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I visited Stanford University to meet with my old friend Jim Ferguson, who is the chairman of the Anthropology Department there; we went to high school together and have been close friends for thirty- five years. Anthropologists study culture, how it shapes our thoughts, ideas, and our worldview, and I thought for sure Jim would help me to avoid all the pitfalls and prejudices that I feared could be so seductive. Jim and I discussed how songs have many roles in the daily lives of people throughout the world and that over the millennia music has been used in so many ways we can’t hope to enumerate them all.

Ubiquitous are work songs, blood songs, lust and love songs. . . . There are songs about how great god is, songs about how our god is better than yours; songs about where to find water or how to make a canoe; songs to put people to sleep and to help them stay awake. Songs with lyrics, songs of grunting and chanting, songs played on pieces of wood with holes in them, on tree trunks, with sea and turtle shells, songs made by slapping your cheeks and chest Bobby McFerrin style. I asked Jim what all these types of music had in common. His answer was that this was the wrong question.

Quoting the great anthropologist Clifford Geertz, Jim persuaded me that the right question to ask, in trying to understand music’s universality, is not what all musics have in common, but how they differ. The notion that humanity can be best appreciated by extracting those features common to all cultures is a bias that I held without even knowing it. Ferguson—and Geertz—feel that the best way, perhaps the only way, to understand what makes us most human is to thrust ourselves face- to- face with the enormous diversity of things that humans do.

It is in the particulars, the nuances, the overwhelming variety of ways we express ourselves that one can come to understand best what it means to be a musical human. We are a complicated, imaginative, adaptive species. How adaptable are we? Ten thousand years ago humans plus their pets and livestock accounted for about 0.1 percent of the terrestrial vertebrate biomass inhabiting the earth; now we account for 98 percent. Humans have expanded to live in just about every climate on the surface of the Earth that is even remotely habitable. We’re also a highly variable species. We speak thousands of different languages, have wildly different notions of religion, social order, eating habits, and marriage rites. (Kinship definitions alone account for mind- boggling variability among us, as any introductory college anthropology text will attest.)

The right question then, after due consideration of music’s diversity, is whether there is a set of functions music performs in human relations. And how might these different functions of music influenced the evolution of human emotion, reason, and spirit across distinct intellectual and cultural histories? What role did the musical brain have in shaping human nature and human culture over the past fifty thousand years or so? In short, how did all these musics make us who we are?

Read Part Three