edited by
204 views
0 votes
0 votes

Comprehension:
The passage below is accompanied by a set of questions. Choose the best answer to each question.
Humans today make music. Think beyond all the qualifications that might trail after this bald statement: that only certain humans make music, that extensive training is involved, that many societies distinguish musical specialists from nonmusicians, that in today's societies most listen to music rather than making it, and so forth. These qualifications, whatever their local merit, are moot in the face of the overarching truth that making music, considered from a cognitive and psychological vantage, is the province of all those who perceive and experience what is made. We are, almost all of us, musicians - everyone who can entrain (not necessarily dance) to a beat, who can recognize a repeated tune (not necessarily sing it), who can distinguish one instrument or one singing voice from another. I will often use an antique word, recently revived, to name this broader musical experience. Humans are musicking creatures. ...
The set of capacities that enables musicking is a principal marker of modern humanity. There is nothing polemical in this assertion except a certain insistence, which will figure often in what follows, that musicking be included in our thinking about fundamental human commonalities. Capacities involved in musicking are many and take shape in complicated ways, arising from innate dispositions ... Most of these capacities overlap with nonmusical ones, though a few may be distinct and dedicated to musical perception and production. In the area of overlap, linguistic capacities seem to be particularly important, and humans are (in principle) language-makers in addition to music-makers - speaking creatures as well as musicking ones.

 

 

 

Humans are symbol-makers too, a feature tightly bound up with language, not so tightly with music. The species Cassirer dubbed Homo symbolicus cannot help but tangle musicking in webs of symbolic thought and expression, habitually making it a component of behavioral complexes that form such expression. But in fundamental features musicking is neither language-like nor symbol-like, and from these differences come many clues to its ancient emergence.
If musicking is a primary, shared trait of modern humans, then to describe its emergence must be to detail the coalescing of that modernity. This took place, archaeologists are clear, over a very long durée: at least $50,000$ years or so, more likely something closer to $200,000$ ,depending in part on what that coalescence is taken to comprise. If we look back $20,000$ years, a small portion of this long period, we reach the lives of humans whose musical capacities were probably little different from our own. As we look farther back we reach horizons where this similarity can no longer hold - perhaps $40,000$ years ago, perhaps $70,000$, perhaps $100,000$. But we never cross a line before which all the cognitive capacities recruited in modern musicking abruptly disappear. Unless we embrace

the incredible notion that music sprang forth in full-blown glory, its emergence will have to be tracked in gradualist terms across a long period. This is one general feature of a history of music's emergence ... The history was at once sociocultural and biological... The capacities recruited in musicking are many, so describing its emergence involves following several or many separate strands.

"Think beyond all the qualifications that might trail after this bald statement. .." In the context of the passage, what is the author trying to communicate in this quoted extract?

  1. A bald statement is one that requires no qualifications to infer its meaning.
  2. Thinking beyond qualifications allows us to give free reign to musical expressions.
  3. Although there may be many caveats and other considerations, the statement is essentially true.
  4. A bald statement is one that is trailed by a series of qualifying clarifications and caveats.

     

edited by

Please log in or register to answer this question.

Related questions

0 votes
0 votes
0 answers
1
admin asked Feb 2, 2023
249 views
Comprehension:The passage below is accompanied by a set of questions. Choose the best answer to each question.Humans today make music. Think beyond all the qualifications...
0 votes
0 votes
0 answers
2
admin asked Feb 2, 2023
233 views
Comprehension:The passage below is accompanied by a set of questions. Choose the best answer to each question.Humans today make music. Think beyond all the qualifications...
0 votes
0 votes
0 answers
3
admin asked Feb 2, 2023
133 views
Comprehension:The passage below is accompanied by a set of questions. Choose the best answer to each question.Humans today make music. Think beyond all the qualifications...
0 votes
0 votes
0 answers
4
admin asked Feb 2, 2023
168 views
Comprehension:The passage below is accompanied by a set of questions. Choose the best answer to each question.We begin with the emergence of the philosophy of the social ...
0 votes
0 votes
0 answers
5
admin asked Feb 2, 2023
187 views
Comprehension:The passage below is accompanied by a set of questions. Choose the best answer to each question. We begin with the emergence of the philosophy of the social...