Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T18:06:28.723Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

What's not music, but feels like music to you?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 September 2021

Vijay Iyer*
Affiliation:
Department of Music & Department of African and African American Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA02138, USA. [email protected]; www.vijay-iyer.com

Abstract

The category “music” as used in this area of science is inconsistent and unstable, and its logical relationship to the word “musicality” – used by scientists to denote the human capacity for music – is circular. Therefore, rather than pursue the question, “Why did music(ality) evolve?” let us ask more inclusively, “What experiences in humankind's deep past might have felt like music?”

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Dolan, E. (2013). The orchestral revolution: Haydn and the technologies of timbre. Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Erlmann, V. (2010). Reason and resonance: A history of modern aurality. Zone Books.Google Scholar
Foucault, M. (1972). The archaeology of knowledge and The discourse on language. Translated by A.M.S. Smith. Pantheon Books.Google Scholar
Henshilwood, C., d'Errico, F., van Niekerk, K. L., Coquinot, Y., Jacobs, Z., Lauritzen, S.-E., Menu, M., & García-Moreno, R., (2011). A 100,000-year-old ochre-processing workshop at Blombos Cave, South Africa. Science (New York, N.Y.), 334(6053), 219222.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Iyer, V. (1998). Microstructures of Feel, Macrostructures of Sound: Embodied Cognition in West African and African-American Musics. (Publication No. 9922889). Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.Google Scholar
Iyer, V. (2002). Embodied mind, situated cognition, and expressive microtiming in African-American music. Music Perception, 19(3), 387414.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Iyer, V. (2004). Improvisation, temporality, and embodied experience. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 11(3–4), 159173.Google Scholar
Iyer, V. (2016). Improvisation, action understanding, and music cognition with and without bodies. In Lewis, G. E. & Piekut, B. (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of critical improvisation studies (pp. 7490). Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Iyer, V. (2017). Far from over (sound recording). ECM Records.Google Scholar
Iyer, V. (2020a). Beneath improvisation. In Rehding, A. & Rings, S. (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of critical concepts in music theory (pp. 761774). Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Iyer, V. (2020b). What's not music but feels like music to you [Tweet]. Twitter. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/vijayiyer/status/1327294519457554432.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Iyer, V. (2021). Uneasy (sound recording). ECM Records.Google Scholar
Iyer, V., & Born, G. (2020). Of musicalities and musical experience: Vijay Iyer and Georgina Born in conversation. Wigmore Hall Podcasts. Retrieved from https://wigmore-hall.org.uk/podcasts/of-musicalities-and-musical-experience-vijay-iyer-and-georgina-born-in-conversation.Google Scholar
Iyer, V., & Smith, W. L. (2016). A cosmic rhythm with each stroke (sound recording). ECM Records.Google Scholar
Iyer, V., & Taborn, C. (2019). The transitory poems (sound recording). ECM Records.Google Scholar
Jackson, Z. I. (2020). Becoming human: Matter and meaning in an antiblack world. NYU Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mann, R. (1981). Imagine the sound (documentary feature film). Janus Films.Google Scholar
Mehr, S. A., Singh, M., Knox, D., Ketter, D. M., Pickens-Jones, D., Atwood, S., … Glowacki, L., (2019). Universality and diversity in human song. Science, 366(6468), 957970.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mundy, R. (2018). Animal musicalities: Birds, beasts, and evolutionary listening. Wesleyan University Press.Google Scholar
Ochoa Gautier, A. M. (2014). Aurality: Listening and knowledge in nineteenth-century Colombia. Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robinson, C. (with Kelley, R. D. G.) (2000). Black marxism. University of North Carolina Press. (Original work published 1983).Google Scholar
Sterne, J. (2003). The audible past: Cultural origins of sound reproduction. Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation – an argument. CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257337. Coloniality's persistence (fall 2003).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wynter, S., & McKittrick, K. (2015). Unparalleled catastrophe for our species? Or, to give humanness a different future: Conversations. In McKittrick, K. (Ed.), Sylvia Wynter: On being human as praxis (pp. 989). Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar