Clues from our present peers? A response to Victor Grauer

This response to Victor A. Grauer's "Echoes of Our Forgotten Ancestors" draws on present-day musical data, including the singing of Pygmies from Gabon, women from the Solomon Islands, carollers from Sheffield and Pennsylvania, and the music-related interactions of mother-baby couples. Initially, I note that generalisation and comparison is prevalent as a context in contemporary ethnomusicology, and distinguish the kind of demands a general account places on its individual pieces of evidence as compared to a more ethnographically focused analysis. Four further conditions are then identified, all of which need to be met for Grauer's account to be persuasive. First, Grauer needs to make a fully convincing case for what he calls the "Pygmy-Bushman style": I argue that he misses essential differences in musical practice between these peoples and misidentifies a single cluster of traits concomitant with hocketing as an unusual series of selections. Second, I suggest that Grauer has selected some examples to fit his theory, rather than vice versa, a problem that leads him to see signs of migration in what may rather be routine outcomes of the normative structure and performance practice of the panpipes. The third condition is concerned with the matter of musical change, which Grauer's account essentially omits: examples are given of styles that changed radically in a short period, all of which show that the acoustic surface of the music appears to be its most changeable element, and that present-day recordings may not be a reliable guide to the musical style of prehistory. The fourth condition Grauer's hypothesis demands is that hocketing was invented just once in human history; this requirement too is problematic, the same technique occurring in many mother-infant musical interactions. In sum, while the account of early human migrations presented by the "out-of-Africa " scientists may be plausible, evidence of musical transmission 70,000 years ago has yet to be located. The search for that evidence will need to look at performance practice, not just acoustics.