Conclusion

Abstract

Abstract The book’s conclusion rearticulates the main arguments of the book and advocates for both interdisciplinary conversations and clearer boundaries between evolutionary biology and music studies. Such communications become all the more important as we witness the re-emergence of evolutionary musicology. After outlining critical questions for assessing music-evolutionary research, the book closes with a gesture toward a politics of informed ambivalence about matters of musical origins. By opting for such ambivalence, we may acknowledge that theorizing about music evolution often creates more problems than it solves. Thus, there is no need to develop a theory to explain an origin or function for what gets called “music.”