Evolutionary psychology and the necessity of music education for all

The initial application of evolutionary theory to the universal practice of music-making in humans was at best marginal and at worst dismissive of non-Western musics. Darwin’s biography defines an agenda for musicality in the emergence of human culture that is receiving considerable attention in several disciplines, presenting a robust case for the contribution which collective and individual musical experience makes to the education of the young, and to the lifelong capacity for musical participation. Natural Selection conveys how the anatomical prerequisites for musicality may have evolved. These conferred a voice that is fundamentally musical in its capacity for the meaningful control of pitch, duration, volume and timbre. This can be attributed to upright posture and bipedal locomotion, their consequences for rhythmic co-ordination, and the independent role in music-making of the feet and hands. Sexual Selection illustrates the means by which musical response and participation pass from parent to child, allied to the clear difference in range between women’s and men’s voices, a further aspect of the musical landscape prefigured in Darwin’s work. This paper presents accumulating evidence in setting out an agenda for the proper role of music in schools. If music was, in Cross’s words ‘The most important thing we ever did’ (1999), the communicative achievement that forms the basis for the subsequent development of language, then it should not remain a luxury available only to those students we select as gifted. Rather, it must take its place as the developmental basis for social organisation, mental integration, and rational thought.