Gary Tomlinson
· Sterling Professor of Music & the HumanitiesYale University · Department of Music
Active 1869–2025
About
Gary Tomlinson, Sterling Professor of Music and the Humanities at Yale University, is a distinguished musicologist with a long-standing commitment to multidisciplinary exploration. His teaching, lecturing, and scholarship encompass a broad range of interests, including traditions of European classical music, the history of opera, early-modern musical thought and practice, as well as the music of indigenous American societies, jazz, cultural and anthropological theory, the philosophy of history, affect theory, and human evolution. His recent research integrates humanistic theory, archaeology, and evolutionary science to investigate the role of cultural forces in the formation of modern humanity, resulting in two books: A Million Years of Music: The Emergence of Human Modernity (2015) and Culture and the Course of Human Evolution (in press). His earlier works include Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance, Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others, Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera, The Singing of the New World: Indigenous Voice in the Era of European Contact, and Music and Historical Critique. Additionally, he is the coauthor of the widely used music appreciation textbook Listen, now in its eighth edition. Tomlinson earned his BA from Dartmouth College and his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley, joining Yale in 2010 after serving as Annenberg Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. His distinguished career includes serving as a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar, receiving prizes from ASCAP, the American Musicological Society, the Modern Language Association, and the British Academy, and being elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001. He is also a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Award.
Research topics
- Sociology
- Computer Science
- Epistemology
- Philosophy
- Evolutionary biology
- Aesthetics
- Literature
- Biology
- Programming language
- History
- Anthropology
- Art
- Psychology
- Cognitive science
Selected publications
Portable Gray · 2025-09-01
articleSenior authorThe Machines of Evolution and the Scope of Meaning
2023 · 6 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Computer Science
- Computer Science
- Epistemology
"Merging recent evolutionary thought, theories of information and signs, and new findings in animal studies, Gary Tomlinson's The Machines of Evolution and the Scope of Meaning offers a groundbreaking account of meaning in our world"--
Musical Meaning in Transspecies Perspective: A Semiotic Model
The MIT Press eBooks · 2023-05-02 · 1 citations
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingPhilosophy Theory and Practice in Biology · 2022 · 5 citations
Senior authorCorresponding- Sociology
- Computer Science
- Epistemology
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 adaptation offered by the preceding “modern evolutionary synthesis” by including additional mechanisms of inheritance and variation; while discussion of biological kinds has turned toward philosophical questions of essential vs. contingent properties of life forms and realist vs. epistemological approaches to categorization and classification. Here we attempt to broaden the explanatory scope of evolutionary theory by linking these two agendas. We expand on the mechanistic orientation of the EES, using new understandings of networked systems of components in order to engage the distinct intellectual challenge of the origination of historical kinds. With this phrase we designate a subset of natural kinds that acquires, through evolutionary processes, a quasi-independent lineage-history. Such kinds emerge in both biology and culture, and we enlarge the limited number of historical kinds that have thus far been recognized in evolutionary biology in a series of paradigmatic exemplars, from genes and cell types to rituals and music. For each exemplar we discern specific mechanisms by which it arose and persists; comparing these, we suggest a general unity in the ways in which diverse historical kinds originate.
Representations · 2021 · 3 citations
Senior authorCorresponding- Sociology
- History
- Aesthetics
Cantology names an approach to the songish impulses that are a ubiquitous aspect of human cultures. It aims to divert our attention from the more restricted objects of musicological and ethnomusicological scrutiny by discerning song formations, conditions of possibility that define experiences of society and history along songish lines. These formations, local phenomena in cantology’s broad purview, emerge from the interactions of levels of cultural production including the performative, the discursive, the metadiscursive, and the archaeological. We outline a cantological theory, then briefly characterize four successive song formations in the West, reaching from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first.
Preprints.org · 2020-04-03
preprintOpen accessSenior authorSince 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-genetic forms of inheritance. While we appreciate the motivation for this recent extension, we argue that it does not go far enough, since it restricts itself to widening explanations of adaptation by adding mechanisms of inheritance and variation. Here we argue that a more thoroughgoing extension is needed, one that broadens the explanatory scope of evolutionary theory. In addition to adaptation and its various mechanisms, evolutionary theory must recognize as a distinct intellectual challenge the origin of what we call “historical kinds.” Under historical kinds we include any process that acquires a quasi-independent and traceable lineage-history in biological and cultural evolution. A limited number of historical kinds have been recognized in evolutionary biology, and corresponding research programs have been formed around them. The best characterized examples are biological species and genes. We propose that the conceptual category of historical kinds can and needs to be extended, and we develop the notion of a historical kind in a series of paradigmatic exemplars, from genes and cell types to rituals and music. The explanation of the origin of historical kinds should be a main objective of biological and cultural sciences.
Oxford University Press eBooks · 2020-12-15 · 1 citations
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract Several distinct strains of posthumanist discourse have pointed beyond twentieth-century humanisms, but their project of alienating the human in a transhuman or transspecies commons remains elusive. Human music can aid in this project, if we gauge it against nonhuman communicative means that we habitually describe as “music” or “song.” All these behaviours are semiotic in nature, their human and nonhuman forms at once related and distinct by virtue of the supernormal animal capacities they marshal. To understand their relations requires the operation of deep-historical abstract machines or modes of virtuality that formed them and shaped the distinctive turn marking the late stages of hominin evolution. Evolutionary musical studies can describe the emergence of human music from this semiotic evolution, distancing music from both nonhuman song and human symbolism and language in features such as discrete pitch perception and rhythmic entrainment. Together these efforts build a prehuman scaffold for posthumanist thought.
Index of Monteverdi's Works and Their Texts
2019-12-31
book-chapter1st authorCorresponding8. Marinism and the Madrigal, II (Developments after Book VII)
2019-12-31
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingThe Perfection of Musical Rhetoric
2019-12-31
book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
Frequent coauthors
- 377 shared
Richard Taruskin
- 377 shared
Philip Gossett
- 377 shared
Ellen Rosand
- 376 shared
David Rosen
UNSW Sydney
- 376 shared
John Deathridge
- 376 shared
Lorenzo Bianconi
- 376 shared
Carolyn Abbate
- 376 shared
D. G. Charlton
Awards & honors
- ASCAP Prize
- American Musicological Society Prize
- Modern Language Association Prize
- British Academy Prize
- Guggenheim Fellowship
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