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What did historical evolutionists such as Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer have to say about music? What role did music play in their evolutionary theories? What were the values and limits of these evolutionist turns of thought, and in what ways have they endured in present-day music research? Theorizing Music Evolution: Darwin, Spencer, and the Limits of the Human is a critical examination of ideas about musical origins, emphasizing nineteenth-century theories of music in the evolutionist writings of Darwin and Spencer. Author Miriam Piilonen argues for the significance of this Victorian music-evolutionism in light of its ties to a recently revitalized subfield of evolutionary musicology. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to music theorizing, Piilonen explores how historical thinkers constructed music in evolutionist terms and argues for an updated understanding of music as an especially fraught area of evolutionary thought.
In this book, Piilonen delves into how historical evolutionists, in particular Darwin and Spencer, developed and applied a concept of music that served as a boundary-drawing device, used to trace or obscure the conceptual borders between human and animal. She takes as primary texts the early evolutionary treatises that double as theoretical accounts of music's origins. For Darwin, music served as a kind of proto-language common to humans and animals alike; he heard the songs of birds and the chirps of mice as musical, as articulated in texts such as The Descent of Man (1871) and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). Spencer, on the other hand, viewed music as a specifically human stage of evolutionary advance, beyond language acquisition, as outlined in his essay, The Origin and Function of Music (1857). These competing views established radically different perspectives on the origin and function of music in human cultural expression, while at the same time being mutually constitutive of one another.
A ground-breaking contribution to music theory and histories of science, Theorizing Music Evolution turns to music evolution with an eye toward disrupting and intervening in these questions as they recur in the present.
List of Figures
Introduction - Music and Evolution Revisited
- The Revival of Evolutionary Musicology
- Historicizing Music as a Deconstructed Thing
- Evolutionary Claims are Ontological Claims
- Book Structure and Chapter Summaries
Chapter 1 - Herbert Spencer Writes to Alfred Tennyson
- Spencer the Evolutionist
- Spencer Writes to Charles Darwin
- The Shifting Terrain of Victorian Evolution Theories
- Spencer's Earworm
Chapter 2 - Charles Darwin VS. Herbert Spencer on the Origins of Music
- Music in Darwin's Early Notebooks and The Descent of Man
- Music in Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
- Spencer's Theory of Music Perception
- Spencer and Darwin's Entwined Theories of Music
- A Debate Without a Winner
Chapter 3 - Sound Symbolism in Spencer's Evolutionary Thought
- Spencer's Evolutionary Theory of Music - Basic Theses
- Sound Symbolism as Imperial Metaphor in Spencer's Evolutionary Thought
- Music and Language as Constructed through Theories of Origins
- Plato's Contribution: Centering Sound Symbolism
- Implications and Consequences of Spencer's Sound Symbolism
- Evolutionary Voices and Non-Linear Histories
Chapter 4 - The Darwinian Musical Hypothesis
- What is the Darwinian Musical Hypothesis?
- Antoinette Brown Blackwell's Feminist Critique of Darwin
- Problems with Applying Darwin's Theory of Sexual Selection
- Darwinian Musical Aesthetics
- Against Adaptationism
Chapter 5 - Edmund Gurney's Darwinian Music Formalism
- Gurney's Evolutionary Music Theory as Idealized Model
- Gurney, Darwin, and Association
- Problematizing Gurnian Formalism
Conclusion - Post-Darwinian Music Theory
A Personal Postscript
Acknowledgements
References
Index
Miriam Piilonen is an Assistant Professor of Music Theory at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research has appeared in Critical Inquiry and Empirical Musicology Review, and her chapter "Music Theory and Social Media" appears in The Oxford Handbook of Public Music Theory.
"In the resurgent field of evolutionary musicology, Miriam Piilonen's critical account of the views of Darwin, Spencer, and Edmund Gurney is a cogent, sometimes pessimistic, always welcome intervention. Highlighting the biases and limitations of nineteenth-century evolutionism and listening for their echoes today, she offers correctives for just-so stories told and retold: about music's adaptive benefits, its primordial anticipation of language, its gendered production and impact, and, most generally, its progress.
– Gary Tomlinson, author of A Million Years of Music: The Emergence of Human Modernity
"The pioneers of evolution, great Victorians like Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin, thought long and hard about music. As an experience, it both puzzled and amazed them. Yet they strongly disagreed about its origins and purpose. The issues raised in their discussions have recently resurfaced, so Piilonen's new book, Theorizing Music Evolution, is both a welcome resource and a gentle caution lest we unknowingly resurrect the problematic presuppositions of our scientific ancestors."
– Robert O. Gjerdingen, Emeritus Professor at Northwestern University
"Piilonen's book sheds light on the surprising similarities between the Victorian tendency to view music as a metonym for evolution and our modern tendencies to continue doing so. Such a robust intellectual history stands as a vital addition to the current fields of music theory, evolutionary musicology, and posthumanism."
– Brad Osborn, author of Everything in its Right Place: Analyzing Radiohead
"In this brilliant, incisive book, Miriam Piilonen shows that nineteenth-century evolutionists such as Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer remain relevant today. Their speculative, often biased theories reverberate in discussions of culture and biology, voice, emotion, embodiment, music-language relations, gender and sexuality, and ultimately, the very definitions of music and humanity. Theorizing Music Evolution will be thought-provoking reading for music scholars, psychologists, and anyone curious about the origins and functions of music."
– Jonathan De Souza, Associate Professor of Music Theory, University of Western Ontario
"Piilonen's book deepens our understanding of nineteenth-century thinking on music and evolution. She explores the nuances of Darwin's ideas on the topic and shows how his ideas are entwined with others such as Spencer and Gurney and enmeshed in English Victorian ideologies. Based on this analysis, Piilonen raises timely issues for contemporary research on the evolution of human musicality."
– Aniruddh D. Patel, author of Music, Language, and the Brain
