Evolutionism in Music History: toward Reconciliation

Francisco Castillo ()
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Francisco Castillo: Universidad Distrital FJdC

No 9310902, Proceedings of Arts & Humanities Conferences from International Institute of Social and Economic Sciences

Abstract: The first part of this paper identifies some of the reasons why evolutionism has been avoided in historical musicology in the Latin American context, including political ideologies, postcolonial studies, and philosophical positions. Moreover, nature has been used many times as an argument to validate music theory and musical hierarchies, causing the links between biology and musicology to be full of faults made by past thinkers. The second part presents some arguments derived from analysis, critically reviewing the objections to musical evolutionism and showing how these have misunderstood the basic principle of natural selection. The paper also discusses the possible claim of evolutionary biology as a useful tool in order to understand music history, while contributing to current discussions in music historiography.

Keywords: Music History; Evolutionism; Historical musicology (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Y90 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 10 pages
Date: 2019-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cul, nep-his and nep-ore
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Published in Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 5th Arts & Humanities Conference, Copenhagen, Jul 2019, pages 15-24

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sek:iahpro:9310902

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