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2.4.2 Music History: Does Music Progress Over Time?
Progress applies to the scientific and technical aspects of culture. But what about the artistic aspects of culture? Do the arts progress? Does music progress?
The answer is no.
Music does not progress, nor do the other arts. The reason has to do with the unchanging nature of the connection between the arts (including music) and emotional communication.
As Darwin correctly pointed out, emotions are adaptations. Emotions are permanently encoded in the human genome, and in the genomes of many other animal species. Emotions such as fear, sadness, joy, and anger evolved because they’re critical for survival.
Sound communication systems in non-human animals (hootin’ and howlin’) evolved as adaptations to communicate these emotions. The evidence indicates this holds for the human animal as well. As discussed in Chapter 1, music evolved in humans as a sound communication adaptation, a way to communicate emotion. Since the same connections between emotions and music in humans have likely not changed in the human species for hundreds of thousands of years, these connections are, in effect, permanent.
(Technically, they’re not permanent, because a species continues to evolve by natural selection until the species becomes extinct. But adaptations such as emotions and music evolve so slowly that, on time scales of tens or hundreds of thousands of years, you can think of such adaptations as unchanging, for practical purposes.)