhythms became simpler and more structured in the course of transmission, paralleling findings from experimental language evolution (Ravignani et al., 2016 ; Jacoby and McDermott, 2017 ; Lumaca and Baggio, 2017 ). Like biological evolution and language evolution, our knowledge of musical evolution can be enhanced by combining ecologically valid studies of musical evolution in the wild (i.e., in its cultural context) with controlled laboratory experiments.

So far, the microevolution of tune families has been investigated largely independently in a variety of cultures and genres, without much attempt at comparing them to explore general patterns of musical evolution. One reason for this is that a broader cross-cultural comparison would require standardized methods for analyzing and measuring musical evolution in different contexts. I proposed such a method and applied it to several of the cases studies discussed above (Savage and Atkinson, 2015 ; Savage, 2017 ). Figure 3 shows an example of this method using an example of melodic microevolution in a well-known folk song: Scarborough Fair .

An example of analyzing tune family microevolution through melodic sequence alignment. The opening two phrases of Simon and Garfunkel's phenomenally successful 1966 version of Scarborough Fair (bottom melody) and its immediate ancestor, Martin Carthy's 1965 version (top melody) are shown, transposed to the common tonic of C (cf. Kloss, 2012 for a detailed discussion of the historical evolution of this ballad). In b , the melodies are shown using standard staff notation, while in c they are shown as aligned note sequences, with letters corresponding to notes as shown in a (following Savage and Atkinson, 2015 ). See Savage ( 2017 ) for a detailed explanation of how this evolution can be quantified (percent melodic identity = 81%; mutation rate = 0.25 per note per year) and discussion of the mechanisms of note substitutions (red arrows) and deletions (blue arrows) shown here

By demonstrating consistent cross-cultural and cross-genre trends in the rates and mechanisms of melodic evolution, I showed that musical evolution, like biological evolution, follows some general rules (Savage, 2017 ). For example, notes with stronger structural function are more resistant to change (e.g., rhythmically accented notes more stable than ornamental notes), and notes are more likely to change to melodically neighboring notes (e.g., 2nds) than to distant ones (e.g., 7ths; cf. Fig. 3 ). This suggests that a general theory of evolution may prove a helpful unifying theory in musicology, as it has in biology.

Musical evolution applications: education and copyright

All musicology is in some sense applied through our research, teaching, and outreach, but some is more explicitly applied for the benefit of those outside of academia (Titon, 1992 ). In this article, I argue that cultural evolutionary theory can provide a useful unifying theoretical framework to apply to research on understanding and reconstructing musical change at multiple levels (both macro and micro) across cultures, genres, and time periods. I now briefly discuss two other ways it can be more directly applied: education and copyright.

The world's musical diversity is woefully underrepresented at all levels of education. Often the job of correcting this falls to ethnomusicologists teaching survey courses on "World Music". As Rahaim ( 2006 , p. 32) notes, "as teachers, we often find ourselves in situations that require us to say something in short-hand about [musical] origins, and have few models at hand apart from evolution". Evolutionary models like Lomax's world phylogenetic tree of regional song style (Fig. 2 ) provide a simple and convenient starting point for teaching about similarities and differences in the world's music, and are flexible enough to adapt to diverse contexts such as conservatory classrooms, instrument museums, or pop music recommendation websites. Such coarse models can be further improved and/or nuanced by following them with microevolutionary case studies of musical change in specific cultures. An evolutionary approach further provides the chance to teach about connections beyond music to other domains in order to understand the ways in which the global distribution of music may be related to the distributions of the people who make it and to other aspects of their culture such as language or social structure (Lomax, 1968 ; Savage and Brown, 2013 ; Grauer, 2006 ).

Since almost all music is influenced by the past in at least some way, whether such influence is within norms of creativity and tradition or amounts to plagiarism is connected to an understanding of processes of musical evolution. US copyright law resembles concepts of tune family evolution in that the core copyrightable essence of a song consists of its representation in musical notation, and that the degree of overall melodic correspondence at structurally significant places between two tunes is a primary criterion for deciding whether the level of similarity constitutes plagiarism (Cronin, 2015 ; Fruehwald, 1992 ; Müllensiefen and Pendzich, 2009 ; Fishman, 2018 ) Footnote 15 . Thus, one famous case concluded that the melody of George Harrison's My Sweet Lord (1970) was similar enough to the Chiffons' He's So Fine (1962) as to constitute subconscious plagiarism (Judge Owen, 1976 ). I used new evolutionary methods involving sequence alignment of melodies to confirm that not only do the two tunes share over 50% identical notes, but the differences that do exist are consistent with the most common types of melodic change (e.g., insertion/deletion of ornamental notes, substitution to melodically neighboring notes; Savage, 2017 , cf. Fig. 3 ). Using a sample of 20 court cases, including He’s So Fine , I showed that this melodic sequence alignment method is a strong predictor of copyright infringement decisions, accurately predicting 16 out of the 20 cases (Savage et al., 2018 ).

However, the concept of individual ownership by composers in copyright law differs from concepts of folk song tune families, where traditional tunes are usually considered to be general property of the community. They are also different from conceptions in many non-Western cultures in which the essence of song ownership may be considered to lie not in its notated melody but in the performance style, performance context, or other extra-melodic features (A. Seeger, 1992 ). Even within US copyright law the question of what types and degrees of copying should be regarded as legitimate borrowing versus copyright infringement is hotly debated and dynamically interpreted, with musicians and lawyers commonly invoking evolutionary principles of continuity and variation to argue for the legitimacy of certain degrees of borrowing, as well as the principle of selection to argue against the deleterious effects on musical creativity if certain types of inspiration are overly restricted (Fishman, 2018 ).

The interpretation of copyright law can dramatically affect the livelihoods of musicians and communities around the world. Thus, a holistic understanding of general dynamics of musical evolution (including the many aspects beyond melodic evolution) and their specific manifestations in various musical cultures and genres may prove crucial to a more cross-culturally principled interpretation of concepts of creativity and ownership.

Objections to musical evolution: agency, meaning, and reductionism

Musical evolution has been and continues to be of interest to musicologists and non-musicologists alike. In fact, many of the processes I discuss are immediately recognizable to many under the terminology of musical change, for which musicologists have long sought a rigorous theory. Merriam ( 1964 , p. 307) argued that ethnomusicology "needs a theory of change". Over a half century later, Nettl ( 2015 , p. 292) summarizes that "there have been many attempts to generalize about change but no generally accepted theory". Why have musicologists interested in general theories of change not adopted the framework of evolution (which is, simply put, a formal theory of change)?

I have presented versions of this argument at international musicology conferences in the USA and Japan, receiving a variety of responses. Most objections to the use of evolutionary theory focused on three issues: implications of progress, individual agency, and reductionism. Since I have already clarified misconceptions about progress at length above Footnote 16 , I will focus here on agency and reductionism.

Building on arguments against cultural evolution by the evolutionary biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, Rahaim ( 2006 , p. 36) argues: "Perhaps most importantly for ethnomusicologists, metaphors of both situated and progressive evolution turn attention away from the agency of individuals". But does the concept of musical evolution negate the agency of individuals to create their own music any more than the concept of biological evolution negates individual free will? In each case, our cultural/genetic inheritances are the product of long evolutionary processes shaped by historical factors, but cannot be simply reduced to or wholly explained by such factors.

Musicians are often free to compose their own music or modify the existing repertoire in whatever ways they see fit (within the physical limits imposed by acoustics, neurobiology, etc.). But whether their creations will appeal to others and be passed on through the generations depends on a variety of factors beyond their control, including the sociopolitical context and the perceptual capacities of the audience. Thus, the role of the individual musicians in this process and their relationships with other actors (audiences, composers, accompanists, producers, judges, etc.) are in fact central to understanding the cultural evolution of music. As Seeger put it:

musical traditions depend on transmission, continuity, change, and interested audiences, but…these take place in a context of emerging mass media, the involvement of outsiders, and the often unpredictable actions of local and national governments. (Anthony Seeger, foreword to Grant, 2014 , p. 9)

Seeger's summary succinctly captures the three key evolutionary mechanisms of "continuity [inheritance], change [variation], and interested audiences [selection]", as well as their dynamic relationships with individual agency and cultural context.

My research has focused on identifying general constraints that apply across many individuals, but this does not mean that other studies must do so. For example, one potentially productive area for exploring the role of individual agency in musical evolution might involve comparing different performers attempting to create their own signature versions of music originally composed and/or performed by others. This could easily apply to a variety of cultures and genres, including art (e.g., the same symphony performed by different orchestras), popular (e.g., cover songs, hip-hop sampling; Youngblood, 2018 ), and folk (e.g., folk song variants; cf. the Scarborough Fair example in Fig. 3 ).

In fact, the presence of human agency and the intentional innovation that comes with it is one of the most interesting aspects about studying cultural evolution. In genetic evolution, natural selection provides the major explanatory mechanism due to the fact that genetic variation is arbitrary (i.e., genetic mutations are not directed towards particular evolutionary goals). However, in cultural evolution, both selection and variation can be directed consciously and unconsciously through a much broader range of mechanisms than typically found in genetic evolution. To accommodate this complexity, cultural evolutionary theorists have proposed a dizzying array of mechanisms to expand the terminological framework of evolutionary biology to cultural evolution (e.g., transmission biases based on prestige, aesthetics, or conformity/anti-conformity; guided variation driven by cognition and/or emotion; cultural attraction through processes of reconstructive rather than replicative transmission; Richerson and Boyd, 2005 ; Mesoudi, 2011 ; Claidière et al., 2014 ; Fogarty et al., 2015 ). The relative strengths of these different types of evolutionary mechanisms and their implications for musical evolution in particular and cultural evolution in general are hotly debated (Claidière et al., 2012 ; Leroi et al., 2012 ). Thus, this is an area where musicologists and cultural evolutionary theorists could both learn much from one another.

An anonymous reviewer of an earlier iteration of this article flatly stated that my cultural evolutionary approach “is not compatible with an anthropological understanding of culture, and seems instead to describe changes in the surface structures of music (tune families and the like)…”. This criticism seems to echo Rahaim’s concerns about agency discussed above, but also goes even further into the longstanding debate regarding the roles of sound vs. behavior, process vs. product, etc. in musicology (Merriam, 1964 ; Rice, 1987 ; Solis, 2012 ). In particular, it follows criticisms by Blacking ( 1977 ) and Feld ( 1984 ) of Lomax’s attempts to use Cantometrics to understand cultural evolution. As Blacking ( 1977 , p. 10) puts it: “Lomax compares the surface structures of music without questioning whether the same musical sounds always have the same "deep structure" and the same meaning”.

Unlike language, music generally lacks clear referential semantic meaning (Meyer, 1956 ; Patel, 2008 ), and this crucial difference is one reason we must be cautious about uncritically borrowing linguistic concepts wholesale to apply to music (Feld, 1974 ). While I agree that a full understanding of the cultural evolution of music will require integrating understanding of both sound structures and their meanings, I can not accept the implication that the study of musical structures such as tune families are not an appropriate subject of musicological inquiry. Here I can only respond by quoting the final sentence published by Alan Merriam ( 1982 ): “ethnomusicology for me is the study of music as culture, and that does not preclude the study of form; indeed we cannot proceed without it.".

Reductionism

Another critique I would like to mention is a broader but related one regarding reductionism and science. This criticism was levelled at cultural evolution in general by Fracchia and Lewontin ( 1999 , p. 507): "the demand for a theory of cultural evolution is really a demand that cultural anthropology be included in the grand twentieth-century movement to scientize all aspects of the study of society, to become validated as a part of ‘social science'".

One version of this criticism appeared in response to one of the studies cited in this review entitled “Measuring the Evolution of Contemporary Western Popular Music” (Serrà et al., 2012 ). In response, Fink ( 2013 ) made a persuasive refutation of the paper’s central finding of decreasing musical diversity and the newspaper headlines touting it (“Modern Music too Loud, All Sounds the Same”), pointing out that the analyses failed to detect increasing rhythmic diversity because the methods ignored rhythm. Or, as Fink put it: "Music isn’t getting stupider, it’s getting funkier.”

Nevertheless, Fink argues that the same reductionistic science that made the study’s conclusion misleading was also a reason it made headlines:

as reporters rush to assure us, they are newsworthy because, for the first time, the conclusions are backed with hard data, not squishy aesthetic theorizing. The numbers do not lie. But research can only be as good as the encoded data it’s based on; look under the surface of recently reported computer-enabled analyses of pop music and you’ll find that the old programmer’s dictum—“garbage in, garbage out”—is still the last word. (Fink, 2013 )

Not long after Serrà et al. published their study, Mauch et al. ( 2015 ) also measured the evolution of Western popular music over a similar time period, but using less reductionistic methods that importantly included rhythmic features. Mauch et al. came to the opposite conclusion: musical diversity actually increased after a brief decline during the 1980s. This provides quantitative support for Fink’s criticism above. Overall, this case highlights both the value of quantifying the cultural evolution of music and the importance of critical thinking in interpreting the reductionism inherent in such studies. Although science does generally require some level of reductionism, the goal is to be “as simple as possible, but not simpler” Footnote 17 .

Charges of reductionism were also leveled directly at my own (Savage and Brown, 2013 ) proposal that included cultural evolution as one of five major themes in a new comparative musicology. In a thorough and nuanced review entitled "On Not Losing Heart", David Clarke approved of the call for more cross-cultural comparison, but worried about its "strongly empiricist paradigm":

Lomax's particular mode of integration "between the humanistic and the scientific" [was] fueled by a politics that had an emancipatory motive. In the metrics and technics of the new comparative musicology proposed by Savage and Brown, traces of any such informing polity melt into air….A political neutrality that is the correlate of an unalloyed empiricism is problematic….My own predilections here are perhaps more attuned to ethnomusicologists who are interested in the particularities of a culture and the actual experience of encounter in the field. By contrast, Savage, Brown, et al. advocate different epistemological values with a different ethos, based on the abstraction of music and people into data. To characterize that ethos as a recapitulation of Lomax, only without the heart, might be an unfair caricature. For the various statistical representations and correlations emerging from their research may well be sublimating a lot of passion, and Savage and Brown’s own day-to-day dealings with musicians and musicking may be no less affective than anyone else’s (it’s just that they exclude this from their research) Footnote 18 . (Clarke, 2014 , 6, pp. 11–12)

While Clarke argues that a "political neutrality that is the correlate of an unalloyed empiricism is problematic", I believe it may be valuable to maintain a relatively neutral political stance, in large part to avoid the problems of confirmation bias that were leveled at Lomax. With Cantometrics, Lomax sought to scientifically validate his strong political views regarding "cultural equity" (Lomax, 1977 ). One of the concerns that doomed Cantometrics was that Lomax's analyses were viewed as being too strongly biased by his political views (Savage, 2018 ; Szwed, 2010 ; Wood, 2018a , 2018b ). Personally, I strongly share Lomax's views about the value of cultural equity, and I, too, see quantitative data as a helpful tool in arguing for the value of all of the world's music. However, I believe it is legitimate to try to limit political aspects in one's published work, and it may well be a more effective long-term strategy for the types of applications described in the previous section Footnote 19 .

Certainly, neither a purely qualitative, ethnographic approach nor a purely quantitative, scientific approach alone will succeed in advancing our knowledge of how and why music evolves. But by combining the two approaches through cross-cultural comparative study, we can achieve a better understanding of the forces governing the world's musical diversity and their real-world implications (Savage and Brown, 2013 ). For instance, the My Sweet Lord plagiarism case mentioned above gives a clear example where quantitative measurements of the degree of melodic similarity (56%) between two tunes and its qualitative interpretation in the context of copyright law has major practical implications in which millions of dollars are at stake. Although perhaps less easily quantified in terms of dollar values, an understanding of the mechanisms of evolution of traditional folk songs may be just as valuable to traditional musicians struggling to protect their intangible cultural heritage.

Music evolves, through mechanisms that are both similar to and distinct from biological evolution. Cultural evolutionary theory has been developed to the point that it shows promise for providing explanatory power from the broad levels of macroevolution of global musical styles to the minute microevolutionary details of individual performers and performances. Musical evolution shows potential for applications beyond research to such disparate domains as education and copyright.

However, I am aware that my review is inevitably incomplete and I have only been able to highlight a tiny fraction of the types of situations and methodologies through which the evolutionary framework can be fruitfully applied to music. To me, that incompleteness highlights the broad explanatory power of evolutionary theory, and broad explanatory theory is something that musicologists such as Timothy Rice ( 2010 ) have argued is sorely needed.

Scientific interest in musical evolution is already growing rapidly, and will continue with or without the involvement of musicologists. Here again, we can learn from language evolution. Several high-profile articles on language evolution were published by teams of scientists without close collaboration with linguists, resulting in bitter disputes and accusations of "naïve arrogance" (Campbell, 2013 , p. 472) that have limited what could have been mutually beneficial collaboration (Marris, 2008 ). A similar pattern seems to be playing out in the recent controversy regarding a team of Harvard scientists analyzing ethnographic recordings around the world to construct a “Natural History of Song” (Mehr et al. 2018 a, 2018 b; Marshall, 2018 ; Yong, 2018 ). I share concerns about scientists studying music and evolution without collaborating with musicologists, but I believe that ultimately both musicology and cultural evolution stand to benefit from productive interdisciplinary collaboration. I have chosen to try to avoid such pitfalls by being proactive in initiating collaborations on musical evolution with cultural evolutionary scientists to combine our knowledge and skills (e.g., Savage et al. 2015 ; Savage and Atkinson, 2015 ).

I do not intend by any means to imply that the predominantly quantitative approach I have presented here—strongly informed by my collaborations with scientists studying cultural and biological evolution, as well as my own earlier training in psychology and biochemistry - is the only way to study musical evolution. One reason I focused in my dissertation on a rigorously quantitative approach modeled on molecular genetics is that such quantitative approaches have shown success in rehabilitating cultural evolutionary theory after much criticism of earlier incarnations such as memetics as lacking in empirical rigor (Laland and Brown, 2011 ; Mesoudi, 2011 ). But I believe that one of the strengths of evolutionary theory is that it is flexible enough to be usefully adapted to a variety of scientific and humanistic methodologies, with plenty of room to coexist productively with non-evolutionary theories. As Ruth Stone ( 2008 , p. 225) has noted, "there is no such thing as a best theory. Some theories are simply more suited for answering certain kinds of questions than others" (emphasis in original). Even if the concept of cultural evolution cannot provide all the answers, I believe it helps to answer enough musical questions of abiding interest that it should be ignored no more.

Data availability

Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analyzed during the current study.

For reasons of space and expertise, I will focus here primarily on the ethnomusicological literature, but the concept of cultural evolution of music should also be applicable to other sub-fields, not least the evolution of contemporary Western classical music from medieval Gregorian chant over the course of the second millennium AD.

Although this movement came to be known as “Social Darwinism”, it was in fact not very reflective of Darwin′s ideas, but rather the ideas of Herbert Spencer ( 1875 ), who coined the term "survival of the fittest". While the historical relationship between evolutionary theory and Social Darwinism is debated, today′s scholars of cultural evolution unequivocally reject such political misappropriation of evolutionary theory (Laland and Brown, 2011 ; Mesoudi, 2011 ; Richerson and Boyd, 2005 ; Wilson and Johnson, 2015 ).

Two of these presentations were about music: my own about the evolution of British-American and Japanese folk song melodies and one by Aurélie Helmlinger

about the evolution of steelpan instrumental layouts in Trinidad and Tobago. The 2018 Cultural Evolution Society conference featured an entire panel with four presentations devoted to music.

Due to space limitations this article will not delve into the areas of biological evolution and gene-culture evolution of musicality (Honing, 2018 ; Tomlinson, 2013 , 2015 ; Patel, 2018 ; Savage et al., In prep.).

Of the musicologists responding to Grauer′s essay, only Rahaim ( 2006 , p. 29) carefully distinguished between these two, using the terms "progressive" and "situated" evolution, respectively.

Kartomi has since changed her views, writing "I now think that music has evolved in a measurable way, as long as ′evolved′ is not defined as ′improved′" (personal communication, June 10th 2016 email to the author).

Discrepancies in published numbers and further details are explained by Savage ( 2018 ).

Although not shown here, finer-scale relationships within and among groups can also be modeled using evolutionary methods (cf. Fig. 3 of Lomax, 1980 , p. 41; Rzeszutek et al., 2012 ; Savage and Brown, 2014 ).

Grauer was heavily involved in the Cantometrics Project as both the co-inventor of the Cantometric classification scheme and primary coder of the Cantometric data.

Macroevolution generally refers to changes among populations (e.g., species, cultural groups), while microevolution generally refers to changes within populations.

Lineages of organizations, composers, performers, etc. are a potentially productive area of studying musical evolution, but I will not discuss them in detail here due to limitations of space and expertise.

Unfortunately, Shapiro′s dissertation was never published and is not available for interlibrary loan.

The research leading to the articles republished in book form in Bronson ( 1969 ) was begun several decades earlier, with one article laying out the basic idea of “Mechanical Help in the Study of Folk Song” published as early as 1949.

Note that this finding is conceptually distinct from the “sound-to-music illusion” (Simchy-Gross and Margulis, 2018 ). The sound-to-music illusion involves the same sound being perceived as more musical after repeated listening by a single listener, whereas MacCallum et al.′s study experimentally evolved new and more pleasing music over time.

Note, however, that Fishman ( 2018 ) in particular has argued that the traditional emphasis on melody may be changing, as evidenced by recent high-profile cases such as the dispute over Blurred Lines .

Unfortunately, the association of evolution with progress is particularly entrenched where I live in Japan, where the characters used to translate evolution (進化 [ shinka ]) literally mean "progressive change" (the English word evolution itself evolved from the Latin evolutio , meaning "unfolding"). In my opinion, those avoiding the term "evolution" because of misconceptions about its meaning are contributing to this popular misconception. Instead I believe concerted effort to correct this misconception for future generations is in order.

Anonymous quote attributed to Einstein (cf. Anonymous, 2011 ).

Personally, I do feel a lot of passion for the world′s musicians and see one of my life′s goals as being advocating for their value. My interest in folk song evolution was motivated not only by theoretical concerns about mechanisms of cultural microevolution, but on my own experiences learning and performing British-American and Japanese folk songs and my hopes that my (Japanese-New Zealand-American) children will be able to sing these songs that have been handed down to them over the course of hundreds of years from their ancestors on opposite sides of the world. I have won trophies in a number of Japanese folk song competitions, so questions about agency in performance and what types of musical (and extra-musical) variation are selected for or against are not merely academic but affect me personally. Do I think that all of these factors can be perfectly quantified? Absolutely not. But I do believe that theories of musical evolution informed by quantitative data could have a positive influence on musicology and beyond. As Clarke ( 2014 , p. 12) later admits: “in fairness, the empirical and the metric have as much potential as any other paradigm to work to humanistic ends”.

Language evolution provides another good analogy. Much work in language evolution focuses on the evolution of basic vocabulary due to its resistance to change and amenability to evolutionary analysis (Pagel, 2017 ). However, broader theories of language evolution incorporate many complex cognitive and social factors, including race, gender and class (Labov, 1994 –2010).

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Acknowledgements

I thank my PhD supervisory committee (Yukio Uemura, Yasuko Tsukahara, Atsushi Marui, and Hugh de Ferranti) for guidance and feedback on this article and my dissertation, and thank Steven Brown, Victor Grauer, Thomas Currie, Quentin Atkinson, Andrea Ravignani, and Jamshid Tehrani for comments on earlier versions of this article. This research was supported by a Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) scholarship, a Keio Research Institute at SFC Startup Grant, and a Keio Gijuku Academic Development Fund Individual Grant.

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Music of Struggle and Protest in the 20th Century

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This is a description of a sound, a poetics, and a political stance in the United States of America during a turbulent century and a half written by someone who grew up in the social milieu described. It endeavors to trace some of the historical and literary roots of 20th-century protest music and discusses the political and musical impact of certain musician-activists on the styles of protest music popular in the second half of the 20th century. These included Charles Seeger, John and Alan Lomax, and Pete Seeger, among others. The tradition of using song to express political ideas flourished in the first four decades of the century, declined due to political repression in the fifth decade, flourished again during the 1960–1980s, and moved to spoken poetry and rap toward the end of the century. For a brief period of time the 20th century forms and performances of music of struggle and protest in the United States had a major impact on music and how music was used in other struggles around the world.

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Seeger, A. (2018). Music of Struggle and Protest in the 20th Century. In: Bader, R. (eds) Springer Handbook of Systematic Musicology. Springer Handbooks. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-55004-5_53

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• NexisUni Full-text newspaper articles from the last several decades: useful for current news and reviews
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• Arts and Humanities Citation Index (ISI Web of Science) (1975-) more... less... Arts & Humanities Citation Index, published by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), is a multidisciplinary database covering the journal literature of the arts and humanities. It indexes 1,100 of the world's leading arts and humanities journals, as well as covering individually selected, relevant items from over 7,000 major science and social science journals. Because the information stored about each article includes the article's cited reference list (often called its bibliography), you can also search the database for articles that cite a known author or work.
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Music Listening in Classical Concerts: Theory, Literature Review, and Research Program

Melanie wald-fuhrmann.

1 Department of Music, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Hauke Egermann

2 York Music Psychology Group, University of York, York, United Kingdom

Anna Czepiel

Katherine o’neill, christian weining.

3 WÜRTH Chair of Cultural Production, Zeppelin University, Friedrichshafen, Germany

Deborah Meier

4 Experimental Psychology Division, University Hospital for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland

Wolfgang Tschacher

Folkert uhde.

5 Radialsystem V, Berlin, Germany

Jutta Toelle

6 Department of Applied Musicology, Gustav Mahler Private University for Music, Klagenfurt, Austria

Martin Tröndle

Performing and listening to music occurs in specific situations, requiring specific media. Empirical research on music listening and appreciation, however, tends to overlook the effects these situations and media may have on the listening experience. This article uses the sociological concept of the frame to develop a theory of an aesthetic experience with music as the result of encountering sound/music in the context of a specific situation. By presenting a transdisciplinary sub-field of empirical (concert) studies, we unfold this theory for one such frame: the classical concert. After sketching out the underlying theoretical framework, a selective literature review is conducted to look for evidence on the general plausibility of the single elements of this emerging theory and to identify desiderata. We refer to common criticisms of the standard classical concert, and how new concert formats try to overcome alleged shortcomings and detrimental effects. Finally, an empirical research program is proposed, in which frames and frame components are experimentally manipulated and compared to establish their respective affordances and effects on the musical experience. Such a research program will provide empirical evidence to tackle a question that is still open to debate, i.e., whether the diversified world of modern-day music listening formats also holds a place for the classical concert – and if so, for what kind of classical concert.

Introduction

Humans love music. We see it as a fitting accompaniment to virtually every situation – using it for a plethora of purposes – and an activity that we engage in daily ( Merriam, 1964 ; DeNora, 2000 ; Schäfer et al., 2013 ). We have further developed our passion for music since the invention of music recording, broadcasting, and playback techniques; and even more so since music has become portable and digital and thus all-available ( O’Hara and Brown, 2006 ; Gopinath and Stanyek, 2014 ). At present, in what the economist and social theorist Jacques Attali (1977 , 1985) called “the period of musical repetition,” people in those countries that account for the vast majority of the global recorded music market listen to recorded music about 18 hours a week ( IFPI, 2019 ). Before this, namely throughout the longest part of its history, music could only be listened to when played live. In other words, musicians and listeners had to be co-present, with production and reception occuring simultaneously in situations such as church services or opera theaters, during public festivities, banquets or dance entertainments, and, starting in the late 17th century, in concerts devoted exclusively to attentive music listening ( Schwab, 1971 ; Salmen, 1988 ; Johnson, 1995 ; Weber, 1997 ; Müller, 2014 ).

Nowadays, live music performance is only one of many ways of listening to and utilizing music and it has to compete with mediatized formats, very similar to other genres of live performances ( Heister, 1983 ; Bontinck, 1999 ; Auslander, 2008 ). One could even wonder if homo economicus still needs the concert at all, given the numerous practical and financial advantages of recorded and streamed music. Economically, however, the live music market has not yet fallen behind. In 2019, it was neck and neck with the market for recorded music, either industry creating a global revenue of around 28 billion $ ( IFPI, 2020 ; Statista, 2021 ). Yet, mostly thanks to music streaming, the market for recorded music could boast an annual growth rate of around 8% per year since 2015, while the live music business has been growing by only about 3% (the COVID-19 pandemic not yet factored in).

While one could leave this for the consumer to decide, publicly funded and subsidized forms of live music, as well as the institutions that have been developed to ensure the public provision with high-quality music performances, face the pressure to substantiate their viability, in addition to their aesthetic and societal relevance. In particular, Western classical music concerts have been challenged. Critics point to shrinking audience numbers, their rapid aging ( Heinen, 2013 ; Gembris and Menze, 2020 ) as well as the narrow social strata that attend those concerts at all ( Reuband, 2007 , 2013 , 2018 ). Music managers, orchestras and music festivals are busy with attempts to respond to these calls, giving the classical concert a makeover and restoring its appeal to contemporary and more diverse audiences ( Schröder, 2014 ; Tröndle, 2020 ). At the same time, the unique character of liveness has found passionate advocates who write about it from an artistic or theoretical standpoint ( Gracyk, 1997 ; Tröndle, 2011 , 2018 ). People are still queuing to listen to famous orchestras, conductors or musicians. New representative concert halls are being built and meeting with enormous public interest, and music festivals are mushrooming in many parts of the world.

The question of whether the diversified world of contemporary music listening formats also holds a place for (different kinds of) classical concerts is still open to debate. At its core stands, we argue, the question whether the concert offers particular and meaningful experiences to its audiences that are qualitatively distinct from those afforded by other musical media ( Burland and Pitts, 2014 ). This is ultimately an empirical question that researchers of liveness in general as well as researchers of the concert and its audiences in particular have only recently started to pursue systematically.

With this article, we want to bring the question of what a classical concert has to offer contemporary audiences to the fore. We present a transdisciplinary sub-field of empirical concert studies with which we expand on earlier ideas of “concert studies” ( Tröndle, 2018 , 2020 ) and take up Eric Clarke’s claim for an “ecological approach” to understanding music listening ( Clarke, 2005 ). We start by sketching out the underlying theoretical framework (part 2). From this, we conduct a selective literature review evaluating evidence on the general plausibility of the single elements of this emerging theory and point to desiderata. Along the way, we refer to common criticisms of the standard classical concert and report how new concert formats try to overcome alleged shortcomings and detrimental effects (part 3). Finally, we suggest an empirical research program, in which frames and frame components are experimentally manipulated and compared to establish their respective affordances and effects on the musical experience (part 4).

Theoretical Core Concepts: Frame, Aesthetic Experience, Classical Concert

Our approach towards the study of music listening in classical concerts is grounded on a theoretical framework that understands a musical experience as the result of a person’s interaction with a musical stimulus in a specific situation (see Figure 1 ). A situation encompasses material, social, spatio-temporal, and cultural characteristics. Adopting a term from the sociologist Goffman(1974 ; see also Willems, 1997 ), aspects of situations that have a bearing on music listening can be conceptualized as frames, that is, features perceived as essentially belonging to the situation and used by participants to understand and interpret it as well as to align their behavior accordingly. As such, the concept of frame is much more specific whilst simultaneously broader than that of context; a term which is typically used if researchers want to address factors that neither belong to the aesthetic object nor the individual ( North and Hargreaves, 2010 ; Brattico et al., 2013 ; Leder and Nadal, 2014 ) 1 . Frames for music listening can be places (e.g., living rooms, cars, concert halls, and public areas), situations (e.g., commuting to work, a romantic dinner, a church service, being alone, or with others), media (e.g., live, recording, digital stream), and discursive contexts (such as a culture’s overarching art and music concepts, or the aesthetics of specific musical styles and genres), all of which are socio-culturally determined.

Schematic depiction of a general framework understanding the aesthetic experience of music as the result of the encounter of a person with a sound sequence in a specific frame. Overlaps of Frame and Sound and Frame and Person indicate mediating effects, overlaps of all three components indicate moderating effects of the Frame.

The frame concept can be related to the theory of embedded cognition. By coining the term “affordance,” Gibson(1966 ; see also Lewin, 1936 ) developed a theory of how an object or an environment (implicitly) affects and structures human behavior by virtue of its material and formal properties. Recently, affordances have also been proposed to shape and organize mental processes ( Bruineberg and Rietveld, 2014 ). In the context of music, frames can thus be understood as environmental properties that affect music-related behavior, as well as the mental processes underlying musical experience. In particular, frames in which music is embedded suggest specific listening modes (e.g., attentive, non-attentive, analytical, and emotional), listening behaviors (e.g., sitting still vs. gesturing or dancing), or functions attributed to the music (e.g., for its own sake or aesthetic pleasure vs. mood management, atmosphere creation, or social bonding).

Frames provide a horizon for evaluation and understanding; they can even define if a sound sequence is heard as music at all (e.g., in the case of noise music, it is more likely that it will be heard as music if presented in a typical music frame like a CD or a concert, rather than when heard on the street). The affordances activated by frames are tied to the material properties of the situation (such as space, technologies), as well as the sociocultural meaning attached to them (e.g., concert halls and opera houses as “temples” of high-quality art music performances). Therefore, it can be expected that such frames affect the music experience in bottom-up and top-down ways and act as moderator and mediator variables.

Aesthetic Experience

The aesthetic experience is a central concept of philosophical aesthetics ( Dewey, 1934 ; Beardsley, 1958 ; Bubner, 1980 ; Shusterman, 1997 ; Küpper and Menke, 2003 ; Reicher, 2005 ; Caroll, 2012 ; Deines et al., 2013 ). It has also been much studied in psychological aesthetics, where it is discussed also under a variety of other terms such as aesthetic appreciation, appraisal, enjoyment, engagement, perception and evaluation, responses, or, simply, reading, watching, and listening ( Abeles and Chung, 1996 ; Leder et al., 2004 ; North and Hargreaves, 2005 ; Marković, 2012 ; Brattico et al., 2013 ; Leder and Nadal, 2014 ; Pelowski et al., 2016 ). Philosophical concepts and psychological operationalizations, however, do not yet fit together very well. Philosophical concepts emphasize the perceivers’ contemplative, even disinterested attitude ( Stolnitz, 1960 ; Bullough, 1995 ), their attempt at understanding a piece of art formally and conceptually, as well as the piece’s potential to provide them with a transformative experience. In contrast, psychological theory would conceptualize aesthetic experience as an output variable in the context of a stimulus-response model, with outputs such as liking, aesthetic judgment and elicited emotion, and their physiological and neurological correlates. Recently, more specific qualities of aesthetic experiences were proposed, i.e., aesthetic emotion ( Marković, 2012 ; Juslin, 2013 ; Schindler et al., 2017 ; Menninghaus et al., 2019 ), fascination ( Marković, 2012 ), awe ( Konečni, 2005 ), or being moved ( Konečni, 2005 ; Menninghaus et al., 2015 ). In general, however, psychological research still emphasizes a primarily passive, physical, and emotional understanding of aesthetic experience, whereas philosophical theorizing tends to apply an overly cognitivist concept.

In psychology and philosophy of mind, a lived experience is generally defined as a first-person, qualitative phenomenon ( Chalmers, 1995 ). Experiences are distinguished from objective response phenomena, such as physiological and behavioral processes. Experiences have qualitative properties (“qualia”), and they are elements of cognitive and emotional processes. In the terminology of phenomenology, qualia comprise “what it feels like” to have exactly this experience in the here-and-now ( Nagel, 1974 ). Cognition refers to the processing of information through mental representations, thought, evaluation, the activation of memory traces and schemata. Cognition can, but need not, be conscious and experienced, sometimes even in a linguistic form as inner speech. Lastly, emotions are generally experienced. Emotions lend a specific flavor to experiences, thus the experience of joy, sadness, fear, or any number of further emotions or mixtures of emotions.

For the remainder of this paper, we will continue with a provisional comprehensive concept of an aesthetic experience of music that combines facets of existing philosophical, aesthetic, and psychological concepts. We conceive of it as a person’s phenomenal state while attending to and internally interacting with a sequence of sounds primarily for the sake of its perceptual and formal properties and their possible meaning, but not so much its real-life information value. In the case of a temporally unfolding stimulus as music, such a state is necessarily dynamic and may combine feelings, perceptions, emotions, associations, expectations, and insights, as well as the evaluation of the musical piece itself and the state(s) into which it puts the listener – all of them mutually influencing each other. It is related to a listener’s present attitude and degree of attention, and comes with physiological, motivational, and behavioral responses.

The Classical Concert as a Frame for Music Listening

This paper claims that a classical concert is one particular frame for music listening, which shapes the aesthetic experience of the music featured within it in specific ways, and that we need empirical studies to test this claim and understand the underlying mechanisms. But which of its characteristics are most likely to guide and influence the experience of a piece of music? Existing descriptions and theories, as well as results that have emerged from qualitative empirical studies ( Heister, 1983 ; Gracyk, 1997 ; Small, 1998 ; Auslander, 2008 ; Gross, 2013 ; Burland and Pitts, 2014 ; Tröndle, 2020 ), point to two defining factors of the classical concert frame: its work-centered aesthetics and its liveness.

As a result of the co-evolution of its forms, its discourses, and its repertoires, the concert has developed into the embodiment (and driving factor) of a specific and presupposition-rich musical aesthetics ( Johnson, 1995 ; Weber, 1997 ; Müller, 2014 ; Tröndle, 2020 ). Heister, who has provided the most exhaustive theoretical concept of the classical concert so far, defines it as the “place where musical autonomy is realized” ( Heister, 1983 , p. 42). A concert, at least in the form it has taken on in the late 19th and early 20th century, publicly celebrates the idea of the musical artwork, which is literally placed centerstage ( Goehr, 1994 ). The musicians have to devote all their skill and artistic refinement into the work’s realization. Meanwhile the audience, which first had to learn “the art of listening” ( Gay, 1984 ), has to receive it with concentration, even contemplation, and reverence, in an act of “purely aesthetic and musical savoring” ( Heister, 1983 , p. 522ss).

Almost all other characteristics of the concert are direct consequences of this aesthetics, as Heister meticulously spelled out. On the one hand, concert hall acoustics, program selections, the training of professional musicians, and the behavioral regimes of sitting still and quietly seek to provide optimal conditions for the production and reception of the greatest musical works ( Gross, 2013 ). On the other hand, the building and design of concert halls, a certain cult of great names and charismatic artists – be they composers or performers – formal dress codes, and rituals serve as constant reminders of the ideology of autonomous music ( Cressman, 2012 ).

The other main factor of a concert is its nature as a live performance featuring the distinct, but interrelated roles, of performers and listeners. This spatio-temporal co-presence entails a number of other aspects, most importantly the possibility to watch the performers creating the music and the genuinely social and interactive character of the event ( Gracyk, 1997 ). Although the concert has typically been seen as the pure embodiment of presentational performance ( Besseler, 1926 , 1959 ; Turino, 2008 ), recently, social-interactive and participatory aspects have been identified as well. As a live performance, a concert affords (verbal) communication between audience members (at least before the concert and in the pause of classical music concerts), inviting participants to form a short-lived community ( Cochrane, 2009 ; Burland and Pitts, 2014 ). It can also lead to manifold interaction processes: audience members can show support, interest, attention and appreciation, or displeasure, thus providing feedback to the performers which they are then likely to respond to, closing the autopoietic feedback loop ( Fischer-Lichte, 2004 ).

Apart from its social character, liveness is also typically associated with ideas of immediacy, indeterminacy, uniqueness, and non-repeatability of the event ( Auslander, 2008 ). Neither the audience members nor the musicians know exactly how the performance will turn out, which might be seen as another mechanism of directing and fixing the audience’s attention. This, in turn, lends presence and an event-like character to a performance, which comes with the promise of a not only quantitatively, but also qualitatively unique experience – a feature of present-day leisure culture that is very much sought-after by audiences ( Schulze, 1992 ; Gumbrecht, 2004a ; Seel, 2008 ; Tröndle, 2011 ; Rebstock, 2020 ).

In sum, the concert is a frame for music listening that is supposed to provide optimal conditions for the purely aesthetic contemplation of (excellent performances of) great musical works together with like-minded people. This historically evolved frame might afford a specific concert experience which consists of a certain type of listening (being pleasurably immersed into the music), a multi-modal character of the stimulus, its social embeddedness (feeling as part of a community), and the appreciation of its singular character. Such experiences have been described in qualitative studies and claimed by theoreticians and advocates of the genre ( Heister, 1983 ; Radbourne et al., 2014 ; Rebstock, 2020 ), but not yet quantitatively corroborated. In addition, while the standard form incorporates implicit assumptions about the relationship between its features and the hoped-for experience resulting from them, new and experimental concert formats that have been developed over the past decades can be understood as a form of aesthetic and social critique of the standard format ( Brüstle, 2013 ; Schröder, 2014 ; Roselt, 2020 ). Typically, these new forms modify the venue, the forms of listening, but also the relationships between performers and audience members and their respective rituals. By singling out and modifying such elements, they point to their potentially detrimental effect on the aesthetic experience and at the same time exemplify how this could be overcome to allow for fresh, heightened and new musical and social experiences that can also have the potential to attract younger audiences or audiences from other social and cultural backgrounds. Thus, they also tend to shift the focus of a concert away from the musical work toward the event-like aspects of a live performance.

This apparent conflict between existing concert formats points to the gap between implicit assumptions of concert practitioners and the lack of empirical knowledge about how exactly the elements of a concert – individually, as well as jointly – contribute to listeners’ actual experiences. Further, each element can, in principle, be realized in a multitude of ways, which might in turn substantially affect the degree and direction of its effect. This as well has not been examined empirically.

What We Already Know About Music Listening in Classical Concerts, and What We Still Need to Know: A Literature Review

To date, concert research consists of several branches. Of these, the history of the concert, its repertoires, halls, and listening forms ( Schwab, 1971 ; Heister, 1983 ; Forsyth, 1985 ; Salmen, 1988 ; Johnson, 1995 ; Weber, 1997 ; Cressman, 2012 ; Thorau and Ziemer, 2019 ), as well as the demography, sociology and consumer behavior of audiences ( Dollase, 1998 ; Reuband, 2007 , 2013 ; Glogner-Pilz and Föhl, 2011 ; Gembris and Menze, 2020 ; Tröndle, 2020 ) have been examined most comprehensively. More recently, a number of qualitative studies has addressed also the motivations and experiences of various audiences ( Pitts, 2005 ; Roose, 2008 ; Dobson, 2010 ; Gross, 2013 ; Brown and Knox, 2017 ; Toelle and Sloboda, 2019 ). There are studies which adopted a quantitative approach in measuring listeners’ experiences in concerts, by collecting continuous or retrospective self-report data or physiological recordings ( McAdams et al., 2004 ; Thompson, 2006 ; Egermann et al., 2013 ; Stevens et al., 2014 ).

Although the specificity of the concert as a medium or format for music listening has theoretically been identified sufficiently well, musical audience research has not yet addressed this issue systematically. Typically, audience experiences are neither analyzed with regard to which of their components are concert-specific, nor are frame effects explicitly addressed. This is related to the fact that music psychological research in general tends to overlook situational and frame effects ( Clarke, 2005 ). Even if studies had been conducted during live concerts, this context was so far neither explicitly addressed nor experimentally manipulated. Likewise, if concerts were compared with other musical media, the focus was not on actual experiences but listening times ( Roose and Vander Stichele, 2010 ).

This is very different from the situation in museum studies, which were the first to experimentally address the effects a museum, and the way it displays and communicates artworks, has on the experience of visitors ( Falk and Dierking, 1992 ; Stuffmann, 2005 ; Brieber et al., 2014 ).

In the following sections of this chapter, we come back to the most distinctive features of a concert identified above and point out what they might contribute to the afforded musical experience. We summarize related results from the fields of concert and audience research. We also identify desiderata and refer to other research contexts and approaches that might prove fruitful for the endeavor of understanding how concerts frame and affect music experiences.

Effects of Venue

Concert halls, the majority of which have been built since the 19th century, are both a prerequisite for a performance-centered staging of classical music and a potent sign of the concert’s underlying aesthetics. By their mere existence as buildings specifically dedicated to hosting musical performances, they signal an assumed importance, seriousness, and high-art quality of the music and the entire event of going to a concert. The architectural style and design of the hall is an aesthetic stimulus in itself that creates a specific atmosphere. Further, their acoustics co-constitute the auditory musical stimulus.

A concert hall is also perhaps the most influential component in the concert regime, as it materially affords what people can perceive and do within such as situation: the tiers require everyone to sit during the performance. Their spatial arrangement directs the audience’s attention to the stage by orienting them physically toward it. Although usually, parts of the audience can also be seen, the lighting control makes it clear that this is only accidental and that the audience should focus on the performers onstage. Taken together, the effect of a concert hall on the musical experience can be studied with regard to (1) the atmosphere created, (2) its function as a framing and/or priming intervention, (3) its contribution to the actual acoustic stimulus, and (4) the behavior it affords.

• (1) The concept of atmospheres stems from phenomenology and has engendered broad and mostly theoretical research in the past years with strong affinities to aesthetic contexts and questions ( Böhme, 1995 , 2006 ; Griffero, 2014 ; Schmitz, 2014 ). It refers to the perception and experience a certain (often architecturally defined) space affords, but also to the social interaction that takes place in that space and theorizes upon the effects a certain atmosphere has on the experience and behavior of an individual. Psychological studies on the perception of atmospheres still are a desideratum ( Schönhammer, 2014 ; but see Tröndle and Tschacher, 2012 for a first example), although practitioners in the fields of concert hall architecture and concert locations are aware of this issue ( Göbel, 2020 ; Kirchberg, 2020 ). Today, concert series or festivals in particular, as well as individual concerts, are often staged in unusual locations. Such locations comprise, among others, of castles, museums, churches, factories, farms, outdoor stages, or dance clubs. In the case of the Yellow Lounge concert series in Berlin, its organizers from Deutsche Grammophon advertise it with particular reference to an altered atmosphere: “classical music can thrill even outside of the concert hall, good-humored and fully relaxed in the Club. (…) Good drinks, communicative atmosphere 2 .” Qualitative research has provided first evidence that festival audiences take note of and appreciate specific atmospheres and see them as a factor that positively influences their experiences ( Karlsen, 2014 ). However, no research so far has examined how exactly the experience of one and the same piece of music differs when listened to in a barn as compared to a hall in a palace, or in a concert hall with modern architecture as compared to one in the styles of the 19th century.

That these effects also work in the contexts of the arts in general ( Tröndle et al., 2014 ; Tröndle and Tschacher, 2016 ), and in music has been shown by a number of studies (for a recent overview, see Fischinger et al., 2020 ). Effects of program notes and other additional information in the form of texts or images have been found for emotions induced by music ( Vuoskoski and Eerola, 2015 ), enjoyment of music ( Margulis, 2010 ), children’s attention and comprehension ( Margulis et al., 2015 ), evaluation ( Anglada-Tort and Müllensiefen, 2017 ; Fischinger et al., 2020 ), and even perception of basic musical characteristics ( Chapman, 1981 ; North and Hargreaves, 2010 ; Fischinger et al., 2020 ).

That listeners might wish for additional information helping them understand and appreciate a piece of music is plausible. Most people lack advanced musical training to be confident in their judgment about any work and performance. In addition, the meaning of musical elements is typically far from being clear but contains a large degree of ambiguity. Even more, in the context of the arts, there simply are no such things as objective value and meaning, according to Umberto Eco’s theory of the open work ( Eco, 1989 ).

So far, priming and framing information about music have been studied in the form of texts or images. These media also play a role in the context of a concert, be it in the form of programs, advertisements, paintings or sculptures of famous composers, program notes, or introductory talks. However, the atmosphere of a concert hall has not yet been researched with regards to its potential nature as prime and frame.

• (3) A concert hall provides a specific acoustic setting ideally optimized for performances of classical music ( Lindau, 2010 ). Tajadura-Jiménez et al. (2010) were among the first to test the effect of room size and sound direction on emotional responses to natural and artificial sounds. They observed that sound sources in front of listeners were perceived as less arousing than those behind listeners, while the sound of a large concert hall was experienced as more arousing and negatively valenced than the sound of a small room. This finding was explained by the additional observation that the larger room in the experiment was also perceived as “less safe” than the small room. Furthermore, Pätynen and Lokki (2016) showed that concert halls with a traditional rectangular shape evoke stronger physiological (skin conductance) and subjective responses to music presented in them (in this case excerpts from Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony). In sum, however, empirical research that compares perception of – and responses to – acoustical variations of the same musical pieces is scarce.

A significant strand of research supports the concept of embodiment among various disciplines (e.g., developmental, social, and clinical psychology). Especially in the field of music psychology, researchers demonstrated the impact of bodily responses on listeners’ music experiences and vice versa. Particularly strong is the urge to move elicited by rhythmically accentuated music with a salient beat, which has been discussed as sensorimotor coupling ( Janata et al., 2012 ; Stupacher et al., 2016 ).

Although a considerable amount of research has already been conducted and published around embodied music experience, literature that examines effects of listening contexts, media, and frames is scarce. As a first step, it has been shown that participants’ non-verbal responses to live music differ from those to recorded music. For example, Swarbrick et al. (2019) found that head movements were faster during a live performance of a Rock musician than during the recorded version as well as finding that movements of self-identified fans being faster and having higher degrees of rhythmic entrainment (movement to beat) compared neutral listeners.

Further, research on non-verbal behavioral synchrony – which refers to the temporal coupling of movement or physiology between at least two individuals – is closely linked to the concept of embodiment and is viable in social listening situations. Although non-verbal synchrony research in the classical concert is still in an early phase, studies in realistic concert settings have so far revealed significant non-verbal synchrony effects within the audience. For example, Seibert et al. (2019) examined the spontaneous coordination of bodily movements – dyadic temporal coupling – within audience members and between audience members and musicians in a classical (chamber music) concert. They found strong movement synchrony between musicians, and also small to medium movement synchrony within the audience, despite the behavioral norms of sitting still. Aspects of music experience, namely absorption and the feeling of being connected to the musicians, were significantly negatively associated with non-verbal synchrony.

In addition to movement synchrony, some studies have explored physiological synchrony across audience members as an index of an embodied experience. Sato et al. (2017) investigated respiratory activity and emotional states within fifteen audience members of a live concert, where they found that respiratory synchronization effects emerged from time to time. Importantly, participants’ excitement seemed to correspond with the respiration activity indicated by synchronized respiratory phases. In another concert study, Bernardi et al. (2017) found that cardiorespiratory synchrony among audience members were higher during live music listening, compared to a resting baseline. In corroborating findings of Sato et al. (2017) , Bernardi and colleagues also found that synchrony and ratings of pleasantness were positively correlated; though it should be noted that synchrony was more strongly correlated (i.e., more variance explained) with low-level acoustic features such as loudness variability (compared to pleasantness ratings). Thus, it could be argued that the quality of performance in terms of excitement and pleasantness can be estimated – at least to a certain extent – by synchronous phase respiration.

Accordingly, the presented results on non-verbal synchrony and its association with perceived quality of performance and music experience underlined the embodiment perspective and stresses the relevance of embodied musical experience despite behavioral regimes that try to suppress it.

Effects of Multi-Modal Perception

As a consequence of the co-presence of performers and audience, music in a concert becomes a richer, multi-modal stimulus. In particular, visual aspects might add layers of meaning and aesthetic affordance to the musical sound. Studies and deliberations of a more general kind have argued that aesthetic pleasure is most commonly evoked by combining multi-modal perception into one single experience, including sight, sound, environment, and company ( Cohen, 2009 ; Huron, 2012 ). So far, potential multimodality effects in music listening and concerts have been primarily studied with regard to visual aspects, i.e., (1) visual aspects of the concert hall and performer, and (2) performers’ gestures. But it can be assumed that aspects of vibrotactile perception of sounds, room temperature and climate, lighting, or seating comfort might also affect the experience within a concert.

• (1) The style and design of a concert venue provides a very strong visual stimulus, which may affect audience members’ emotions and level of engagement and to which they will respond with a judgment of taste ( Cook, 2012 ). By investigating the concert setting, a study by Coutinho and Scherer (2017) compared emotions during a live performance in a real-world musical context in a church (as part of a Lieder recital) to the audio-video recording in a laboratory situation (university lecture hall). Self-reports of emotion engagement, feelings of wonder and tenderness were much higher in the church setting, while boredom, tension and sadness were higher in the lecture hall setting, showing that environment could indeed be a crucial component in evoking more intense aesthetic emotions. Equally, fashion is a field where visual properties carry meaning and where human tastes vary a lot ( Solomon, 1985 ). In a concert, it is present via performers’ attire. For example, formal dress can create a “sense of occasion” ( Griffiths, 2011 ) and increase the perception of a performer’s technical and musical proficiency ( Griffiths, 2010 ).

Using psychophysiology as a measure of felt affect, Chapados and Levitin (2008) demonstrated that electrodermal activity (representing felt arousal) was significantly higher in audiovisual performances of Stravinsky’s Second Piece for solo clarinet, compared to audio-only and visual-only performances. Together with evidence showing that performer movement increases perception of expressivity, emotionality, and skill, this suggests that the visual component of a live concert performance can enhance our experience of the music. Indeed, first-time concertgoers commented on how they felt the visual cues enhanced enjoyment of the music ( Dobson, 2010 ; Dobson and Pitts, 2011 ).

However, there is also some research showing that visuals do not seem to enhance the emotional experience in listeners. Finnäs (1992) found no significant difference of subjectively rated felt emotional response (of either musicians or non-musicians) between audio-only and audiovisual versions of Mahler’s Second Symphony. Vuoskoski et al. (2016) found that audio-only performances of Brahms’ piano Intermezzo in B minor – compared to audiovisual performances – elicited more emotional arousal (as indexed by skin conductance), contrary to findings of Chapados and Levitin (2008) . The authors discuss how musical styles (Romantic vs. Modern) and the degrees of freedom of the performer (a clarinetist who is standing up compared to a pianist who is sitting down) may influence the extent to which visuals play a role in musical experience. Thus, the specific role of visuals as an enhancer in live music experience still requires further empirical study to consider possible variables (styles, instrument, and musical expertise of perceiver), as well as considering these factors in more applied and multi-modal contexts, such as a concert setting.

Effects of the Social Character of Music Listening

The presence and visibility of musicians, as well as the group nature of the audience, lend a social, and participatory component to the aesthetic experience. This social component is moderated, however, by behavioral protocols, arrangement of tiers vs. stage, and existing power relationships.

Qualitative research shows how much listeners appreciate the social nature of a concert and whether it is able to induce feelings of a shared experience with peers, a sense of belonging, direct interaction with the performers, and participation in something meaningful ( Radbourne et al., 2014 ). The possibility to watch performers is often mentioned as a positively experienced element of concerts alongside a real interest in personal connections with performers ( Burland and Pitts, 2014 ).

Quantitative and experimental studies have further corroborated these qualitative findings, in particular regarding the social character of the audience. For example, it was experimentally demonstrated that social feedback about other music listeners’ enjoyment changes how listeners respond to music subjectively, where knowledge of previous ratings of a musical performance influences an individual, motivated by a desire to conform ( Egermann et al., 2013 ). This finding was interpreted as a form of normative social influence on social appraisals ( Manstead and Fischer, 2001 ) assuming that a similar mechanism could be activated in classical music concerts through social feedback via ( inter alia ) applause ( Mann et al., 2013 ).

Previous research has demonstrated the effect the presence of other people has on a listener’s response to music. The emotion experienced when listening to music, specifically strong experiences with music, has been shown to be influenced by the social context in which the listening occurred ( Gabrielsson and Wik, 2003 ), with intense experiences occurring more frequently in live concerts when other people were present ( Lamont, 2011 ). In a more controlled study that utilized recorded stimuli – where participants listened to self-chosen or randomly sampled music samples – more intense emotions were reported when participants were listening with a close friend or partner compared to when listening alone ( Liljeström et al., 2013 ). However, another study found that listening in a group does not lead to more intense emotional responses perhaps due to less concentration on the music ( Egermann et al., 2011 ). In a later study by Linnemann et al. (2016) , music was found to reduce stress more if it was listened to in the presence of others, regardless of the original motivation for listening to the music, where influence of others has been found to be stronger if they are known to the listener.

Research on the effects of an interaction between listeners and performers, however, is much more sparse. Here, qualitative studies also provide evidence for the general importance and appreciation audiences and performers attribute to it ( Moelants et al., 2012 ; Toelle and Sloboda, 2019 ). In the behaviorally restricted setting of a classical concert, however, real and spontaneous interaction is only possible to a small degree. The only legitimate form of mutual feedback is applause ( Toelle, 2018 ), which not only informs the musicians how the audience is responding to their performances, but also provides feedback to an audience member on the reception of the music by other audience members.

If compared with other concert types, such as jazz and popular music concerts, classical concerts seem to leave the potential of creating a social experience of music largely unused, which is one factor behind the different experiences these concert types can afford ( Pitts, 2005 ; Kulczynski et al., 2016 ). This has not only been criticized from a theoretical point of view ( Small, 1998 ), but also been addressed by performers and concert curators who have started to experiment with forms that invite true interaction and even participation ( Schröder, 2014 ; Toelle and Sloboda, 2019 ). So far, the underlying assumptions as to how exactly such changes impact the collective experience have not yet been explored in a systematic way. The need to test these assumptions in a multi-disciplinary and ecologically valid way is central to further the understanding of the social experience of a concert and how the group experience can be enhanced.

Effects of Presence, Uniqueness, Immediacy

The live character of a concert is also closely tied to its nature as a single, unique, and un-repeatable event that might be valued for its presence and immediacy ( Auslander, 2008 ). According to Walter Benjamin, this special quality of a live concert could be described as the “aura,” i.e., the authenticity, realness and presence of the aesthetic object that technical reproduction would not be able to recreate ( Benjamin, 1963 ). Gumbrecht (2004b) even puts “presence” in the focus of the aesthetic experience as the sensorial and lived experience of an appearance. Further developing this concept of presence in the context of classical music concerts, Rebstock (2020) claims that the production of presence might be the key component of a concert and, therefore, new concert formats should aim for a higher intensity of presence ( Rebstock, 2020 ).

Although the concept of presence in the context of aesthetic experiences is repeatedly discussed in theory ( Seel, 2003 ; Fischer-Lichte, 2004 ; Gumbrecht, 2004b ; Rebstock, 2020 ; Roselt, 2020 ), no specific empirical research on it seems to exist, supposedly because of its intangible nature. However, some of the studies mentioned in the above sections include certain components, as the experience of presence can be understood as a sensorial and intense physical experience and is per se part of the aesthetic experience ( Gumbrecht, 2003 ).

While on the one hand the “incursion of reproduction into the live event” ( Auslander, 2008 ) can be seen as a threatening development for the live experience, on the other hand it can be argued that technical reproduction might increase the demand of experiences of unmediated presence or is already even a fixed component of auratic moments ( Schulze, 2011 ). Either way, there is no denying the fact that the link between uniqueness and presence dissolves due to technical developments, which empirical research might take up in a fruitful way.

Toward a Research Program

Our literature review has shown that the (classical) concert and concert listening experiences have been already acknowledged as worthwhile research topics by a multitude of disciplines. At the same time, more thorough, systematic, and transdisciplinary research is still needed since (so far) a theoretical framework able to generate interrelated research questions and overarching hypotheses has not been postulated. In the final passages of our paper, we develop what we have outlined in the preceding sections into a sketch of a research program that, albeit functioning within a psychological scheme, is genuinely interdisciplinary. In a nutshell, this research program stipulates the comparison and experimental manipulation of frames as well as frame components to establish their respective affordances and effects on the musical experience. Here, the aesthetic experience of music is the dependent variable of interest. Although it is brought about by listening to a specific performance of music, i.e., the stimulus, and how a listener interacts with it, this is not what will be of primary interest. Rather, the focus will lie on the mediating and moderating effects of the concert frame, as well as its interactions with person- and stimulus-related factors.

Frame Components as Stimuli

At the heart of empirical concert research, as we propose in this current article, stands the idea of using frames and their individual components as stimuli and manipulating them experimentally, in order to establish the nature, form, and strength of their influence on the musical stimulus and the affordances they unfold for performers and listeners (see the expanded model in Figure 2 ). By nature, we mean whether an effect enhances or disturbs the experience, and on which component(s) of the aesthetic experience it exerts its influence. By form, we mean whether an effect is rather a mediating or moderating one. While some aspects of frames can be studied in the lab (which should be acknowledged as a particular frame of its own), frames that largely rely on particular venues and social situations cannot. This is especially true for the concert. While virtual reality technologies might provide a more lab-like solution for this in the near future, at the moment, researchers have to go to or create such frames and situations themselves.

Expanded frame-music-listener model to show potential concrete mediating and moderating effects of concert components on the performance and the listener and thus, the aesthetic experience of music.

In essence, series of experiments need to be designed in which individual concert components are manipulated. Inspirations for the components and types of such experimental manipulations should be derived from contemporary (and possibly even historical) concert practices, most importantly from practitioners who critically reflect on the concert ( Rebstock, 2020 ; Roselt, 2020 ). In such a case, the pieces to be performed as well as the musicians performing them need to remain the same to control for (the largest part of) the acoustic stimulus. Components to be manipulated would be those that have been shown to define the concert as a concert, namely: the venue and the atmosphere it creates, the multi-modality, the listening mode, the behavior, and the social component. This will, at least partially, result in concerts that have a very different character and atmosphere, concerts whose frame function will thus become increasingly more “visible” up to a degree where it might no longer be working as a frame, but as an artistic stimulus in its own right, completely merged with the music.

In terms of the venue, a considerable number of effects on the musical stimulus and the listeners can be studied, that likely work either in the form of mediators or moderators. A manipulation in the form of performing the same program in halls with different acoustics, architectural styles, layout of tiers and stage, and social connotations suggests itself. While the acoustics have an effect on the sound of the performed piece, the atmosphere and architecture may likewise influence the state of the listeners. Potential priming effects of style and decoration of a venue, however, might primarily work as moderators on how a listener experiences the music.

The multimodal character of music in a concert, that follows from the co-presence of performers and listeners, is also a way in which the concert exerts an influence on the musical stimulus or even contributes to it. It can be examined by varying the visual appearance of performers, their behavior toward the audience, the degree and form of their overt interaction with each other, their display of their own emotions and engagement. An extreme form would be to hide performers from sight, as was repeatedly proposed and realized by historical theoreticians and practitioners of the concert since the 17th century ( Schwab, 1991 ; Schröder, 2014 ). Besides, existing ideas to increase the value of the visual aspect even more by an artistic design of lighting, stage decorations, or the integration of video projections could be taken up and experimentally explored if they have an effect on attention, immersion, understanding, and appreciation.

Although, as a consequence of its underlying aesthetics, the attentive and disembodied listening mode is the historically preferred one in a concert, neither do all concerts afford these to a satisfying degree, nor should other potentially pleasurable and meaningful listening modes be excluded due to ideological reasons. Manipulations of a concert in the attempt to afford a specific listening mode is therefore another potential area of experimental variation of the classical standard concert. Such listening modes could include the exploration of the embodiment of the music, listening emotionally, associatively, or auto-biographically.

Related to this is the aspect of behavioral regimes exerted by a standard concert that can be assumed to moderate listening experiences. Here, moreover, variations can be designed that explore which other (less strict and ritualized) behaviors are possible and how they change the experience of the music.

Further, the social component needs careful consideration. Obvious variations could target the relationship between performers and audience in the attempt to make it less hierarchical, more spontaneous, personal, interactive, and – on the side of the audience – more participatory. Also, moderating effects of the size, density, and spatial arrangement of audiences can be examined.

Finally, variations could address the aspect of a perceived event-character and uniqueness of a concert. Here, elements that enhance the degree of surprise and indeterminacy would be related to the programming, the staging of pieces, or the integration of improvisation, among others, and thus moderate their experience.

All such variations would have to fulfill the double need of making sense artistically as a concert and of singling out individual components. To achieve this, concert curators need to form an essential part of a research team. Any hypothesis underlying a concrete experimental manipulation should primarily regard direct and mediated effects on attention, relating to the music, making sense of it, perceived presence and event-character, and the social components of the concert experience. This is because the distinctive features of a concert can all be seen as meant to afford intense, immersed, unique, and personally meaningful musical experiences that are characterized by two dimensions of relationships: between the individual listener and the music, and between the listeners and performers.

Perspectives

Such a research program that thoroughly and empirically investigates, as well as manipulates, the concert frame and its components can only be performed in interdisciplinary teams that gather musicologists, sociologists, concert practitioners, and under the guidance of psychologists ( Tröndle et al., 2020 ). It will come with a lot of challenges, above all methodological and conceptual ones in order to balance control with realism. However, it also provides important perspectives and promises to greatly advance (music) psychology, (cultural) sociology, and (empirical) aesthetics. In particular, it places a defining aspect of the art of music centerstage, namely that music requires to be mediated by performers, technologies, and even the air circulating through particular rooms. At the same time, our concept of frame highlights an aspect that is not only relevant, but crucial for all art forms. How (art) objects are perceived and experienced is only in part a direct result of their sensory and formal properties, but depends to a large degree on the aesthetic, social, and cultural discourses creating and surrounding them, as well as the situations in which they are perceived ( Clarke, 2005 ). Artifacts, cultural objects, and art works in particular do not have a meaning of their own, but gain their meaning from cultural practices and discourses in which they are embedded. The concert provides a particularly convenient example to embark on a systematic exploration of effects of frames – their situational, social, multi-modal, and discursive constituents – on one set of aesthetic experience, the experience of music. Thus, we can expect to gather insights that will help us answer the initial questions, whether and in what respects music listening in classical concerts is different from other listening frames, and also, which types of concerts may continue to be of aesthetic interest to contemporary societies.

Author Contributions

MW-F created a first and second draft of the article, prepared figures, wrote most of the sections, and led the process. KO’N, HE, AC, CW, DM, WT, JT, and MT wrote individual sections of the article. All authors discussed and revised earlier versions of the manuscript and read and approved the final manuscript.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Felix Bernoully from the graphics department at the MPI for Empirical Aesthetics for designing the figures.

Funding. This article is related to the research project Experimental Concert Research (ECR), which receives substantial funds from the Volkswagen Foundation and the Aventis Foundation.

1 A frame conceptualized as a set of concepts that organize experiences guiding the actions of individuals and groups, can be closely connected to Michael Focault’s idea of the dispositif. Goffman is referring to the experience, Focault to power, both theories stem from the 1970s and try to conceptualize human behavior.

2 http://www.communicating-music.eu/en/345/yellow-lounge-berlin-de.html , 19 June 2020.

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The Sounds of Music in the Twenty-first Century

By Alex Ross

When the hip-hop artist Kendrick Lamar won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Music, in April, reactions in the classical-music world ranged from panic to glee. Composers in the classical tradition have effectively monopolized the prize since its inception, in 1943. Not until 1997 did a nominal outsider—the jazz trumpeter and composer Wynton Marsalis—receive a nod. Lamar’s victory , for his moodily propulsive album “ damn .,” elicited some reactionary fuming—one irate commenter said that his tracks were “ neurologically divergent from music” —as well as enthusiastic assent from younger generations. The thirty-one-year-old composer Michael Gilbertson, who was a finalist this year, told Slate, “I never thought my string quartet and an album by Kendrick Lamar would be in the same category. This is no longer a narrow honor.”

Lamar’s win made me think about the changing nature of “distinguished musical composition,” to use the Pulitzer’s crusty term. Circa 1950, this was understood to mean writing a score for others to perform, whether in the guise of the dissonant hymns of Charles Ives or the spacious Americana of Aaron Copland. But that definition was always suspect: it excluded jazz composers, whose tradition combines notation and improvisation. In 1965, a jury tried to give a Pulitzer to Duke Ellington, but the board refused. Within classical composition, meanwhile, activity on the outer edges had further blurred the job description. By the early fifties, Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry were creating collages that incorporated recordings of train engines and other urban sounds; Karlheinz Stockhausen was assisting in the invention of synthesized sound; John Cage was convening ensembles of radios. By century’s end, a composer could be a performance artist, a sound artist, a laptop conceptualist, or an avant-garde d.j. Du Yun , Kate Soper , and Ashley Fure , the Pulitzer finalists in 2017—I served on the jury—make use, variously, of punk-rock vocals, instrumentally embroidered philosophical lectures, and architectural soundscapes. Such artists may lack the popular currency of Lamar, but they are not cloistered souls.

Writing overnight history is a perilous task, but the British critic Tim Rutherford-Johnson manages the feat in “ Music After the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture Since 1989 ” (University of California). In fewer than three hundred pages of cogent prose, Rutherford-Johnson catalogues the bewildering diversity of twenty-first-century composed music, and, more important, makes interpretative sense of a corpus that ranges from symphonies and string quartets to improvisations on smashed-up pianos found in the Australian outback (Ross Bolleter’s “ Secret Sandhills ”). By the end of the book, definitions seem more elusive than ever: to compose is to work with sound, or with silence, in a premeditated way, or not. What, then, isn’t composition? Conversations around the term often focus on either erasing or redrawing the boundary between the classical and the popular. Rutherford-Johnson makes us think about other borders: between genres, between ideologies, between art and the world. “Music After the Fall” is the best extant map of our sonic shadowlands, and it has changed how I listen.

I first encountered Rutherford-Johnson as the author of a new-music blog called the Rambler, which he started in 2003, when starting a blog was still a novel thing to do. I became a devoted reader after he compared the work of Harrison Birtwistle to “granite in November rain”—a fine phrase for that rugged, monumental music. “Music After the Fall,” like the blog, addresses a vast range of music, from the gnarliest experimentalism to the mellowest minimalism, and Rutherford-Johnson applies a critical intelligence that is at once rigorous and generous. He has the faculty of “omniaudience”: he seems to have heard and comprehended everything.

Rutherford-Johnson, who is forty-one, is wise to commence his account in 1989, rather than in 2000. Just as the cultural twentieth century began late, with the modernist convulsions of 1907-13 (Picasso, Matisse, Stein, Pound, Schoenberg, Stravinsky), so it ended early, its verities collapsing under the pressure of political and economic tumult. The “fall” in the title points most obviously to the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, but it has wider resonances. The rapid spread of globalization, the triumph of unregulated free-market economics, the invasive power of the Internet, and the decline of liberal democracy have eroded institutions that defined cultural activity throughout the twentieth century. I was a college student in 1989, and the world of that year now seems ancient. Like my parents and grandparents, I grew up reading print newspapers and magazines, writing longhand or on a typewriter, listening to records, mailing letters, driving with maps. I have far less in common with people twenty years younger than I am. Virginia Woolf’s famous birth date for modernity—“On or about December 1910 human character changed”—probably has a latter-day counterpart, sometime in the nineties.

In composed music, the big news was the retreat, and possible demise, of modernism. After the Second World War, prodigiously complex systems of organizing music spread to all corners of the globe: twelve-tone composition, its serialist variants, chance operations, and so on. The archetypal modern piece was knotty and abstract, with angular gestures and abrupt transitions. Traditional musical forms fell from fashion, and direct emotional expression was considered vulgar. The high priest of the epoch was the late Pierre Boulez, who declared that any composer who had not absorbed Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method was “ useless .”

One of the sharpest critiques of the modernist ethos came from the musicologist Susan McClary, who, in a 1988 paper, “Terminal Prestige,” dissected the “mystique of difficulty,” seeing modernism as a “reductio ad absurdum of the nineteenth-century notion that music ought to be an autonomous activity, insulated from the contamination of the outside social world.” Behind the defiant modernist façade she detected a macho pose, an aversion to “soft, sentimental, ‘feminine’ qualities.” The modernist disdain for popularity and commercial values masked an alternative marketplace in which élite artists competed for grants and professorships. All this could be seen as an offshoot of a Cold War mentality in which abstruse pursuits were propped up with scientific-sounding language.

The seventies and eighties saw the gradual return of tonally based composition, in the form of minimalism, the New Simplicity, and the New Romanticism. These developments aligned with postmodern trends in other art forms: the return of ornament in architecture, of figuration in painting, of episodic narrative in fiction. The first work that Rutherford-Johnson discusses in his book is Steve Reich’s “ Different Trains ,” from 1988, which incorporates a live string quartet and a digital soundtrack of speaking voices, prerecorded string tracks, and ambient sounds. Its chugging motion and repetitive gestures present an invitingly smooth surface, even as the recorded material pivots toward stories of the Holocaust. The piece typifies the late-twentieth-century return to fundamentals—what McClary describes as “composing for people.”

Yet Rutherford-Johnson follows his analysis of “Different Trains” with discussions of very different works from the late eighties: Galina Ustvolskaya’s Sixth Piano Sonata , in which the performer bashes out hyper-dissonant cluster chords; Hildegard Westerkamp’s “ Kits Beach Soundwalk ,” a montage of sounds recorded near Vancouver, Canada; Merzbow’s “ Brain Forest—For Acoustic Metal Concrete ,” an onslaught of electronic noise; and Bright Sheng’s “ H’un ,” a brooding orchestral memorial to victims of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The point is clear: Reich’s reaction to modernist complexity is merely one strand of an intricate musical fabric.

Indeed, Rutherford-Johnson takes a cool view of mainstream minimalism, saying that it “speaks of and to America in the 1990s: it is redeemed, technologically ascendant, media friendly, culturally dehierarchized, and postmodernistically optimistic.” Such music appeals to classical and pop-trained listeners in equal measure—a characteristic that gave Reich, Philip Glass, Arvo Pärt, and other minimalist-leaning composers an audience far larger than the industry average. The most unexpected Billboard hit of the early nineties was Nonesuch’s recording of Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 , a hypnotically doleful immersion in slow-moving tonal harmony, which sold more than a million copies. By the early years of the twenty-first century, pop-inflected post-minimalism was the dominant style among younger Americans. At a certain point, composers like Nico Muhly and Caroline Shaw and indie-pop groups like the National and Arcade Fire often seemed to be speaking the same half-bright, half-bittersweet language.

Tonality had its comeback, to the extent that it ever went away. At the same time, modernism failed to expire, despite the many obituaries that were written for it. McClary acknowledged as much in a 2015 essay, “The Lure of the Sublime,” published in the anthology “ Transformations of Musical Modernism ” (Cambridge University). In it, she describes the emergence of a “twenty-first-century version of modernism” that adopts a more openly sensuous language. McClary singles out three operas on topics of doomed passion: Salvatore Sciarrino’s “ Luci Mie Traditrici ” (1998), Kaija Saariaho’s “ L’Amour de Loin ” (2000), and George Benjamin’s “ Written on Skin ” (2012). All three works have mesmerized large audiences, even though they avoid obvious tonal reference points. The arrival of Saariaho’s opera at the Met, in 2016, was a particularly bracing sign of modernist longevity. The piece begins with low tendrils of sound, which gather into immense, shuddering dissonances. But the gradualness of the process—the methodical accumulation of shimmering patterns over organ-like bass tones—saturates the ears instead of battering them. The music breathes and moves like a living organism. As McClary suggests, it imparts a human dimension to the modernist sublime.

Other heirs of the modernist legacy have refused to compromise, hunkering down in dissonance and difficulty. In the nineteen-eighties, the British-born, American-based composer Brian Ferneyhough was named the avatar of a New Complexity, and although Ferneyhough never adopted the term himself, it reflects the extreme density of his music—a meticulous chaos of piled-up rhythms, conflicting melodic lines, and disintegrating forms. Rutherford-Johnson captures the effect: “The way Ferneyhough deliberately overpacks his music with information, starting and restarting it every few seconds to create a perceptual overload, thwarts the memory’s ability to create a meaningful structure. . . . Time after time, what we have just heard is pushed into the background by what follows next.” This is a very contemporary experience, matching the from-all-sides tempo of video games and social-media threads. Small wonder that Ferneyhough has been hugely influential among composers who have come of age since 1989.

Much twentieth-century modernist music sounded like—and actually was—the outcome of a preordained process, the working out of a utopian or a mathematical idea. Modernists of today, whether of the sensuous or the spastic type, are less concerned with method: their music tends to have a tactile immediacy. One compelling figure is the Israeli-born composer Chaya Czernowin, who studied with Ferneyhough and has become a formidable teacher herself. Rutherford-Johnson says of her 1999 opera, “Pnima,” that listeners can feel the notes being played “as different forms of abrasion and pressure”: “air pushing against dilating lips, bow hairs sliding against strings, fingertips plucking and sliding.” Although her music is dark and unyielding, and is written in the shadow of trauma—“Pnima” is about younger generations coming to terms with the Holocaust—there is nothing dry or cerebral about it. Czernowin composes the negative beauty of disaster; it is the musical equivalent of Picasso’s “Guernica” or Anselm Kiefer’s “Margarethe.”

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Modern classical music is bedevilled by what might be called the Kandinsky Problem. Modernist painters, writers, and filmmakers had a far easier time finding a wide audience than composers did. Kandinsky creates mob scenes in museums; the mere appearance of Schoenberg’s name on a concert program can depress attendance. Although composers do not deserve blame for this state of affairs—conservative institutions are fundamentally at fault, having created a hostile atmosphere for new music as far back as the mid-nineteenth century—inscrutable program notes and imperious attitudes did not ease the standoff between artist and audience. Millennial modernists tend to take a different tack. Trevor Bača, one of Czernowin’s American students, says of his grittily evocative scores, “I write because I feel an emotional compulsion to write—to give form to fantastic or impossible colors and shapes as sound and as pleasure—and, yet, when I write, I am intensely aware of the fact that I am setting up and taking apart a code. . . . I reject any dichotomy that pits the analytic against the emotional.”

Rutherford-Johnson has no interest in constructing a new canon of Great Men, or of Great Women, who are carrying on the saga of heroic musical innovation. (The suffocating maleness of music history is at an end, even if the news has yet to reach most big-league orchestras and opera houses.) Instead, he presents a decentered, democratized scene, in which famous names collide with figures who may be obscure even to plugged-in fanatics. Reading his book took me months, as I stopped to search out Internet evidence of the likes of Cynthia Zaven’s “ Untuned Piano Concerto with Delhi Traffic Orchestra ” (2006), in which the composer improvised raucously on the back of a truck being driven around New Delhi.

In Rutherford-Johnson’s telling, composers are not sequestered monks but attuned social beings who react to cultural pressures. The book is organized around an array of such forces: late-capitalist economics, the breakdown of genres, sexual liberation, globalization, the Internet, environmentalism, the traumas of war and terror. Moving from nation to nation and continent to continent—the book includes not only British, American, French, and German composers but also Lebanese, Filipino, and Asian-Australian ones—Rutherford-Johnson hosts a musical version of the Venice Biennale. For a theoretical frame, he adopts the curator and critic Nicolas Bourriaud’s notion of “radicant” aesthetics—radicant being the botanical term for organisms with no single root, like ivy.

Attracted to conceptual extremes, Rutherford-Johnson devotes many pages to works that extend the radical experiments of John Cage. A lot of the pieces he describes consist mainly of verbal instructions, and verge on being exercises in meditation. Peter Ablinger has written an assortment of compositions that involve photographs hanging on a gallery wall or chairs arranged in various locations, such as a parking lot or a beach. The music becomes, as in Cage’s “4'33",” whatever one happens to hear in the space. The score for Jennifer Walshe’s “ THIS IS WHY PEOPLE O.D. ON PILLS / AND JUMP FROM THE GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE ” begins with the instruction “Learn to skateboard, however primitively.” Performers are asked to acquire the rudiments of the sport and then to re-create the experience while playing whatever instrument comes to hand.

What does any of this have to do with distinguished musical composition? With that inevitable question, the Kandinsky Problem resurfaces. In the art world, instinctive antagonism to the new, the weird, and the absurd is less common. People think nothing of queueing for hours in order to sit in a chair opposite Marina Abramović or to grope their way through a foggy tunnel designed by Olafur Eliasson. Indeed, composers can often find a more appreciative audience if they reclassify their music as an installation or as performance art. Walshe is a fascinating in-between case: her catalogue includes a delightfully bewildering group of manifestos, scores, art works, and recordings that purport to document an Irish Dadaist collective called GRÚPAT . The collective is entirely Walshe’s invention. GRÚPAT works have been presented mainly at museums and galleries.

Outré tinkering can yield new kinds of beauty. Such is the story of the international composing collective known as Wandelweiser , many of whose creations are so austere that they try the patience of even hardcore vanguardists. Manfred Werder’s “2003 (1)” asks a trio of performers to make only two sounds during a performance of indeterminate length; the one extant recording lasts seventy minutes. As Rutherford-Johnson has written on his blog, such a score is a “utopian extravagance,” but it clears a space for a piece like Jürg Frey’s Third String Quartet , a whispery procession of frail, gorgeous chords. The music of Wandelweiser seems to embody a philosophy of passive resistance. In an information-overload culture, the most revolutionary act might be to say as little as possible, as quietly as possible, as slowly as possible. (John Cage’s “ As Slow As Possible ” is currently receiving a performance at a church in Germany; it began in 2001 and is scheduled to end in 2640.)

The twenty-first-century aesthetic of quietude often overlaps with site-specific and installation-like works, which escape the concert hall and merge with the environment. Rutherford-Johnson explores the genre of the “soundwalk,” in which a composer curates a journey through a particular soundscape. Field recordings are a popular way to evoke places, especially those endangered by environmental change. Annea Lockwood has produced “sound maps” of the Hudson, Danube, and Housatonic rivers; Francisco López’s “ La Selva ” is a transfixing seventy-minute fabric of sounds from the Costa Rican rain forest. A related genre is what Rutherford-Johnson calls the “journey form.” In 2016, the percussionist Payton MacDonald performed thirty works while taking a twenty-five-hundred-mile bike trip from Mexico to Canada, along the Continental Divide. Such projects often have a political undertow. When we stop using music as a noise-cancelling shield—when we listen sensitively to the natural world—we register how much damage we are doing.

“Music After the Fall” would be a dull book if it satisfied everyone, and not all of it persuaded me. Rutherford-Johnson is inconsistent in how he handles composers who have reverted to some form of tonality. Some, such as John Adams, are depicted as market-oriented artists peddling nostalgic neo-Romanticism. Others are praised for undertaking “personal explorations of the expressive and formal limits of musical materials.” It’s not clear how one can decide from a distance what inner urges motivate any given composer. Nor is it necessarily the case that pure or impure motives lead to better or worse music. And Adams hardly fits the profile of a pandering nostalgist; otherwise, he would not have written “ The Death of Klinghoffer ,” the most politically divisive opera of recent decades. Rutherford-Johnson is on firmer ground when he observes that few artists fall into the binary positions of “resisting or embracing the market.” On either side of the enduring tonal-atonal divide, most composers are, at best, eking out a living.

Rutherford-Johnson is correct in asserting that market forces have led to an upsurge of euphonious, audience-friendly scores. Still, there should be a space for principled populism—works that enter the arenas of opera, symphonic music, film scores, and musical theatre not to appease but to provoke. An avant-garde piece that addresses misogyny and rape culture is unlikely to cause much dissent in an audience of metropolitan connoisseurs. But when Missy Mazzoli’s 2016 opera, “ Breaking the Waves ,” a brutally expressive adaptation of the Lars von Trier film, places such issues in front of a broader crowd, the tension is palpable. The atmosphere becomes all the more charged when Mazzoli uses gestures out of Puccini, Janáček, and Britten, in which women have limited agency or hardly exist.

Another blurry area of Rutherford-Johnson’s map—one that might require another book—is the terrain where experimental composers cross paths with the less popular denizens of popular music. In his opening discussion of 1989-era figures, one stands apart: Masami Akita, who records under the name Merzbow. Unlike the others, Akita never received formal classical training, and his enormous output takes the form not of scores but of studio and live recordings. Still, the decision to include him makes intuitive sense. What Akita shares with the notational composers who dominate “Music After the Fall” is his distance from the center: noise music is, by its nature, an underground culture. To many ears, Merzbow and Chaya Czernowin may sound much the same, despite the obvious differences in the composers’ backgrounds and methods. They are Other Music—to borrow the name of the beloved, now departed East Village store that stocked the kinds of releases you couldn’t find at Tower Records.

But, if noise musicians belong in Rutherford-Johnson’s narrative, so do countless other contrary-minded artists. The lineage of free jazz and “great black music” that descends from Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and Anthony Braxton should have a prominent place. The composer and multi-instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey , a deserving recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship last year, shows the vitality of that strand in the younger generation. He writes in the interstices of classical and jazz; his music is both composed and improvised. Such artists also refuse to play the problematic role that white America tends to assign black musicians: that of the redemptive mass entertainer. The composer-scholar George E. Lewis has noted that the idea of a black avant-garde—or, for that matter, of a black classical composer—is often considered a contradiction in terms. The awarding of the Pulitzer to Lamar was widely hailed, but the choice of the avant-garde-leaning Henry Threadgill, two years earlier, was largely ignored.

The veneration of the musical canon leads all too easily to a kind of highbrow theme park that trades on nostalgia for a half-mythical past. Yet tradition can also foster a revolt against a quasi-totalitarian popular culture that subjects everyone to the same bundle of products. Rutherford-Johnson mentions “something indefinable” in the Western classical tradition that attracts creative musicians from across the globe, even if they end up rebelling against that tradition. The more they reject the past, the more they pay tribute to it. This September, the New York Philharmonic will give the première of Ashley Fure’s “Filament,” for orchestra, instrumental soloists, and singers. Some members of the gala audience may squirm at Fure’s fiercely bright chords and distorted, staticky instrumental textures. When, at the end of the program, they rise to cheer “The Rite of Spring,” they should remember that they are applauding yesterday’s unlistenable noise. ♦

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History of Pop Music in the Early 20th Century Research Paper

Introduction, about jazz and ragtime music, analysis of sheet music of “love will find a way”.

Sheet Music provides a visual and aural cue for experienced musicians and conductors and all that expert musicians need is a good score sheet to render a complete composition. There have been many genres of music compositions such as the chamber, orchestra, waltz to Jazz, and the modern forms such as rock and metal. This paper analyses sheet music for “Love Will Find a Way” a ragtime composition by the famed Jazz musician Eubie Blake who composed the song in 1921. The song was a hit composition from the musical Broadway called Shuffle Along.

With strong roots that date back to the period when slavery was popular, people of African American descent began playing a new form of music that was called Jazz. According to Gioia (1998, p. 78). Ragtime predated Jazz and was popular during 1899 and 1925 and some great classic compositions have been rendered in the genre. The author has written that Ragtime started as a form of fast dance music that was originally set to an organ and later adapted as sheet music for the piano.

The sheet music provides a score of the composition ‘Love will find a way. The song was a part of the musical Broadway called ‘Shuffle Along’. Jansen (2003, pp. 185) has given a detailed analysis of the musical and the particular song and he suggests that the sheet music and the performance reveal a combination of different types of ragtime music.

What purpose did sheet music illustrations serve? What are some of the most striking aspects of the illustrations that accompanied the sheet music?

The music sheet illustrations served as a good advertising medium, both for the musician as well as the publisher and anyone who was willing to buy space and the advertisements served as a source of revenue. For this particular music sheet, the back cover, the back cover featured advertisements for M. Witmark & Sons stock The front cover art is a marquee featuring just the lower limbs of several people who could be considered as dancers. There are a total of seven pairs of legs shown in the cover art, three of who are men and four of whom are women. Three of the women have black-colored legs while the remaining women have white legs. This depiction points to the strong racial statement as it can be argued that the cover is trying to show that Black women are coming out into the open and are dancers as well. It is not clear if the black color is due to the stockings or if the black color has been shown on purpose. The legs of the two men are shod in white dress shoes with neat trousers and other assortments. The last pair of legs seem to be shod in working man’s shoes and the arrangement can be interpreted as the white men going out to dance while the black working shoes are moving to entertain them.

What are some of the recurrent themes in the lyrics and imagery of sheet music?

The sheet music provided on the Levy website features four scores of lyrics and these are given as below (Eubie Blake, 1921).

“Come dear and don’t let our faith weaken Two babbling brooks with sources in the wind, Let’s keep our love fires burning bright Will meet before they reach the sea Your love for me is a heavenly beacon, Two mountain trails with courses grinding, Guiding me through loves darkest night Will cross before they reach the lea, Don’t start minding or faith finding Two hearts yearning, or faith finding No matter how dark one path may grow, Love lights burning, just like babbling brooks and mountain trails, Fate won’t hurry, well don’t worry, Well just keep our hearts aglow, meet together on life’s heather, It is a rule that never fails Refrain: Love will find a way, though skies are now gray, Love like ours can never be ruled Cupids not schooled that way Dry each tear-dimmed eye,’ clouds will soon roll by,’ though fate may lead us astray, My dearie, mark what I say, love will find a way, way.”

The lyrics and the score provide a deep insight into the pangs of yearning and love that lovers feel. The singer and his beloved seem to be undergoing a deep trauma and pains that are rending them apart. The lyrics appeal to any couple, irrespective of their skin color, and are based on the common love ballads that had become popular in those times. There are many trails and hurdles that the lyricist speaks of and these can be again interpreted as a symbolism of the Black struggle. An indomitable spirit and the spirit to live and thrive is the common undercurrent in the lyrics and though there are many troubles, the singer exhorts his lover not to lose heart or courage. As with the Black community in those days who were deeply religious, the lyrics suggest that the couple repose their future in fate and destiny and that both these factors would not hurt their love as cupid is not ruled by such factors. The lyrics also speak of the need to comfort each other and wipe their tears as the singer says that love will triumph and that they would survive. The following table gives images of the sheet music.

What was the relationship between the images on sheet music and the music itself?

Jensen (p. 185-197) has written that the Shuffle Along was a remarkable breakthrough for the African American musicians and performers and it served as a launching point for this community of African Americans. Before this musical, the community members were not regarded with respect by the whites. The musical and the scores showed that even whites, which made up a major part of the audience, we’re ready to pay money and see an African American musical. The launch on Broadway, which has long been regarded as the hallmark of success ensured that the scores became very popular. The musical served as a cornerstone for African Americans and showed to the world at large that African American themes and musicals could stand on their own. The public accepted the musical with gusto and Jensen has reported that there were more than 541 stagings of the play. Following the success of the musical, nine more musicals with African American themes and compositions were launched. The musical also helped to serve the careers of many Black dancing and singing stars such as Bill “Bojanles” Robinson, Wallace Thurman, and Rapp who launched the slow drag musical that was a different type of social dance that was practiced by African Americans. The story and plot are not extensive or deep and just gave a reason for the performers to sing. The plot was about a contest for the post of Mayor in Jim Town. There were several contenders for the post and each was trying to dupe the other. Several lead African Women were also featured and the plot also spoke of the desire that the actors had for the women. During those times, in a race to gain acceptance among the whites, a Black woman was considered more attractive and desirable if she had lighter skin and the tone and ethos of the musical would offend some people now.

According to the Maryland Society (Sheet Music, 2003)), the original score for the musical and song had 42 pages that were handwritten for different musical instruments. Out of the 42 pages, the first two pages were designed for the piano. The music sheet also includes several pages for other instruments and pages 3 to 6 were meant for the conductor who would direct the score. The Trumpet also featured prominently in the score and the music sheet provides the scores for three accompanying trumpets. The score for the 1st trumpet is given on pages 15 to 18, for the second trumpet on pages 11 to 14 and for the 3rd trumpet on pages 7 to 10. Also featured in the music sheet is the tenor saxophone and the score is given on pages 19 to 23. Pages 24 to 28 feature the score for the 3rd alto saxophone and the 1st alto saxophone is stored on pages 29-33. Ragtime made good use of bass, especially while building the changes in the temp and the bass is featured on pages 34 to 37. The trombone also features in the score and the score is given on pages 38 to 42.

The score is based on the e minor scale and there is a scale change for the refrain when the D major scale is played and we have a rapid movement between different chords in the scale. Berlin (p, 25) has written that to a certain extent, the music showed the struggle that African Americans went through in the early 1900s. The author has argued that the dancers were predominantly whites while the musicians were inevitably Blacks. The form of music echoes the wistfulness and longing of the community and reveals the depression and angst they went through. The high soprano notes seem rather like the plaintive wail of the suffering body as it cries out against injustice. The refrain that comes out strongly seems like a united chorus that seeks to reassure the couple. The author has also argued that the musicians derived satisfaction at making the white people dance and enjoy themselves and he speaks of this feeling as a form of the assertion made by the musicians. The music started as an adaptation of the popular March numbers and was written with a time of 2/4 and even a 4/4 meter. The music features bass notes that are predominant in the left-hand pattern with odd-numbered notes. The chords however are placed on even-numbered beats and have a melody that follows the right hand. The music is sometimes also called ragtime waltz and is written on a 3/4 meter. The author has also written that music can be adapted to any kind of meter and does not follow a strict 2/4 meter of March time of the 3/4 meter of the Waltz time. The distinguishing character of this genre is that the melodic accents are placed in between metrical beats. Gioia has argued that in many compositions, the melody seems to move away from the metrical beats that are created by the accompanying instruments. The overall feeling when the song starts is that it calls the feet to start tapping on their own and the body to sway with the music. In the 1920s, this kind of music was usually played in bordellos and ‘houses of ill repute’ where despite the prohibition, people enjoyed alcohol and danced to the music. As in those times, music at the revue was live and expert musicians had a knack of playing a slower tempo and that would make the people sway to the beat and then increase the beat and tempo to make them swing. It must be emphasized that ragtime featured predominantly a rolling piano and was accompanied by other instruments also.

What marketing techniques were incorporated into sheet music?

Jasen (p. 29) suggests that various publishers had seen the potential of selling sheet music and took up mass publishing and marketing of sheet music. The publishers even hired musicians to transcribe and write the score for various popular musical scores and songs of those days. The sheet music was sold in stores and other commercial ventures and people who wanted to know the lyrics and those who wanted to play the score bought the sheet music.

What were some of the limits of sheet music to disseminate and popularize various music styles?

An analysis of sheet music shows that to understand and interpret it requires a basic knowledge of music, music notations, and a good understanding of how music is organized and played. Common people would have limited idea of such technical music terms and to most of them, the music sheet would be a mass of meaningless symbols.

Berlin Edward A. (30 November 1995). King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and His Era. Oxford University Press, USA.

Eubie Blake. (1921). Love Will Find a Way: Sheet Music from the Levy Collection. 2007.Web.

Gioia Ted. (1998). The History of Jazz. Oxford University Press: London.

Jasen David A. (25 June 2003). Tin Pan Alley: An Encyclopedia of the Golden Age of American Song. Routledge, USA.

Sheet Music. (2003). The Eubile Blake Collection: Maryland Historical Society. 2007. Web.

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2021, September 18). History of Pop Music in the Early 20th Century. https://ivypanda.com/essays/history-of-pop-music-in-the-early-20th-century/

"History of Pop Music in the Early 20th Century." IvyPanda , 18 Sept. 2021, ivypanda.com/essays/history-of-pop-music-in-the-early-20th-century/.

IvyPanda . (2021) 'History of Pop Music in the Early 20th Century'. 18 September.

IvyPanda . 2021. "History of Pop Music in the Early 20th Century." September 18, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/history-of-pop-music-in-the-early-20th-century/.

1. IvyPanda . "History of Pop Music in the Early 20th Century." September 18, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/history-of-pop-music-in-the-early-20th-century/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "History of Pop Music in the Early 20th Century." September 18, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/history-of-pop-music-in-the-early-20th-century/.

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