Joshua Becker: What Is Minimalism?

Cultural evolution of music.

The concept of evolution played a central role during the formation of academic musicology in the late nineteenth century (Adler, 1885/1981; Rehding, 2000). During the twentieth century, theoretical and political implications of evolution were heavily debated, leading evolution to go out of favor in musicology and cultural anthropology (Carneiro, 2003).

In the twenty first century, refined concepts of biological evolution were reintroduced to musicology through the work of psychologists of music to the extent that the biological evolution of the capacity to make and experience music ("evolution of musicality") has returned as an important topic of contemporary musicological research (Wallin et al., 2000; Huron, 2006; Patel, 2008; Lawson, 2012; Tomlinson, 2013, 2015; Honing, 2018). Yet the concept of cultural evolution of music itself ("musical evolution") remains largely undeveloped by musicologists, despite an explosion of recent research on cultural evolution in related fields such as linguistics. This absence has been especially prominent in ethnomusicology, but is also observable in historical musicology and other subfields of musicology