Charles Darwin, Percy Grainger, and John Blacking: Reflections on the Historical Emergence of Music as a Human Universal

Music from every culture throughout history is now available at the click of a mouse. Prior to the development of recording, the unfamiliar largely separated musical cultures. This paper sets out a narrative to illustrate the framework through which a universalist approach to music emerged over the period 1871–1970, derived from placing in relation to one another accounts of the influence of three historical figures. The first is Darwin, whose theories of evolution embraced speculation on the origin and purpose of music, and who himself wrote about the effect on him of encountering unfamiliar musical styles in the Southern Hemisphere. The second is Grainger, influenced by Darwin’s work and persuasively concerned to open musical contact between all cultures. The third is Blacking, a pioneer in ethnomusicology and commentator on Grainger’s ideas. Tracing the links between these authors inevitably represents an English-language historical perspective on the issues of colonization, cultural appropriation, and the educational influence of a dominant culture. In offering such a historical account of fluctuating experience of ‘the other’ in music, the aim is to illustrate these authors’ contribution towards convergence on an open, informed position consistent with viewing musical exchange from a universalist perspective.