In a recent New York Times Op-Ed piece, Dan Levitin suggests that music, biologically, cannot be separated from dance, and bemoans the evolution of concert hall traditions that unnaturally require a strict dichotomy of active performers and passive (once they’ve paid for their tickets and settled into their seats) listeners.

In my opinion, Levitin’s plaint is reasonably valid, up to a point: To the extent that it exists, non-participation of the audience does seem, well, not what nature would “prefer”. And yet, I feel that his discussion has something of a straw-man flavor to it, positing a thing that doesn’t quite exist in order to pummel it.

It is true that music halls and their associated performance traditions are very recent cultural inventions. In fact, they could not have begun without a prosperous yet non-elite social class. Though there were a few earlier exceptions, the solid “middle class”, as an enduring institution, was pretty much a post-renaissance novelty in human history. It is interesting to note that concert hall music traditions share many features with other performing arts, like the theater, oratory, political and athletic events, circus, lecture hall teaching, and, come to think of it, book writing—particularly the strict separation of professional or semi-professional presenters and the much more numerous bill-paying (but otherwise relatively passive) audience members, the “customer base”. (Cf. the Greek odea and Roman gladiatorial arenas.) Moreover, it must be pointed out that such class divergences were not possible in hunter-gatherer societies which were, presumably, ubiquitous until the advent of city-state social structures. The latter organizational style, with its large and storable resources, for the first time in human history allowed (certain technologies pending) the development of professional classes—of priests, scribes, butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers, and of full-time performing artists. Of course, the phrase, “don’t give up your day job”, surely came into being about the same time, as artists could hardly play to the masses until those masses could afford to keep their idols in clover. That took the aforementioned prosperous but non-elite classes (i.e., neither the nobility nor full-time laborers).

So, yes, a performer-participant/spectator-customer dichotomy is “odd”, in that it seems to deviate from what we presume to be the standard for our ancestral forbears. (This is, to be sure, the case with most everything in the cultural domain.) But in an evolutionary sense, are dance and music truly one dissociable entity? That contention is debatable, Levitin’s (and John Blacking’s) assertions of such throughout cross-cultural history notwithstanding. In fact, many postulated precursors of music have little to do with dance-like movement. Dancing, in Levitin’s sense, at least, emphasizes (often ritualistic) group participation in an extreme calorie-consuming form. Thus, it must have been very “costly” in terms of biological fitness, requiring huge potential “pay-outs”, such as a large probability of increase not only in individual fitness but group competencies as well—success in inter-tribal conflicts in particular.

These martial competencies, while important in the long run (as is national security nowadays), are not everyday necessities, which are better served by other postulated music precursors. These include the caretaker-infant mutual bonding hypothesis (championed by Ellen Dissenayake, Colwyn Trevarthen, and Dean Falk, among others); some forms of singing and dancing may well modulate dopamine levels, the “feel good“ neurotransmitter, but other forms modulate levels of oxytocin, the “bonding” hormone); the “grooming and gossip” hypothesis (favored by Robin Dunbar); cross-generational histories (consider the ubiquity of folk ballads and epic narratives—cf, West African griot traditions); conflict resolution (by, among other things, mutual entrainment of emotions—something that music seems very good at); certain forms of sexual selection (e.g., female signaling that features clarity and a good range of voice, indicative of youth, fecundity, and mothering skills, and male signaling suggestive, via vocal stylings, of nurturing willingness); development of fine motor skills (perhaps those of vocal mechanisms were critical for language development); and over-all cognitive-affect development (the well-rehearsed brain hypothesis). [I hope to provide an extended review of these posited precursors in a later post.]

In this view, some music has “always been a communal activity”, but certainly not all. To be fair, Levitin does give passing reference to these other aspects of what we think of as “music”, but then it is back to emphasizing “full-body aerobic[s]”. Again, I have no cavil with the importance of music-as-dance for large-group bonding, aggressive intra- and inter-group signaling. (Intra-group bonding can be a tricky issue, however: Long term relationships among members of orchestras—and rock groups—require an interplay between cooperation and competition; they can and do become famously fractious.) Nevertheless, concerning Levitin’s discomfort with concert hall traditions, I feel that a few observations are in order.

First, the idea that audience members sit “in rapt attention with their hands folded quietly in their laps”, though stereotypical, is certainly not historically accurate (anecdotes abound of noisily cheering—or grumping—audiences throughout most of the music hall era; cf. the famous “riot” at the premiere of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps), and is an overstatement and far from universal even in current practice. A cursory glance around at a chamber music performance, or even at a (usually) far stodgier symphony concert, will reveal a fair amount of physical activity, such as head weaving, foot tapping, covert conducting and other gentle arm waving, and, of course, applauding (and not always at the “officially prescribed” times). While these “activities” may appear contemptuously subtle to Levitin’s sensibilities, they seem to me more of a reflection of not only conventional decorum, but also the fact that “classical” performances generally play to more older (and, perhaps, more musically trained) audiences than does, say, Ludacris. (Sexual selection theories note that “full-body aerobic” dancing is generally a youthful activity. That is, it is mostly practiced by those of mate-seeking ages—not that much different than what you see in rock or hip-hop concert settings.) In any case, it is notable that performances of driving, highly rhythmic works (such as Le Sacre du Printemps and Ravel’s “Bolero”) elicit a higher degree of physical involvement, perhaps correlated with the conductor’s histrionic gesture level, even among the most geriatric of audience members.

Secondly, contemporary rock concerts are hardly devoid of the performer-audience divide. Indeed, for security, and, perhaps, quasi-religious reasons, the chasm is often much deeper in the pop genre. But if, in the latter case, noisier audience participation is the standard, much of the difference can be attributed, I think, to the fact that Ludacris et al. are jacked up by a gazillion amps of current flowing through many kilo-bucks worth of loudspeaker arrays. Thus, the differences in sound pressure levels between contributions from the stage and audience are probably similar for all genres. That is, if the average SPL at a Ludacris concert is 115 dB measured at, say, 10 meters from the main stack, while the audience contribution would amount to, maybe 80 dB (if it could be measured at all), the 35 dB difference is about the same as the likely 80/45 dB ratio in the concert hall. Too, it should be pointed out that pop genre presentations typically have a much narrower dynamic range than is the norm for the concert hall. Thus, to shout “yeah!” at the stretto of Copland’s Third Symphony might make perfect sense; but so would ecstatic silence during a stunningly pianissimo adagio from Mahler 5.

So, should we, in the name of being true to our biological roots and freeing ourselves from oppressive cultural conditions, abandon concert hall traditions as they have evolved? I, for one, am leery of over-investing in the applicability of our primitive selves to life in the world today. Those same “biological roots” may need a strong cultural overlay (indeed, those roots must have, in some sense, prepared the way for culture as we know it), without which most societal activities as we practice them today would not be possible, be those related to music, or to science, or to medicine, or to politics, or to diplomacy, or to economics….Could we today, without that cultural overlay, without destructive turmoil handle our proclivities toward tribalism and exclusivism? Could we study the realities of the physical universe? Could we mitigate the pain of injury and disease for so much of our present population? Could we rejoice in the vast knowledge afforded by great libraries of written documentation, a possibility impossible to dream of when our biological roots were laid down? I have nothing against physical expressions of joy, of pleasure, of pain…of all the emotions music is capable of engendering. Those, too, are, in specificity, cultural, aesthetic choices. Nevertheless, from this perspective, the idea of a redesigning Avery Fisher Hall to include a mosh pit does not seem to me at all liberating.