ments of adults indicates an innate capacity for recognizing and acting
on certain isomorphisms (abstract,intermodal representations) between
themselves and other humans (Meltzoff 1985:3).Crown (1991) found
that mothers and six-week-old infants can engage in a cross-modal
(mother vocalize,infant gaze) interaction.At three to four months,
infants and mothers match each other’s direction of affective change
cross-modally and supramodally,with mutually regulated facial mirror-
ing,kinesic and vocal turn taking,and kinesic and vocal movements and
holds (Beebe and Lachmann 1988b:316–320).
The fundamental cross-modal and supramodal nature of infant neural
processing of the maternal package of varied sequential signals is con-
sistent with a hypothesis that the temporal arts were ancestrally closely
associated.In addition,infant cross-modal processing and its emotional-
motivational concomitants suggest that similar nonverbal (hence inde-
scribable) associations may persist in adult experience,particularly in
responses to music and other arts.The Importance of Movement
Of particular interest to appreciation of music’s evolutionary origins
is the importance of bodily movement in mother-infant interaction,
whether in eliciting interactive behavior,sustaining intensity,coordinat-
ing synchrony,or recognizing each other’s participation in the “beat”of
the encounter.I suggest that in their origins,movement and music were
inseparable,as they are today in premodern societies and in children.^5
As theorists tended to neglect the importance of gesture to language
and thought (McNeill 1992) and the importance of prosody to spoken
language,so the integral importance of bodily movement in musical
behavior has been overlooked in the way we define music in Western
culture.Typically,hearers are also participants.What is atypical is silent
and motionless listening.
I consider it essential that we incorporate movement (or kinesics) with
song as integral to our thinking about the evolutionary origin of music.
For example,for Australian Aborigines,dance never occurs without
song and often accompanies singing (Clunies-Ross 1986:246).For the
Andamanese,singing and dancing are two aspects of one and the same
activity;the purpose of song is to accompany a dance (Radcliffe-Brown
1922/1948:334).Clapping,swaying,and head nodding are ways of par-
ticipating without performing.A similar overemphasis on vocal behav-
ior in mother-infant studies also distorted and confused theoretical
debate and conjecture,leading some researchers to question the univer-
sality of early interactive behaviors,since many cultures have little vocal-
izing and it is primarily Western,even middle-class,mothers who are
most highly vocal.397 Antecedents of the Temporal Arts