SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Popular and academic studies of music frequently claim that human musicality arose from the so-called natural world of nonhuman species. And, amid the anxieties produced by the Anthropocene, it is thought that the possibility of reconnecting with the natural world through a renewed appreciation of music’s links with nature may usher in a new era of posthuman environmental consciousness, offering repair and redemption. Intervening in these debates, this article traces how notions of “musicality” have been applied to or denied from nonhuman entities across diverse disciplines since the late nineteenth century. It concludes that debates about the relation between human and animal musics have always reinforced the separation that today they seek to overcome, as this separation is itself rooted in the history of the study of music in nature. The article demonstrates that the study of music in nature has often relied upon an epistemology of origins-listening in which attention to the acoustic is used to formulate implicit evolutionary hierarchies organized along an axis of similarity and difference among species. While who or what is placed within these categories and the relative value of musicality thus derived may have changed over time, this axis of comparison remains in place. As a corrective, the article provokes a new epistemology of listening in which musicality and species are situated becomings.