Music is the “social glue” par excellence. But why does it exist?

“Every genre has the right to exist, but when you make music, not when you just scream”. This is what Uto Ughi said about the Maneskins, triggering an obvious controversy; and so, whoever isn’t already arguing about wine can always do so about the meaning of rock and music in general.

Now, given that the subject is considered so important as to build up an animated public controversy, it is perhaps worthwhile to raise ourselves a little higher than the words of these days and try to ask ourselves about some perhaps more interesting question: why do we have music? What is it for, and why is it widespread in every human culture? Is it an ability unique to our species, perhaps produced by our recent cultural history?

A few years ago it became popular to approach these questions from an evolutionary perspective, hypothesizing that music played a role in our survival as a species and proposing that musicality – understood as the ability to produce and consume music – derives from natural selection in the broad sense or from specifically sexual selection.

The initiator of this kind of evolutionary interpretations is even the same Charles Darwin: he was the first to suggest a role of sexual selection in the origins of music, a view that has been taken up and elaborated in recent years. For Darwin, music had no direct survival benefits, but it offered a means of impressing potential mates, thus contributing to reproductive success – just like the song of birds and other types of animals. He, like other later scholars, even maintained that in the evolutionary line that led to our species, musical vocalizations preceded language.

Another theory traces the origins of music to adult vocalizations in the presence of children, more or less melodious vocalizations and lullabies that are thought to enhance the parent-child bond and promote the well-being and survival of the child. This type of protomusical behavior, with rhythmically repeating words, is also thought to be particularly useful in promoting language learning in children.

Another view points to the role of music in promoting and maintaining group cohesion. Music is thought to be the “social glue” that enhances cooperation and strengthens feelings of unity made up of vast numbers of individuals. According to Dunbar, group singing and dancing in our hominid ancestors replaced grooming as a means of maintaining social connections as groups expanded in size. As an element to reinforce this interpretation, it has been demonstrated that song and dance mimic the neurochemical effects of social grooming in nonhuman primates, including the release of endorphinswith important social consequences.

In the interpretations just presented and in others related to them, the music and musicality of our species have an adaptive meaning: that is, they are traits subjected to natural selection that have conferred advantage on the bearers, and then spread throughout the entire human population, resulting in a favorable adaptation .

However, they have recently emerged non-adaptive interpretations, that is, mechanisms have been formulated that do not foresee an increase in fitness or sexual success at the basis of the origin and diffusion of music and musicality. An important non-adaptationist view regards music as a technology or “transformative invention” that makes use of existing abilities and has important consequences for our culture and biology. This notion has parallels to early humans’ transformative control of fire, which made cooking food and obtaining heat possible, with important cultural and biological consequences. Seen in this way, music is an exaptation, or evolutionary byproduct of other biological traits of a species.

Steven Pinker is probably the most important exponent of this interpretation of music as adaptation: he wrote that music “is a technology, not an adaptation”.

I would like to point out that, from the point of view of the current meaning of music, i.e. as a social glue, as an element of sexual selection and as a stimulus to speak in the child, the data obtained are compatible both with a vision in which the advantage conferred on individuals ” musical” was such as to favor the expansion of the trait in the population, so much with the vision in which music would not be a trait on which selection acted, but a by-product fixed in our culture for its pleasantness – a bit like the use of alcohol, just to mention another controversy in vogue these days.

In all cases, music has rapidly spread throughout our cultures, but the interesting thing is that this could have happened in a very remote time in other human species as well. If its discoverers are right, about 50,000 years ago, in what is now Slovenia, a Neanderthal made a flute from the left femur of a young cave bear, which would constitute the oldest example of a musical instrument known up to now. Also in this case an endless controversy flared up, which still today has to see its solution, between the supporters of the existence of musical instruments among the Neanderthals and those who instead believe that what appears to us a flute, which has been demonstrated can producing music, is actually the product of a hyena’s casual chewing of a bone; and it is curious that while paleontologists are tearing apart about the fact that the Neandertal culture could produce music among ancient rocks, the rock of the Maneskin is attacked by Uto Ughi because it would be “an insult to culture”.

The inseparable combination of music and culture continues to produce identity battles: music is what only our species does, or not, music is what only our cultural group does, or not; waiting for the dust to settle again, we just have to get a new rush of endorphins by listening to our favorite record.