who asked the first question? - International Research Center For ...

324Is Music an enigma?At the very beginning of his discussion about human musicality Steven Pinkercandidly declares, “music is an enigma” (Pinker, 1997:528). These words openly tell usabout the problem many linguists have in dealing with the phenomenon of music. Mostlinguists prefer not to mention music in their writings about language evolution at all.Noam Chomsky arguably is the best-known representative of this huge group of linguists.As Mithen pointed out (Mithen, 2005:280), one of the most important recent publicationson the evolution of language, written by a big group of the most renowned experts (seeChristiansen & Kirby, 2003), fails to make any reference to music. This policy of mostlinguists of hiding their heads in the sand does not make the universal humanphenomenon of music disappear from human society and communication. Pinker evengoes on to declare that “Compared with language, vision, social reasoning, and physicalknow-how, music could vanish from our species and the rest of our lifestyle would bevirtually unchanged” (Pinker, 1997:528). I am not so sure that “our lifestyle would bevirtually unchanged” if music vanished from the human species, but I guess the life ofsome linguists, who work on the origins of language, would be much easier.Some linguists do mention music in their writings, but mostly to dismiss itspossible evolutionary role in the evolution of language. Steven Pinker is arguably the bestrepresentative of this, much smaller group of linguists. Pinker devoted eleven pages ofhis 600-plus page book to music. On these pages he does not try to discuss the possiblerole of music in language evolution, but discusses music as one of faculties that our braindeals with, and the discussion about music is sandwiched between discussions aboutbrain reaction on watching paintings and going to movies. His dismissive commentsabout music as a “pure pleasure technology,” with no evolutionary importancewhatsoever (“as far as biological cause and effect are concerned, music is useless”), donot do justice to the millions of years of evolution of our ancestors before the advent ofarticulated speech.Otto Jespersen’s 1895 suggestion that musical pitch-based expressions played amajor role in the initial stages of language development is a rare exception amonglinguists. Unfortunately, linguists of the following generations were too absorbed in theworld of syntactic structure to notice the importance of non-articulated means ofcommunication. Even the tone element of tone languages is mostly perceived by linguistsas a late addition to spoken languages.In this context Pinker’s declaration “Music is an enigma” is very eloquent. Musicwill remain an enigma for linguists until they accept the idea that musical (pitch)communication could have been a crucial part of early language evolution. After theacknowledgment of the evolutionary role of a non-articulated, pitch-based channel for theearly development of human language, linguists will have a clearer picture of the reasonswhy there are so many common features between language and music, why music andlanguage activity involve the same brain structures of our brain, why we all want to tap,move our body or to sing along with our favorite songs, why participation in commonrhythmic activity is so emotionally involving, why soldiers marching in exhausting drillfeel uplifted and fight better, why the tone languages are such a mix of pitch and