
Gary TomlinsonYale University | YU · Whitney Humanities Center
Gary Tomlinson
About
57
Publications
3,594
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
647
Citations
Introduction
Publications
Publications (57)
Interdisciplinary essays on music psychology that integrate scientific, humanistic, and artistic ways of knowing in transformative ways.
Researchers using scientific methods and approaches to advance our understanding of music and musicality have not yet grappled with some of the perils that humanistic fields concentrating on music have long articu...
Two welcome extensions of evolutionary thinking have come to prominence over the last thirty years: the so-called “extended evolutionary synthesis” (EES) and debate about biological kinds and individuals. These two agendas have, however, remained orthogonal to one another. The EES has mostly restricted itself to widening the explanations of adaptat...
Viewed in broad and deep-historical perspective, human musicking can help us to discern a semiotics reaching far beyond the human sign, clarifying its signifying processes while at the same time delimiting them within the larger realm of information. These categories and distinctions, brought to bear on recent affect theory, show it to be often ina...
Two welcome extensions of evolutionary thinking have come to prominence over the last thirty years: the so-called "extended evolutionary synthesis" (EES) and debate about biological kinds and individuals. These two agendas have, however, remained orthogonal to one another. The EES has mostly restricted itself to widening the explanations of adaptat...
The discourse of posthumanism is made up of a group of approaches to cultural theory and philosophy that attempt to supersede perceived limitations of the humanisms of the twentieth-century. In the essay that follows, I will try to outline these approaches as they have taken shape over the last thirty years or so. I will suggest that their move bey...
This Handbook offers an overview of the thriving interdisciplinary field of Western music and philosophy. It seeks to represent this area in all its fullness, including a diverse array of perspectives from music studies (notably historical musicology, music theory, and ethnomusicology), philosophy (incorporating both analytic and continental approa...
Since its inception, evolutionary theory has experienced a number of extensions. The most important of these took the forms of the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis (MES), embracing genetics and population biology in the early 20th century, and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) of the last thirty years, embracing, among other factors, non-genet...
Since its inception, evolutionary theory has experienced a number of extensions. The most important of these took the forms of the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis (MES), embracing genetics and population biology in the early 20th century, and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) of the last thirty years, embracing, among other factors, non-genet...
Anatomically modern humans appeared at least 200,000 years ago, but there is little evidence for another 100,000 years of their acting much like modern humans. In trying to explain this “sapient paradox,” archaeologists, paleoanthropologists, paleogeneticists, and paleodemographers have recently moved toward the nuanced tracking of the lifeways and...
Accounts of the final coalescence of human modernity have tended to rely, for its foundational elements, on either language (a linguocentric view) or symbolic cognition (symbolocentrism). But archaeological evidence and the model of biocultural evolution developed here together suggest that these were not the starting-points for our modernity. Inst...
Feedback is a twentieth-century name for a dynamic that has been understood to be basic to evolution at least since Darwin’s proposal of natural selection. Feedback is an important aspect of the so-called “modern evolutionary synthesis,” which guided thinking through much of the twentieth century and led especially to gene-centered views. And it ha...
In a series of recent essays, Dipesh Chakrabarty has analyzed the Anthropocene as a problem of incommensurable conceptual scales and offered a historiographic meditation on the difficulty of visualizing its threat. After surveying Chakrabarty's analysis, this essay poses two thought experiments in such visualization. Each takes its start from a typ...
The huge proliferation of the polyphonic madrigal around 1600 raises basic questions that have not been effectively posed, let alone answered, in the scholarly literature. This essay presents these questions and suggests provisional answers for them. In doing so, it describes several dynamics in the development of the madrigal that seem to oppose t...
Viewed in broad and deep-historical perspective, human musicking can help us to discern a semiotics reaching far beyond the human sign, clarifying its signifying processes while at the same time delimiting them within the larger realm of information. These categories and distinctions, brought to bear on recent affect theory, show it to be often ina...
Music is many things; but some of them it can be to everyone. The wording here is intended to be cautious and conditional – “can be,” not “is” – since music-making and perception constitute a large, fuzzy set of capacities and activities, not readily defined or delimited. Cautious or not, however, the frank universalism of the formulation will come...
In this bold recasting of operatic history, Gary Tomlinson connects opera to shifting visions of metaphysics and selfhood across the last four hundred years. The operatic voice, he maintains, has always acted to open invisible, supersensible realms to the perceptions of its listeners. In doing so, it has articulated changing relations between the s...
No one speaks of Verdism, of Bachism, or even of Beethovenism or Mozartism; but Wagnerism we cannot avoid. Twentieth-first-century discourse about Wagner should start by noting this fact, then work toward a clearer separation of the historical formations “Wagner” and “Wagnerism” than the last century observed. I will begin with the second and come...
Regarding the logic of the human/non-human limit in a deep-historical light reveals a distinction of human and pre-human. This might be thought to draw a border sharply on a timeline somewhere between the two, but it does not. Instead it offers multiple chronologies that work to efface borders—40,000 to 100,000 years for features of human modernity...
For Louise George Clubb
"Every natural occurrence in this world could be the effect or materialization of a cosmic reverberation or sound, even of the movement of the stars." These are words of the seventeenth-century playwright and poetic theorist Sigmund von Birken. Walter Benjamin quotes them, near the end of his Habilitationsschrift of 1923–25,...
What makes Bernard Shaw, for us, the most perfect of Wagnerites is that he did not mince words when he judged the master to have taken a wrong turn. Such a turn came in Das Rheingold , and Shaw was quick to expose it, even though he had just spent a chapter elaborating the profound political allegory he discerned in the work:
In the midst of these...
Attempts to understand the place of song in indigenous New World societies have been stymied by powerful European ideologies of music and its uses. This is particularly evident in the case of the Mexica or, as they are commonly known, Aztecs of central Mexico. The crystallization of European conceptions can be followed through five centuries of acc...
Magic enjoyed a vigorous revival in sixteenth-century Europe, attaining a prestige lost for over a millennium and becoming, for some, a kind of universal philosophy. Renaissance music also suggested a form of universal knowledge through renewed interest in two ancient themes: the Pythagorean and Platonic "harmony of the celestial spheres" and the l...
Schenker attempted to explain "what really matters in the musical experience: the workings of genius upon the imagination of the listener through the medium of the musical work" (p. 108). When he turned to an examination of the compositional process, rather than the listener's experi-ence, though, in 1896, Schenker briefly em-braced his historian c...
Typescript. Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Berkeley, 1979. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 352-364). Microfilm. s