The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [116]
I think it likely that every known medium that can be manipulated, utilized, or adapted to the basic requirements of an art form has already been turned toward making art. Human ingenuity and creativity, with the relentless desire to turn pleasures into arts, has guaranteed Academic pleading at this late stage on behalf of smell arts is much interesting than trying to answer the question of why smell, despite importance in evolution and the plea sure it can provide, has never itself been the stuff of art. Moreover, despite artistic experimentation academic theorists’ hopes, smell shows no solid signs of becoming basis for a high art tradition.
Sound
Music, on the other hand, did become one of the supreme art forms: universal across cultures and history, a focus of spontaneous interest from infancy, and for many individuals a source of consuming, lifelong plea All this despite the fact that the ability to perceive its medium— pitched sound—has almost no imaginable significance for survival natural selection. The sounds of nature—wind in the trees, crack lightning, breaking waves and rushing waters—are predominately variations on white noise. It is a feature of music cross-culturally, however, it uses relatively pure, pitched tones. The only common natural inaudible to the human ear, and, in any event, there is nothing in the potential adaptive advantages of knowing birdsongs and animal cries that remotely explain the deep and pervasive hold of music on the human mind in almost every culture.
Charles Darwin himself counted the “capacity and love for singing music” among “the most mysterious” features of the human race, and in The Descent of Man he devotes a substantial passage to the origins music. The very uselessness of music in terms of natural selection, along with its flamboyance, forces Darwin to see it as a product of sexual descended from mating and rivalry cries of our prehuman In the course of presenting his case, Darwin also makes observations that go beyond overt issues of sexual selection while cutting to the heart of music as a potential art form. First, Darwin stresses the relation of music to emotion:
Music arouses in us various emotions, but not the more terrible ones of horror, fear, rage, etc. It awakens the gentler feelings tenderness and love, which readily pass into devotion. In Chinese annals it is said, “Music hath the power of making heaven descend upon earth.” It likewise stirs up in us the sense triumph and the glorious ardour for war. These powerful mingled feelings may well give rise to the sense of sublimity.
Darwin would not deny, presumably, that a musical soundtrack could appropriate for a horror movie; he is only claiming that the raw horror a dramatic story might incite could never be produced by music, any more than anger or fear could be produced by music. Music’s natural ground is—as you would expect for an adaptation of sexual selection— romance. Indeed, he remarks, “Love is still the commonest theme of our songs.”
A second connection Darwin describes is music’s ancient tie to in partic u lar to oratory—that is to say, language in public per mance. He observes that “when vivid emotions are felt and expressed orator, or even in common speech, musical cadences and rhythm instinctively used.” The sensations and ideas “excited in us by music, age.” Darwin’s speculations have for me a ring of truth:
All these facts with respect to music and impassioned speech become intelligible to a certain extent, if we may assume that musical tones and rhythm were used by our half-human ancestors, during the season of courtship, when animals of all kinds excited not only by love, but by the strong passions of jealousy, rivalry, and triumph . . . We must suppose