The Origins of Music: Preface - Preface

The present volume is based on a workshop entitled “The Origins of

Music”arranged by the Institute for Biomusicology in the Etruscan town

of Fiesole outside Florence in late May 1997.As the workshop was the

first international gathering held under the auspices of the Institute since

its founding in 1995,a few words are in order concerning the Institute’s

background.

In 1982 one of us (NLW) published his dissertation Den musikaliska

hjärnan(“The Musical Brain”) in Swedish,which was followed in 1991

by the book Biomusicology:Neurophysiological, Neuropsychological

and Evolutionary Perspectives on the Origins and Purposes of Music.

Both works gave expression to long-standing curiosity on the part of a

musicologist regarding what light modern neuroscience might shed on

questions such as the origins,evolutionary development,and purposes

of music,questions that he felt were incompletely dealt with by his dis-

cipline.Ever since his student days,this musicologist had been on a quest

for a musicological paradigm to complement traditional approaches.He

now hoped to find in modern biology what he had not found in Hume’s

empiricism,in the logical empiricism of the Vienna and Chicago schools,

or in the phenomenological trends that flourished in the 1940s and 1950s.

Time was on his side.

Since the Second World War,and more particularly in recent decades,

the neurosciences and behavioral biology have made significant strides

in areas relevant to the foundations of musicology.Thus there is now

hope of gaining an understanding of the processes of musical cognition

as well as biological factors that,together with cultural determinants,

shaped mankind’s musical behavior and the rich global repertoire of

musical structures it has produced.In 1994 a symposium inspired by the

book Biomusicologywas held in Milan,sponsored by the Royal Swedish

Academy of Sciences,the Institute for Futures Studies,and Pharmacia

AB.Under the title “Man,Mind,and Music”the symposium brought

together neuroscientists,mathematicians,systems theorists,musicolo-

gists,ethnomusicologists,a composer,and a conductor for fruitful dis-

cussions.One result of this was the creation of the Foundation for

Biomusicology and Acoustic Ethology,with its executive organ the

Institute for Biomusicology,in March 1995.The Institute is located in

the town of Östersund,situated close to the geographic midpoint of

Scandinavia.

As part of its efforts to stimulate biomusicological research,the

Institute sketched a series of international workshops to be held in Flo-

rence,Italy,a place where in the late sixteenth century the scholastically

oriented music theory of the Middle Ages started to give way to more

empirically oriented musicology,represented among others by Vincenzo

Galilei,the father of Galileo Galilei.These Florentine Workshops in

Preface

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