The aims of this article are to select, to summarise, and to critically discuss the principal topics presented in the papers of this special issue. Two main themes have been developed: the first makes reference to the origins of music, with a comparison of anthropological conceptions (the origins of mankind) with psychological conceptions (the musical development of infants). Particular attention is given to the “musilanguage” theory proposed by Steven Brown in 2000. The second main theme is related to the impact of theories of “origins” on what musicology today thinks of as the nature and sense of music. In order to provide concrete arguments pertaining to these topics, a section of the article is devoted to the main relationships between primordial proto-musical behaviours and adult musical activity. The presence of pre-verbal, “multimodal”, affective, interactive and ritual aspects of proto-musical behaviour, thought of as the more important characteristics of musical phenomena, has been considered as common both to anthropological and psychological theories and to their impact on today's conceptions of music. Three specific topics are discussed: proto-narrativity, musicality, and the relationships between musical structures and temporal dynamics.
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