Theorizing Music Evolution: Darwin, Spencer, and the Limits of the Human (Oxford Studies in Music Theory) 0197695280, 9780197695289

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Theorizing Music Evolution

OX F O R D ST U D I E S I N M U SIC T H E O RY Series Editor Steven Rings Studies in Music with Text, David Lewin Metric Manipulations in Haydn and Mozart: Chamber Music for Strings, 1787–​1791, Danuta Mirka Songs in Motion: Rhythm and Meter in the German Lied, Yonatan Malin A Geometry of Music: Harmony and Counterpoint in the Extended Common Practice, Dmitri Tymoczko In the Process of Becoming: Analytic and Philosophical Perspectives on Form in Early Nineteenth-​Century Music, Janet Schmalfeldt Tonality and Transformation, Steven Rings Audacious Euphony: Chromatic Harmony and the Triad’s Second Nature, Richard Cohn Music as Discourse: Semiotic Adventures in Romantic Music, Kofi Agawu Beating Time and Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era, Roger Mathew Grant Mahler’s Symphonic Sonatas, Seth Monahan Pieces of Tradition: An Analysis of Contemporary Tonal Music, Daniel Harrison Music at Hand: Instruments, Bodies, and Cognition, Jonathan De Souza Foundations of Musical Grammar, Lawrence M. Zbikowski Organized Time: Rhythm, Tonality, and Form, Jason Yust Flow: The Rhythmic Voice in Rap Music, Mitchell Ohriner Performing Knowledge: Twentieth-​Century Music in Analysis and Performance, Daphne Leong Enacting Musical Time: The Bodily Experience of New Music, Mariusz Kozak Hearing Homophony: Tonal Expectation at the Turn of the Seventeenth Century, Megan Kaes Long Form as Harmony in Rock Music, Drew Nobile Desire in Chromatic Harmony: A Psychodynamic Exploration of Fin de Siècle Tonality, Kenneth M. Smith A Blaze of Light in Every Word: Analyzing the Popular Singing Voice, Victoria Malewy Sweet Thing: The History and Musical Structure of a Shared American Vernacular Form, Nicholas Stoia Hypermetric Manipulations in Haydn and Mozart: Chamber Music for Strings, 1787–​1791, Danuta Mirka How Sonata Forms: A Bottom-​Up Approach to Musical Form, Yoel Greenberg The Musical Language of Italian Opera, 1813–​1859, William Rothstein Exploring Musical Spaces: A Synthesis of Mathematical Approaches, Julian Hook Times A-​Changin’: Flexible Meter as Self-​Expression in Singer-​Songwriter Music, Nancy Murphy Swinglines: Rhythm, Timing, and Polymeter in Musical Phrasing, Fernando Benadon Tonality: An Owner’s Manual, Dmitri Tymoczko Sounds as They Are: The unwritten music in classical recordings, Richard Beaudoin Theorizing Music Evolution: Darwin, Spencer, and the Limits of the Human, Miriam Piilonen

Theorizing Music Evolution Darwin, Spencer, and the Limits of the Human M I R IA M P I I L O N E N

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2024 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Piilonen, Miriam, author. Title: Theorizing music evolution : Darwin, Spencer, and the limits of the human / Miriam Piilonen. Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2024. | Series: Oxford studies in music theory | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023040397 (print) | LCCN 2023040398 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197695289 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197695296 (epub) | ISBN 9780197695319 Subjects: LCSH: Music—Origin. | Evolution. | Darwin, Charles, 1809–1882—Criticism and interpretation. | Spencer, Herbert, 1820–1903—Criticism and interpretation. Classification: LCC ML3800.P496 2024 (print) | LCC ML3800 (ebook) | DDC 780.01—dc23/eng/20231004 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023040397 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023040398 DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197695289.001.0001 Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America

Contents List of Figures 

Introduction: Music and Evolution Revisited 

vii

1

 e Revival of Evolutionary Musicology  Th Historicizing Music as a Deconstructed Thing  Evolutionary Claims Are Ontological Claims  Book Structure and Chapter Summaries 

2 4 6 10

1. Herbert Spencer Writes to Alfred Tennyson 

15

2. Charles Darwin vs. Herbert Spencer on the Origins of Music 

31

3. Sound Symbolism in Spencer’s Evolutionary Thought 

55



65 70 72 74 79



S pencer the Evolutionist  Spencer Writes to Charles Darwin  The Shifting Terrain of Victorian Evolution Theories  Spencer’s Earworm   usic in Darwin’s Early Notebooks and The Descent of Man  M 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  S pencer’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 Nonlinear Histories 

4. The Darwinian Musical Hypothesis 

 hat Is the Darwinian Musical Hypothesis?  W Antoinette Brown Blackwell’s Feminist Critique of Darwin  Problems with Applying Darwin’s Theory of Sexual Selection  Darwinian Musical Aesthetics  Against Adaptationism 

17 19 21 23 32 37 44 50 51 56

87

89 94 100 103 109

vi Contents

5. Edmund Gurney’s Darwinian Music Formalism 

118

Conclusion: Post-​Darwinian Music Theory 

137

Acknowledgments  References  Index 

143 145 159



 urney’s Evolutionary Music Theory as Idealized Model  G Gurney, Darwin, and “Association”  Problematizing Gurnian Formalism 

121 126 131

Figures 2.1: Letter from Charles Darwin to Henrietta Litchfield, December 2, 1872

45

3.1: Herbert Spencer’s “notation” of four songs in his discussion of the “universal fact” of melodic variation (1902, 63)

61

4.1: Antoinette Blackwell’s “Tabular View of Equations in Organic Nature” (1875, 55)

97

4.2: Antoinette Blackwell’s “Tabular View of Equations in Organic Nature,” continued (1875, 56)

98

4.3: Antoinette Blackwell’s “Tabular View of Equations in Organic Nature,” continued (1875, 58)

99

4.4: Mr. Waterhouse’s notation of gibbons’ whooping, cited by Darwin in his discussion of musical powers (Darwin 1871, vol. 2, 332–​33)

108

5.1: The primary theme of Beethoven’s Pathétique sonata and Gurney’s recomposition of it (1880, 152)

123

5.2: The theme of Beethoven’s Leonore overture and Gurney’s two recompositions of it (1880, 152)

123

Introduction Music and Evolution Revisited

The idea of musical origins was a source of fascination among continental thinkers in nineteenth-​ century Britain.1 With the advent of Victorian theories of evolution, theorists such as Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, and Edmund Gurney brought new evidence and explanation to bear on music’s presumed place in evolution. How “music” was invoked by Victorian evolutionary theorists implied a novel theoretical affordance for the concept of music, which crystallized alongside nineteenth-​century evolutionary science: Music as a special kind of boundary-​drawing device, deployed to trace or obscure the conceptual borders between human and animal. Music served this adjudicative function especially well within the nascent field of evolutionary science because music was already considered an ambiguous way of expressing. Music was somehow both nonrepresentational and directly reflective of thoughts and feelings, an ethereal essence that nevertheless could be recorded in written notation and analyzed formally.2 I argue it was this slippery quality of music that made it an especially potent element of Victorian evolutionary theorization. At times a conceptual bridge between human and animal, at times a dividing line, music became a site of evolutionist debate and a sticking point between divergent theories. Imbued with evolutionary significance, musical notes, rhythms, melodies, and other forms came to be heard as scientific evidence of evolutionary history. When Victorian evolutionists such as Spencer or Darwin invoked music, it was to delineate or complicate a human–​animal boundary, such that the structures of music became theoretically entwined with the limits and potentials of the 1 The idea of an evolutionary origin for music is an ancient one. For a historical account of pre-​ Victorian speculations about musical origins, see Warren Dwight Allen’s Philosophies of Music History (1962 [1939]). See also Bryan Levman’s “Western Theories of Music Origin, Historical and Modern” (2000). 2 For example, Joseph Goddard’s “The Moral Theory of Music” (1857)—​an important precursor to the evolutionary music theories of Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin—​treats musical tones as both nonrepresentational and direct reflections of thoughts and feelings (43).

Theorizing Music Evolution. Miriam Piilonen, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2024. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197695289.003.0001

2 Introduction human species. Music thus became a prism through which different thinkers theorized evolution and what it meant to be human. Theorizing Music Evolution reconstructs theories of music evolution and the historical terrain in which they were created. Rather than search for facts about music’s origins, this book explores how evolutionists came to interpret music as a subject of evolutionary analysis. Through close readings of music-​ evolution texts, archives, and musical scores, we will discover how theorizing music evolution also meant theorizing the very ground of music and what it means to be musical. This ontological dimension of music-​evolutionary theorization has implications for the resurgent field of musical-​origins; this book’s historical focus on Darwin and Spencer is inspired by the recently revitalized subfield of evolutionary musicology and its ties to Victorian music evolutionists. In this book we will explore how ideas about evolution have affected how music was interpreted by listeners, and how music-​­­via-​­evolution has in turn affected how the human species is imagined in relation to other species. The domain of music-​evolution was never strictly scientific, in other words, but also speculative and creative. What was created in the act of theorizing was a set of evolutionist ontologies of music—​the subjects of this book’s critical inquiry.

The Revival of Evolutionary Musicology This book adds a critical perspective to the study of music’s evolutionary origins in examining this specifically musical dimension to Victorian evolutionary theories. This study is not simply a matter of the past; evolutionary musicology is presently being revitalized after decades of dormancy. For much of the late twentieth-​century, music scholars were reticent to theorize about evolutionary origins.3 Theories of origins were often deemed too “speculative” to be afforded serious attention, as Peter Kivy put it (1962, 328–​29). This reputation of unseriousness was compounded by the fact that many such theories advanced transparently ethnocentric accounts of music and human nature, often with European art music perched at the top of a racist chain of excellence.4 In the field of evolutionary biology too, music 3 See Ames (2003), Mundy (2010 and 2014), and Rehding (2000) for discussion. 4 Nancy Stepan’s The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–​1960 (1982) offers an important study of the scientific codification of racism in evolutionary thought. Commenting on the shift from earlier ethnographic monogenist approaches to anthropological polygenist approaches in Victorian British scientific discourse, she remarks that races had come to be seen as “forming a natural but

Introduction  3 and other so-​called adapted traits have become controversial subjects of research. Steven Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin (1979) famously ignited evolutionist debates by questioning the extent to which individual organisms may be divided into discrete traits or behaviors, each with their own evolutionary significance.5 In spite of this history of controversy, studies of music evolution have once again returned. A new field of evolutionary musicology began to cohere in the 1990s and early 2000s that was notably distinct from evolutionary biology. The results of these recent speculations have been rich and varied. Studies by Anne Fernald (1992), Steven Mithen (1996), Ian Cross (1999), David Huron (2001), W. Tecumseh Fitch (2005), Aniruddh Patel (2010), Dylan van der Schyff (2013), and Gary Tomlinson (2015), among others, have offered accounts of music’s evolutionary history, while also reinforcing the idea that human diversity and difference are not reducible to genetic or environmental phenomena.6 Other recent contributions offer more dogmatic treatments, using evolutionary science misleadingly to describe idiosyncratic musical practices as preordained by biology. For example, consider studies that purport to add to the Darwinian idea that sexual selection explains the evolution of musical traits (for example: Charlton 2014; Miller 2000). Such studies are undergirded by sketchy interpretations of evolutionary science and equally sketchy theories of human sexuality, as this book discusses. In order to address the spread of false evolutionary narratives, this book offers a set of critical readings that may be brought to bear on historical thought, as well as the contemporary convergence of music studies and evolutionary science. By considering the question of music evolution as such, the scholarship in this area prompts us to consider some important ideas. Is it possible to speak of music origins without reifying music as a timeless universal? How can we as scholars put pressure on the categories of our own research? How do different analytical lenses change our understandings of what music, and evolution, might be? Take, for instance, a historically

static chain of excellence” (46). This would later come to serve as a scientific justification for imperialism and genocide. For further examples and discussion see Allen (1962 [1939]), Brantlinger (1985), Zon (2007 and 2017). 5 Gould and Lewontin, “The Spandrels of Saint Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme” (1979). See also Jack Selzer (ed.), Understanding Scientific Prose (1993). I discuss ongoing discussions of adaptationism in c­ hapter 4. 6 This is only a handful of examples in a growing subfield of evolutionary musicology. Some of these authors have published much more than I reference here, as I discuss later in this book.

4 Introduction significant debate between Darwin and Spencer about music evolution. From one perspective, these two appear to disagree when it comes to their ideas about music and evolution. But from another perspective, their ideas have more in common than meets the eye, especially when we consider that these thinkers had a direct influence on one another. Darwin, for one, posited a sexual-​selection-​origin for music, where musical emotion is analogized with amorousness (1871; 1872; 1874); Darwin’s idea was partially an outgrowth of Spencer’s more general materialist conception of musical expression as “reflex actions” (1857). If we zoom out further, consider how these two converge within a Victorian musical episteme that inhered many more readings of the terms “music” and “evolved.” Victorian theorist Edmund Gurney, for instance, organized his post-​Darwinian evolutionary account of music around the pleasure of listening to well-​made melodies, where such pleasures represent embodied memories of primal courtship behaviors (1880). Spencer (1902) went on to describe the irritation of having a song stuck in his head as evidence against a classical model of the self—​for what rational, self-​knowing person would actually enjoy having catchy tunes on mental repeat? By unpacking historical examples of music evolutionism such as these, throughout this book we will think critically about how music has been defined and redefined through models of evolution, often in connection to changing theories of emotion. This historical framing provides a broad base for understanding what has been included in the term “music” by evolutionists and what has been excluded. By jumping between moments in time that grapple with music evolution, we will explore how theorization of music shines a light on how people think about humanity and creative expression.

Historicizing Music as a Deconstructed Thing Victorian evolutionists, influenced as they were by the musical thinkers of their time, participated within the messy conceptual terrain of “music” in nineteenth-​ century continental thinking.7 These evolutionists disagreed 7 Historical portraits of Victorian musical cultural such as Nicholas Temperley’s (1988) or Ruth Solie’s (2004) depict music in a variety of frames: as the subject of discourse in magazines and treatises, at the parlor piano as part of a young woman’s education, as a common domestic pastime, at the opera house, and in places of worship. The ways in which Victorian critics and philosophers wrote about music reflected the world in which they lived, providing important details about the

Introduction  5 strenuously about why music was important or even what music might be in the first place. In a tradition that includes Joseph Goddard, George Eliot, and Walter Pater, music was figured as a useful metaphor for interstitial or ineffable things (Goddard 1857; Eliot 1871; Pater 1888). For Darwin, music is a kind of proto-​language common to humans and animals alike; he hears the songs of birds and the chirps of mice as musical (1872; 1874). Spencer, on the other hand, views music as a specifically human stage of evolutionary advance, beyond language acquisition (1857; 1890). For thinkers like Edmund Gurney, music is a formalized mode of attention that distills and makes perceptible important features of human psychology (1880). These competing views established radically different perspectives on the origin and function of music in human cultural expression, and not always for the better. Music-​ evolutionary thinkers, in addition to testing relationships between humans and nonhumans through music theorizing, participated in an emerging scientific imperialism. Evolutionary ideas both benefited from and contributed to the British missions of expansion, extraction, and domination. Only from the seat of empire could Darwin voyage to Galápagos as a gentleman naturalist, or was Spencer able to publish an estimated million copies of his books. Gurney similarly was able to promote an evolutionist conception of the human species that reflected the race hierarchies on which Imperial Britain built its mission, and which dominated English society at the time.8 When other music scholars such as Sir Hubert Parry (an admirer of Spencer) developed their own evolutionary accounts of music history, many wrote that non-​European musical traditions were the less-​evolved precursors to European art music traditions (see, for instance, Parry’s The Evolution of the Art of Music [1893]9). Evolutionism became a significant founding principal for an explicitly white nationalist and patriarchal field of comparative musicology around the turn of the twentieth century.

cultural landscape; the critical language used to describe music “reveals the common concerns and ideological presuppositions of the period,” as Solie put it (5). 8 Darwin and Spencer refer to “savage races” to refer to nonwhite and non-​European people throughout their careers. For Darwin, “[Music is] present, though in a very rude and, as it appears, almost latent condition, in men of all races, even the most savage . . . their music is to us hideous and unmeaning” (1871, vol. 2, 333). For Spencer, “That music is a product of civilization is manifest; for though savages have their dance-​chants, these are of a kind scarcely to be dignified by the title musical” (1857, 405). These are the kinds of scientific racism that this book condemns. 9 In this book’s preface, Parry thanks “Mr. Herbert Spencer” in particular “for communications about the dancing and music of savage races” (1905, v) in support of his own bigoted hierarchy of musical progress.

6 Introduction Incorporating feminist, queer, and postcolonial theories, we affirm that such constructions are dehumanizing and incorrect. Throughout this book, we will look for opportunities to question “music” as it appears in such guises.

Evolutionary Claims Are Ontological Claims To theorize music evolution is to theorize music. Evolutionary thinking involves long historical timelines, observations of population-​level changes, and hypotheses about what evolves in the first place. When evolutionary thinkers hypothesize about musical origins—​whether they presume to recover ancient histories of music, reconstruct so-​called Ur-​forms of music, draft mathematical models of evolutionary processes, or predict a musical future based on evolutionary principles—​they are implicitly making a case for the very essence of music. Such ontologies are not simply ontologies of music-​as-​works.10 I am also referring to ways in which music’s evolutionary definition acts as a metonym for larger ontological worldviews. In order to explore the ways that evolutionary claims about music have also functioned as ontological claims, one must confront the instability of music. What has been called music has sometimes been an art, sometimes a practice, a set of forms, an expression of qualities—​or something else entirely. “Musical” things are not all alike, nor is “music” just one thing, one kind of trait, behavior, or genetic profile. Music is a noisy phenotype—​an imprecise set of not-​always-​observable characteristics. Music as a concept changes from place to place, sounds different at different times to different ears, and is called by many other names. Some people and cultures do not have a concept of music. In Philip Bohlman’s words, “Music may be what we think it is; it may not be” (1999, 17). When evolutionists such as Darwin and Spencer theorized the origins of music, they were enacting a specific notion of music as an evolved trait, and thus were taking the definition of “music” for granted, albeit in very different ways. In theorizing music at an evolutionary scale, they reveal a particular ontological worldview. There are political implications to ontologizing music. Some evolutionists have been aware of this, such as Spencer, who routes his evolutionism toward matters of societal structure, state governance, and national identity 10 Lydia Goehr’s (2007 [1998]) historical and philosophical study of the musical work concept is pertinent here.

Introduction  7 wherever possible, as we will see. Others have been more reluctant to acknowledge that evolution has politics at all, thereby exemplifying a mode of “depoliticized speech,” to borrow a phrase from Roland Barthes (1972 [1957], 142–​56). Depoliticized speech (which Barthes also calls “myth”) is speech that describes its subject of interest as a natural given, rather than the result of circumstances that could have been different. To see depoliticized speech in action, consider a recent confrontation among three scholars over the idea of political neutrality. In a 2013 paper, Patrick Savage and Steven Brown proposed a “new comparative musicology” comprising five major themes: biological evolution, cultural evolution, classification, human history, and universals. David Clarke critiqued Savage and Brown’s proposal on grounds of reductionism. For Clarke, the proposal is epistemologically at odds with ethnomusicological modes of inquiry, where scholars are interested “in the particularities of a culture and the actual experience of encounter in the field” (2014, 11–​12). In Clarke’s words, a comparative musicology rooted in Savage and Brown’s model would be “based on the abstraction of music and people into data” while aspiring to a problematic “political neutrality” (6–​12). Savage responded independently to Clarke’s critique by doubling down on his own “relatively neutral political stance,” contending “it is legitimate to try to limit political aspects in one’s published works” (2019, 8). What Clarke calls “the abstraction of music and people into data” is part of the politics that Savage denies. Like all depoliticized speech, Savage’s model and response presumes no political opposition and falsely presents its methods as politically neutral. The prefix “de-​” in Barthes’s figuration of depoliticized speech implies an impossible action of removal. Thus, when I say “all evolutionary claims about music are also ontological claims,” I am inviting scholars to grapple with the politics of ontologizing music. We should be sensitive to theories that use music to define the human species in monolithic terms. Evolutionary accounts of music are not just ontologies of music but also of the human. They invoke ideas about “what a human being is” but in specifically musical terms. Spencer’s ontology of a musical being, for example, cast the composers he heard at the London Opera House as the pinnacles of musical progress—​an imperial metaphor that saw Wolfgang Mozart, Giocomo Meyerbeer, and Ludwig van Beethoven perched atop an artificial musical hierarchy. As Sylvia Wynter (2003) pointed out, such monolithic accounts have failed to describe human difference with any nuance or precision. For Wynter, a notion of humanity-​as-​Man that is treated “as if it were the human itself ” indexes a problematic recentering of

8 Introduction white Eurocentric humanism (259).11 Elizabeth Tolbert has similarly shown how debates over usefulness in music-​evolution research are implicated in enlightenment understandings of human uniqueness and claims to knowledge, while purporting to represent the species as a whole (2001a; 2001b; 2002). Critiques of cultural extractionism by researchers such as Adam J. P. Gaudry (2011) or Dylan Robinson (2020)—​in which settler scholars extract cultural knowledge and intellectual resources from cultures without participating meaningfully in the cultures they study—​are also relevant to how evolutionists have approached people as subjects of research. By considering the consequences of how historical evolutionists studied and ontologized music, with insights from thinkers such as Wynter, Tolbert, Gaudry, and Robinson, among many other voices, this book brings an ethical line of questioning to the readings. Questioning evolutionary thinkers for their tendencies toward incomplete or dehumanizing ontologies of the human species is nothing new. I look to thinkers from the same historical period as Darwin and Spencer for additional critical cues. One is abolitionist and advocate for women’s rights Antoinette Brown Blackwell and her book The Sexes throughout Nature (1875). One of Blackwell’s signature claims was that Darwin and Spencer misrepresented evolution, particularly the evolution of sex differences, by excluding the insights of women scientists. We can take Blackwell’s cue to reflect critically on the ways in which beliefs about the human species have fed into ideas about music, and vice versa. I also draw inspiration from critiques of ideal theory leveraged by Charles Mills, who himself borrows from the feminist writings of Onora O’Neill (1987; 1993). In “ ‘Ideal Theory’ as Ideology” (2005), Mills describes how instances of ideal theory (representations of what things should be, rather than how they actually are) often serve to rationalize a status quo by reflecting “illicit group privilege” (167). Through such lenses, I unpack moments when early evolutionists’ accounts of music and human nature reflect instances of author bias (following Blackwell), or Ideal theory (following Mills). Examples include Spencer’s teleological account of musical progress, or Gurney’s treatment of melody as the most important element of music.

11 See also Tiffany Lethabo King’s “Humans Involved: Lurking in the Lines of Posthumanist Flight” (2017), Zakkiyah Iman Jackson’s “Review: Animal: New Directions in the Theorization of Race and Posthumanism” (2013), and Tyrone Palmer’s “ ‘What Feels More Than Feeling?’: Theorizing the Unthinkability of Black Affect” (2017). Also of direct relevance is Philip Ewell’s (2020) critique of the “white racial frame” that unjustly dominates music-​theoretical discourse within scholarly conversations, particularly within the Society for Music Theory.

Introduction  9 Although this book does not always paint a flattering portrait of historical music-​evolutionism, it is my aim to think constructively about these ideas as evolutionary ways of listening that reveal values and priorities about music. To understand what I mean, let us look at an example. A recent evolutionary way of listening is found in Gary Tomlinson’s (2015; 2016; 2018) account of hominin vocality as an emergent property of evolution. Tomlinson expands on Manuel De Landa’s theory of “nonlinear history” in order to describe how vocal expressions might have emerged gradually and piecemeal, a treatment which is intriguing for its avoidance of the overly deterministic concepts of inevitability or progress that define evolutionism’s more retrograde potentials. In Tomlinson’s ear, the ambiguity and in-​betweenness of vocal expression is what is interesting about it, opening onto a semiotic treatment of meaning-​making in the vein of Charles Sanders Peirce.12 In a very different mode, consider Geoffrey Miller’s often-​cited claim that Jimi Hendrix’s promiscuous lifestyle is evidence of Darwin’s suggestion that music is for mate selection (2000). Miller propagates an aggressively mechanical relationship between music and sexuality, verified by “scientific” methods and endorsed by retrofashionable figures like Darwin. Miller’s post-​Darwinian way of interpreting music is questionable, not just for its gendered and heteronormative assumptions, and not just for its limiting definition of music, but for taking too literally Darwin’s speculative comments about music—​Darwin himself revised his theory in a later text, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). By recognizing that Miller’s reading of Darwin and his hearing of Hendrix’s music feed into one another, one can see how evolution-​based views of music may emerge from and reinforce how music (that ambiguous medium) is listened to and interpreted. When we place Tomlinson and Miller alongside one another, the different politics of their divergent evolutionary interpretive strategies come to the foreground where they may be compared directly. This book is really about two subjects. The first subject is Victorian evolutionary theories of music. The second is the recent return of Victorian music-​ evolution through the revival of evolutionary musicology after decades of relative inactivity. By considering these two scenes together, I highlight what is shared between Victorian music-​evolutionism and the contemporary 12 Charles Sanders Peirce was a nineteenth-​century American logician known for his contributions to semiotics. Perhaps most relevant to Tomlinson’s evolutionary theory of vocality is Peirce’s trichotomy of signs, in which interpretive meaning is generated through interactions between signs, objects, and interpretants.

10 Introduction field: the intellectually exciting possibility of large-​scale theories of music, as well as the risk of prescribing a musical norm that is limiting or even pathologizing. Theorizing music evolution, for Darwin or Spencer, was implicitly a means to naturalize what it feels like to be “properly” musical. Such grand, normalizing approaches aided in the construction of a utilitarian music, which remains both the legacy and the difficulty of theorizing music evolution in the present. As a result, the research is founded on Victorian scientific bigotries of all sorts (racism, sexism, classism, ableism) and readers should be warned that the language used in these texts is frequently dehumanizing. The problem with music-​evolutionism today is that its proponents frequently describe changes in music over the course of tens or hundreds of thousands of years—​but not millions. Much of the research is confusing small-​ scale musical changes with species-​ level population shifts, while trying to make an objective measurement of musical things. By treating evolution as a metaphor, researchers are failing to address personal biases as to what music is, while confusing evolution with history and conflating the present with the past. Darwin and Spencer made these sorts of conflations fashionable. The problems with such Victorian theories of music evolution have not yet been adequately addressed. As a result, no one has produced what I would consider to be a convincing theory of music evolution.

Book Structure and Chapter Summaries The book begins with a study of Victorian conversations, emphasizing the viewpoint of Herbert Spencer, before focusing on Spencer and Darwin’s musical debate and finally branching into historical and music-​analytical chapters. Chapter 1 (“Herbert Spencer Writes to Alfred Tennyson”) introduces Spencer’s musical thought through an admiring letter (or rather, a thinly veiled request for endorsement) that Spencer wrote to the poet laureate after publishing The Principles of Psychology (1855). This letter sets the scene for a reading of Spencer’s theory of music psychology and his rise to fame within nineteenth-​century mental science. Soon after, Spencer wrote to Darwin on the subject of evolution and the two began a lifelong correspondence. In contextualizing Spencer’s theory of music, this chapter touches on Spencer’s social life among religious dissenters and London intellectuals, his armchair approach to scientific research, and his ambition to define evolution

Introduction  11 once and for all. This chapter further recounts the non-​Darwinian terrain of Victorian musical culture as a messy field of inquiry where Darwin’s music theory foundered and Spencer’s sailed more smoothly into the popular imagination. It was not until decades later that Spencer’s historical character shifted to that of the “social Darwinist” and Darwin gained his reputation as the father of evolution. Chapter 1 concludes with a reflection on an underappreciated aspect of Spencer’s musical thinking: his philosophical reflections on the earworm (a mental tune that plays on repeat). For Spencer, having a song stuck in his head is evidence against the idea of a unified personality or “Self,” and a blow to the metaphysics of autonomous subjectivity. This nonsubjective notion of selfhood accords with his broader theory of emotion—​first put forth in his Principles of Psychology. In what amounts to a pre-​Freudian mental science, something like the unconscious was discussed by Spencer through the example of an earworm—​a subject Darwin would not have considered. In an analytical experiment, I set aside Spencer’s evolutionism in order to engage with his account of earworms as self-​defying sonic imagery. Chapter 2 (“Charles Darwin vs. Herbert Spencer on the Origins of Music”) compares these two competing evolutionary accounts of music, as articulated in texts such as Spencer’s “The Origin and Function of Music” (1857) or Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871). Whereas Darwin understood music as an unconscious proto-​language that emerges alongside instinctual urges for domination, conquest, and sexual reproduction, Spencer described music as an advanced province of the human species, which alone possesses the emotional “force” and “variation” necessary for musical expression. By sharpening the distinctions in this evolutionist debate, this chapter highlights finer points of agreement and disagreement between these two: their divergent ideas about the sonic expressions of animals, questions about what distinguishes a “note” from a “noise,” and their shared view of music as a universal good. This chapter is interested in resisting what I call the “Darwin-​ization” of music-​evolutionist history: the tendency to treat Darwin as the only relevant historical figure. In the final section of this chapter, I contend that the relationship between Darwin and Spencer, their ideas, and their historical milieus, is more interesting, and more complex, than overly simple narratives of Darwin’s correctness or heroism, or of debates with winners and losers. In fact, their theories were mutually constitutive of one another, and ultimately they dissolved into a shared position opposing a more historicized

12 Introduction view. The next two chapters continue in this direction, contextualizing and unpacking in more detail the mutually constitutive music theories of Spencer (­chapter 3) and Darwin (­chapter 4). Chapter 3 (“Sound Symbolism in Spencer’s Evolutionary Thought”) analyzes the theory of sound symbolism (mimetic uses of sounds to represent things) that undergirds Spencer’s theory of music and language origins. For Spencer, music is a development from vocal expression and specifically from impassioned speech, as consolidated by his dictum: “All music is originally vocal” (1857, 397). Spencer tracked a questionable line of progress from simple vocal exclamations, to complex speech, and finally to music. An increasingly dynamic emotional capacity, unique to the human species, is here expressed and evidenced by an equally dynamic musical capacity—​that is Spencer’s vision of music evolution, which tracks with his conception of a special capacity for emotional progress that is unique to the human species. The Spencerian idea that language and music evolved teleologically from simplicity to complexity reflects his more general theory of evolutionary progress, and was foundational to certain modernist aesthetic ideologies.13 In Spencer’s essays such as “Progress: Its Law and Cause” (1857) and Philosophy of Style (1852) he argues that language began as sonic imitations of the phenomenal world—​a much older idea on which Spencer puts a new evolutionary spin. Here Spencer is situated as part of a long history of imaginative speculations about sound symbolism and the so-​called well-​designedness of music and language—​alongside Plato, Gottfried Leibniz, John Locke, and Max Müller, among others. Taking a closer look at Spencer’s thinking enables one to consider overlooked dimensions of Spencer’s ideas about language and music in fresh terms—​including problematic ideas about the “well-​ suitedness” of words to their referents. Chapter 3 concludes with an extended engagement with the theory of music/​language origins in Gary Tomlinson’s evolutionary theory of music, which implicitly demonstrates a way to avoid the pitfalls of Spencerian sound symbolism. Chapter 4 (“The Darwinian Musical Hypothesis”) turns to Darwin’s theory of music and sexual selection. “Sexual selection” is Darwin’s idea that species evolve in part through sex preferences for specific traits. Darwin connected his theory of sexual selection to his theory of music primarily in two texts. In The Descent of Man (1871) and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and 13 Progress, for Spencer, is the principle underlying every aspect of the universe. Such grand narratives were both idolized and the subjects of critique within musical modernism. See also Daniel Albright, Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources (2004).

Introduction  13 Animals (1872), Darwin wrote that music played a primeval role in sexual selection and procreation. Having observed the sonic behaviors of animals during mating season, Darwin extrapolated their meanings to early humans, arguing that musical displays stem from the strong emotions that define both human and nonhuman courtship rituals. For Darwin, this feeds into a method of interpreting sounds and facial expressions as immutable signs—​ what I call his “formalism of feelings.” In this chapter’s conclusion, I discuss and critique the revival of Darwin under the banner of adaptationism—​a conflation of natural selection with evolution. Chapter 5 (“Edmund Gurney’s Darwinian Music Formalism”) turns to Edmund Gurney’s The Power of Sound (1880), one of the first examples of a post-​Darwinian music theory. Using music analysis, in the form of score studies, Gurney offers a kind of music formalism grounded in Darwinian evolution. Having developed Darwin’s ideas into an evolutionary account of musical pleasure and having combined this with studies of form in the music of composers such as Ludwig van Beethoven, Gurney argues that “impressive” music evokes an unanalyzable feeling that dimly recalls primal scenes of erotic courtship. At the end of this chapter, I synthesize current thinking about formalism in music studies in order to reflect on Gurney’s evolutionary formalism. This has implications for how music evolution is being revitalized in the present. By highlighting specific musical structures, such as pitches, rhythms, melodies, timbres, song forms, or tunings, evolutionists risk making the same mistakes Gurney made when he combined Darwinian evolution with music analysis—​the creation of a compendium of “greatest hits of music” that points more toward the tastes of the authors than toward evolution as such. All the more reason for better communication between evolutionary biology and music studies, as I suggest in the book’s Conclusion (“Post-​ Darwinian Music Theory”). Interdisciplinarity is highly desirable at the present moment—​this book is proudly interdisciplinary—​but boundaries between disciplines have value as well. Music theorists, musicologists, and ethnomusicologists have long discussed the values and limits of evolution as a method of analyzing music. Such conversations become all the more relevant as we witness the re-​emergence of evolutionary musicology. I discuss what it would mean to be “post-​Darwinian” in music research—​and why I would not characterize the current field as such. In my reading, music-​evolution theories postulated by Darwin, Spencer, and Gurney are examples of how “music” and “evolved” have been pulled and

14 Introduction stretched, warped and changed, sifted and shape-​shifted, into contrasting narratives—​an important element of what defined the Victorian musical episteme and occasionally the current one. Alternately defined as an advanced form of speech, an ancient mode of expression, an animalistic gesture-​call, or high human artifice—​or something else entirely—​music has been invoked by evolutionists as a pliable rubric that can animate a wide range of origin stories. Still, Victorian evolutionist constructions of music were not infinitely pliable—​what, and whom, they excluded from the category of music was significant as well. Music remains a uniquely difficult subject for evolutionary research, and my main goal in this book is not to adjudicate the science. I do not enter into debates about whether music evolution is really a matter of biology, or culture. Nor do I combine biological and cultural views of evolution into a “biocultural” perspective, as scholars such as Patel or Tomlinson have done. Rather, I approach music evolution as an inherently speculative enterprise where conceptual tensions may be left unresolved. I point to the present pluralist state of thought about musical origins, from Steven Pinker’s (1997) hearing of music as evolutionarily useless; to Michael Spitzer’s (2021) romantic notion that music “makes us human” (5); to the ideals of humanist Kathleen Higgins (2012), who suggests that music can help people become “more humane” by virtue of its shared natural origin (2). This book differently suggests that music (whatever that might be) has as much power to complicate and alienate as to clarify or bring together, being neither an easy nor a coherent subject of evolutionary theorization.

1 Herbert Spencer Writes to Alfred Tennyson Shortly after Herbert Spencer published Principles of Psychology (1855)—​his first attempt at a psychology grounded in evolution—​he penned a letter to poet laureate Alfred Tennyson: I happened recently to be re-​reading your Poem “The Two Voices,” and coming to the verse   “Or if thro’ lower lives I came—​   Tho’ all experience past became   Consolidate in mind and frame—​” it occurred to me that you might like to glance through a book which applies to the elucidation of mental science the hypothesis to which you refer. I therefore beg your acceptance of Psychology, which I send by this post.1

Unfortunately for Spencer, any perceived rapport between him and Tennyson was strictly unidirectional. Tennyson never wrote back, and most of the pages of his copy of Spencer’s Psychology were left uncut.2 Had Spencer anticipated Tennyson’s shortness of attention, he might have urged the poet to begin with Part III, the “General Synthesis,” which, in Spencer’s words, “contained the fundamental conception which pervades the entire work” (Spencer 1904 vol. 1, 536). This fundamental conception is Spencer’s idea that every aspect of life operates according to the principle of “correspondence,” that is, ongoing negotiations between mind and body, under the more general law of evolution. “Though we commonly regard mental and bodily life as distinct,” Spencer writes, “it needs only to ascend somewhat above the ordinary point of view, to see that they are but sub-​divisions of life in general; and that no line of demarcation can be drawn between them, otherwise than arbitrarily” (1855,

1 Letter reprinted in The Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer (Duncan 1908, vol. 1, 78). 2 See Gregory Tate, “Tennyson and the Embodied Mind” (2009), for further discussion of Spencer’s letter to Tennyson, as well as of Tennyson’s copy of Spencer’s Psychology (61–​62).

Theorizing Music Evolution. Miriam Piilonen, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2024. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197695289.003.0002

16  Theorizing Music Evolution 349). Spencer’s sense that the mind is radically integrated with the body, such that all aspects of life are understood as dynamic “motions” (350) was key to his evolutionary theory. This connected his thinking across a range of subjects, from biology to sociology, economics, politics, and music. Decades later, William James would define the Spencerian model of psychology as such: “the essence of mental life and of bodily life are one” (1890, 6).3 At core, Spencer was a materialist and an antidualist. Spencer’s letter to Tennyson provides an access point to his early thinking, as well as a sense for his place within the broader terrain of Victorian “mental science,” as it was sometimes termed. Spencer’s reading (or rather his selective misreading) of Tennyson’s poem “The Two Voices” serves as a roving spotlight: illuminating passages that align with Spencer’s own ideas and leaving dark the rest. The full poem dramatizes its narrator’s contemplation of suicide through an imagined dispute between the “voice” of cynical self-​negation, on the one hand, and of desperate idealism on the other. The poem’s metaphysical commitments alternate between embodied mind and immaterial soul, fragmented ego and immutable identity, and the descent of species and divine creation, among other schisms. In the verses quoted by Spencer in his letter, the narrator briefly contemplates his place within a cosmology ordered by material evolution (“Or if thro’ lower lives I came—​”), an idea Tennyson gleaned from the writings of Arthur Henry Hallam, and from his own father.4 Ultimately, however, the poem’s final conception of mind is left as ambiguously defined and messily practiced as that of the broader terrain of Victorian mental science.5 It was within this messy terrain—​both poetic and historical—​that Spencer’s ideas stood out. Spencer’s letter to Tennyson was part of a strategy to promote his new book. Indeed, sales of Spencer’s Psychology were flagging and his friend George Henry Lewes had recommended he distribute copies to leading intellectuals. In a letter from Spencer to his mother, Harriet, dated March 31, 1856, he writes, “At the suggestion of Lewes I have been distributing about thirty copies of the ‘Princ. of Psy.’ among the leading men of science 3 James continues: “[The Spencerian model] takes mind in the midst of all its concrete relations, it is immensely more fertile than the old-​fashioned ‘rational psychology,’ which treated the soul as a detached existent, sufficient unto itself, and assumed to consider only its nature and properties” (1890, 6). 4 See Tennyson 1897 (1–​44) as referenced and discussed in Tate (2009). 5 The richly fraught field of Victorian mental science was closely related to the period’s writings on art and literature, as demonstrated in Rick Rylance’s Victorian Psychology (2000), Nicholas Dames’s The Physiology of the Novel (2007), and Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narratives in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-​Century Fiction (2000).

Herbert Spencer Writes to Alfred Tennyson  17 and philosophy” (1904, vol. 1, 590). In Spencer’s Autobiography, where this letter is copied, he explains the letter’s context: “Doubtless Lewes had made this suggestion on learning from me that there was very little sale of the Psychology, and on thinking that some use might be made of it by distribution if not otherwise” (590–​91). Spencer’s missive to Tennyson, though penned in the flattering language of fan mail, actually represents his efforts to secure an endorsement.

Spencer the Evolutionist Spencer’s Principles of Psychology had a slow start, but with the publication of a series of evolutionist treatises, his fame grew. In Spencer’s First Principles of a New Principle of Philosophy (1862), he purports to demonstrate how the principle of evolution undergirds all aspects of existence, defining evolution as “a change from the homogenous to the heterogeneous . . . this law of organic evolution is the law of all evolution” (148). At the peak of his publishing career, critics compared his intellectual achievements to those of Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel; his First Principles was placed alongside the writings of Newton and Laplace.6 He garnered national and international followings; editions of his works were translated into German, Italian, Spanish, French, Russian, Japanese, and Chinese.7 Spencer’s strongest following—​and most fervent opposition—​was in the United States, where his ideas were seen to affirm the American capitalist way of life (Moore 1979, 168) and the Emersonian ideal of self-​reliance (Jacoby 2004, 142). Near the turn of the century, three Supreme Court justices were avowed Spencerians: Stephen Field, David Brewer, and Rufus Peckham (Kennedy 1978, 120). Famed intellectuals positioned their own thinking alongside or in opposition to Spencer’s, including William James, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henry Bergson, and Emile Durkheim.8 His influence can be measured not only in citations but also in sales. It has been estimated that Spencer was the first philosopher in history to sell a million copies of his works within his own lifetime (Taylor 2007, 4). 6 See, for instance, Allen (1904, 628). 7 For accounts of Spencer’s national and international followings, see Balan (2003), Beck (2004), Chatterjee (2003), Gransow (2003), and Nagai (1954). 8 See Michael Taylor’s The Philosophy of Herbert Spencer (2007, esp. 1–​8). See also H. Elliot (1917), P. Elliott (2003).

18  Theorizing Music Evolution Spencer’s social life comprised two spheres: a family of religious dissenters in Derby, England, and a network of intellectuals in London. He counted among his friends some of the leading radical thinkers, including John Chapman (organizer of the “Chapman circle” of intellectuals), John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, and George Henry Lewes. Conversations with Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot) were of particular significance, as her views about evolution inspired Spencer’s own. George Eliot was often seen accompanying Spencer to the Royal Italian Opera in 1852 London (he had free admission for two). They remained lifelong friends, though he took care to dispute any rumors about their romantic attachment. Spencer remained single all his life, never admitting nor accepting romantic interest from anyone. Thinking was his passion.9 Thinking takes center stage in his Autobiography (1904), where he charts the highs and lows of his intellectual life from childhood to old age, leaving nonwriterly plot points to be read between the lines. Music arrives late to the story, as he had no formal music training. After completing Principles of Psychology, Spencer spent two years without a writing assignment, plagued by sleeplessness and nervous disorders, for which he briefly mentions music was a meaningful cure (1904, vol. 1, 581). As his strength returned, he penned several essays on matter’s evolution: “Progress: Its Law and Cause” (1857) and “The Origin and Function of Music” (1857). In “Progress,” Spencer combined insights from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s essay “The Theory of Life” with insights from Karl von Baer’s theory of embryological development to produce his own original theory of evolutionary progress. According to Spencer’s account, all things in the universe progressively transform from homogeneous simplicity to differentiated complexity via the unifying principle of evolution. I discuss the details of Spencerian evolutionism in later chapters. “The Origin and Function of Music,” also published in 1857, combines Spencer’s ideas about evolution with his thoughts about music. Spencer took great pleasure in music, often attending concerts in London and being surrounded by popular domestic music of the time, which included piano and chamber music and choral singing.10 In Spencer’s theory of origins, 9 On the topic of Spencer’s sexuality, the secondary literature tends to point to asexuality as the best description of his preferences and lifestyle. 10 See especially Spencer’s An Autobiography (1904, vol. 1). Spencer shares a reflection on his friendship with George Eliot (456–​62), which includes a mention of them singing together. Spencer writes, “Her voice was a contralto of rather low pitch and I believe naturally strong. On this last point I ought to have a more definite impression, for in those days we occasionally sang together; but the

Herbert Spencer Writes to Alfred Tennyson  19 “music” represents a specifically human stage of evolutionary progress. He describes music as an advanced form of expression, more complex than language. As Spencer’s account of evolution began to gain notoriety among a bourgeois Victorian readership, so too did Spencer’s account of music evolution soon become popular within Victorian musical culture, winning out over competing ideas about the origins and purposes of music.11 Charles Darwin, for instance, would not articulate his own theory of music until 1871. As we shall see, Spencer’s ideas had great appeal to Darwin, who was an early reader—​and admirer.

Spencer Writes to Charles Darwin Sometime around 1858, Spencer sent a package of essays to Darwin.12 Among these essays was Spencer’s “Origin and Function of Music” which piqued Darwin’s interest. In a letter reply, Darwin wrote back to Spencer: Dear Sir,—​I beg permission to thank you sincerely for your very kind present of your Essays. I have already read several of them with much interest. . . . Your article on Music has also interested me much, for I had often thought on the subject, and had come to nearly the same conclusion with you, though unable to support the notion in any detail. Furthermore, by a curious coincidence, expression has been for years a persistent subject with

habit of subduing her voice was so constant, that I suspect its real power was rarely if ever heard. Its tones were always gentle, and, like the smile, sympathetic” (458). The year 1952 was also when these two read Comte’s Philosophie Positive together. Spencer, disagreeing with Comte’s classification of the sciences (theological, metaphysical, positive), set himself on a path to correct the record (461). 11 See Bennett Zon, “The ‘Non-​Darwinian’ Revolution and the Great Chain of Musical Being” (2014b), for a study of Spencer’s influence on Victorian musical culture. In addition to discussing Spencer’s centrality to nineteenth-​century music-​evolutionism, Zon clarifies some of Spencer’s unnamed influences. For instance, in Zon’s words, Spencer “unapologetically replicat[ed]” the philosopher Joseph Goddard’s music evolutionism, but Spencer’s account was “arguably more famous and influential” than Goddard’s (196). 12 The exact dates of Darwin’s and Spencer’s first letter exchanges is contested. Spencer mentions in his Autobiography (vol 1., 32–​33) that he sent a package of essays to Darwin in 1858, after Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace had read their paper on natural selection to the Linnaean Society. The Darwin Correspondence Project suggests Darwin’s reply could have been written as late as 1863, but comments in Spencer’s Autobiography suggest it was written closer to 1858–​59 (vol. 1, 32–​33). If I am correct in my estimate of the timing of this exchange, then Spencer and Darwin were in touch prior to the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859).

20  Theorizing Music Evolution me for loose speculation, and I must entirely agree with you that all expression has some biological meaning.13

In Spencer’s theory of music, Darwin recognized a version of his own ideas about a biological rather than a divine origin for expression. Darwin’s interest in music may be traced to his early notebooks, in which he notes a curiosity about the songs of birds, which he links to human song: “Did our language commence with singing[?]‌”14 Darwin’s and Spencer’s shared interest in expression here is a reference to sonic expression, especially vocal expression—​for Darwin, this means singing, as well as birdcalls, mouse squeaks, and even the sounds produced by a porcupine’s quills. For Spencer, however, music is not an animalistic expression but a higher, more advanced language of emotions. Over the next several decades, Spencer and Darwin would exchange dozens of letters on such topics as music, science, evolution, nature, and society. At the heart of their musical debate was the shared idea that sonic expression must have some biological meaning. This was, in Victorian culture, a point of controversy that both Darwin and Spencer devoted many pages to defending. Spencer approached the matter of expression through a mechanism he called reflex action, the principle of a direct connection between emotion and movement—​something Darwin found convincing enough to reiterate in his own work. In Psychology, Spencer defined reflex action in its most general form as “the sequence of a single contraction upon a single irritation” (1855, 533). This establishes a one-​to-​one mapping between muscular contractions and feelingful sensations—​a formalism of mind–​body correspondence. Carrying this idea forward into “The Origin and Function of Music,” Spencer writes: All music is originally vocal. All vocal sounds are produced by the agency of certain muscles. These muscles, in common with those of the body at large, are excited to contraction by pleasurable and painful feelings. And therefore it is that feelings demonstrate themselves in sounds as well as in movements. (1857, 397)

13 Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 2373,” accessed April 15, 2022, https://​www.darwin​ proj​ect.ac.uk/​let​ter/​?docId=​lett​ers/​DCP-​LETT-​2373.xml. 14 From the early notebooks of Charles Darwin (1980 [1837–​38], 74).

Herbert Spencer Writes to Alfred Tennyson  21 In this passage, Spencer first articulates his famous idiom “All music is originally vocal.” Through the principle of reflex action, he theorized a universal taxonomy of life on the basis of embodied sensations: “A vague manifestation of this sequence [of reflex action] marks the dawn of sensitive life . . . animal organisms are broadly distinguished from vegetable organisms by the peculiarity that they move on being touched, or otherwise impressed” (1855, 533). Such a theory reflected the cosmology of a Great Chain of Being, that is, the idea that all life is organized hierarchically (and, in Spencerian terms, teleologically) according to relative degrees of divine favor (or, in Spencerian terms, evolutionary progress). That Spencer’s theory had something in common with natural theology—​indeed, that its teleology belied a kind of God complex—​likely had something to do with its popularity.15 Tracing the origins of music to vocal expression and to primal physiology, Spencer located music within his more general theory of evolution, and treated it as a mark of progress. Darwin went on to extend the Spencerian model, albeit with a new twist: sexual selection. Darwin’s narrative of primal scenes of mating and conquest seemed to fall on disinterested ears, however, and Darwin eventually turned away from music as a subject of interest. Spencer’s theory of music as evolved biological impulses, linked as it was to natural theology, kept its hold on the Victorian popular imagination until the turn of the twentieth century.

The Shifting Terrain of Victorian Evolution Theories The terrain of Victorian evolution theories was a terrain in flux. Numerous figures competed for attention and Darwin was not immediately the center of a cultural upheaval. Peter Bowler’s notion of a “non-​Darwinian revolution” in Victorian thought is relevant here: Darwin’s theory should be seen not as the central theme in nineteenth-​ century evolutionism but as a catalyst that helped to bring about the transition to an evolutionary viewpoint within an essentially non-​Darwinian conceptual framework. This was the “Non-​Darwinian Revolution”; it was 15 Bennett Zon discusses the convergence of theological images of a Great Chain of Being and Victorian evolutionism in several publications (2017; 2014b).

22  Theorizing Music Evolution a revolution because it required the rejection of certain key aspects of creationism, but it was non-​Darwinian because it succeeds in preserving and modernizing the old teleological view of things. (1988, 5)

Darwin’s theory of natural selection might have been a catalyst for a new evolutionary viewpoint but that new viewpoint remained linked to the old teleological vision, perhaps best encapsulated by Spencer’s emphasis on “survival of the fittest.” Darwin’s ideas took decades to spread, and in the meantime it was other theorists, particularly Spencer, whose ideas held sway.16 It remains valuable to acknowledge the significance of non-​Darwinian figures such as Spencer within Victorian musical culture, not necessarily to elevate such figures, but so as not to exaggerate the importance of Darwin’s theory of music evolution. Consider the rise and fall of Spencerism. Despite early successes, Spencer’s fame did not last. By 1903, the year of Spencer’s death, his reputation was in “free fall.”17 His ideas had come to seem reductive and overgeneralized, a defect captured by a parody of Spencer’s writing style by Victorian mathematician Thomas Kirkman: “Evolution is a change from nohowish, untalkaboutable, all-​ alikeness, to a somehowish and in-​general-​talkaboutable not-​all-​alikeness, by continuous somethingelseifications, and sticktogetherations.”18 Spencer’s ideas suffered in the long run because he seemed all too willing to summarize the complexities of life with a single natural law—​a mono-​interest encapsulated by his misreading of Tennyson’s poem, in which he misses the poetic nuance in favor of his own theory of evolution. Spencer’s reputation took further damage for its emphasis on the theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics, a view associated most strongly with Jean-​Baptiste Lamarck (though Darwin too was sympathetic to this form of inheritance). Spencer’s reading of Darwin’s Origin of Species inspired him to coin the phrase “survival of the fittest” in his own Principles of Biology (Spencer 1864, 444)—​an idiom that would occasionally be misattributed to Darwin himself. Over time, the name “Herbert Spencer” became shorthand for evolutionary theory’s more retrograde potentials; Darwin replaced him

16 Bennett Zon has done the most to show how this same “non-​Darwinian revolution” played out in Victorian musical culture (2014a; 2014b; 2017). 17 The rhetorical figure of Spencer’s reputational “free fall” is used by Diane Paul (1994, 561), following insights from Robert Perrin (1993). 18 Quoted in the sixth edition of Spencer’s First Principles (1900, 519). This parody is occasionally misattributed to William James.

Herbert Spencer Writes to Alfred Tennyson  23 as the preeminent evolutionary theorist. At the same time, Darwin’s ideas about music never gained a significant following.19 At least, not until recently. Spencer was best known for his efforts to popularize a general theory of evolution and to describe its principles at work everywhere—​from the growth of plants from seeds, to the rise and fall of empires, to the births and deaths of planets, to the emergence of the human mind. Aside from his evolutionary theories, however, are musical ideas of his that have not been given their due consideration because of the problems with his evolutionism, such as embodiment. In the last section of this chapter, consider his comments on the earworm, which represent a historically significant reflection on nonconscious thought as well as a corollary to recent work on earworms.

Spencer’s Earworm In a late essay called “A Problem” (1902), Spencer turns an experience of having a song stuck in his head into a reflection on thoughts that are beyond conscious control. He writes: People devoid of musical perceptions have some compensations: one of them being that they are not persecuted by tunes which have obtained lodgments in consciousness and cannot for a time be expelled. Most if not all who have ordinarily good ears are liable to be annoyed by these invading melodies—​often those vulgar ones originating in music-​halls and everywhere repeated by street-​pianos. (1902, 12)

In this passage, Spencer paints a portrait of British music society as a scene of mass production and repetition. Spencer’s sense of being “persecuted by tunes” belies a classed attitude toward those “vulgar” melodies that appeared “in music-​halls” and were “repeated by street-​pianos.” What matters to him is not the melodies themselves but rather their appearances as earworms, given what such experiences might imply about mental action. For Spencer, earworms are annoying because they sing themselves, without deferral to consciousness. Spencer’s earworms even persist through sleep: “Repeatedly I have observed on awaking that it was the first thing of which I was 19 For further discussion of the relative paucity of engagement with Darwin’s theory of music during his lifetime, see Cross (2016).

24  Theorizing Music Evolution conscious,” he writes (13). For him, the earworm is an example of the correspondence between mind and body, the experience of unconscious thought, and the porousness of the “Ego” (Spencer’s term for consciousness).20 Spencer goes on to explain that the earworm exists somewhere beyond “Self ” and “not-​Self ” (Spencer’s terms), thereby disrupting the metaphysical “dogma” of a “distinct, coherent, ever-​present personality” (1902, 12). This idea accords with his own earliest ideas about perception and subjectivity. In Principles of Psychology, he had suggested that “consciousness of objective existence is accompanied by an unconsciousness of subjective existence” (1855, 44). An astonishing observation will render the observer oblivious of himself: “We say of such a one that he is absorbed in contemplation; lost in wonder; has forgotten himself: and we describe him as afterwards returning to himself; recollecting himself,” Spencer writes (44). By targeting these poetic evocations of divided selfhood, Spencer sketches a philosophy of dynamic mental action. “From a deeply interested spectator who is so far possessed by his perception as not to hear what is said to him, up to the stupefied victim of an impending catastrophe, may be seen all grades of this state,” he continues. For Spencer, “an ordinary perception as well as an extraordinary one, must, while it lasts, exclude the idea of self ” (45). Put differently, perception is always a bit outside of the self, a bit disconnected from consciousness—​a bit nonsubjective. Spencer’s earworm is just such an ordinary-​extraordinary form of perception, disrupting his sense of self and highlighting certain nonsubjective qualities of mental action. The special qualities of the earworm—​its silent soundings, its impersonal intimacy, its confusion of agency—​work in concert to form “an organized and integrated cluster of states of consciousness quite independent of consciousness as I call myself,” says Spencer (1902, 15). Earworms are not first-​person thoughts, rather they seem to come from outside the mind. The invading melody is not only “in conflict” with the self, it “continually triumphs over it” (15). The scene of Spencer silently singing to himself—​or rather, being sung to . . . but by whom?—​invokes a voice that is I but not I. The earworm plays him rather than the other way around. In this way, Spencer suggests that experiencing an earworm means being inhabited by another and being taken beyond himself.

20 It is not clear where Spencer gleaned these ideas, as he was not a prolific reader and he rarely cited others’ works.

Herbert Spencer Writes to Alfred Tennyson  25 In contemporary scholarship the term earworm—​also called “stuck song syndrome,” “sticky music,” or “involuntary musical imagery”—​refers to colloquially annoying instances of repetitive auditory imagery. In French, earworms are known as musique entêtante (“stubborn music”) and canzone tormentone in Italian (“tormenting songs”).21 Recent studies of earworms come mainly in two forms: descriptive/​anecdotal and empirical/​data-​driven. An exemplary descriptive account is found in Steven Brown’s article “The Perpetual Music Track: The Phenomenon of Constant Musical Imagery” (2006), which chronicles and comments on Brown’s own incessant earworms. An exemplary empirical account can be found in Elizabeth Margulis’s chapter “Earworms, Technology, and the Verbatim” (2014). Based on available empirical research, including studies conducted in her own music cognition laboratory, Margulis argues that the earworm “parallels and exaggerates the unusual repetitiveness of actual music in the world” (2014, 76). Margulis’s sense is that the quotidian nature of earworms—​most people seem to get them, she suggests—​reflects the increasing repetitiveness of music-​listening practices more generally. For Margulis, the earworm further reflects the ways in which music as a temporal art form is remembered in sequence like a line of tape. This leads her to conclude that earworms have a special connection to recording technologies. Robert Fink (2005) and Eldritch Priest (2016; 2022) each share with Margulis a version of this technocentrist conception of earworms. For Fink, repetitive listening experiences are an “aesthetic effect of late modernity, sometimes experienced as pleasurable and erotic, but more often as painfully excessive, alienating, and (thus) sublime” (2005, 4). For Priest, the earworm is a realm of apparently useless thought on which the logics of capitalism have begun to encroach; a mind’s openness to earworms represents ways that even the most private thoughts may be put toward the production and circulation of capital.22 For both Fink and Priest, this occasionally evokes a chaotic 21 See Halpern and Bartlett (2011), Liikkanen (2008; 2012), and Sacks (2007). The origins of the English word “earworm” are unclear, and this ambiguity of its etymological history is rooted in the sound of the word itself. One popular origin story of the word “earworm” finds its roots in the German word Ohrworm (“ear worm”), of which the English earworm is either a calque or a loanword. The verb “to calque” indicates borrowing a word from another language by translating each root word literally—​in this case “ear” from “Ohr” and “worm” from “worm” (“loanword” is itself a calque of the German Lehnwort). A loanword implies borrowing a different language word’s sound without regard for conventional translation protocols. To summarize: the fact that the word “earworm” sounds like “Orhworm” is either incidental, if it is a calque, or essential, if it is a loanword, and this semantic distinction depends on the word’s audibility. 22 Priest’s primary intellectual debt in this work is to philosopher Suzanne Langer, for whom music is “articulate but non-​discursive,” its significance “felt as a quality rather than recognized as a function” (Langer 1953, 32). By nondiscursive, Langer means that music “lacks one of the basic

26  Theorizing Music Evolution experience of selfhood as intruded on by society. For Spencer too, the space between Self and not-​Self is a space where the Ego cannot filter at will; one may find themselves singing songs in their mind, whether they like those songs or not. Spencer’s theory of the earworm is relevant to a history of ideas about emotion, as articulated in postmodern affect theory. Fredric Jameson (1991) famously claimed that “the death of the subject” (the postmodern idea that the subject is a product of ideology, rather than the reverse) was a sign that emotion would experience a related conceptual death—​after all, “there is no longer a self present to do the feeling” (15). This inspired a wave of counter arguments.23 In Rei Terada’s response, emotion would not exist if we were bounded subjects; in other words, emotion requires the death of the subject. While Terada does not treat Spencer’s thinking in her research (she takes British romanticism as her analytical object and deconstruction as her method), Spencer is an example of the kinds of “nonsubjective” ideas about emotion that she locates in historical texts and that she uses to dismantle the Jamesonian idea that the death of the subject implies a concomitant death of emotion.24 For Spencer, the emotionality of the earworm is an indication of the porousness of selfhood. Just as Spencer’s earworm appears to have its own agency and emotionality, it also seems to come from within the self. Spencer’s term for this chaotic negotiation between inner life and external reality as it plays out in everyday life is “correspondence.” Terada’s term for it is “nonsubjectivity.” Recent theories of musical embodiment also share something in common with Spencer’s account of correspondence.25 Such theories often build on characteristics of language—​fixed association, and . . . a single, unequivocal reference” (31). Music serves as a symbol of “the pattern of life itself,” its import constituted by “[f]‌eeling, life, motion, and emotion” (32). Its lack of “vocabulary” makes it abstract, general, and without conventional reference. For Langer, and for Priest, music’s symbolic agency imports pure sensuality, explained through the totalizing concept of significant form, under which music is framed as an “abstraction” that is only perceivable insofar as it is felt (Priest 2016, 3). This position is what supports Priest’s argument that the earworm finds a place of significance in the emotional/​affective landscape of capitalism. 23 One such response can be found in Lauren Berlant’s “Thinking about Feeling Historical” (2008b). Berlant interprets Jameson’s reference to a “waning of affect” to be referring to a waning of melodramatic genres of writing about historical experience. 24 Terada is responding to Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, which suggests that the “death of the subject” heralds a death of emotion as well, “since there is no longer a self present to do the feeling” (1991, 15). 25 See for instance Bradby (1993), Butler (2006), Cimini (2011), Clarke (2005), Cone (1974), Cusick (1994), DeNora (2000), Fisher and Lockhead (2002), Godøy and Leman (2010), Iyer (2002), Kozak (2015), Leman (2007), McMullen (2006), Mead (1999), Robinson (2005), Sterbenz (2017), Toiviainen et al. (2009a; 2009b), Watkins and Esse (2015), and Windsor and de Bézenac (2012).

Herbert Spencer Writes to Alfred Tennyson  27 Gibsonian affordance theory (Gibson 2014 [1979]) to posit that the world is perceived not just in terms of the forms of objects but the ways in which those objects may be engaged. The idea that music affords opportunities for interactivity is one way of explaining the complex sense of agency that listeners often ascribe to musical experiences. From a music theorist’s perspective, there are many analytical benefits to imagining music as a sentient persona, as in Matthew BaileyShea’s analysis of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. Consider BaileyShea’s discussion of the analytical idiom “the melody struggles to ascend”: If I say that the Adagio melody struggles to ascend, I’m treating the melody as an independent sentient agent—​something that wants to achieve a particular goal. But the simple phrase “struggles to ascend” implies something far more complicated, which might be expanded as follows: “When I imagine what it’s like to be the Adagio melody, I imagine a painful, difficult struggle to rise upward. But since I know I’m not ascending when I listen to the piece, I imagine the melody as the agent of the action, and I empathize with its plight.” . . . And as analysts, we step back and recount what “the music” does, even if, in a very important sense, the music is us. (2012, 11, emphasis added)

BaileyShea’s suggestive conclusion—​that the music is both an agent in itself and us—​vivifies an imaginative analytical space that overflows with sentient personae. This is productive for moving beyond treatments of listening as the apprehension of a static object and toward notions of listening as dynamic attending (see also Gadir 2018; Garcia 2015; Palfy 2021). Seth Monahan in “Action and Agency Revisited” (2013) similarly explores the tendency among music analysts to ascribe agency to sonic phenomena. Monahan begins by describing a common rhetorical strategy among music analysts: attributing agency alternately to the composer, to the piece, to individual parts of the piece, and to the listener. As a demonstrative example of this many-​voiced mode of music-​analytical writing, Monahan quotes from Joseph Kerman’s analysis of the opening movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s A-​minor String Quartet, op. 132. Monahan identifies a “dizzyingly inconsistent” (321) handling of musical agency; at times Kerman describes the piece as a unified sentient being; at others, the agency of the composer is in control; at still others, multiple intramusical entities compete for command. Attempting to sort through the “agential

28  Theorizing Music Evolution chaos” (322), Monahan posits four fictional agent types, or agent classes (individuated element, work persona, fictional composer, and analyst) and theorizes their hierarchical roles in various examples of music-​ analytical prose. These four agent classes exist hierarchically in a “relational matrix,” for Monahan (2013, 333). Agency may be transferred up the hierarchical rankings, but rarely down: “any musical event that can be regarded as agential can also be construed as the intentional action of any higher-​(but not lower-​) ranking agent class” (333, emphasis in original). For instance, an individuated element, such as a melody, can be seen as an autonomous dramatic agent. But we can also understand it as part of a larger musical structure—​thus we may advance up the hierarchy by one rank, from individuated element to work persona. At the same time, we can think of this structure as being controlled by the agency of the artist who created the piece; thus we advance upward again, to the fictional composer(s). Finally, we can move upward once more, to the agency of the analyst. 1. Analyst 2. Fictional Composer 3. Work Persona 4. Individuated Element Monahan claims that a subversion of this hierarchy—​what he calls a “hierarchical contradiction” or an “ambiguity”—​is a rare “extraordinary situation” (Monahan 2013, 346 and 353). Spencer’s earworm is an example of just such a situation, though it is hardly extraordinary. Spencer’s earworm is an improbable instance of the analyst being controlled by an individuated element. The individuated element in this case is whatever portion or aspect of music is being repeated; indeed, the earworm controls from the bottom up. A short segment of music repeats itself obsessively, bypassing the logics of the work persona, ignoring the song’s original form, supplanting the desires of the fictional composer, and irritating the analyst. In its repetitions, the earworm might have something in common with descriptions of indeterminate music, where antiteleological musical structures may be interpreted as devoid of agency, “present[ing] static endless Nows” (Kramer 1978, 178). But there is a more subtle argument to be made here, in that the earworm is less a case of subverted hierarchy driven by the “agency” of repetition itself. Spencer’s earworm helps us go a step beyond Monahan, to thematize a sense

Herbert Spencer Writes to Alfred Tennyson  29 of uncertainty about where musical agency is coming from, and about who or what is controlling the action. Spencer’s earworm highlights this agential chaos itself, and rather than being an extraordinary situation, it is an ordinary one. The earworm is a prime example of agential chaos, and hence the vulnerability of thought. Earworms are opportunities for intrusion that are particularly intimate—​and perhaps particularly insidious—​because their meanings are often affective, tonal, and resistant to analysis. Eldritch Priest suggests the earworm can serve as a “limit case of perceivable abstractions in sound”; he targets the earworm precisely because of its spontaneous and nonconscious appearances; he explores but ultimately rejects the idea of the earworm as an example of Baudrillard’s illusive “integral music” (“music in which sounds have been clarified and expurgated . . . shorn of all noise and static”); eventually Priest arrives at an ontological crisis (“And yet is this still music?”) (2016, 10). The earworm challenges his understandings of music, just as it challenges his sense of self. Thus, the limit case of the earworm is not merely defined by its structural features—​rhythm, harmony, melody, etc.—​but also by the dynamic and interpretive experience of being subject to earworms in the first place. How does one get rid of an earworm? Spencer recommends a cure: One remedy for the evil, which is temporarily if not permanently efficient, is that of voluntarily taking up in thought some other melody: the result being that as consciousness will not contain both, the original intruder is for a time extruded. There is some danger, however, that the invited occupant will get possession instead. (1902, 12)

A new earworm is one way to excise the offending melody. The negativity of Spencer’s language—​ “annoying,” “evil,” “intruder”—​ suggests infestation, a plague of earworms. Spencer’s negative perspective provides an interesting twist on Priest’s sense that the earworm is a kind of machine for feeling—​and for being felt. In Priest’s philosophy of musical technics, “music is a kind of technology,” one that produces “an abstraction of feeling” (2016, 4). Earworms are interpreted as “expressive of the way historically useless thinking, the kind of thinking we associate with reverie and brooding, is being rhetorically and imaginatively recuperated as a passive technology of the self ” (2). Priest suggests that the “ideosonic persistence” of earworms is indicative of the “mad and fatalistic” hyper-​vitality of capitalism (17). By this

30  Theorizing Music Evolution Priest means that under capitalism, even the mind’s capacity to be spontaneously gripped by earworms can be co-​opted toward a specifically economically oriented construction of selfhood. The consequences of this take are particularly devastating. Just as one might say there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, there would similarly be no ethical earworm—​and therefore no ethical personhood—​under capitalism. What is important here is Priest’s emphasis on the vulnerability of thought, which is what Spencer also considered when he wrote of an earworm’s intrusion on his mind. Spencer, in reflections on minor mental phenomena, opens onto grand questions about how brains, evolution, and the universe might work. What is actually revealed in Spencer’s music theorizing is an attitude toward the self. By attending to the nonsubjective theory of emotion latent within Spencer’s account of musical correspondence, we find that Spencer’s earworm enacts an instance of agential chaos so minor it is almost imperceptible. The irritation one may feel at finding their mind singing to itself is what Spencer thematizes when he reflects on having a song stuck in his head. Spencer’s earworm intrudes on his ego and problematizes his sense of self, revealing an inner conflict that wonders: Is this me?

2 Charles Darwin vs. Herbert Spencer on the Origins of Music From their first letters to their last ones, Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer engaged in a lively conversation about topics such as species origins, national and global events, and the arts. A subject they returned to many times in their written dialogue was music. Darwin and Spencer’s music-​evolutionist dispute, as some have called it, hinged on divergent conceptions of music’s form and function.1 This evolutionist dispute has recently been revitalized as a point of fascination among scholars, usually with Darwin positioned as the focal point or winner. This chapter resists what I call the “Darwin-​ization” of music-​evolutionist history, that is, the tendency to treat Darwin as the only, or only relevant, historical figure. In fact, Spencer’s theory of music was more widely read and accepted than Darwin’s at the time of their debate.2 Since then, the reputations of their respective theories of music have changed considerably. Still, the “winner” of the debate is beside the point. In this chapter, I compare Darwin’s and Spencer’s mutually reactive treatments of music’s origins as a means to understand their dynamic positions on music and evolution and to help contextualize their debate and its changing receptions. In my account, no one won this particular debate; rather, their positions were constitutive of one another and ultimately their differences dissolved into a shared position that was in itself opposed to a more historicized view. Whereas Darwin defined music as a proto-​language that emerges in instinctual urges for domination, conquest, and sexual reproduction (1871; 1872), Spencer described music as an advanced province of the human species, which alone possesses the emotional “force” and “variation” necessary for musical expression (1857, 398–​400). For Spencer, what is primal about 1 “Dispute” is Peter Kivy’s term. Kivy characterizes Darwin’s and Spencer’s exchange as a dispute in his unpublished dissertation, Herbert Spencer and a Musical Dispute (1960) and associated publications (1959; 1962). See also recent mentions of Darwin’s and Spencer’s dispute/​debate about the origins of music in Brotman (2005), Cross (2016), Kleinman (2015), Patel (2008), Zon (2017). 2 For discussion of Spencer’s preeminence within Victorian musical culture, see Grew (1928), Offer (1983a; 1983b), Zon (2014b).

Theorizing Music Evolution. Miriam Piilonen, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2024. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197695289.003.0003

32  Theorizing Music Evolution music is not sexuality but rather the unique receptivity of human subjects to emotions, both pleasurable and painful. Darwin suggested that music’s evolutionary function was for mate selection—​an idea gaining new notoriety among contemporary scholars, which should be critiqued afresh—​but this is not the whole story. While Darwin was indeed concerned with music as the spread of inherited traits through sexual selection, mate selection was just one of his suggestions and should not be seen as his last word. Darwin’s interest in music spanned across his life and went through many changes. As we have seen, his first reflections about music were in early notebooks, where he mused about the songs of birds and the differences between the arts and sciences. His first published discussion of “man’s musical powers” can be found in The Descent of Man (1871), where he writes on the mating calls of quadrupeds. He extends that discussion in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), as well as in personal correspondence. Over the course of his life, however, Darwin became increasingly ambivalent about the evolutionary role of music. In a letter to his daughter Henrietta, he privately expressed frustration that he would be expected to discuss music at all. By the end of his life, he was claiming to have lost his musical sensibility. Spencer, on the other hand, formulated a theory of evolution where music remained a key exemplar of more general evolutionary principles. Music, for Spencer, was a central rather than peripheral feature of the evolution of mind. Still, the point is not to elevate Spencer over Darwin. Rather, I mean to highlight what is different, as well as what is shared, between the two. In this chapter’s conclusion, I discuss why I characterize this as a debate without a winner and I speculate about why a Darwin-​ized history of evolutionary musicology might be politically expedient precisely because of its historical inaccuracy.

Music in Darwin’s Early Notebooks and The Descent of Man Darwin began to speculate about the forms and functions of music in his M and N notebooks, written in his twenties, where he recounted memories of music from across his lifetime (Darwin 1980 [1837–​38], 7). Here he reflected on the differences between works of invention (e.g., science) and works of imagination (e.g., music) (11). In one such notebook entry, he articulates

Charles Darwin vs. Herbert Spencer  33 the kernel of what would become his music theory in the form of a question: “Did our language commence with singing[?]‌—​Is this origin of our pleasure in music[?]” (74). He wondered whether birds learn to sing in the manner of language learning in humans (16) and suggested that birdsong might be a learned/​hereditary form of knowledge rather than an instinctive one (11). At the same time, he speculated that music might differ from poetry because music “pleases from instinct” (12). Being a gentleman naturalist with limited musical training, Darwin was mainly a music listener. His wife, Emma Darwin (née Wedgwood), was a pianist. She had taken a handful of lessons with Frédéric Chopin in her youth and was fond of playing the music of Wolfgang Mozart, Felix Mendelssohn, and Ignaz Moscheles (the Bohemian piano virtuoso who was also Mendelssohn’s teacher) (Beer 2013, 103–​104).3 Musicianship in Victorian Britain often meant extensive training, whether on an instrument or voice, and learning to read sheet music. Yet the bird sings without written notation—​a question mark for Darwin. Starting in 1839 with the birth of their first child, Darwin set about documenting the musical expressions and behaviors of his and Emma’s children.4 Later, he tried several musical experiments with worms and animals, blasting them with whistles and bassoons and setting them on a piano to feel the vibrations, attempting to trace various connections between the pleasures of music and the evolution of species.5 In Darwin’s most famous work, On the Origin of Species (1859), music does not figure prominently. It was not until The Descent of Man (1871) that he turned in earnest to music as a subject of evolutionary analysis, in the context of theorizing the evolution of the human species and its varied “races.” “The sole object of this work,” he writes, “is to consider, firstly, whether man, like every other species, is descended from some 3 See also Bannan (2017). 4 See Darwin’s notebook of observations on the development of his children. https://​www.darwin​ proj​ect.ac.uk/​peo​ple/​about-​dar​win/​fam​ily-​life/​dar​win-​s-​obser​vati​ons-​his-​child​ren. 5 In Darwin’s The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Actions of Worms (1881), he writes, “They took not the least notice of the shrill notes from a metal whistle, which was repeatedly sounded near them; nor did they of the deepest and loudest tones of a bassoon. They were indifferent to shouts, if care was taken that the breath did not strike them. When placed on a table close to the keys of a piano, which was played as loudly as possible, they remained perfectly quiet. Although they are indifferent to undulations in the air audible to us, they are extremely sensitive to vibrations in any solid object. When the pots containing two worms which had remained quite indifferent to the sound of the piano, were placed on this instrument, and the note C in the bass clef was struck, both instantly retreated into their burrows. After a time they emerged, and when G above the line in the treble clef was struck they again retreated” (26–​27).

34  Theorizing Music Evolution pre-​existing form; secondly, the manner of his development; and thirdly, the value of the differences between the so-​called races of man” (1871, vol. 1, 2–​3). Darwin here explores the question of whether different races may be conceived as varieties of the same species (monogenism) or as different species (polygenism). He summarizes arguments given in defense of each position but ultimately believes that “the most weighty of all the arguments against treating the races of man as distinct species, is that they graduate into each other, independently in many cases, as far as we can judge, of their having intercrossed” (1871, vol. 1, 226), thereby siding with monogenism. Darwin goes on to develop the concept of sexual selection in this text. Sexual selection, posited as sometimes continuous with and sometimes distinct from natural selection, was how Darwin accounted for traits not obviously related to survival. In developing the idea of sexual selection, Darwin applied the theory of evolution to topics as varied as human psychology, evolutionary ethics, sex differences, and morality. On occasion, he also brought in music. In the 800 plus pages of Descent’s two volumes, Darwin mentions music only a handful of times. Most are confined to the chapter “Secondary Sexual Characters of Man.” Here Darwin brought his theory of sexual selection to bear on vocal expression, the role of beauty in marriage, the law of competition for mates, and the differences between the sexes, which reflected the Victorian bourgeois attitudes of Darwin’s time and place. “Man is more courageous, pugnacious, and energetic than woman, and has a more inventive genius,” Darwin writes (1871, vol. 2, 316). He works to support these kinds of misogynist claims with physiological evidence of sexual differences, referencing pseudoscience such as Hermann Schaaffhausen’s study of the shape of the brow, and Ecker’s and Welcker’s studies of the form of the skull in men and women (316–​17). Phrenology, the debunked late-​eighteenth-­century theory that head shape reveals individual character and morality, was a significant element of evolutionists’ efforts to define and measure psychological traits—​and musical ones. Darwin carries this emphasis on physiology into his discussion of voice and music. He describes the physiology of the vocal organs, and introduces speculation about, for example, the role of sounds produced by male mammals during mating season, the question of which creaturely sounds might be classified as musical, and whether the capacity to produce music is necessary for perception of music. Says Darwin, “The perception, if not

Charles Darwin vs. Herbert Spencer  35 the enjoyment, of musical cadences and of rhythm is probably common to all animals, and no doubt depends on the common physiological nature of their nervous systems” (1871, vol. 2, 333). Darwin had explained a few pages earlier that “Quadrupeds use their voices for various purposes, as a signal of danger, as a call from one member of a troop to another, or from the mother to her lost offspring” but elects not to discuss which purposes, concerning himself “only with the difference between the voices of the two sexes” (274). When he turns to man’s vocal powers, he remarks on the “long-​continued use of the vocal organs by the males under the excitement of love, rage, and jealousy” (330). Like lions, bulls, and stags, bellowing and roaring “as a call to the female” (276), so too does man voice his strongest emotions, he suspects. For Darwin, this observation leads to further discussion of music: The capacity and love for singing or music, though not a sexual character in man, must not here be passed over. Although the sounds emitted by animals of all kinds serve many purposes, a strong case can be made out, that the vocal organs were primarily used and perfected in relation to the propagation of the species. Insects and some few spiders are the lowest animals which voluntarily produce any sound; and this is generally effected by the aid of beautifully constructed stridulating organs, which are often confined to the males alone. The sounds thus produced consist, I believe in all cases, of the same note, repeated rhythmically; and this is sometimes pleasing even to the ears of man. Their chief, and in some cases exclusive use appears to be either to call or to charm the opposite sex. (330–​31)

The quintessentially Victorian views of sex that dominated the bourgeois class especially relied on maximum differentiation of the sexes. Darwin’s approach to voice begins with such views, on which he builds an elaborate account of the most “beautifully constructed” traits. For Darwin, the most powerful and beautiful traits are passed strictly between the males—​something he claims occurs across species. It is significant that Darwin, in his discussions of early humans’ various powers, continually turns to certain species of fish, spiders, alligators, seals, and other nonhuman creatures. By cherry-​picking examples of sex differences in nature, he reinforces a view of men and women as maximally differentiated. By further observing the courtship behaviors of animals and insects alongside those of early humans, he arrives at a narrow conclusion about

36  Theorizing Music Evolution the purpose of music writ large. Darwin further argues that such an erotic capacity for music may not be immediately obvious to the reader, and that pleasure in music is “not a sexual character in man.” Perhaps suspecting that some of his Victorian readers might bristle at the mention of sex in relation to music, Darwin is sure to de-​emphasize such appearances in polite society. Even as Darwin emphasizes a sexual origin for music, he envisions a more chaste model for his fellows, and puts music’s amorous significance firmly in the past. Spencer’s thinking was an important source for Darwin’s ideas about music. Darwin directly references Spencer’s essay “The Origin and Function of Music” (1857) in Descent and further discusses Spencerian ideas about music evolution in later texts such as The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). Darwin and Spencer agree that song is “the basis or origin of instrumental music” (Darwin 1871, vol. 2, 333). However, Darwin disagrees with Spencer about the relation between music and language—​this is one of most important differences between them. Darwin makes this difference plain: “He [Spencer] concludes that the cadences used in emotional speech afford the foundation from which music has been developed; whilst I conclude that musical notes and rhythm were first acquired by the male or female progenitors of mankind for the sake of charming the opposite sex” (336, fn. 33). Darwin sees music as a kind of proto-​language, evolving into speech. Spencer thinks the opposite: music evolved from impassioned speech. Their differences deepen with regard to the nature and purpose of musical emotion. For Darwin, the instinctual use of the voice during the season of courtship established and reinforced a connection between vocalizing and amorousness. “Thus musical tones became firmly associated with some of the strongest passions an animal is capable of feeling, and are consequently used instinctively, or through association, when strong emotions are expressed in speech,” Darwin writes (1871, vol. 2, 336, fn. 33). For Spencer, musical emotion is not strictly primal and instinctual but civilized and refined, a uniquely human development beyond the less nuanced emotional affordances of language. Darwin’s counterbelief in a sexual selection origin leads him to conclude that music “affects every emotion” but cannot in itself arouse feelings of horror, rage, or other “terrible” emotions. Rather, music awakens “the gentler feelings of tenderness and love, which readily pass into devotion” (335). He returned to these ideas a year later.

Charles Darwin vs. Herbert Spencer  37

Music in Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals In the introduction to Descent, Darwin had noted that he intended to include an essay on the expression of emotions as a subdivision of anatomy and physiology. But the book had already grown prodigiously long, so he reserved this discussion for a separate text, which would become Expression (1872). His interest in emotion had been piqued in reading the work of anatomist Sir Charles Bell, who famously argued that the human species is endowed with special muscles devoted singularly to expressing his emotions.6 Bell wrote of a divinely designed muscular system, uniquely suited to the expression of human emotions, which was at odds with Darwin’s view that “man is descended from some other and lower form” (Darwin 1871, vol. 1, 5) and thus inspired a response from Darwin. In Expression, Darwin offered his expanded account of emotion under natural selection. This involved rearticulating his views on music, a topic he wove into general discussions of sound emissions in humans and animals. For Darwin emotions represent muscular responses to environmental stimuli and suggests that certain features of emotional expression are pervasive across human cultures and across species. He conveys his disappointment in nearly all of the available theories of expression for being too general and vague, being mainly focused on broad categories such as pleasurable or painful feelings. He is interested in more than just pleasure and pain, that is, the varied and subtle “special expressions” (1871, vol. 1, 9)—​it is in his refinement of categories and detailed taxonomy of expressions that his music theory comes into focus. It is also a place where he creates many conceptual knots for himself as he relies on cultural stereotypes as evidence of evolutionary processes. Let us analyze his ideas in more detail. For the most part Darwin dismisses prior scholarship on emotion. Only Spencer’s writings on the physiology of emotion satisfy him; he refers to Spencer’s discussions of feelings in Principles of Psychology as “the true theory of a large number of expressions: but the chief interest and difficulty of the subject lies in following out [Spencer’s] wonderfully complex ideas” (1871, vol. 1, 9). Spencer is an especially appealing figure to Darwin because his physiological take on psychology is grounded in material evolution. “All the authors who have written on Expression, with the exception of Mr. 6 See Darwin (1871, vol. 1, 5) for discussion.

38  Theorizing Music Evolution Spencer—​the great expounder of the principle of Evolution—​appear to have been firmly convinced that species, man of course included, came into existence in their present condition” (10). As we shall see, the two evolutionary theorists each in turn make recourse to music in their discussions of emotion, albeit in different ways. In Expression, Darwin’s discussion of music is scattered throughout his discussions of “sound emissions,” such as chirps, screams, growls, and other vocal utterances (in Descent these topics were more clearly delineated). In these discussions he touches on three major topics: (1) the physiology of sound emissions, (2) their underlying “states of mind,” and (3) their various uses and benefits. Sound emissions are partially figured as “involuntary” muscular contractions, in response to pleasure or pain: strong feelings are often accompanied by involuntary and “purposeless” muscular contractions, which result in sound emissions. Examples Darwin discusses include a wounded hare’s screams of pain or the “agonized death-​bellow” of cattle (1872, 83–​84). Hypotheses like these are not unique to Darwin; he is indebted to W. C. L. Martin’s natural history of mammals, Sir John Lubbock’s archaeology, and Herman von Helmholtz’s studies of sound physiology, among others.7 Following Helmholtz, Darwin sees the shape of the ear, mouth, and lips as evidence of the primal role of sonic emissions; for instance, a human scream “will naturally be loud, prolonged and high, so as to penetrate to a distance.” Due to the shape and placement of the mouth and lips, and, “owing to the shape of the internal cavity of the human ear and its consequent power of resonance,” the scream will produce a “particularly strong impression” (91). At times, he seems to evoke Jean-​Jacques Rousseau’s ideas about “the natural” in music, but there is no evidence that Darwin read Rousseau’s philosophy of music. Darwin suggests that a given species will find certain sounds “naturally” pleasing or displeasing, due to its physiology. For example, “When male animals utter sounds in order to please the females, they would naturally employ those which are sweet to the ears of the species” (1872, 91).8 This leads Darwin to affirm his earlier identification of a “primeval use” of the voice for reproductive purposes. “The sexes of many animals incessantly call for each 7 Darwin cites Martin’s A General Introduction to the Natural History of Mammiferous Animals (1841), Lubbock’s popular archaeological textbook Pre-​Historic Times (1865), and Helmholtz’s Théorie physiologique de la musique (1868, the French translation). 8 Darwin notes that animals sharing similar nervous systems derive pleasure from the same sounds; he gives examples like the pleasure that humans derive from birdsong and tree-​frog chirps (1872, 91).

Charles Darwin vs. Herbert Spencer  39 other during the breeding season; and in not a few cases, the male endeavors thus to charm or excite the female,” Darwin writes. Thus, “the use of the vocal organs will have become associated with the anticipation of the strongest pleasure which animals are capable of feeling” (84). The notions of “association” and “anticipation” are important here because they muddy the pure adaptive function of music that is so often read into Darwin’s thinking.9 In fact, a kind of enculturated habit plays an important role in Darwin’s account of the development of sound emissions—​just as important a role as instinct. For Darwin, vocal communication, purrs of pleasure, and bellows of pain all can be practiced and made habitual—​in short, they can be learned. Darwin writes, Involuntary and purposeless contractions of the muscles of the chest and glottis . . . may have first given rise to the emission of vocal sounds. But the voice is now largely used by many animals for various purposes; and habit seems to have played an important part in its employment under other circumstances. Naturalists have remarked, I believe with truth, that social animals, from habitually using their vocal organs as a means of intercommunication, use them on other occasions more freely than other animals. (84)

In this way, Darwin describes a bidirectional flow between instinct and habit: a feeling, such as rage, leads to muscular exertion, but this innate connection between emotion and musculature can also be harnessed and targeted toward a specific end. He gives examples such as a lion leveraging its power to roar in order to terrify its enemies: “Thus the use of the voice will have become associated with the emotion of anger, however it may be aroused” (85).10 In another example of this bidirectional flow, Darwin explains that a body in pain may scream involuntarily; but upon discovering

9 For example, in Levman’s “Western Theories of Music Origin, Historical and Modern” (2000), he contrasts Darwin’s adaptive theory of music with Spencer’s sociological/​psychological theory. Levman writes, “Darwin believed that the primary purpose of the vocal organs was the attraction of the opposite sex and the propagation of the species” (190). In ­chapter 4, I discuss in more detail how Darwin has been framed as an adaptationist thinker by recent evolutionary musicology. 10 In Darwin’s N Notebook, he offers an early reflection on the lion’s roar that may have been the basis for this passage. He writes, “Understanding language seems simplest case of Association . . . Probably, language commenced in some necessary connexion between things & voice, as roaring for lion, etc. etc. (in same way alphabet arose from letters, symbol of word beginning with the sound of the letter)—​crying yawning laughing being necessary sounds . . . not produced by will but by corporeal structure.—​” (Darwin 1980 [1837–​38], 74).

40  Theorizing Music Evolution that the scream provides relief may lead to more screaming—​a learned screaming—​“and thus the use of the voice will have become associated with suffering of any kind” (85). Compare Darwin’s position with that of an earlier naturalist—​Erasmus Darwin, Darwin’s grandfather. In his Zoonomia, Erasmus remarked that “the singing of birds, like human music, is an artificial language, rather than a natural expression of passion. Our music, like our language, is perhaps entirely constituted of artificial tones, which by habit suggest certain agreeable passions” (1803, vol. 1, 116). In Erasmus’s view, the “artificial” nature of music is evidenced by the fact that the same combinations of musical notes and rhythms will not excite the same emotions in Englishmen as in foreigners; he references research by a number of naturalists who contrast the musical styles of England, Turkey, and Morocco, among others. In equating birdsong with human language in this way, Erasmus Darwin reinforces the role of association in the production of musical meaning, including the “music” of animals. He shares this position with the younger Charles Darwin. The latter, however, seems more explicitly puzzled by the relation between innate and learned sound emissions. For instance, Charles acknowledges that we may never know the exact source of particular sound emissions, only the feelingful associations that build up around sound, admitting that “why particular sounds are uttered, and why these give pleasure cannot at present be explained” (1872, 88, emphasis added). Then, in the very same text, he targets a strictly physiological origin of certain sound emissions, such as the use of high-​pitched sounds to express suffering or impatience, or the distinction between men’s and women’s laughter: low-​pitch “O and A” for the former, high-​pitched “E and I” for the latter (88). Why the back and forth? While contemporary readers of Darwin often emphasize Darwin’s adaptationism (e.g., Patel 2008), early readers correctly apprehended his ambivalence about the adaptive nature of sound emissions. George John Romanes, in his Mental Evolution of Man (1902), adopted Darwin’s uncertainty about music’s role in evolutionary processes in order to disrupt the idea that humans possess special mental capacities that are distinct from those of animals, specifically by troubling the distinction between conventional and natural signs. For Romanes, all signs that appear to be natural can find examples in other cultures or time periods that would be regarded as conventional, and vice versa. Animals must employ signs that are both natural and conventional, he thinks, thus “it is clearly a matter of no consequence that we should be able to classify all signs as natural or conventional” (1902, 103). Despite dispensing

Charles Darwin vs. Herbert Spencer  41 with the distinction between natural and conventional signs, Romanes nevertheless proceeds with an account of sign-​making’s “probable evolution” by beginning with “the most natural, or least conventional of the systems. This is the language of tone and gesture” (103). This formulation feeds Romanes’s analysis of tone and gesture as the primitive building blocks of communication. Among “savages,” he writes, “it is notorious that tone, gesticulation, and grimace play a much larger part in conversation than they do among ourselves” (105). In what was a common formula, Romanes reinforces the ethnocentric view that a relative degree of evolutionary advancement is audible in the form of communication, with Europeans treated as the pinnacle of progress and non-​Europeans treated as evolutionary relics still on the path toward developed speech. Again, it was Darwin’s music theory which Romanes used to authorize such a treatment. For the racist Romanes, the ability to recognize and use conventional forms of signification requires “a higher order of mental evolution.” He writes, “we everywhere find the language of tone and gesture preceding that of articulate speech, as at once the more simple, more natural, and therefore more primitive means of conveying receptual ideas” (1902, 106). What this ultimately adds up to is a theory of sonic signification that works hard to legitimize an evolutionary account of human mental activity by equating animal communication with human semiosis, while nevertheless maintaining the idea that “tone” is more “primitive” than linguistic structures. This idea reinforces a conceptual framework that positions certain non-​European forms of expression beneath those of their European counterparts—​a tricky turn of thought that relies on, and exploits, the more ambiguous qualities of sonic expression. “Tone” is Romanes’s convenient implement for this double action, being abstract enough to justify the elevation of animal communications and to establish the relative positions of European and non-​European cultures in an artificial ladder of progress. The role music plays in this Darwinian music-​evolutionary tradition is comparable to the role of music in Western philosophy, as recounted by thinkers such as Martin Scherzinger and Robin James: music as an ambiguous concept, to be molded and imbued with philosophical meaning. In Scherzinger’s telling, music functioned as “discourse of idealized negation par excellence” for philosophers such as Friedrich Schelling, Søren Kierkegaard, and Arthur Schopenhauer (2012, 347). In the European philosophical tradition glossed by Scherzinger, “music’s failure to operate according to the model of language paradoxically afforded it the capacity for

42  Theorizing Music Evolution elevated metaphysical reflections on human existence” (2012, 346). Robin James’s charge against similar reductions is more polemical: For philosophers with little formal training or practical experience in music, “music” often serves as a metaphor for all that philosophy isn’t: affective, sensuous, embodied, feminine, etc. Or, because we don’t know how to put our experiences of music into propositional form, it seems to be purely affective, implicit, sensuous experience. . . . If we don’t understand all the work that goes into making music—​from the epistemic frames that organize music/​noise distinctions, to the logic of specific compositional strategies (like tonality or ragas), to more practical matters like audio engineering or how to play the piano—​it might appear to affect us in relatively immediate ways. Our experiences of music are certainly affective, but music is not magical, non-​propositionalizable, or extra-​logical. (2012, 59–​60)

In James’s account, music is all too easily wielded as a metaphor that naturalizes hegemonic biases. If we bring James’s critique to bear on Romanes’s “Darwinian” account of musical progress, it is clear that Romanes’s conceptions of musical and linguistic tone serve problematically as metaphors for degrees of evolutionary progress. For Darwin too, musical structures seem at once primitive enough to explain a biological link between humans and animals and complex enough to add to an aesthetic theory of beauty. Darwin reveals as much in his discussions of voice. When it comes to the human voice and vocal music, Darwin agrees with Spencer’s claim that vocal sound is grounded in “the general law that a feeling is a stimulus to muscular action.”11 However, Darwin finds this law “too general and vague to throw much light on the various differences . . . between ordinary speech and emotional speech, or singing” (1872, 87). Ultimately Darwin maintains that regardless of whether the reader sides with Spencer’s position, that the musical qualities of voice arise from impassioned speech, or with Darwin’s belief that musicality is a proto-​ linguistic aspect of voice, they will admit there is no clear boundary between ordinary speech, emotional speech, and song.

11 Darwin also recognizes Spencer’s point, that “emotional speech . . . is intimately related to vocal music” (Darwin 1872, 86); “No one can listen to an eloquent orator or preacher, or to a man calling angrily to another, or to one expressing astonishment without being struck with the truth of Mr Spencer’s remarks,” Darwin wrote (86).

Charles Darwin vs. Herbert Spencer  43 Such a tantalizing suggestion would seem worthy of additional commentary, yet Darwin does not oblige. He admits he has nothing original to add; instead, he quotes a lengthy memorandum from one “Mr Litchfield.” No citation is given—​Richard Buckley Litchfield, the husband of Darwin’s third daughter, Henrietta, was a London intellectual and music teacher. Giving over two pages of text to a single lengthy quotation, Darwin lets Litchfield have the last word on the subject of music. Litchfield is partially a proxy for Spencer, who is cited in the affirmative. In the passage quoted by Darwin, Litchfield comments on Spencer’s “The Origin and Function of Music” and offers his own take on specifically “musical expression” (emphasis in the original). He admits that the elements of musical expression remain “unsolved enigmas” (Darwin 1872, 89) but he insists that “any law which is found to hold as to the expression of the emotions by simple sounds must apply to the more developed mode of expression in song, which may be taken as the primary type of all music” (89). He places great emphasis on performance: “A great part of the emotional effect of a song depends on the character of the action by which the sounds are produced”; a passionate song will fail in its “proper effect” if the vocal delivery lacks sufficient “exertion” (89). Litchfield mentions what he presumes to be a familiar example—​“the transposition of a song from one key to another”—​and he argues that the stereotyped “loss of effect” depends “not merely on the actual sounds, but also in part on the nature of the action which produces the sounds” (89)—​in other words, how it is performed. For Litchfield, “it is obvious that whenever we feel the ‘expression’ of a song to be due to its quickness or slowness of movement—​to smoothness of flow, loudness of utterance, and so on—​we are, in fact, interpreting the muscular actions which produce sound, in the same way in which we interpret muscular action generally” (89). For Litchfield, Spencer’s claim that psychology is really a physiological matter explains this phenomenon very well. However, for Litchfield, Spencer does not solve the riddle of specifically “musical” expression, which Litchfield equates with “the delight given by its melody, or even by the separate sounds which make up the melody” (89–​90). Even the “ingenious speculation” of Herbert Spencer cannot account for this enigmatic delight, which Litchfield insists is “indefinable in language” (90). Litchfield reiterates that the formal features of music—​loudness or softness, absolute pitch, instrumentation, etc.—​are not what produce musical effects. “The purely musical effect of any sound depends on its place in what is technically called a ‘scale;’ the same sound producing absolutely different

44  Theorizing Music Evolution effects on the ear, according as it is heard in connection with one or another series of sounds. It is on this relative association of the sounds that all the essentially characteristic effects which are summed up in the phrase ‘musical expression,’ depend” (Darwin 1872, 90). As a way forward, he recommends a radically materialist investigation of both the musical materials themselves (the “well-​known arithmetical relations” between pitches of musical scales) and the physiology of performance (“the greater or less mechanical facility with which the vibrating apparatus of the human larynx passes from one state of vibration to another”) (90). In fact, Spencer anticipated such a recommendation. Had Litchfield read Spencer’s Principles of Psychology, published two years prior to his work on the origins of music, he would have discovered a materialist account of mental action explicitly focused on the correspondence between things, rather than the things themselves. Darwin seems satisfied to defer to Spencer via Litchfield without engaging further with music himself. Perhaps this is because Darwin found the topic burdensome. In a December 1871 letter to his daughter, Henrietta Litchfield, he laments that his manuscript on the use of the voice for expression “is an extremely poor affair, but I must say something, & and have nothing worth saying.”12 He admits that, in Expression, “music comes in only quite subordinately” and that his own discussion relies heavily on the ideas of other, more musically inclined thinkers. Figure 2.1 shows a page from his letter to Henrietta. It seems as though he felt pressured to discuss music, possibly because Spencer had already made the subject an important one for theorists of evolution to address. It is notable, then, that Darwin has come to serve as the avatar of music evolutionism when in fact his thinking on the subject was limited and, more often than not, borrowed from peers. Indeed, Darwin seemed frustrated by the need to comment on music at all.

Spencer’s Theory of Music Perception By contrast, Herbert Spencer had been developing an evolutionary account of human psychology with music at its very center, beginning with the first edition of his Principles of Psychology (1855). The connections between Principles of Psychology and Spencer’s article on music, “The Origin 12 Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 8089,” accessed April 15, 2022, http://​www.darwin​ proj​ect.ac.uk/​DCP-​LETT-​8089.

Charles Darwin vs. Herbert Spencer  45

Figure 2.1  Letter from Charles Darwin to Henrietta Litchfield, December 2, 1872

46  Theorizing Music Evolution and Function of Music” (from here: “OFM”), have been underappreciated since these texts’ original publications. This oversight is not surprising, as Psychology is a book of “legendary impenetrability” (Leslie 2006, 125) and Spencer does not make reference to Psychology in “OFM.” Furthermore, Psychology contains only a handful of references to music. Still, the psychological claims that form the foundation of “OFM” are extensions of those presented in Psychology, as I will show. Furthermore, Spencer stressed the connection between Psychology and “OFM” in his Autobiography: “An obvious corollary from the doctrine set forth in the Principle of Psychology, was that the musical faculty, in common with all faculties, must have arisen by degrees through complications of pre-​ existing elements in human nature” (1904, vol. 1, 594). The connection between these texts had a personal significance for Spencer. During the two-​year period between the publications of Psychology and “OFM,” Spencer developed insomnia and nervous disorders, which inhibited his thinking and writing. “Music,” he recounts, “was perhaps the only thing which I could enjoy in full measure with impunity” (581). He became interested in the question of music’s natural origins and secured an engagement with Fraser’s Magazine for an article on the subject. He wrote the majority of “OFM” while vacationing in Andarroch, north of Dalry (592–​95). Although music appears rarely in Psychology, its appearances are significant ones. For example, music is a key example of one of Spencer’s most radical claims: the unity of emotion and cognition. He writes, “in the states of consciousness produced by music the two are inseparably united; but it is, that the state of consciousness produced by a single beautiful tone, presents cognition and emotion fused into one. . . . It follows, of necessity, that no act of cognition can be absolutely free from emotion . . .[and] that no emotion can be absolutely free from cognition” (1855, 586). In this regard Spencer was surprisingly out of sync with the intellectual movements of his time. He notably questioned the distinction between mind and outer world, and between subject and object, and he postulated an evolutionary history of human mental powers, seeing them as having developed from earlier forms of life in concordance with changes in the environment. In addition to thinking about music in Psychology he thinks deeply about sound and hearing more broadly. One of the grounding claims advanced in Psychology is that the relations between things will take primacy over the things themselves. Spencer summarizes his own project thus:

Charles Darwin vs. Herbert Spencer  47 [A]‌ll reasoning is definable as the classification of relations . . . the perception of an object, is possible only by the classing of a present group of attributes and relations with a past group . . . the constituents of any complex perception, must be severally classed with previously known constituents of the same order, before the perception in its totality can arise . . . not even the simplest attribute or relation can be known, until there exist others with which it can be ranged. (330–​331)

In response to Descartes’s famous adage Cogito ergo sum (“I think therefore I am”), Spencer poses a “fatal question”: “What gives validity to the therefore?” (11). In an argument that is emblematic of Psychology as a whole, he insists that “the content of every rational proposition” is “some relation” (168). What is more important than “I think” or “I am,” for Spencer, is “the state of consciousness in which the relation of the one to the other is established” (11). In this way, Spencer establishes an antidualist metaphysics of perception, whereby the mind is radically integrated with the material body.13 Throughout his career Spencer would work to demonstrate the primacy of mind–​body relationality at every level of organic life. As we saw in Darwin’s writings, the emotionality of music was often seen as a given in Victorian musical culture, and the quality of a piece of music was seen as attendant on its expressivity, that is, on its perceived emotionality. Spencer theorizes emotion and expressivity in ways that are similar to, but distinct from, Darwin’s in important ways. The differences between their positions yield two distinct models of listening and two different models of musical subjectivity. This dynamic is worth considering in detail. As we have seen, Spencer’s position yields a distinctly nonsubjective approach to emotion. Darwin’s theory, on the other hand, privileges an expressive model of emotion that works to retain programs of aesthetic value specific to subjectivity. Thus, Darwin is in many ways closer to the sort of music aesthetics that have long been the focus of music philosophy. As we have seen, Rei Terada makes this point in her work on “emotion after the death of the subject” (2001). Terada references a debate between music philosophers Peter Kivy and Jerrold Levinson, each of whom advocates a 13 Spencer’s approach to mind–​body dualism has long been a source of confusion. For instance, in Edmund Gurney’s essay “Monism” (1887) he distinguishes Spencer sharply from the most famous antidualist, Baruch Spinoza. Gurney quotes Spencer arguing that mental and neural processes are “faces of the same thing” but ultimately treats Spencer’s Realism as a modified Cartesianism that relies on an unknown “substance of mind” (324).

48  Theorizing Music Evolution theory of musical emotion with strict boundaries between inside and outside, that is, between subject and object (Terada 2001, 93–​97). While Kivy and Levinson disagree on where emotional expression is coming from—​ from the music, on the one hand, or from the listener on the other—​they agree that emotional expression is coming from somewhere, thereby reifying what Terada calls the “expressive hypothesis”: the idea that emotion is inherently tied to expression, and thus to subjectivity. For Terada, the expressive hypothesis helps to shore up a circular definition of the subject: “The claim that emotion requires a subject—​thus we can see we’re subjects, since we have emotions—​creates the illusion of subjectivity rather than showing evidence of it” (11). More interesting to Terada is the puzzle of emotion’s sources—​ what she calls “the mystery of emotive cause” (99). What is significant is the ambiguity of musical emotion—​is this expression coming from me, from the music I listen to, or from somewhere else? Something like a “mystery of emotive cause” is what Darwin might have postulated, had he taken his own ambivalence about the relation between instinct and habit as a methodological virtue. Without acknowledging the bidirectional flow between instinct and habit, contemporary readers may extrapolate from Darwin an expressive hypothesis that only ever expresses survival instincts, which then participates in a Darwinian music theory that is hyperfocused on musical meaning—​and a very specific kind of meaning, that is, the pursuit of an opposite-​sex mate—​and further attributes that meaning to a particular source, whether to the music itself, as object or event, or to the mental state of the listener. This is one area where readers may assign an “adaptationist” position to Darwin—​I unpack this further in ­chapter 4. Spencer differently makes it possible to uncouple musical emotion from expression, even as he argues that the function of music is emotional expression. This argument would appear paradoxical, except that Spencer’s discussion of emotion is itself an assault on the expressive hypothesis. The puzzle of emotion’s sources—​Terada’s “mystery of emotive cause”—​is, for Spencer, a defining feature of emotional experience. Even seemingly “rational” propositions are rooted in the muddier realm of relationality; remember he insists that the content of every rational proposition is some relation (1855, 168). In Spencer, the emotional force of music is bound up with the mystery of its emotive cause. It is, as it were, emotion ex nihilo, which need not be felt or expressed anywhere in particular in order to surface in sound. The very incongruity between the force of its expression and

Charles Darwin vs. Herbert Spencer  49 the enigma of its source just is the excess that constitutes musicality, for Terada, and for Spencer. To extend Terada’s thought, consider that while a Romantic tradition of music philosophy pays lip service to emotion—​ indeed, their philosophies are ostensibly about emotion—​in many cases emotion comes after expression or is a product of expression or requires expression to get off the ground. Expression is the place where emotion comes to “mean,” suggesting that these thinkers are actually invested in how emotion might mean something in particular. Emotion, in short, becomes the vehicle for musical meaning. Spencer, by contrast, does not care what music means, he cares what it does, and so he is able to think more broadly about the foundations and functions of music, and to investigate musical phenomena that Darwin does not. For instance, in Principles of Psychology, Spencer describes a pianist learning to read music, which he sees as the “most marked instance” of something he calls “the gradual lapse of memory into automatic coherence”: The visual impression produced by the crotchet or quaver; the consciousness of this position on the lines of the stave, and of its relation to the beginning of the bar; the consciousness of the place of the answering key on the piano; the consciousness of the muscular adjustments required to bring the arm, hand, and finger into the attitude requisite for touching that key; the consciousness of the muscular impulse required to give a blow of the due strength, and of the time during which the muscles must be kept contracted to produce the right length of note—​all these states of consciousness which at first arose in a distinct succession, and thus formed so many recollections, ultimately constitute a succession so rapid that the whole of them pass through consciousness in an inappreciable time. (1855, 562)

In reflections like this, Spencer accounts for the rapid, reflexive, or otherwise preattentive aspects of music that are sidelined by models governed by the expressive hypothesis. Music, for Spencer, is a phenomenon of technique and physicality, pattern recognition and habit, and a mode of attention that distills and makes perceptible various features of human psychology. This embodied, phenomenological approach, if taken to its conceptual extreme, has little to say to a hermeneutics of organic form, but something interesting to offer to our conceptions of musical experience—​a way of thinking about the nonsubjective qualities of music and emotion, and the ways in which “music” might skirt or exceed subjectivity.

50  Theorizing Music Evolution

Spencer and Darwin’s Entwined Theories of Music Darwin and Spencer’s theories were entwined with one another not just by coincidence but by direct influence on one another. In dozens of letters over two decades, Darwin and Spencer continued their discussions of music and evolution, among other topics. In 1881, Spencer wrote to Darwin asking him to add his name to an Anti-​Aggression League, meant to curb colonial powers.14 Darwin wrote back to decline.15 This appears to have been their last exchange of letters. Darwin died the following year. When it came to music in Darwin’s later life, he claimed to have lost his musical sense. A passage from Darwin’s Autobiography is illuminating: I have said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry; I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music. Music generally sets me thinking too energetically on what I have been at work on, instead of giving me pleasure. I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did. (1888, 100–​101, emphasis added)16

As a young man, Darwin had a strong taste for music, he recounts, but he never learned to play or sing. Of his own musical abilities, he writes, “I am so utterly destitute of an ear, that I cannot perceive a discord, or keep time and hum a tune correctly; and it is a mystery how I could possibly have derived pleasure from music” (49). Reflecting on his loss of musical interest late in life, Darwin seems to blame the issue on his overemphasis on scientific 14 Darwin had previously given £10 to the Jamaica Committee, a related group that Spencer was part of. Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 13351,” accessed December 21 2022, https://​ www.darwin​proj​ect.ac.uk/​let​ter/​?docId=​lett​ers/​DCP-​LETT-​133​351.xml. 15 Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 13352,” accessed December 21 2022, https://​www. darwin​proj​ect.ac.uk/​let​ter/​?docId=​lett​ers/​DCP-​LETT-​133​352.xml. 16 For this plus additional personal reflections on music, see The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Including an Autobiographical Chapter, edited by Francis Darwin (1888, especially pp. 44, 49–​50).

Charles Darwin vs. Herbert Spencer  51 thinking: “My mind seems to have become kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive” (101). He wonders then, had he known his taste for poetry and music would atrophy, whether he might have set aside time for reading and listening. Spencer, on the other hand, maintained an interest in music throughout his life.

A Debate without a Winner There is a lingering question in this music-​evolutionist debate: Who won? Historically speaking, Spencer’s theory of music had more impact on Victorian culture than Darwin’s did during their own lifetimes, but Spencer later fell out of favor. Spencer’s theory of mimesis was central to Darwin’s own account of music, though this detail is often forgotten or sidelined. Neither thinker conceded to the other, nor did they acknowledge a musical rivalry, though Darwin did eventually move away from the subject of music. Darwin has since developed a reputation as the preeminent evolutionist, while Spencer and other non-​Darwinian evolutionists are mostly overlooked—​consider that “Darwinian” is a colloquialism for “evolutionary.” Still, it would be misleading to depict either Spencer or Darwin as the winner of the music-​evolution debate, I claim. Why would it be misleading? For one, it would suggest that their music theories are separable. Darwin’s theory of music was in many ways an extension of Spencer’s theory—​which was bound up with earlier theories such as Joseph Goddard’s. Spencer borrowed from Darwin and Darwin borrowed from Spencer. Theorizing music evolution was something they did, intentionally or not, together, over decades. To name one or the other the winner would misrepresent how their ideas emerged and collided historically. Naming a winner would also wrongly imply that one or the other was more correct. Darwin and Spencer, as different as their theories may seem, had much in common. As educated men who traveled in similar circles in Victorian bourgeois society, Darwin and Spencer inherited many of the same pillars of music philosophy. Their accounts of “music” were sentimental accounts, thematizing music’s importance, its innate value, its evocation of feelings such as joy and earnestness—​all translated into the language of science as part of a broader continental turn toward evolutionism. For Spencer,

52  Theorizing Music Evolution music is seen to advance human happiness, calm the anxious mind, and play with the sensations, all through a logical ordering and reordering of patterns. For Darwin, music helps people fall in love and build family lineages through an innate proto-​language. Such sentiments evoke romantic ideals of music’s untimeliness and beauty, just as they purport to elevate music to the highest levels of meaning and profundity. Darwin evokes this through music’s primality, Spencer does it through music’s high artifice. One empties the concept of music, the other overinflates it. Their shared musical project was not a scientific breakthrough in the realm of music, but rather the continuation of a romantic and sentimental tradition of music philosophy, albeit with an evolutionist twist—​one that reflected the educated corners of bourgeois musical culture in nineteenth-​century Britain where Darwin and Spencer enjoyed listening to music as gentlemen ticket holders. The current field of evolutionary musicology frequently continues in the same sentimental direction advanced by Spencer and Darwin. Similar sentiments decorate corners of the new evolutionary musicology, where researchers often are explicit about their interest in music for its proposed universal goodness, usefulness, wellness, or social power. These sentimental accounts often take the form of lists of attributes or functions. Daniel Levitin (2008), for instance, argues that six fundamental song types (friendship, joy, comfort, religion, knowledge, and love) helped modern humans to evolve. Such a view of music as a playlist, embodying positively valanced archetypes of human meaning and happiness, advancing up an evolutionary chain, belies a distinctly Victorian conception of musical progress, wherein degrees of evolutionary advance may be measured through a combination of evolutionary taxonomy, romantic narrative, and music analysis. Such accounts sell music as something everyone wants and needs, with the aid of an ahistorical and simplistic analytical frame. Evolutionary musicologists such as Levitin, among others, often lapse into clichés about music’s adaptive power to soothe babies, to attract a quality mate, or to improve social bonding or communication because they have not historicized music as a deconstructed thing. From a music theory perspective, music-​evolution debates are not strictly debates about evolution but about what music is in the first place—​yet they are rarely acknowledged as such. Within US-​based scholarship, for example, there are rewards to be gained by presenting evolutionary musicology as evolutionist debates more so than as music debates. In a scholarly landscape of competitive grant funding and shrinking job markets, evolutionary musicology often wins out because it is willing to participate in a game of

Charles Darwin vs. Herbert Spencer  53 constant competition and scientific innovation.17 This branding effort is partially evidenced by the ways this work is framed and discussed in popular media: Scientists Decode Universality of Music! Music Could Be Universal Language, Says New Global Study!18 Such hyperbolics help explain why the relatively small subfield of evolutionary musicology has become one of the most visible areas of music scholarship, as well as why so many scholars who work in the arts and humanities find such research to be unserious, even gimmicky. “Debates” over evolution and music lack musical nuance and basic historical grounding, amounting to science theater that is as tiresome as it is expensive. By framing music as a subject of evolutionist debate with right and wrong answers, they do too much and too little.19 Music is abstracted, again, into data, reduced of qualities, and instrumentalized through a reactionary position. One way of responding to recent revivals of Darwin and/​or Spencer as music evolutionists is to gain historical and critical understanding of their ideas. It is important to disinvest in a Darwin-​centered history of the field (or an anyone-​centered history), lest the most important historical lessons be reduced out. What I call the “Darwin-​ization” of evolutionary musicology refers to a tendency among music-​evolutionists to take Darwin to be the only, or only relevant, historical figure. For example, Michael Spitzer offered a Darwinized history in his The Musical Human (2021), mentioning Darwin frequently (Spencer does not appear) and giving Darwin credit for Spencer’s mimetic theory (16). Another example of Darwin-​ization is found in the article, “Music as a Coevolved System for Social Bonding” (Savage et al. 2021), where the first sentence is, “Darwin famously considered music to be a puzzle for evolutionary theory” (1). Such rhetorical maneuvers elevate Charles Darwin to founder status, while hiding figures such as Spencer, Erasmus Darwin, Romanes, and the phrenologists, out of sight. This Darwin-​ization is especially hypocritical when Spencer is simultaneously dismissed for his “social Darwinism.” Darwin incorporated many 17 Rachel Mundy makes a similar point in Animal Musicalities (2018, 13). 18 Examples of articles published between 2019 and 2022 include: “Beat of the Drum, Harvard Lab Decodes Universality of Music” (Boston College Heights), “Music Could Be a Universal Language We All Understand, Science Says” (Science Alert), “New Global Study Reveals Baby Talk Is a Universal Language” (TODAY on YouTube), “ ‘Parentese’ Is Truly a Lingua Franca, Global Study Finds” (New York Times). 19 In Sianne Ngai’s theory of the gimmick, gimmicks “strike us as working too little (labor-​saving tricks), but also as working too hard (strained efforts to get our attention)” (2020, 1). Framing evolutionary musicology in terms of aesthetics judgments, as I am doing in this section, speaks to evolutionary musicology’s affective power.

54  Theorizing Music Evolution of the same social theories as Spencer, as we have seen, and he attempted to apply evolution to human society with equally disastrous results. If Spencer is the premiere social Darwinist, Darwin is the premiere naturalist Spencerian, and their music theories equally reflect their retrograde social theories. Rejecting Spencer on the grounds that his social ideas were oppressive should also mean rejecting Darwin on the same grounds. Probably the reason Darwin is so appealing as a mascot for evolutionary musicology is because of his popular reputation as an adventurous and humble naturalist. But that is a myth in its own right. Still, the point is not to insist that either thinker be read through a single interpretive lens. The relationship between these two thinkers and their ideas is more interesting, and more complex, than the common narratives of Darwin’s correctness or heroism, or of debates with winners and losers. An understanding of the convergences and divergences between Darwin’s and Spencer’s ideas about music evolution may be had through closer consideration of historical timelines, texts, and correspondence. At this stage, we have only scratched the surface. A more extended period of reading and analysis is necessary to adjudicate these theories satisfactorily and to trace their connections to present thought. The next two chapters offer extended treatments of Spencer’s and Darwin’s attempts at theorizing music evolution. What I will be showing is that, as exemplars of Victorian musical culture and the history of ideas about music and evolution, their theories are historical touchstones. But as evolutionary theories of music, neither comes out ahead.

3 Sound Symbolism in Spencer’s Evolutionary Thought This chapter focuses on music and language as they appear in the evolutionary writings of Herbert Spencer. The core of his speculations is vocal expression, as articulated in his famous injunction: “All music is originally vocal” (1857, 397). Language arose progressively from vocal expression, according to Spencer, followed by music, which he conceived as an “idealized language of emotion” (405). The vocal sounds from which music and language evolved are thus figured by Spencer as direct imitations of interior states such as emotion or intention, or of external phenomena. In music-​ theoretical parlance, Spencer argued for a mimetic origin for music and language: “the symbols of thought . . . are at first, merely reproductions of the things signified”; thus, “the notion of likeness underlies all language” (1855, 179). In other words, Spencer’s evolutionary theory of language and music origins incorporates a theory of sound symbolism, that is, the mimetic use of sounds to represent things. There are many problems with the sound symbolic mappings that Spencer theorizes, which are exacerbated by the evolutionary scale of his speculations. Across his writings, Spencer presumes to track a teleological line of ascent from simple vocal exclamations, to complex speech, and finally to music. His metaprinciple—​the inevitability of evolutionary progress—​ anticipated modernist aesthetic ideologies of the sort famously described by Jean-​François Lyotard: I will use the term modern to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse . . . making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working Subject, or the creation of wealth. (1984 [1979], xxiii)

Theorizing Music Evolution. Miriam Piilonen, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2024. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197695289.003.0004

56  Theorizing Music Evolution Spencer’s evolutionary theory was a grand narrative par excellence. As we have seen, his ideas had a significant impact on nineteenth-​century Victorian views about music and the human species.1 As certain evolutionary musicologists have recently begun to reinvest in such grand narratives of music evolution (i.e., music is for social bonding, mating, etc.), understanding nineteenth-​century corollaries takes on a new urgency. Through close examinations of Spencerian ideas about sound symbolism, contextualized within a long history of sound symbolic theories going back at least to Plato, this chapter takes on the question of evolutionary narratives as grand narratives. I recount in detail how Spencer builds his account of music and language origins—​and how he fails to make his case. At chapter’s end, I turn to Gary Tomlinson’s work, which implicitly carves a path around the problems of Spencerian sound symbolism through critical historicization and deconstructive methods.

Spencer’s Evolutionary Theory of Music—​Basic Theses First, a deeper dive into the tenets of Spencer’s theory of music. In “The Origin and Function of Music” (1857), Spencer outlined his basic theses as follows: (1) that there is a physiological relation, common to man and all animals, between feeling and muscular action; (2) that as vocal sounds are produced by muscular action, there is a consequent physiological relation between feeling and vocal sounds; (3) that all the modifications of voice expressive of feeling are the direct results of this physiological relation between feeling and vocal sounds; (4) that music, adopting all these modifications, intensifies them more and more as it ascends to its higher and higher forms, and becomes music simply in virtue of thus intensifying them; (5) that from the ancient epic poet chanting his verses, down to the modern musical composer, men of unusually strong feelings, prone

1 Mark Francis’s Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life (2007) offers an important historicization of Spencer’s impact on Victorian and later thinking, as does Kieran Egan’s Getting It Wrong from the Beginning (2002), which historicizes the “progressivist” position in Spencer, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget.

Sound Symbolism  57 to express them in extreme forms, have been naturally the agents of these successive intensifications; and (6) that so there has little by little arisen a wide divergence between this idealized language of emotion and its natural language: to which direct evidence we have just added the indirect—​that on no other tenable hypothesis can either the expressiveness or the genesis of music be explained. (1857, 405) Spencer goes on to explain that these add up to a theory where so-​called primitive vocal expressions developed into complex language and then finally into music, by virtue of a gradual intensification of both the emotions felt and the sounds produced. The agents of this intensification were “men of unusually strong feelings,” that is, musical composers. Over time, the music that arose from composerly modifications of vocal sound came to differ vastly from natural language. For Spencer, the music he heard in London concert halls represented an advanced form of emotional communication and a significant source of human happiness that could only be explained as highly evolved. It was this music (European art music) of which he spoke in the most admiring words. Let us examine each thesis in detail.

(1) “there is a physiological relation, common to man and all animals, between feeling and muscular action” Spencer begins “The Origin and Function of Music” (from here: “OFM”) with examples drawn from animal behavior: the excitement of a domestic dog that has been promised a walk, a cat’s pleasure at being stroked, an angry lion’s knitted brow. Within this impassioned menagerie, Spencer locates the human species, which is distinguished from other animals by its capacity for diverse and complex emotions: “In ourselves, distinguished from the lower creatures as we are by feelings alike more powerful and more varied, parallel facts are at once more conspicuous and more numerous. . . . We shall find that pleasurable sensations and painful sensations, pleasurable emotions and painful emotions, all tend to produce active demonstrations in proportion to their intensity” (1857, 396). The stimulus to motion, such as the vibrations of vocal cords, is what he calls feeling. What is feeling and what does feeling do, according to Spencer? Recall from earlier chapters that feeling and emotion (which are interchangeable) are

58  Theorizing Music Evolution psychophysical sensations directly tied to muscular activity. Spencer grounded his theory of musical emotion in the law of reflex action, that is, the direct connection between emotion and movement. Reflex action is “a law conformed to throughout the whole economy, not of man only, but of every sensitive creature—​a law, therefore, which lies deep in the nature of animal organization” (1857, 400). Reflex action enables him to establish a physiological basis for emotion, as opposed to a divine or immaterial one. This theory sets the scene for a gradual development of the feelings associated with advanced music.

(2) “as vocal sounds are produced by muscular action, there is a consequent physiological relation between feeling and vocal sounds” In Spencer’s account, the voice’s expressiveness is “innate” (1857, 400) in that vocal sounds are expressions of feelings. Sounds have a direct tie to interior states; they are imitations of felt sensations. That sounds are more-​or-​less accurate imitations of interiorized states is what enables others to recognize and interpret those sounds, because they have felt something similar themselves. Beyond simply affirming the psychophysical nature of vocal expression, Spencer is describing in this thesis something like a conventionalist attitude toward how meaning is ascribed to voice: “[W]‌e have acquired an established association between such sound and the feeling which caused it” (400). At the same time, however, he complicates this notion of a conventionalist attitude by emphasizing sound symbolism—​a mimetic link between voice and feeling. I further discuss the conventionalist/​naturalist dichotomy later in this chapter. From a music-​theoretic perspective, it is notable how Spencer elaborates his mimetic link between vocal sound and emotion through musical examples. “When the like sound is made by another, we ascribe the like feeling to him; and by a further consequence we not only ascribe to him that feeling, but have a certain degree of it aroused in ourselves. Thus these various modifications of voice become not only a language through which we understand the emotions of others, but also the means of exciting our sympathy with such emotions” (1857, 400). Feelings do not just travel in one direction, they go both ways. This exchange, he insists, constitutes the basis for a theory of music. Music can aid in emotional contagion. By being stirred by the emotive expressions of others, we find ourselves feeling a bit of what they feel.

Sound Symbolism  59

(3) “all the modifications of voice expressive of feeling are the direct results of this physiological relation between feeling and vocal sounds” In this thesis, Spencer highlights the diversity of music that results from the principle of reflex action. Here, the term “modifications” represents all manner of audible differences: changes in pitch, rhythm, timbre, melodic form, etc. For Spencer, “recitative of the early Greek poets (like all poets, nearly allied to composers in the comparative intensity of their feelings), was really nothing more than the slightly exaggerated emotional speech natural to them, which grew by frequent use into an organized form” (1857, 404). As an “organized form,” Spencer’s music acts as a technology of emotion. Specific sonic structures afford different emotional affects; for instance, “greater extremes of pitch, and wider intervals” enable “a greater variety and complexity of musical expression” (404). Spencer draws comparisons between vocal expression and gestural forms of communication, such as dancing. Dancing “is a rhythmical action natural to elevated emotion . . . And when we bear in mind that dancing, poetry and music are connate—​are originally constituent parts of the same thing, it becomes clear that the measured movement common to them all implies a rhythmical action of the whole system, the vocal apparatus included; and that so the rhythm of music is a more subtle and complex result of this relation between mental and muscular excitement” (1857, 402). Rhythm is a powerful force in Spencer’s thinking. At times, rhythm takes on a cosmic significance in Spencer. For instance, in First Principles (1862), Spencer devotes a chapter to describing “the rhythm of motion” as a general principle of the universe (313–​34). In his essay on music, rhythm is but one way in which the voice may be modified by strong feelings.

(4) “music, adopting all these modifications, intensifies them more and more as it ascends to its higher and higher forms, and becomes music simply in virtue of thus intensifying them” For Spencer, music’s emotional force is a development of instinctive emotional responses exhibited by all creatures. Put metaphorically, music is emotion systematized. Spencer offers a kind of music analysis to demonstrate

60  Theorizing Music Evolution such a system. First, he identifies five features (he calls them “peculiarities”) of vocal expression: loudness, quality or timbre, pitch, intervals, and rate of variation (1857, 398). Each of these features refers to a specific emotional and perceptual phenomenon. For instance, consider Spencer’s reflections on vocal quality, or timbre: If after uttering a word in his speaking voice, the reader, without changing the pitch or the loudness, will sing this word, he will perceive that before he can sing it he has to alter the adjustment of the vocal organs, to do which a certain force must be used; and by putting his fingers on the external prominence marking the top of the larynx, he will have further evidence that to produce a sonorous tone the organs must be drawn out of their usual position. Thus, then, the fact that the tones of excited feeling are more vibratory than those of common conversation, is another instance of the connexion between mental excitement and muscular excitement. The speaking voice, the recitative voice, and the singing voice, severally exemplify one general principle. (1857, 398)

When a person sings, Spencer tells us, they exaggerate the emotive force that underlies all bodily motion. In this sense, singing is a means by which one’s emotion can be wielded intentionally, thus singing emerges as a kind of technical enterprise. The differences between normal speech and singing are heard in the unique tones of excited feeling and felt in the larynx. Spencer claims there is a progressive line of ascent from (a) the speaking voice to (b) the recitative voice (partway between singing and speech) to (c) the singing voice; the singing voice is the pinnacle of emotive control and performativity/​ technicity. For Spencer, “the distinctive traits of song are simply the traits of emotional speech intensified and systematized” (402). This idea is clearly opposed to how Darwin saw things; for him, what defines music is that it is not language, even though they share many qualities. Darwin identified a number of similarities between music and language said to arise from their historical entwinement. For instance, he saw the ability to sing songs as an acquired trait, similar to language. Darwin writes, The sounds uttered by birds offer in several respects the nearest analogy to language, for all the members of the same species utter the same instinctive cries expressive of their emotions; and all the kinds that have the power of singing exert this power instinctively; but the actual song, and even the

Sound Symbolism  61 call-​notes, are learnt from their parents or foster parents. . . . I have given the foregoing details to shew that an instinctive tendency to acquire an art is not a peculiarity confined to man. (1874, vol. 1, 55–​56)

In other words, music is speech-​like in that it combines an instinctive element with a learned one. Spencer took a special interest in a musical feature he terms “rate of variation” (Figure 3.1). Increased variation implies increased complexity and heterogeneity—​the goal of evolutionary progress, in his view. By pointing to a universal law of variation, he gestures incorrectly toward the audibility of a more developed musical faculty. Relative degrees of evolutionary progress can be heard in the relative degrees of variation. This observation

Figure 3.1  Herbert Spencer’s “notation” of four songs in his discussion of the “universal fact” of melodic variation (1902, 63)

62  Theorizing Music Evolution of a continuum of musical excellence sits alongside and helps to evidence Spencer’s sense that all things develop from simplicity to complexity. He describes the human as “the latest and most heterogenous creature” and the most “civilized” (1881 [1857], 236), which tracks with his sense that the most advanced forms of music will adhere to specific musical laws. These claims have been thoroughly debunked. It is possible to make a historical distinction between the conviction that music is primarily a matter of mimesis and the conviction that music is primarily a matter of the expression of emotion. Spencer tries to have it both ways, in that he sees vocal expression as mimetic of both external natural phenomena (i.e., early humans imitating the cries of animals or other humans) and of internal felt phenomena (i.e., pleasure or pain). He sees music emerging from this double-​mimesis.

(5) “from the ancient epic poet chanting his verses, down to the modern musical composer, men of unusually strong feelings, prone to express them in extreme forms, have been naturally the agents of these successive intensifications” Spencer applauds successful composers for their role in the evolution of music, and hence the so-​called progress of the human species. Such grandiose claims are a Spencerian signature, and here we see them play out through his musical taste. In an essay celebrating the composer Giacomo Meyerbeer, Spencer justifies his preference for what he describes as subtle musical surprises. Spencer loves “familiar figures strung together in a new order” (1902, 115). He is bored with Wolfgang Mozart and impressed with Meyerbeer, whose style seems more refined to Spencer because it more effectively plays with his expectations. Spencer likes it when a conventional musical path gets diverted. “Sometimes, indeed, to test a composer’s originality, I have, while listening, observed whether I could often anticipate, or partially anticipate, the phrases that were coming, or something like them, and when I could, have discounted my estimate of him,” Spencer writes (1902, 114). In the pen of a proud amateur, he writes that with Meyerbeer’s music, “there is generally much that is fresh—​very few hackneyed phrases” (1902, 115). He loves “Robert, toi que j’taime” in particular. In his way, Spencer taps into how these composers combined stock musical phrases into coherent larger forms (Gjerdingen 2007) in what amounts to a construction grammar (Gjerdingen

Sound Symbolism  63 & Bourne 2015). However, since Spencer does not play or read music, his analytical examples represent only vague impressions of what makes a stylish piece of music. In Figure 3.1, we find Spencer’s notation of four songs, accompanying his discussion of the “universal fact” of melodic variation (1902, 62–​63). For Spencer, famous musical composers play an important role in humanity’s emotional advancements. Emphasizing increased emotional precision and complexity as signs of human progress, he praises his favorite composers for their deep wells of emotion, which he views as a masculine strength. This thesis of Spencer’s—​that men of unusually strong feelings are the arbiters of musical progress—​is not just historically significant for its equation of masculinity with emotionality but also for its elevation of emotional expression to the highest level of evolutionary progress. The composers he has in mind include Meyerbeer, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Frédéric Chopin, and Ludwig van Beethoven (1857, 403). He mentions the singer Enrico Tamberlik in “OFM” as an example of a particularly dramatic use of vocal tremulousness (401). Paying respect to composers is an aesthetic imperative for Spencer, who urges the same of performers hoping to do justice to their works. In a later essay, “The Corruption of Music,” Spencer complains about performers who seem too focused on themselves, thereby failing to pay proper attention to the thoughts and intentions of the composer (1902, 26–​27). Such reverence to the composer and his musical genius is one of the more transparent examples of Spencer’s debt to romantic idealism. It is this romantic idealist undercurrent that undergirds Spencer’s turn to musical form. Musical forms such as loudness, quality or timbre, pitch, intervals, and rate of variation become the parts of speech in a so-​called advanced language of music. Having a wide palette of musical sounds on hand is what allows “the musical composer to express the feelings possessed by others as well as himself. . . . [This] also leads him to give musical utterance to feelings which they either do not experience, or experience in but slight degrees, Spencer writes” (1857, 404). Pieces of music take on a painterly quality as Spencer paraphrases the conductor Hans Richter: “[Music] tells us of things we have not seen and shall not see” (404). This is Spencer’s promise for the future as well as his observation of the present: that the most advanced forms of music will be those that represent and deliver complex feelings through syntactical surprise and the avoidance of clichés, and those performances which abide by the intuitions of the men who composed this

64  Theorizing Music Evolution music. With music-​analytical clarity, Spencer envisions a musical future full of more of what he likes.

(6) “so there has little by little arisen a wide divergence between this idealized language of emotion and its natural language” For Spencer, the gap between music and language widens with evolutionary progress and the two become more distinguished from one another. Music represents a gradual intensification and diversification of innate emotional capacities, thus the more highly evolved, the more musical and less speech-​ like it becomes. This has implications for musicians whose music he deems boring, simplistic, or lacking in refinement and subtlety. Among civilized people, he claims, music will naturally be more civilized as well: “That music is a product of civilization is manifest; for though savages have their dance-​ chants, these are of a kind scarcely to be dignified by the title musical: at most, they supply but the vaguest rudiment of music, properly so called,” Spencer writes, connecting his racist music theory to his racist social theory (1857, 405). This has further implications concerning the people whose language he deems undeveloped. Building on his general law of reflex action, he postulates a mimetic link between communicative style and national language. This undergirds his bigoted idiom in The Philosophy of Style that non-​Latin English is the best language, for it most accurately mimics thought (1884 [1852], 12). In the final paragraphs of “OFM” Spencer addresses what he sees as music’s higher purpose, which is to bear on human happiness. Music enables complex feelings to be communicated to others. Modifications of voice “give life to the otherwise dead words in which the intellect utters its ideas; and so enable the hearer not only to understand the state of mind they accompany, but to partake of that state. In short, they are the chief media of sympathy” (1857, 407). How Spencer lionizes European art music has interesting resonances with previous generations of European aestheticians who treated European concert music as a distillation of feelings. Kant famously dismissed music as the most agreeable but the least conceptual of the arts, since it “merely plays with the sensations” (2000 [1790], 206 § 53). In a post-​Enlightenment context, music’s sensibility becomes a prized virtue for thinkers like Arthur

Sound Symbolism  65 Schopenhauer, who exalted music as the truth of pure feeling, extracted from the mere contingency of narrative and circumstance: “[Music] renders all the impulses of our innermost essence, but without any reality” (2010 [1818], 1:292). As “abstracted quintessence,” music opens us to a “vividly aroused spiritual world . . . [which] speaks to us directly,” while the other arts “speak only of shadows” (1.289, 285). Put another way, music presents emotional content without object-​cause; without recourse to the interpretant, it elevates the soul. Some version of this thinking lies behind Walter Pater’s overquoted declaration: “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music” (1888, 140). Despite Spencer’s efforts to avoid treating music as a transcendent art, and to avoid the discourse of the soul, he nevertheless preserves certain capital-​R Romantic (or at least post-​Enlightenment) aesthetic investments in music as the most emotive, benevolent, elevated art-​form. Spencer writes: [M]‌usic must take rank as the highest of the fine arts—​as the one which, more than any other, ministers to human welfare. And thus, even leaving out of view the immediate gratifications it is hourly giving, we cannot too much applaud that progress of musical culture which is becoming one of the characteristics of our age. (1857, 408)

The extent to which Spencer’s evolutionary theory was imbricated with Romantic aesthetic ideology has been discussed extensively. As Della de Sousa Correa writes, “Despite [Spencer’s] demystification of music as a transcendent art, the role which Spencer allotted music at the conclusion of ‘The Origin and Function’ effectively placed it in the same position at the head of the aesthetic hierarchy which it had occupied in Romantic aesthetics” (2002, 23). A distinctly Romantic strain of aesthetics persisted in Victorian musical culture, and in Spencer’s musical writings. It is his strange combination of Romantic sentiments and new modern ideals that gives Spencer license to think creatively about the origins of music and to enact his imperialist theory of “advanced” words and sounds.

Sound Symbolism as Imperial Metaphor in Spencer’s Evolutionary Thought In Spencer’s writings about language and music, he traces the origins of vocal communication to sonic imitations of thoughts, feelings, and the

66  Theorizing Music Evolution phenomenal world—​what together may be called sound symbolism. Sound symbolism is an especially music-​theoretical aspect of Spencer’s thinking, and it is where his imperial metaphor (music-​as-​progress) plays out most cannily. In modern linguistics, sound symbolism refers to resemblances between sounds and meanings, a form of linguistic iconicity (analogies between the form of a word and its meaning). Spencer uses sound symbolism to explain where language and music came from: from imitations of inner feelings and external objects. Spencer, as usual, seeks a universal rule, elevating sound symbolism to the status of origin and function. In my reading, Spencer may be located within a long history of imaginative speculations about sound symbolism and the so-​called well-​designed nature of language—​alongside Plato, Gottfried Leibniz, and Charles Sanders Peirce, among others. Addressing a long history of ideas about the original significance of sound symbolism enables us to consider the conceptual affordances and limits of such a theory. Structuralist theorist Gérard Genette defined the basic tenets of such treatments as “a certain turn of thought or of imagination which assumes, rightly or wrongly, a relation of reflective analogy (imitation) between ‘word’ and ‘thing’ that motivates, or justifies, the existence and choice of the former” (1995 [1976], 5). For Genette, such a mimetic program was inaugurated in Plato’s treatise Cratylus (“on the correctness of names”) and notably contains an imaginative element. I take up the Genettian approach here, exploring the imaginative and creative dimensions of sound symbolism in Spencerian thought. Spencer outlined his sound symbolism in “OFM” as well as three other early texts: “Progress: Its Law and Cause” (1881 [1857]), Philosophy of Style: An Essay (1884 [1852]), and Principles of Psychology (1855). Later he would apply these ideas in his grand Synthetic Philosophy, which spanned ten volumes and numerous subject areas. In “Progress: Its Law and Cause” Spencer argued that the origins of language lie in mimesis: “a name is a copy of some real attribute of the thing named . . . all language is in the beginning mimetic” (1881 [1857], 178). This suggests a nonarbitrary connection between communicative gestures and the things they reference. Emotion is central to these lines of thought because, for Spencer, the most basic forms of communication are gestural and vocal exclamations that activate reflexively alongside primal emotions. Under reflex action, vocal expressions of various kinds share a common origin in muscular activity. Furthermore, under reflex action, some rather musical qualities are latent within language, that is, within all vocal expression. This extends to the selection of words.

Sound Symbolism  67 For Spencer there is a “close kinship between naming and reasons” (1855, 178) that reflects an ancient tradition of sound symbolism. “Voice” is a key term here. “Voice” exemplifies the Spencerian notion of a physiological link between emotion and muscular movement—​indeed, Spencer saw voice as a ready example of the mimetic and emotive origins of communication writ large. Departing from peers who asserted a divine or immaterial origin for vocal expression, Spencer posited a biological connection between voice and emotion that he believed was common to humans and animals alike. Spencer’s recourse to what he called reflex action—​the direct connection between voice and muscular sensation—​reflected his assertion of a continuity between mind and body in vocal expression (see my ­chapter 2 for discussion). With this anti-​Cartesian gesture, Spencer implicitly rejected a tradition of aesthetic idealism and mind–​body dualism. He also anticipated certain theoretical and experimental engagements with the materiality of vocal expression in music studies, albeit with vastly different sociopolitical aims, as I discuss at the end of this chapter. Spencer’s account of mental action was unusual for its time. With his interest in the irrational and instinctive, he was one of few.2 His closest counterpart was Alexander Bain, whose The Senses and the Intellect (1855) appeared the same year as Spencer’s Principles of Psychology (1855). Both Bain’s and Spencer’s ideas represented substantial revisions of the old associationist psychology, which held that the mind works through a series of concatenated leaps or associations. It is important to remember that psychology did not cohere into an academic discipline until the turn of the twentieth century, when experimental psychology labs opened at Cambridge and University College London (1897) and the British Psychology Association was founded (1901).3 The Victorian pre-​era of psychology, sometimes termed “mental science,” was loosely organized, with many competing perspectives. Still, Spencer’s psychology stood out for its rejection of associationism. In addition to differing from his peers with regard to the question of association, Spencer’s evolutionary psychology departed from the “discourse of the soul” that dominated the fields. In his Principles of Psychology, he established 2 Consider Spencer within this incisive description of Victorian psychology by Rick Rylance: “Victorian psychology was clearly overwhelmingly rationalist and intellectualist in methodological demeanour. It made little of apparently irrational experience, and avoided the instinctive. It evaded experiences of physicality and of the body except as issues of abstract sensation considered epistemologically, or, in physiology, as psychological bodies imagined in the anatomical inertias of death” (2000, 148). 3 For discussion, see Rylance (2000, 5–​17).

68  Theorizing Music Evolution that the mind is radically integrated with the material body. He brings this anti-​Cartesian attitude to his essay on music: “[F]‌eeling is a stimulus to muscular action,” thus, “all the leading vocal phenomena . . . have a physiological basis” (1857, 400). Spencer did not speak about emotion in pejorative terms. Music scholars have pointed to the historical equation of music with emotion for having a role in the perceived femininity of music (Tolbert 2002). Spencer, however, sees emotion as a sign of cognitive advancement and masculine power. An increase in emotional capacity—​that is, the possession of a wider spectrum of feeling, a greater ability to interpret others’ emotional states, and the skill to express subtle interior states via musical expression—​ is, for Spencer, an index of manliness, power, and evolutionary progress. Spencer’s attitude toward the manliness of musical progress was somewhat unusual for his time and place, just as it was also importantly shaped by his surroundings. That he attended many concerts in London where the relevant composers were men fed directly into his music theory—​and his treatment of evolutionary progress. Later, under the influence of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, Spencer would claim that the preservation of so-​called favorable variations under natural selection explained the inevitability of progress, and thus coin the term “survival of the fittest” (1864, 444). Music is but one example of the human species’ advancement beyond so-​called primitive vocal communications, in such a theory. Primitive vocal exclamations evolve into language, in Spencer’s account, and music helps along this progressive ascent. Simple vocal expressions evolve into highly nuanced forms of emotional communication, and music is the most recent stage of this series of developments. What counts as music at such a stage of development is highly circumscribed, according to Spencer’s imperial metaphor. For instance, the musical examples he chooses represent a decidedly nationalist bias. Western culture is the primary site of the “advanced” musical principles he mentions. For instance, when he describes recitative as musical declamations that resemble ordinary speech and an intermediary stage between speech and song, it is with reference to musical practices he treated as less developed than art song. An unfortunately emblematic passage of his: For recitative, or musical recitation, is in all respects intermediate between speech and song. . . . Thus, then, we may not only infer, from the evidence furnished by existing barbarous tribes, that the vocal music of pre-​historic

Sound Symbolism  69 times was emotional speech very slightly exalted; but we see that the earliest vocal music of which we have any account, differed much less from emotional speech than does the vocal music of our days. That recitative—​ beyond which, by the way, the Chinese and Hindoos seem never to have advanced—​grew naturally out of the modulations and cadences of strong feeling, we have indeed still current evidence. (1857, 402–​403, emphases in original)

Spencer’s comments about “barbarous tribes” and “the Chinese and Hindoos” signal a racist hierarchy wherein such groups and their musics are treated as less evolved. Spencer makes claims like this frequently—​in this essay and in all of his writings—​using “undeveloped” people and cultures to demonstrate his theory that all things develop from homogeneous simplicity to heterogeneous complexity (see in particular Spencer 1881 [1857]; 1867). He further stratifies relative degrees of evolutionary advance according to social class, such as in his comparisons of the vocal timbres of a “servant-​girl” and an “accomplished lady” (1857, 407). His arguments are gendered, racialized, and classed. They are also extractionist, in Adam J. P. Gaudry’s sense that they take “deeply meaningful information, often from a marginal or ‘underresearched’ community, and present it to a third party . . . a highly educated academic audience or government bureaucracy, both of whom have little staked on the preservation of the integrity of that extracted knowledge” (2011, 113). Spencer extracts examples from non-​Western cultures and treats them as objects of analysis only, to be picked up and reordered according to his own “rational” system. In this sense, Spencer’s evolutionary ideas about music and musical emotion function as a technology of hegemony. In Sylvia Wynter’s study of the emergence of secular ontological accounts of the human, she demonstrates how colonial conquest led to an equation of “the human” with white Western bourgeois masculinity, i.e., “Man.” Wynter warns against treating an Enlightenment notion of humanity-​as-​Man “as if it were the human itself,” for this would evoke a problematic recentering of white Eurocentric humanisms (2003, 259). In Wynter’s account, Man’s most common “descriptive statement” functions in part by categorizing Man and his Others as alternately “selected” or “dysselected” by evolution (2003, 325–​26).4 Spencer’s imperial metaphor of sound symbolism as the proper order of relations 4 See also “The Re-​Enchantment of Humanism” (2000), David Scott’s interview with Sylvia Wynter.

70  Theorizing Music Evolution between vocalizations and things is one example of what Wynter was importantly critiquing. Next, a detour into older philosophies of sound symbolism—​inaugurated by Plato’s dialogue Cratylus—​provides further context for Spencer’s imperial treatment of a mimetic origin for language and music. This in turn will help us unpack additional layers of Spencer’s account of music, which builds up from the mimetic ground established in his account of language. The main question that guides what follows is: How are “music” and “language” constructed through theories of origins such as Spencer’s?

Music and Language as Constructed through Theories of Origins Debates about the origins of language—​which some have called “the hardest problem in science” (Christianson & Kirby 2003)—​have a long history. For instance, in Jean-​Jacques Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Language (published posthumously in 1781) he describes primitive language as highly musical and emotive; thus, the development of rational forms of language meant shedding some of these musical characters. By the mid-​nineteenth century, linguistic societies in England and France were turning against both the pursuit of a universal language and the study of language origins. Such debates over linguistic origins seemed to go nowhere and ultimately were banned in 1866 by the Linguistic Society of Paris (Stam 1976, 255). This pronouncement had ripple effects across the continent. Pre-​Victorian debates about language-​origins were numerous and rather than presume to offer a comprehensive history, I want to focus on a handful of examples. For instance, one trend in eighteenth-​and nineteenth-​century theories of origins approached language as a set of highly literal imitations of natural objects—​a kind of onomatopoeia. Max Müller pioneered an account of language origins in opposition to those “bow-​wow theories.” For Müller, the development of language through sonic imitations would imply too loose a border between human and animal. He writes: “No animal thinks, and no animal speaks, except man. Language and thought are inseparable. Words without thought are dead sounds; thoughts without words are nothing. To think is to speak low; to speak is to think aloud” (1861, 369). Such treatments dramatized the origins of language through the immutable differences between human and animal, while essentializing language as a more or less

Sound Symbolism  71 accurate representation of the phenomenal world, and therefore of the speaker’s capacity to grasp that world. Though Müller dismisses mimetic theories as oversimple, Müller borrows the same ethical failures of such thinking with his treatment of language as unmediated thought: “The word is the thought incarnate” (369). In his poeticization of the word’s perfection, Müller portrays language as the pinnacle of human cognition, discarding the rest as unthinking. Consider a critique of Müller by his contemporary Shobal Vail Clevenger, who leads the way to further problematics. Clevenger dismisses Müller’s notion that thought and language are identical, but ultimately reproduces the idea that language represents an accurate reflection of the phenomenal world. For Clevenger, formal analysis of words can help explain the origins of different races; we may gain insight into the “thoughts” of Paleozoic people by studying contemporary “savage” languages (“Those who have lived with savages, and are familiar with the puerility of their conceptions and their disposition to incessantly invent words and then forget them, are able to estimate gibberish at its proper value”; “The Australian savage language is exceedingly regular and simple, in keeping with its poverty of ideas. The Spanish language is probably the most beautiful, resonant, inflexible, of any of Latin descent” [1891, 953]). While Clevenger is determined to discredit the idea that language has a directly divine origin, he nevertheless preserves the problematic notion that language offers direct access to the relative advancement of a given linguistic group, propping up a racist hierarchy. Such absolute mimologics give the impression of an ideal or more evolved state of language, as though evolution proceeds linearly and logically toward an endpoint. The consequences of such extreme mimetic theories are made especially clear in one German nationalist’s swift denigration of speaking more than one language: “Multilingualism is the den of iniquity from which all the fogginess of books steams up.”5 The problems with such theories are twofold: they misrepresent evolutionary processes and they route theories of language origins toward theories of more or less evolved people. Next, we will consider Plato’s contribution to theories of language origins. In Plato, the ideal state of language is bound up with the sound of language, albeit in complex ways. Sound symbolism leaks into the margins of Plato’s 5 As quoted in Fraser (1978, 271).

72  Theorizing Music Evolution texts as a means to clarify the foundations of language, just as it also functions to confound.

Plato’s Contribution: Centering Sound Symbolism Perhaps the earliest recorded philosophy of sound symbolism is Plato’s Cratylus.6 The text plays out as a dialogue between two thinkers, Cratylus and Hermogenes, each of whom takes a different view of language origins. The eponymous figure of Cratylus argues for a so-​called naturalist basis for language, whereby the names of objects are natural or suitable to the things they reference. The Cratylian thesis is set against a so-​called conventionalist one, embodied by the figure of Hermogenes, who holds out for arbitrary connections between words and things. Hermogenes maintains that the fitness of words is established not by some essential connection between word and thing, but rather by their usage. The fitness of a word for its referent, then, is merely a matter of consensus among participants in a given linguistic group. Importantly, there is an essential sonic dimension to Plato’s treatment. Although there is no evidence that Spencer read Cratylus, Plato’s theory of language origins has something in common with Spencer’s. For instance, in the dispute between Cratylus and Hermogenes staged by Plato, Cratylus dispenses with the social dimension of language by tricking Hermogenes into admitting how confusing and inconvenient a conventionalist basis for language would be—​everyone would go around naming things however they please. Cratylus is then able to argue for the correctness of names, and for the primacy of the act of naming itself. For Spencer too there is a well-​chosenness to certain words and languages, specifically those that affirm his own sense of what constitutes refined or stylish language. In Plato, the act of naming involves shaping linguistic matter—​sounds and syllables—​into ideal forms. In order to assign proper names to things, a special kind of work would be required—​work that calls for a skilled technician, a name-​maker. The name itself therefore marks the technical nature of one’s relation to things in the world; here, assigning something a suitable name is a technological act.

6 Plato’s dialogues include the earliest recorded philosophy of sound symbolism according to Girard Gennette (1995 [1976), 22). In my own readings of Plato’s Cratylus, I draw from Benjamin Jowett’s English translation in Plato: The Collected Dialogues (1961, 421–​74). Plato lived approximately from 428 to 348 bc.

Sound Symbolism  73 Socrates appears in Plato’s dialogue as a third character with his own position. For Socrates (counter-​Cratylus and Hermogenes), there are such things as badly chosen or badly formed words, which are the fault of the name-​maker’s original error. Socrates’ sense that a word can be badly chosen or “wrong” for what it signifies is slightly to the side of the arguments presented by Cratylus and Hermogenes. Cratylus believes all language imitates the world and is therefore “right”; the Cratylian name-​maker is infallible, while the Socratic name-​maker is not. For Hermogenes, language is conventional, so all linguistic uses are right, even when they inevitably shift over time; each one of us is therefore a name-​ maker. These distinctions have important consequences in the domain of sound. Socrates insists that the units of linguistic meaning are sounds and syllables. For Cratylus, the name-​maker is infallible, able to select the correct sound without error. Yet, Socrates’ admission of the name-​maker’s potential for (in)accuracy is what discloses his allegiance to the “truth” of phonic expressiveness. The idea that the name-​maker might have made a mistake discloses the centrality of the sonic dimension of the thing to be named, in that it admits that the name-​maker may apprehend, correctly or incorrectly, how the word should sound. By admitting that language comes up short when the name-​maker errs, Socrates admits his faith in an ideal language undergirded by sound symbolism. The Socratic position differs from a pure Cratylian position in that it rejects in advance the idea of an original natural language that has since been corrupted or forgotten. Any problems with language in the present, according to Socrates, are congenital. The name-​maker is to blame. This position leaves open the possibility of constructing a new natural language without error. For comparison’s sake, consider another famous Cratylian thesis, advanced by the philosopher Gottfried W. Leibniz. “We cannot claim that signification springs from a merely arbitrary institution,” Leibniz proclaims.7 This is his response to John Locke, whose insistence that the usage of a given word does not reflect any “natural connexion” between word and thing but rather a “voluntary Imposition”8 recalls Hermogenes’ conventionalist thesis. For Leibniz, there must be a reason why one word is chosen over another. Like Socrates, Leibniz tends toward the Cratylian pole, and he does so in three respects: (1) he holds that the relations between words and things are mimetic, 7 Leibniz, as cited and translated in Genette (1995 [1976], 44) from the Latin text (1903, 151). 8 The full passage: “Words . . . come to be made use of by Men, as the Signs of their Ideas; not by any natural connexion, that there is between particular articulate Sounds and certain Ideas, for then there would be but one language amongst all Men; but by a voluntary Imposition, whereby such a Word is made arbitrarily the Mark of such an Idea” (Locke 1975 [1689], 405).

74  Theorizing Music Evolution (2) he invokes the idea of an original “natural language,” and (3) he argues for the primacy of sound symbolism therein. For Leibniz, languages have a natural origin in the harmony between the sounds and the effects produced in the soul by the spectacle of things; and I am inclined to believe that this origin can be seen not only in the first natural language but still in the natural languages born later, in part from the first one, in part from the new usages acquired by mankind, scattered as it was over the surface of the globe. And to be sure, the imitation of nature is often unmistakable in onomatopoeia: thus, we say that frogs croak (coaxatio) or we express the command to be silent by st, rapid movement by r (cursus), laughter by hahaha, and the cry of pain by ouaie (vae [ow!]).9

In essence, Leibniz claims that natural resonances between the sounds of words, on the one hand, and their referents, on the other, is secured by a “harmony” felt in the soul. Leibniz rejects the hypothesis of a divine origin to language. Unlike Socrates, he envisions no master name-​maker. Rather his invocation of natural languages (plural) implies a host of name-​makers. “Natural languages were not created by convention, not founded as if by decree; they were born out of a sort of natural tendency of men to harmonize sounds with the affections and the movements of the soul.”10 He supports his quasi-​Cratylian11 thesis with classic mimological specimens: onomatopoeia (hahaha!), verbal imitations of animal cries (croak), and oblique symbolism (the letter r’s invocation of rapid movement). As we will see, Spencer settles things in favor of the Cratylian thesis, interpreted in a style similar to Leibniz, but replacing the Adamic origin story with an evolutionary one.

Implications and Consequences of Spencer’s Sound Symbolism Why does it matter whether or how the sounds of words are related to the phenomenal world? One reason why it matters, as we have already seen, is because 9 Leibniz, as cited and translated in Genette (1995 [1976], 44) from the Latin text Opuscules et Fragments Inédits de Leibniz (1903, 151–​52). 10 Translated by Genette and quoted in his Mimologics (1995 [1976], 47), from Leibniz (1768, 187). 11 Despite Cratylian affinities, Leibniz betrays his sympathies with Hermogenes’ conventionalist thesis in his desire to invent a completely arbitrary language. See Genette (1995 [1976]) for discussion, particularly pages 43–​51.

Sound Symbolism  75 the presumed strength of language’s connections to its referents can be theorized to reflect the accuracy of the speaker’s grasp of reality. Conceptions of the nature and origins of language reflect epistemic ideas about what it means to communicate well. For instance, early modern English grammarian John Wallis sought to establish the superiority of the English language by speculating about the suitability of certain sound syllables to their meanings, i.e., the natural violence of thr (as in “throw”) or the retentive qualities of cl (as in “cleave,” “climb,” or “close”).12 These idioms help to activate another line of questioning: If a word can be well-​ made, are some words made badly? Are well-​made words selected spontaneously or should there be a criteria? Or a technique? In Spencer’s “Progress: Its Law and Cause,” he uses language evolution as an elaborate metaphor for species evolution and offers a unique take on the criteria of well-​formed language. It is worth examining Spencer’s full paragraph in detail: The lowest form of language is the exclamation, by which an entire idea is vaguely conveyed through a single sound; as among the lower animals. That human language ever consisted solely of exclamations, and so was strictly homogenous in respect of its parts of speech, we have no evidence. But that language can be traced down to a form in which nouns and verbs are its only elements, is an established fact. In the gradual multiplication of parts of speech out of these primary ones—​in the differentiation of verbs into active and passive, of nouns into abstract and concrete—​in the rise of distinctions of mood, tense, person, of number and case—​in the formation of auxiliary verbs, of adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, articles—​in the divergence of those orders, genera, species, and varieties of parts of speech by which civilized races express minute modifications of meaning—​we see a change from the homogenous to the heterogeneous. (1881 [1857], 238)

In the racist language of a hierarchy of being, in which “uncivilized races” are aligned with animals, Spencer recounts the so-​called gradual development of language from what he calls “exclamations,” which are common to humans and animals alike. Spencer seems to be analogizing exclamations with nouns, in that each utterance conveys a thing. He believes families of words can be traced to their shared root word(s) (he cites Max Müller, Bunsen, and



12 Wallis (1672, 148–​64). Cited in Genette (1995 [1976], 37–​42; 345).

76  Theorizing Music Evolution “philologists”). For Spencer, “the progress of language conforms to the general law, alike in the evolution of languages, in the evolution of families of words, and in the evolution of parts of speech” (1881 [1857], 239).13 This implies a mimetic link between sound and phenomenal world that takes one of two forms: (1) imitation of things in the external world (i.e., animal cries), or (2) imitation of interior states (i.e., emotions). In Principles of Psychology (1855) Spencer offers the following description of the evolution of language: Wherever we can trace out the origin of symbols used to convey thoughts—​ whether it be in the infantine habit of naming animals by imitating their cries, or in that of senselessly repeating the articulate sounds made by persons around; whether it be in the signs spontaneously hit upon by deaf-​ mutes, or those by which travellers in strange lands express their wants; whether it be in the dramatic gestures with which the uncivilized man ekes out his imperfect vocabulary, or in the simulative words of which that vocabulary so largely consists—​we see, not only that the notion of likeness underlies all language, but that the symbols of thought, both vocal and mechanical (and even literal also), are at first, merely reproductions of the things signified. (1855, 179)

In yet another passage defined by bigotry, Spencer here suggests that linguistic symbols emerge through a process of inarticulate imitation. Notice in particular that physical gesture is mentioned in the same breath; for Spencer, spoken symbols and gestural symbols find the same origins in mimesis. He describes the “uncivilized” human being’s “imperfect vocabulary” as simulative, that is, an imitation of the appearance of things in the world. Spencer contributes a number of other details to the history of sound symbolism theories. Like Socrates in Cratylus, Spencer believes the noun is the most important unit of language. Only nouns are fixed enough to maintain the mimetic relationship; verbs only work this way sometimes. Other parts of speech—​adverbs, modifiers, etc.—​are trickier. But he does not concern himself with explaining that mystifying leap from nominal to verbal

13 For Spencer, writing arises from the “habit” of representing things with images: “From the habitual use of this pictorial representation there naturally grew up the but slightly modified practice of picture-​writing” (1881, 239).

Sound Symbolism  77 constructions. Instead, he gestures toward the proliferations of races and national languages and sums himself up: “Thus the progress of language conforms to the general law, alike in the evolution of languages, in the evolution of families of words, and in the evolution of parts of speech” (1881 [1857], 239). Later he suggests that linguistic advancement parallels the gradual separation and distinction of the arts (poetry, dancing, and music), as well as the separation of these arts from religion. Similarly, in “OFM” he makes a case for the mimetic nature of specific musical elements. For instance, with regard to musical pitch, he suggests that “mental excitement vents itself in the higher and lower notes of the register; using the middle notes but seldom” (1857, 401). Here he suggests that middle notes do not betray strong emotion in the same way that higher or lower notes do; one wonders whether this implies that if one can speak with a calm tone that they are not as emotional, or if speaking in a calm tone is merely an effective tool for disguising strong emotion. Does Spencer believe that early human vocal exclamations call on a sense of individual preference? Is there an evolutionist aesthetics of vocal exclamations? Or one that factors into apprehensions of meaning therein? Can these vocalizations be considered beautiful? If yes, beautiful to whom? By Cratylian standards, “a name is vocal imitation of that which the vocal imitator names or imitates.”14 So, when we name something, we express a mimetic relation between name and thing. The name-​maker’s taste appears to be irrelevant. Because the name-​maker’s aesthetic preferences are discussed only indirectly in Cratylus, and always subsumed beneath his authority as name-​maker, we find little to guide our discussion of aesthetic preference, or taste, in Plato. Indeed, the matter of taste is one that is undertheorized in mimetic theories. Spencer, however, has plenty to say on the subject of taste. In “The Philosophy of Style” Spencer sets out to explain why certain words and sentence structures seem more effective than others. This he believes will aide in the construction of a more scientific account of style in writing and in speech (1884 [1852], 9–​11). His main point here is that style is expressed intuitively, as in the French saying “The Style is the Man”; put differently, “style is organic.” At the same time, he believes style can be altered and improved—​ along with a writerly sense of clarity—​through engagement with good writing. There is a certain mimetic character to this recommendation too—​ the symptoms of high-​quality writing can be contagious. When it comes

14 Quoted and translated in Genette (1995 [1976], 21).

78  Theorizing Music Evolution to style, Spencer wants to have it all ways: style is natural, yet conventional; intuited, yet learnable. All this in service of an account of language’s so-​called progress that reveals a decidedly English bias. On one occasion, Spencer suggests that “a voluminous, mouth-​filling epithet is, by its very size, suggestive of largeness or strength” (1884 [1852], 14), vivifying a direct motivation for the selection of words like “voluminous.” One can make a distinction between direct and indirect motivations for such derivative sounds such as these. Direct motivations are classically mimetic, as in onomatopoetic imitation. Indirect motivations are etymological, as in the history of a word’s usage and the word’s derivations from other words and symbols. In Cratylus, the terms shift from indirect motivations to direct ones when the conversation turns to sound symbolism because sonic mimesis is understood to be a quintessentially direct form of mimesis. Spencer allies himself with the argument for direct motivations in his recourse to the law of reflex action, which grounds unmediated transmissions of emotion through voice, or when he describes Saxon English as superior to other languages by virtue of its brevity, which he believes mimics the conciseness of thought in a metaphorical way (1884 [1852], 11–​13). Some theorists of sound symbolism treat the origins of language as a lost linguistic paradise, degraded by centuries of culture. Spencer differently believes the path to ideal forms of language and music is forward; for him, progress is not just desirable but inevitable. On this point, he makes no concessions: “The current conception [of progress] is a teleological one” (1881 [1857], 233). Treating progress not just as desirable but teleological, he then finds evidence of progress in the musical choices of European composers and the word choices of Anglo-​Saxon Englishmen. By elevating his own aesthetic preferences to the pinnacle of evolutionary advance, Spencer serves as a key example of the use of sound symbolism to naturalize a given set of aesthetic ideals as biological truths. How voices express concepts, emotions, ideas, moods, or intentions is a puzzle that remains unsolved. Plato explored the question in Cratylus. Ferdinand De Saussure famously argued against the idea of natural connections between signifier and signified when he theorized the arbitrariness of the sign (1959 [1916]). American philosopher Suzanne Langer hypothesized that vocal acts were not “purposive” in their origins, but rather “autistic, spontaneous acts of self-​enlargement” (1967, 122). In recent music studies, theories of mimesis have offered significant contributions to our

Sound Symbolism  79 understandings of music perception (see for instance Cox 2001; 2011; 2016). Spencer is an important figure in the history of these ideas. His theory of music is rooted in the idea that language and music are closely connected, and that both find their origins in sound symbolism. There is much more to be uncovered in closely reading Spencer and his place in histories of sound symbolism. To accomplish just this, I want to turn to more recent evolutionary theories of music. How do present-​day theorists grapple with concepts of voice, emotion, sound symbolism, and subjectivity? I will be mainly exploring these terms as they appear in Gary Tomlinson’s account of music-​evolutionary origins (2015; 2016; 2018). I bring insights drawn from a long historical survey to bear on Tomlinson’s work, as well as recent turns to voice in music studies to demonstrate how Tomlinson carves a path around the problems of sound symbolism.

Evolutionary Voices and Nonlinear Histories Scholars associated with the “vocal turn” in music studies have tended to speak about the voice as something in between. The voice’s force is said to reside in its contingency and abstraction; its slippery relation to representation; and its role in the circulation of interstitial things like affect, identity, and difference: “voice is nothing if not relational, always situated at boundaries” (Feldman, 2015, 658).15 Theorists of evolution have long shared with music scholars this conception of voice as a mediate entity, something that muddies distinctions between nature and culture, human and animal, language and music. One recent and significant evolutionary theory of voice as a mediate entity appears in Gary Tomlinson’s account of music’s evolutionary origins, which has been called the “state of the art” of the field (van der Schyff & Schiavio

15 In the quoted passage, Martha Feldman is describing what is shared, conceptually, between the five contributors to a 2015 JAMS Colloquy “Why Voice Now?” It is contributor Brian Kane (671) who refers specifically to a “vocal turn” in the humanities, on the way toward a new philosophical-​ psychoanalytic method for analyzing vocal meaning. An alternate summary of the field is given by Emily Dolan to Opera Quarterly (2017), emphasizing the interdisciplinarity and rapid growth of voice studies: “A complete accounting of voice-​centered work from even the past five years is impossible here; this issue . . . adds to a seemingly indefatigable chorus” (203). See also Nina Sun Eidsheim’s Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice (2015), in which Eidsheim radically re-​envisions the concept of “music” by thematizing material vibration, and Matthew D. Morrison’s “Race, Blacksound, and the (Re)Making of Musicological Discourse” (2019), where Morrison figures the co-​optation of the Black voice as blacksound, a sonic form of blackface.

80  Theorizing Music Evolution 2017, 2). Tomlinson identifies the voice as an important means by which ancient hominins negotiated their environments and others, as well as an important philosophical problem in and of itself. Tomlinson’s work presumes to establish the central role of vocality in the emergence of modern music and language. Further, it offers a framework for rethinking the role of the voice in subject formation and communication and brings this to bear on the voice’s presumed power to enact and disrupt meaning. Tomlinson shows awareness of the risks of theorizing the origins of music from within musicology. Consider, for instance, his response to a central question within evolutionary musicology: does music play an active role in human evolution, or is it a cultural invention without adaptive function? To say that music does play an active role in human evolution is to align oneself with the adaptationist tradition, which seeks to explain how music helps humans to survive and reproduce, or is otherwise biologically essential to our understandings of “the modern human.” Nonadaptationism, on the other hand, sees music as superfluous, unnecessary for survival, even decadent; in Steven Pinker’s (1997) words, music is “auditory cheesecake” (534).16 Tomlinson, however, rejects both positions. In place of the adaptationist/​ nonadaptationist distinction, he develops a biocultural approach that treats musical behaviors as emergent properties of embodied interactions with an ever-​changing sociomaterial environment. Drawing on recent evolutionary biology, he demonstrates that the question “is music essential to humans?” is reductive, both in its conception of music and its conception of human evolution. For Tomlinson, the story of music’s origins cannot simply be the story of music. It is, rather, the story of the acquisition of various cognitive competencies within the hominin line that have come to define both human modernity and modern musicality: mimesis, joint attention, entrainment, and recursive mind-​reading.17 Although Tomlinson structures his ideas as a historical narrative, he notes that it is misleading to think of these cognitive competencies as developing teleologically or even linearly. Relying on

16 It is worth noting that Pinker appears to have changed his position from that of a nonadaptationist to that of an adaptationist (see Mehr et al. 2019). Pinker’s change of position supports my assertion that there is a nondistinction between the two positions (see my c­ hapter 4). 17 Cf. Tomlinson (2015, esp. 15–​22). Tomlinson uses the term “entrainment” in two different senses. First, he means the musical concept of entrainment, or synchronization with an external pulse. Second, he means entrainment as it is conceived by complex systems theory to describe assemblages of systems of matter (see p. 309).

Sound Symbolism  81 dynamic systems theory, Tomlinson tracks the gradual, incremental, and nonlinear materialization of hominin cognition and its aggregation with patterns of sociality and communication, out of which modern music and language “fell out, as belated emergences” (2015, 12).18 Tomlinson sets the scene long before the known origins of music, with the invention of Acheulean bifaces—​prehistoric stone implements flaked on both sides. The process of creating and using such tools was bound up with rudimentary vocal and gestural communication, or “gesture-​calls.” As Tomlinson explains, gesture-​calls are the spontaneous vocalizations or physical gestures produced alongside “emotion” and “intention” (see esp. 106–​112). Gesture-​calls developed prior to recognizable agency, which means they rely on co-​present, face-​to-​face interactions. Tomlinson’s conception of the nonagential invention of Acheulean bifaces, and the role of nonagential vocalic and gestural communication to that process of invention, implies a “technosociality.” Technosociality is the crucial binding of the technological and the social, the idea that technology is shaped by a matrix of social interactions, which are in turn shaped by technology. The philosopher Bernard Stiegler (1998)—​an important influence on Tomlinson—​ encapsulates the concept of technosociality in two questions: Who or what does the inventing? And, who or what is invented?19 For Tomlinson this launches a Derridean line of inquiry into ideas about the material transmission of information and the emergence of the inscribed sign (the grammè). I will say more about Tomlinson’s Derridean detour in a moment. Tomlinson holds that the origins of music are twofold: “Musicking was always technological” and “[m]‌ usicking was always social” (2015, 48). He begins his account a million years ago with flaked stone implements (again, Acheulean bifaces) discovered in the French town of Saint-​Acheul, describing the social and mental actions that facilitated their manufacture. Technosociality serves as the horizon of ancient hominin existence. Following pioneering archeologists like Clive Gamble, Ian Davison, and William Noble, Tomlinson argues that at the time when these tools were invented, a recognizable human agency was absent. This implies that early

18 Tomlinson’s account is not teleological, inspired in part by Darwin’s model of evolutionary contingency: the sense that biocultural life moves toward nothing, has no end game, no cosmic ambition, and no finale. 19 These questions are from Stiegler’s (1998, esp. 134–​79) chapter “Who? What? The Invention of the Human,” a source of inspiration for Tomlinson.

82  Theorizing Music Evolution hominins created sophisticated tools “without planning to do so” (51), using “gestural sequences,” absent of reference, implication, or logical form. In other words, stone tools were not the products of action plans or mental templates. Rather, they emerged from the imbrication of available materials and patterns of sociality, and they simultaneously influenced the hands and minds of the beings that facilitated their creation. In Acheulean toolmaking we discover our ancient hominin ancestors shaping and being shaped by the “rhythms of their techne” (Tomlinson 2015, 87). In describing the inherent connection between matter and sociality, Tomlinson makes use of Leroi-​Gourhan’s (1993) notion of the chaîne opératoire (operational chain). The chaîne opératoire is a “succession of gestures” where the social and material formed an aggregate; “from their meeting a stone tool emerged” (Tomlinson 2015, 63). Take special note of the choice of language: “a stone tool emerged.” The passive voice is a feature of this theory, and the means by which Tomlinson stylizes the nonteleological play of ancient hominins. With Leroi-​Gourhan, Tomlinson imagines a means of manufacture “without planning, foresight, or mental image of the product to come” (86). Tomlinson links this idea to Derrida, who argued that by going beyond “intentional consciousness,” the grammè appears according to a new structure of nonpresence (64). This Derridean response to Leroi-​Gourhan discovers the emergence of the sign absent of recognizable agency. In its place is what Tomlinson terms an “earliest poiesis” that relies on “no mode of abstraction, no cognitive distance, no knowing craftsman; it was poiesis from the bottom up” (87). Tomlinson follows Stiegler in drawing on Leroi-​Gourhan’s universal technical tendency to theorize the coevolution of technological development (technogenesis) and biological and social developments (anthropogenesis). Tomlinson criticizes Stiegler, however, for using his discussion of the integration of technological being and biosocial being to “turn from Derridean possibilities beyond ‘intentional consciousness’ . . . back to a Heideggerian model in which technology as poiesis is founded in an anticipation or foresight arising with the temporality of Dasein” (Tomlinson 2015, 86). Stiegler’s figuration of the early hominin strikes Tomlinson as too agential and therefore too modern. In opposition to Stiegler, he seeks to describe the “nearly imponderable” idea of an early hominin technological tradition “that knows little self-​ possession and no gathering-​ together-​ in-​ advance, that results in products but does not thereby realize a future” (87). While Stiegler aims to demonstrate how early hominins represented the unconcealing of a Heideggerian Dasein, Tomlinson centralizes a Derridean notion of

Sound Symbolism  83 nonpresence. Nonpresence enables Tomlinson to imagine a technological era prior to the two imagined by Heidegger, an era defined by “pre-​sapient, primordial, nonhuman Dasein” (88). Nonpresence is what yields “Acheulean possibilities” (poiesis, entrained operational sequences, mimetic traditions, etc.), which emerge in the absence of recognizable human consciousness, representation, or rational planning. What does all of this have to do with the sound symbolism, the main subject of our Spencerian reading? Tomlinson’s model of Acheulean life incorporates a rudimentary mode of communication, within which we may discover how Tomlinson treats the matter. “Gesture-​calls,” for Tomlinson, are basic, physical, and vocalic means of communicating emotion and intent. Like tool-​ making, voice-​ making was a technosocial phenomenon: “[voice] was a construction” (2015, 89). Closely related to gesture-​calls is “protodiscourse”: “the negotiation of intersubjectivity through vocalization and gesture but without language” (17). Protodiscourse is a fraught area of research; Tomlinson’s thinking is unique for its de-​emphasis on lexical language. He explicitly critiques the scientific tradition that positions language’s presumed logic and clarity as the key to, if not the telos of, human modernity.20 Indeed, a key motivation behind Tomlinson’s research is the need for a broader approach to early-​hominin vocalization than the “post-​ Chomskyan generative-​ grammar linguocentrism,” or “syntactocentrism” (106) that dominates thought about the origins of human communication. Tomlinson’s account tracks a parallel trajectory for music and language, but unseats language from its place of conceptual privilege, with the audacious goal of securing music’s role in the emergence of human modernity. Notably, even as he navigates away from a linguocentric model of protodiscourse, he does not offer a music-​centric model in its place. He warns that fantasies of a “protomusic”—​like those of a “protolanguage”—​lead to “fruitless teleology” of the sort presumed by Vico, Rousseau, or Darwin. Voice is an important element of Tomlinson’s approach to the music–​ language relationship, and his descriptions of it add up to a distinct approach to subjectivity. He simultaneously rejects linguocentrism and foregrounds the role of a Derridean notion of nonpresence within ancient vocal 20 For Tomlinson (2015), “questions of the nature of protolanguage have too often been limited by a unilateral teleology. They have tended to look back from the single vantage of modern language . . . they have reflected the emphases of post-​Chomskyan linguistics and the disciplinary allegiances of those who have stepped into the protolanguage arena, mostly linguistics and language cognitivists” (90).

84  Theorizing Music Evolution communication. By doing both, Tomlinson provides an implicit response to Derrida’s ideas about voice and presence, as articulated in his critique of Husserl’s theory of the subject. For Husserl, the subject is animated by the act of silently speaking to oneself. Husserl proposes a compulsory connection between voice and logos to justify a sense of self-​presence that Derrida would in turn deconstruct. Musicologists have noted the challenge of turning to the voice without also returning to the metaphysics of presence—​Brian Kane (2015) dubs this the vocal turn’s “Derridean impasse” (672). Husserl’s vision of a high-​fidelity voice-​to-​ear circuit yields an autonomous and integral subject, known fully to itself, by itself. Derrida critiques Husserl’s idealization of the voice and his assertion of (in Tomlinson’s words) “the unity of thought and voice in the logos,” arguing that the “privilege of being cannot resist the deconstruction of the word” (Tomlinson 2015, 64). In other words, when the subject speaks, it still hears itself as if it were other. There is a self-​other division contained within the subject’s voicing and auditing of itself. And within that self-​other division, deconstruction begins. Tomlinson’s evolutionary theory of voice avoids the Derridean impasse, in which the voice becomes the guarantor of subjectivity, in two ways: 1. It refuses to reduce voice to logos. 2. It does not fasten the voice to presence. Furthermore, it does not rely on familiar strategies for avoiding the metaphysics of presence, by say, figuring the voice as an index of material uniqueness, as thinkers like Adriana Cavarero do, or figuring voice as a failure to guarantee presence, as in the Lacanian tradition.21 Though Tomlinson does not explicitly describe his project as a response to Derrida, or psychoanalysis, he employs Derridean resources to point beyond the capacity of intentional consciousness for ancient technological activity and to imagine an ancient poiesis with “no mode of abstraction, no cognitive distance, no knowing craftsman” (2015, 88). This “accidental poiesis” stands outside Heidegger’s figuration of two technological eras, and apart from metaphysics as such. Tomlinson moves toward “the original and non-​empirical space of nonfoundation” described by Derrida (1999 [1967]) as the undercurrent beneath presence, that is, toward “the irreducible emptiness from



21 See Cavarero (2005) and Dolar (2006).

Sound Symbolism  85 which the security of presence in the metaphysical form of ideality is decided and from which this security removes itself ” (6). To summarize: Tomlinson’s strategy assumes the voice was never a site of presence, but also does not figure the voice as a kind of gap or lack. Rather, Tomlinson’s evolutionary voice functions as a tool for testing environmental and social affordances in the absence of recognizable agency. In this sense, the voice is an expression of the “universal technical tendency,” an asubjective technologic that invents and is invented by the vocalizing body’s contact with its material surroundings. By comparison, sound symbolism is too one-​dimensional a concept to account for the above, thus it would have little use to Tomlinson. Musicologists have already begun to put Tomlinson’s thinking to work. Carolyn Abbate (2016), for instance, makes use of Tomlinson’s figuration of technosociality as a means to conceive of musical instruments as prostheses. In Abbate, musical instruments are not mere things to be “put to use.” They are also agents that actively shape the cognition and corporeality of their “users.” In other words, musical instruments are users (Abbate 2016, 804). Tomlinson actually went further than Abbate. Tomlinson writes: [T]‌his early hominin voice was not merely an innate one, elicited by external stimuli in preprogrammed ways and involving little voluntary control and social complexity. Instead, it had already begun to shift along the biosocial spectrum toward modest voluntary control and social complexity. It was a construction molded [. . .] by encounters with others amid the materials, dangers, and rewards of the environment. (2015, 89)

In other words, the voice itself might have emerged as a kind of prosthesis.22 Present-​day scholars of music’s evolutionary origins are well aware that the archaeological record carries limited material traces of ancient music. There is little proof of music’s evolution in a strong sense: as put by Honing and colleagues (2015), “[f]‌or the moment, at least, definitive conclusions about the prehistory and origins of music cannot be formulated” (2). But for Tomlinson, speculation about the origins of music is about more than music—​ it is about understanding our sociobiological circumstances, of which music is an emergent property. For Stiegler (1998), following Derrida, we are driven to interrogate the birth of the human because we have

22 Jonathan De Souza (2014) makes a similar argument.

86  Theorizing Music Evolution “unceasingly . . . questioned its end” (135). The matter of ends leaks into the margins of Tomlinson’s thought as well: The cosmos may be destined to wind down to a point of maximum entropy and to an unarticulated dispersion of matter/​energy. It seems probable, however, that the systems and histories that are maintaining it far from that point across billions of years cannot all be explained by linear thermodynamics alone. The systems that present the brightest evidence of this are living ones, the histories evolutionary and—​at a late, incandescent moment—​cultural ones. (2015, 298)

Tomlinson thus imagines the inevitable end of the cosmos delayed by systems of culture. At this moment—​Tomlinson at his most apocalyptic—​he raises the banner of humanism once again. Indeed, he hopes readers of his work will find “humanism redeemed” (347). Even as he dismantles the place of the human at the center of musicking, Tomlinson evinces a wistful commitment to the same cultural traditions whose subjectivity he has just evacuated. There remains, then, only the call and response of interlocking systems, a “voice” that emanates not from someone or something but from everywhere.

4 The Darwinian Musical Hypothesis Consider a study published in the British Royal Society’s flagship biological research journal, titled “Menstrual Cycle Phase Alters Women’s Sexual Preference for Composers of More Complex Music” (Charlton 2014). The study set out to test Darwin’s idea that music plays a role in sexual selection. The protocol was as follows. Women participants (n =​1,465) began by recording the dates of their most recent menstrual cycles. Next, they listened to pairs of melodies and indicated which sounded more complex. In a second experiment, participants again listened to pairs of melodies, but this time were asked to indicate which composer they would like to have for (a) a “short-​term sexual partner,” or (b) a “long-​term partner in a committed relationship” (2014, 2). Based on their responses, the study concluded that women “have sexual preferences for composers of more complex music during peak conception times, but not outside this time,” which is said to imply that women are attracted to indicators of genetic quality in potential sex partners during the most fertile time of the month (4). The author claims to confirm Darwin’s suggestion that music plays an evolutionary role in sexual reproduction. This study has many problems, from its basement-​level standard of evidence; to its outmoded treatments of gender, sex, creativity, and attraction; to its sketchy ideas about “good genes”—​problems fortified by the author’s overly literal reading of Darwin on music. In texts such as The Descent of Man (1871) and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Darwin claimed that music played a role in ancient scenes of mate selection and procreation. Having observed that certain animals cry out to one another during mating season, and having extrapolated such behaviors to early humans, Darwin postulated a prelinguistic origin and an erotic function for music. In the vocabulary of present-​day evolutionary musicology, Darwin offered the premiere “adaptationist” account of music by arguing that music had an adaptive role in the survival and flourishing of the species.1 The above 1 See Patel (2010, particularly 98).

Theorizing Music Evolution. Miriam Piilonen, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2024. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197695289.003.0005

88  Theorizing Music Evolution study (“Menstrual Cycle Phase . . .”) is an especially extreme interpretation of Darwin’s original hypothesis. Having extracted from Darwin an aggressively mechanical relationship between music and sexuality, where music serves as a kind of primal machine for churning out DNA and where “complexity” is the mark of fitness (i.e., sexual attractiveness to women), “Menstrual Cycle Phase” leverages its participants’ aesthetic preferences as evidence of an evolutionary scale of biological causality. The above study is not unique. Many others have recently returned to Darwin’s claim that music plays a role in sexual selection—​what I call the Darwinian musical hypothesis—​ to authorize similarly unscientific research programs. Consider a second example. In an essay titled “Evolution of Human Music through Sexual Selection” (2000), evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller suggested that Jimi Hendrix’s promiscuous lifestyle evidences the “Darwinian” view that “music evolved as sexually selected courtship displays”: [Hendrix had] sexual liaisons with hundreds of groupies . . . and fathered at least three children in the United States, Germany, and Sweden. Under ancestral conditions before birth control, he would have fathered many more. Hendrix’s genes for musical talent probably doubled their frequency in a single generation through the power of attracting opposite-​sex admirers. As Darwin realized, music’s aesthetic and emotional power . . . points to a sexual selection origin where too much is never enough. Our ancestral hominid-​Hendrixes could never say, “OK, our music’s good enough, we can stop now,” because they were competing with all the hominid–​Eric Claptons, hominid–​Jerry Garcias, and hominid–​John Lennons. (2000, 331)

In this passage, Miller equates modern-​ day celebrity culture with the foundations of music, while shoring up an outdated notion that virile masculine artistry is preordained by biology as an expression of instinct and nature. Despite its problems, Miller’s essay continues to be cited favorably. It has been cited 591 times as of January 12, 2023. The passage quoted above is presented as positive evidence in trade books such as Robert C. Brooks’s Sex, Genes and Rock ’n’ Roll: How Evolution Has Shaped the Modern World (2011, 271) and David Williams’s The Trickster Brain: Neuroscience, Evolution, and Narrative (2012, 83–​84). If an appeal to Darwin can lessen the demand for evidence needed to support sketchy arguments like these, it is worth returning to

The Darwinian Musical Hypothesis  89 Darwin’s musical writings in order to better understand better why Darwin is not a reliable authority on music. In this chapter, I contend that the task is not to ignore the biological sciences, nor to make shallow observations about modern music based on romanticizations of evolutionary research, nor to conduct ahistorical positivist studies of crude linkages between ovulation and musical complexity. Rather we should engage the Darwinian musical hypothesis critically and historically, with an eye toward disrupting and intervening in these questions as they occur in the present. Returning to Darwin’s writings on music will enable us to clarify what he really said and how it has been interpreted and misinterpreted. To that end, I offer a critical reading of Darwin’s musical ideas that highlights what is historically significant about them, as well as why he may not be the most useful authority on the subject. I also speculate about why the Darwinian musical hypothesis has become newly interesting to contemporary researchers. My sense is that these ideas are being maintained in part because of a specific blend of ideologies about what music is, how music functions, and who makes and listens to music at a “high level.” Detailing the history and conceptual commitments of the Darwinian musical hypothesis in these terms can help us better understand why such logics can be limiting, as well as why they continue to capture the imaginations of a small but visible group of musical thinkers. Darwin’s ideas about music and sexual selection have been read as persuasive because they appear to explain the usefulness of apparently useless traits, helping to reinforce a utilitarian ontology of music. Wanting to avoid the utilitarianism that confines what I call strict readings of the Darwinian musical hypothesis (à la Charlton or Miller), this chapter concludes with a gesture toward properly contextualized interpretations of Darwin’s ideas, while also thinking critically about the return of Darwin’s music theory under the banner of adaptationism.

What Is the Darwinian Musical Hypothesis? When Darwin noted the musicality of certain natural sounds—​tuneful chirps of birds, harmonious thrums of insects, melodic squeaks of mice—​ it was to explain the ways that sonic expressions help to coordinate the social lives of animals in a general sense. As we have seen, music was never his

90  Theorizing Music Evolution main focus.2 Despite his hesitations about theorizing music, he nevertheless offered a tentative account of musical origins across several texts that adds up to a theory of music in the mating practices of various species, including “Man.” The details of Darwin’s theory of music are principally outlined in The Descent of Man (1871) and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), as well as early notebooks. In this section, when I refer to a Darwinian musical hypothesis, I am referring to Darwin’s general idea that music plays a role in species propagation. What that role is, or was, however, was never precisely clear in Darwin’s pen, as we will see. In Descent, Darwin states his hypothesis as such: “Although the sounds emitted by animals of all kinds serve many purposes, a strong case can be made out, that the vocal organs were primarily used and perfected in relation to the propagation of the species” (1871, vol. 2, 330). As with Herbert Spencer, Darwin takes vocal expression to be the ground of music. Here Darwin is not just theorizing about vocal sounds but also about emotions. When contemporary musicians and impassioned speakers arouse their audience member’s emotions, Darwin suggests, they use “the same means by which, at an extremely remote period, his half-​human ancestors aroused each other’s ardent passions” (337). Music, for Darwin, taps into an ancient affective wellspring born of a basic biological equivalence between humans and animals. By extension, part of the Darwinian musical hypothesis is that music continues to evoke shades of a primal emotionality. For Darwin, sonorous utterances are audible manifestations of strong feelings. This idea he gleaned from Spencer. Differently from Spencer, however, Darwin conceives the sonic cries of animals as constitutive of an unconscious proto-​language. Darwin’s ideas about music may be summarized in three theses: 1. Music is an evolutionary precursor to language. 2. Music is inherently tied to prelinguistic forms of communication, including gestural communication. 3. Music served early humans as a tool for organizing their social scenes, and for the more specific goal of attracting opposite sex mates. These add up to a theory of emotive carnality, wherein expressive sounds evoke primal feelings below the level of concrete language. 2 See my c­ hapter 2 for discussion of Darwin’s hesitations about discussing music.

The Darwinian Musical Hypothesis  91 Vocal song has a special place in this hypothesis, specifically in Darwin’s discussions of how early humans and certain animal species conducted their interpersonal affairs. For him, music long ago served as a site of courtship and romantic affection; thus, “musical tones became firmly associated with some of the strongest passions an animal is capable of feeling” (vol. 2, 336, fn. 33). For Darwin, the musical qualities of so-​called primitive sonic expressions (animal cries, certain kinds of songs) are themselves evidence of a primal role for music in sexual selection. Music is particularly well-​suited to scenes of amorous delight, he suggests, because music “affects every emotion, but does not by itself excite in us the more terrible emotions of horror, rage, &c” instead awakening “the gentler feelings of tenderness and love, which readily pass into devotion.” He continues: “It likewise stirs up in us the sensation of triumph and the glorious ardour for war. These powerful and mingled feelings may well give rise to the sense of sublimity” (1871, vol. 2, 335). What he calls the “sublime” in music is a concoction of sweetness and obsession, glory and desire, delicacy and control, which powerfully communicates a musical sense both awe-​inspiring and tinged with carnality. Darwin anticipated that Victorian readers would not accept such a carnal explanation for what was often considered a polite pastime.3 Instead, he emphasizes the “vague and indefinite manner” in which music evokes such primal eroticism. A representative passage: [M]‌usical tones and rhythms were used by the half-​human progenitors of man, during the season of courtship, when animals of all kinds are excited by the strongest passions. In this case, from the deeply-​laid principle of inherited associations, musical tones in this case would be likely to excite in us, in a vague and indefinite manner, the strong emotions of a long-​past age. . . . The impassioned orator, bard, or musician, when with his varied tones and cadences he excites the strongest emotions in his hearers, little suspects that he uses the same means by which his half-​human ancestors long ago aroused each other’s ardent passions, during their courtship and rivalry. (1871, vol. 2, 336–​37)

3 In Edmund Gurney’s Darwinian music theory, he too worries that his reader will find the sexual selection hypothesis to be “derogatory to Music” and carefully explains why it should not be seen as such (1880, 121).

92  Theorizing Music Evolution In Darwin’s formulation, the early ancestors of humans used musical sounds for the purposes of charming potential mates; however, the modern listener “little suspects” the connection to ancient courtship practices. Beyond simply easing his readers’ potential discomforts, such a passage helps shore up an animalistic nature for music. By locating music’s purpose in more general principles of animal sociality, Darwin reinforces his broader sense of a fundamental continuity between humans and animals, as a means to disrupt notions of divinely created or autonomous human nature. Indeed, for Darwin, “The perception, if not the enjoyment, of musical cadences and of rhythm is probably common to all animals, and no doubt depends on the common physiological nature of their nervous systems” (1871, vol. 2, 333). Such a universalizing gesture—​not just a universe of humans but all creatures with a nervous system—​sets the stage for an account of sexual selection that belies a decidedly Victorian attitude toward “the sexes.” In the same passage quoted above, where I have placed an ellipsis, Darwin included a brief meditation on sexual differences in the vocal abilities of early humans: [T]‌he suspicion does not appear improbable that the progenitors of man, either the males or the females, or both sexes, before they had acquired the power of expressing their mutual love in articulate language, endeavored to charm each other with musical notes and rhythm. So little is known about the use of the voice by the Quadrumana during the season of love, that we have hardly any means of judging whether the habit of singing was first acquired by the male or female progenitors of mankind. Women are generally thought to possess sweeter voices than men, and as far as this serves as any guide we may infer that they first acquired musical powers in order to attract the other sex. But if so, this must have occurred long ago, before the progenitors of man had become sufficiently human to treat and value their women merely as useful slaves. (1871, vol. 2, 337)

It is a banal fact that Darwin, throughout his writings, outlined a sexist account of the human species.4 An important dimension of his theory of sexual selection—​which is key to his theory of music—​is the idea of a strict sexual dimorphism whereby superior traits are passed only between male members 4 See Female of the Species (1975), where M. Kay Martin and Barbara Voorhies locate Darwin’s ideas about gender and sex within a longer anthropological tradition of theorizing about the so-​ called fundamental nature of the sexes (1975, 147–​49).

The Darwinian Musical Hypothesis  93 of the species. Furthermore, in Descent he advanced the position that morality is what separates the human species from animals and proposed that the regulation of sexuality is a crucial feature therein. By his account, controlling human sexuality, particularly male sexual jealousy and violence, was key to the rise of marriage, which was itself (he claims) a means of maintaining the so-​called proper hierarchy of the sexes, wherein women are reduced to property in the interest of making society more civil. Such ideas represent an especially potent form of scientific sexism, which benefited from and contributed in innumerable ways to the oppression of all genders, especially marginalized ones, in Victorian society. It did not take long for Darwin’s ideas about sexual selection to be criticized. Alfred Russel Wallace, one of Darwin’s most important collaborators, was repeatedly critical of sexual selection. For instance in 1889, Wallace write, “[F]‌emale birds may be charmed or excited by the fine display of plumage by the males; but there is no proof whatever that slight differences in that display have any effect in determining their choice of a partner” (286–​87). In 1875, an American scientist and Protestant minister Antoinette Brown Blackwell criticized Darwin’s theory of evolution for reinforcing a “time-​ honored assumption that the male is the normal type of his species” (122).5 In her book The Sexes throughout Nature (1875), she questions Darwin and Spencer—​the premiere evolutionists—​for offering male-​centric accounts of nature, which she believed reinforced the general perception that women are inferior to men. “The facts of Evolution may have been misinterpreted, by giving undue prominence to such as having been evolved in the male line; and by overlooking equally essential modifications which have arisen in the diverging female line” (20). By Blackwell’s charge, the matter is not just a cosmological one but a social and political one. She explains that the exclusion of women from the study of science was one reason why scientific luminaries such as Darwin and Spencer were free to infer that masculine traits were superior to feminine ones, and that natural selection favors the passage of traits between males. Let us take a detour into Blackwell’s critique of Darwin in order to gain a sense for how his contemporaries were responding to him in the moment. 5 Blackwell’s critique is leveraged equally at Darwin and Herbert Spencer, whom she saw as the two most influential theorists of evolution. She writes, “When, therefore, Mr. Spencer argues that women are inferior to men because their development must be earlier arrested by reproductive functions, and Mr. Darwin claims that males have evolved muscles and brains much superior to females, and entailed their pre-​eminent qualities chiefly on their male descendants, these conclusions need not be accepted without question, even by their own school of evolutionists” (1875, 14).

94  Theorizing Music Evolution

Antoinette Brown Blackwell’s Feminist Critique of Darwin Blackwell’s critique targets Darwin’s beliefs about the place of sex in evolution, reflecting her unique position as an educated American woman. Blackwell was a prominent abolitionist, proponent of women’s rights, and the first woman Protestant minister to be ordained in the United States. In The Sexes throughout Nature (1875), she targets Darwin’s claim that “males have evolved muscle and brains much superior to females” (14), which she notes implies a preoccupation with so-​called male traits and a presumption of their innate advantage. She writes, “With great wealth of detail, [Darwin] has illustrated his theory of how the male has probably acquired additional masculine characters; but he seems never to have thought of looking to see whether or not the females have developed equivalent feminine characters” (16). In an extended passage, she laments the repetitiveness of Darwin’s elevation of the male type of every species: Mr. Darwin’s theory of Sexual Selection supposes that a male superiority has been evolved in the male line, and entailed chiefly to the male descendants. The females, sometimes, inherit characters originally acquired by the males; but this form of evolution is carried forward principally from father to son, from variety to variety, and from species to species, beginning with the lowest unisexual beings and continuing upwards to man. With a few inconsiderable exceptions, the more active progressive male bears off the palm, among all higher animals in size, and among all animals high and low, in development of muscles, in ornamentation, in general brightness and beauty, in strength of feeling, and in vigor of intellect. Weighed, measured, or calculated, the masculine force always predominates. (18)

In Blackwell’s view, the tendency to address all of nature “from the male standpoint” was inherited from older models of human physiology, where it was presumed that “the male is the representative type of the species—​the female a modification preordained in the interest of reproduction, and in that interest only or chiefly” (17). With her charge against Darwin, then, she also implicitly takes aim at an Adamic origin story in which Eve is taken to be a modification of her male counterpart, created from his rib. Blackwell did not deny evolution. Indeed, she wielded her authority as a religious leader to argue in favor of evolution, just as she did in her advocacy

The Darwinian Musical Hypothesis  95 for the rights of woman and the abolition of slavery. With her book The Sexes throughout Nature, she offered an original reading of evolutionary science that affirms the equity of the sexes and establishes the positive powers of feminine traits. She also argues that masculine and feminine forces are found in all creatures, and thus departs from views of sex as something inherently about physiological differences. Let us go deeper. Blackwell’s rereading of evolutionary theory begins with a system of “natural checks” that work to maintain equilibrium between the sexes. “[A]‌s a whole, the males and females of the same species, from mollusk up to man, may continue their related evolution, as true equivalents in all modes of force, physical and psychical,” Blackwell writes (1875, 21–​22). Masculine and feminine traits are not strictly differences in form, in her account, but differences in function. “Division of function,” she writes, “is the origin of sex” (46). Men and women “are evolved not in parallel but in adapted diverging lines” (25). The balance between the sexes is not just biological but cosmological: “The universal law of balanced action and reaction dominates all aggregates, inorganic and organic alike. No tension could be established otherwise, no two atoms could enter into combination. Without this balance of forces, a mass or aggregate of any kind would be impossible” (35). Blackwell affirms infinite balance in the vocabulary of her own religious faith: “But that all this has been accomplished without intelligent plan or prevision, certainly is not a theory essential to the hypothesis of Evolution. . . . Nowhere is there higher evidence of Design, and of the existence of a true sentient force co-​ operative in every organism” (62). At the same time, she follows Spencer’s lead in departing from the discourse of the soul, arguing like he does for a physiological basis for thought: “[I]n organized life, motion and emotion are but two phases of the same process” (66). There is one case in which Blackwell departs from her own insistence on the equivalence of the sexes. A sense of cosmic imbalance between male and female emerges in a passage where Blackwell is discussing species with more than one sex. Although she reiterates that equilibrium between the sexes is guaranteed by evolutionary principles, she nevertheless describes a progressive force of evolution itself that is a product of feminine technicity. The “division of functions” that distinguishes the two sexes may be the result of “the addition of exclusively female characters” (1875, 28). In this sense, the special exponent force of femininity adds something, a progressive force. This force serves as the evolutionary engine of sex differences, in Blackwell. For her, the divergence between male and female is not the result of an

96  Theorizing Music Evolution essentialized patriarchal ascendance, or suppression of women, but rather by virtue of a feminine supplement. As examples, she credits female insects with innovating the practice of laying eggs near a food source; she cites the mother bird for ingeniously contributing her own body heat to the growth of her chicks; and female mammals for feeding their young directly from their own bodies. “The male never affords direct nurture to offspring; the female always affords direct nurture to offspring,” (29). Femininity leads to innovation all the time, in Blackwell. But ultimately for her, neither male nor female functionality is superior to the other. Any functional differences are rooted in a fundamental unity of opposing energies, which are found in every creature, sexed or not: “the feminine and masculine, with their opposed tensions and polarities of forces, are combined in every organism” (43). This cosmic tension exists all the way down to the cellular level: “Every cell is a little organism, like every other of its own type” (44). Blackwell reminds her reader that a theory of evolution is nothing without facts drawn from natural history. Combining Spencer’s concept of “moving equilibrium” with her own studies in natural history, she argues that the material world tends toward states of balanced differentiation. “Applied to sex, as to species, ‘variation is necessitated by the persistence of force’ ” (1875, 32 and 43)—​in this passage she quotes Spencer directly and thus transfigures his words into her own scientific statement about male and female equity. She similarly appropriates Darwin’s extended comparisons of secondary sexual characters toward her own table of equations representing the equilibrium of the sexes in various species. In her “Tabular View of Equations in Organic Nature” she rearranged Darwin’s male-​centered data into a comprehensive demonstration of the balance between the sexes. In her description, this table helps to reset the balance between the sexes that is so often misrepresented in evolutionary writings. “Fixing attention, as [Darwin] does, upon masculine characters only, there seems to be no equilibrium of sex; but, holding the feminine characters up beside the others in a balanced view, the equilibrium is restored” (59). Figures 4.1–​4.3 depict examples of her tablature of traits (55–​58). Blackwell’s political goal in rereading evolutionary science through the lens of feminine traits was ultimately meant to serve her broader mission of securing increased respect and rights for women (as the category was understood at the time). She warned readers that thinkers like Darwin and Spencer “are now scientifically remanding Woman to a position of permanent mental inferiority” (1875, 185), and each in their own distinct ways: “Mr. Spencer

The Darwinian Musical Hypothesis  97

Figure 4.1  Antoinette Blackwell’s “Tabular View of Equations in Organic Nature” (1875, 55)

scientifically subtracts from the female, and Mr. Darwin as scientifically adds to the male” (18–​19). This bias has consequences for every aspect of women’s lives, Blackwell writes. In her chapter “Sex and Work” she worries about the effects of a male-​centered metaphysics elevated by evolutionary science: “The world has insisted, and still insists, whenever it attempts an estimate, on measuring the woman’s work directly by the man’s standard. If it falls short according to these, it is allowed no other appreciable merit” (184). Understanding that Darwin’s and Spencer’s evolutionary theories were

98  Theorizing Music Evolution

Figure 4.2  Antoinette Blackwell’s “Tabular View of Equations in Organic Nature,” continued (1875, 56)

helping to set the standard of nature, Blackwell was sure that evolutionary knowledge was having negative ramifications, particularly for the people who were denigrated by those evolutionary accounts. “[T]‌he great underlying cause of all is a false theory that, because women are to be the mothers

The Darwinian Musical Hypothesis  99

Figure 4.3  Antoinette Blackwell’s “Tabular View of Equations in Organic Nature,” continued (1875, 58)

of the race,” Blackwell writes, “therefore they are not to be the thinkers or the pioneers in enterprise. This ancient dogma enfeebles one class of women and degrades the other” (112). Blackwell’s observation—​that the evolutionary value of women’s labor is rendered invisible when it is measured by

100  Theorizing Music Evolution masculine standards—​has a secondary implication for anyone being held to an unfair standard. By remaining busy with work dictated by others, we cannot begin work of our own. Although Blackwell makes almost no mention of voice or music in The Sexes throughout Nature, her critique of Darwin has significant implications for his evolutionary theory of music, which fed directly into his ideas about the place of sexual selection in human evolution. In the next section I want to look more closely at Darwin’s account of music and its position alongside his account of sexual selection.

Problems with Applying Darwin’s Theory of Sexual Selection Sexual selection was formulated by Darwin alongside and in tandem with natural selection, the idea that organisms that are better fit for their environments tend to survive and produce more offspring. Darwin proposed the theory of sexual selection in Origin of Species (1859) and elaborated its applications to human evolution in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871). By distinguishing between natural selection and sexual selection, he worked to account for aspects of life that natural selection appeared not to favor, while arguing that both forms of selection can be involved in evolutionary processes. There are three components of Darwin’s theory of natural selection: (1) variation among individuals, (2) transmission of variance across generations, and (3) competition and selection of certain variants (Darwin 1859). Sexual selection is said to be involved in all of these (Darwin 1871). A significant feature of Darwin’s sexual selection theory is the emphasis he placed on female preference. To be clear, there is nothing feminist about Darwin’s treatment of female preference, which reroutes a narrow band of Victorian sexual politics into a theory about the utility of marriage for controlling male jealousy. Darwin’s writings, rooted as they were in Victorian ideals about gender and sexuality, relied on maximum differentiation between “the sexes.” Consequently, he distinguished between sexual selection mediated by male–​male combat and sexual selection mediated by female preference, an idea later instrumentalized by post-​Darwinian thinkers such as Robert Trivers (1972) to ground a male-​ biased sex ratio, as we will see.

The Darwinian Musical Hypothesis  101 A concept of female preference had been percolating in Darwin’s mind as early as 1844. In an early essay, Darwin described birdsong’s role in male songbirds’ competition for females: “These struggles are generally decided by the law of battle; but in the case of birds, apparently, by the charms of their song, by their beauty or their power of courtship,” he writes.6 For Adam Jones and Nicholas Ratterman, Darwin’s argument for female preference is “one of the largest shortcomings in his treatment of sexual selection,” not necessarily because it belies a sexist view of choosy females and competitive males, but because it gives the impression that animals must employ “a human-​like sense of aesthetics” in order for sexual selection to work (2009, 10002). Jones and Ratterman explain that Darwin went to “great lengths” to argue that certain animals “possess sufficient intelligence to appreciate beauty” (10002), figuring sexual attraction as a kind of aesthetic judgment. Sexual selection continues to be a subject of strenuous debate in the biological sciences. In a comprehensive review of sexual selection theories, a group of researchers sympathetic to sexual selection nevertheless described the terrain of available sexual selection theories as “enormous” and “bewildering”; the only apparent consensus is that “mate choice can evolve by a combination of direct and/​or indirect benefits” (Kokko et al. 2006, 48–​59)—​a consensus so vague as to be difficult to parse. In addition to the conceptual challenges of theorizing sexual selection, there are ethical problems as well. For instance, by drawing on Darwin’s theories of male–​male competition and female choice, scholars have contributed to a dangerous gender ideology. One such gender ideology is a popular, though contested, evolutionist claim about sexual behaviors: that due to differences in investment in parenting, women evolved to be selective with their partners and men evolved to seek out as many partners as possible. Robert Trivers, for one, elaborated this contested claim into a “parental investment theory” (1972) that thematizes the differing parental investments of men and women (men are said to invest less so they are promiscuous, while women are said to invest more so they are choosy) and rationalizes violent sexual behaviors as adaptations. Not all such theories are as ideological, ahistorical, or gender essentialist—​a rare few incorporate insights from gay, lesbian, and transgender theories—​but many are hotbeds of nonsense about the “nature” of human sexuality.7 6 See the “Essay of 1844” in Francis Darwin (ed.), The Foundations of the Origin of Species: Two Essays Written in 1842 and 1844 by Charles Darwin (1909, 92–​93). 7 For additional critical interventions into adaptationist accounts of sexual behavior, see Lloyd (2001), Roughgarden (2013), and Zeedyk (2007).

102  Theorizing Music Evolution The concept of sexual selection becomes even murkier in relation to music. Consider the “Menstrual cycle phase” example by Charlton from the beginning of this chapter. For such a theory of music as-​signal-​of-​ sexual-​fitness to be true, a hypothetical music genotype would need to be associated with a heritable trait. That trait would have had to pass between generations by virtue of its active role in sexual selection. “Males” with this “complex music trait” would have had to reproduce more successfully than those without it because of the presence of that trait, and this would have had to alter the frequency of the complex music trait in the human population over time. Add to the mix the need for “females” to possess an evolved “good mate choice mechanism,” enabling them to choose mates with specific genes. A tendency among females to select partners based on their musical behaviors would have had to alter the prevalence of those traits in the human population. Most importantly, music would have had to function as a high-​fidelity signal of genetic quality, audible to an ear specifically adapted for survival and procreation, according to objective criteria of fitness. The study does not actually demonstrate any of this evidence. If it had, it would have been truly groundbreaking. Instead, the study builds on prior theories about sexual selection, specifically those that claim women and men possess distinct evolved mating strategies meant to maximize their reproductive success. The author cites two papers to support this theory: Geoffrey Miller and Peter Todd’s “Mate Choice Turns Cognitive” (1998) and Steven Gangestad and Randy Thornhill’s “Human Oestrus” (2008). These papers invite a closer look because they are so central to Charlton’s ideas. In “Mate Choice Turns Cognitive” (1998), Miller and Todd suggest that evolutionary theory can demystify sexual attraction by explaining how sexual cues function as reliable indicators of heritable traits. Combining an evolutionist framework with outmoded cognitivist perspectives, they set out to taxonomize so-​called attractive traits as signals of genetic fitness. Fitness is vaguely defined as “survival and reproduction ability” (191) and “fit” traits are things such as: male jaw size, scent, female waist-​to-​hip ratio, kindness, parenting abilities, and political status (there is no evidence that such traits are any more or less fit than others). Similarly, in “Human Oestrus” (2008), Gangestad and Thornhill propose a set of evolutionary functions for women’s nonfertile or extended sexuality, in order to suggest that women are more attracted to indicators of genetic quality during fertile periods (this is not

The Darwinian Musical Hypothesis  103 how human fertility actually works). They further argue, but do not demonstrate, that women’s sexual preferences will shift based on their evaluations of men’s attractiveness as a short-​term partner. All of the above claims are contested. By presenting them as a consensus, Charlton frees himself from having to do the most important and difficult work required to make his case convincing. By citing a small group of controversial evolutionary psychologists, Charlton skirts the need to demonstrate that music is an adaptation in the first place. This is how most theories of sexual selection and music tend to go: by citing other sexual selection models, a chain of citation is enacted that justifies continued turns to sexual selection, often propped up by a sycophantic reading of Darwin.8 According to Darwin’s theory of “inherited associations,” music is an inherited trait built on primal passions common to all of humanity, as well as every creature with a nervous system. Musical experiences recall in us distant memories of ancient species-​being, he claimed. The “impassioned orator, bard, or musician” stirs the “ardent passions” of his listener in much the same way that early humans did, or that songbirds do, without being aware of it (1871, vol. 2, 336–​37). Efforts to revive the Darwinian hypothesis often leave out these romantic idioms, however, focusing instead on the gender ideology that was bolstered by Darwin. One begins to wonder whether that is the real point of these theories: to advocate for a Darwinian mating environment.

Darwinian Musical Aesthetics We have seen how Darwin’s biological account of music stood out within the broader terrain of Victorian mental science, as well as the modern terrain of evolutionary biology. Darwin’s musical hypothesis was never simply a theory of biology, however, but also an aesthetics—​a way of thinking about beauty. In this section, we will consider the beauty of music for Darwin, which he claims is different from mere “noise.” For the second edition of 8 Samuel Mehr and Max Krasnow (2017) operate similarly in structuring their evolutionary theory of infant-​directed song. They cite Darwin, Trivers, Fisher, and Dawkins as the main foundations for a narrative of an evolutionary arms race between parents and infants, where a competitive scene of parental song becomes the basis for the development of complex music. Mehr and Krasnow further cite Buss and Schmitt’s “Sexual Strategies Theory” (1993) in support of the discredited idea that sex differences in mate preferences result from sexually differentiated adaptations for minimizing cuckoldry in men and divestiture in women.

104  Theorizing Music Evolution Descent, Darwin added several new paragraphs to the section called “Voice and Musical Powers.” Notably, he added a passage that distinguishes between a “note” and a “noise”: A critic has asked how the ears of man, and he ought to have added of other animals, could have been adapted by selection so as to distinguish musical notes. But this question shews some confusion on the subject; a noise is the sensation resulting from the co-​existence of several aërial “simple vibrations” of various periods, each of which intermits so frequently that its separate existence cannot be perceived. It is only in the want of continuity of such vibrations, and in their want of harmony inter se, that a noise differs from a musical note. Thus an ear to be capable of discriminating noises—​ and the high important of this power to all animals is admitted by every one—​must be sensitive to musical notes. We have evidence of this capacity even low down in the animal scale. (1874, 568–​69)

For Darwin, noises and notes are objective things with specific acoustical properties. Animals and humans did not evolve to hear music per se. Rather Darwin assumes many species possess the ability to distinguish between noises and notes. The ability to hear a sound as musical is tied to a proposed ability to differentiate between meaningful sounds (notes) and unmeaningful excess (noise). In this way, Darwin appears to side-​step the question of adaptation (and sexual selection) by suggesting that such musical perceptions are so pervasive and instinctual that even the “lowest” animals possess such capacities. Darwin presumed music to be an ancient mode of expression, developed from older and more generalized behaviors and traits. This idea contributes to a Darwinian take on musical feelings. A transhistorical connection between ancient and contemporary musical feelings is what evidences the origin and function of music across time, for Darwin. He took care to distinguish himself from Spencer, who had previously positioned music above language in a proposed chain of progress. Darwin saw no need for such teleology, or goal-​directedness. Music was Darwin’s example of primitive forms of expression—​birdsong is his preferred exemplar. Spencer replied directly to Darwin in an essay for Mind in 1890, rejecting Darwin’s claim that music is older than language and reasserting his own position that music is an advanced human behavior. Spencer also rejected Darwin’s hypothesis that music has an important erotic function; Spencer

The Darwinian Musical Hypothesis  105 counterargues that birdsong is hardly proof of concept, as birds often sing outside of mating season.9 Darwin’s aesthetics of music began to take shape in the early stages of his career as a naturalist. In one of his early notebooks—​colloquially termed his “N Notebook”—​Darwin wrote his reflections on the aesthetic apprehension of beauty: Old man at Cambridge observed the ignorant merely looked at picture as works of imitation.—​Hence pleasure in the beautiful (distinct from sexual beauty) is acquired taste.—​Whilst music extremely primitive.—​Almost like tastes of mouth & smell. (1837–​38, 74)10

Darwin’s early musings on “merely looking” versus “taking pleasure in the beautiful” suggests a sharp division between instinct, on the one hand, and elevated aesthetic sensibility on the other; here he finds music firmly on the instinctual side of things. However, Darwin’s distinction between innate pleasures (including sexual pleasures) and learned pleasures (which are involved in the apprehension of art) grew increasingly complicated for him over the course of his career. Darwin asks how we can explain traits that appear universal, yet that possess “the least direct use to man in reference to his ordinary habits of life.”11 Having observed that animals of all types exhibit a certain erotic magnetism with their sonic stylings—​“Their chief, and in some cases exclusive use appears to be either to call or to charm the opposite sex” (1871, vol. 2, 331)—​and that certain mammals “use their voices as a love-​call” (332), he extrapolates the same powers to early human sonic expressions. Interestingly, Darwin acknowledges that music tends not to be associated with sex in human culture: “The capacity and love for singing or music, though not a sexual character in man, must not here be passed over” (330). Still, he offers the best solution he can think of, claiming that the voice was originally used as a mating call. “Although the sounds emitted by animals of all kinds serve 9 Spencer writes, “I have made memoranda concerning various songbirds dating back to 1883. On February 7 of that year I heard a lark singing several times; and still more remarkable, during the mild winter of 1884 I saw one soar and hear it sing on January 10. Yet the lark does not pair till March” (1890, 452). 10 Paul Barrett notes that the words “Descent of Man” are written in crayon above this paragraph of the N Notebook (Darwin 1980 [1837–​38], 93). 11 The full passage: “As neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least direct use to man in reference to his ordinary habits of life, they must be ranked amongst the most mysterious with which he is endowed” (1871, vol. 2, 333).

106  Theorizing Music Evolution many purposes, a strong case can be made out, that the vocal organs were primarily used and perfected in relation to the propagation of the species” (330). This is the crux of his argument in The Descent of Man, but his views would change by his next book, published the following year. In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Darwin defines sonic utterances as one form of expression “involuntarily used by man and the lower animals, under the influence of various emotions and sensations” (27, emphasis added).12 For Darwin, these types of sonic expressions are involuntary and universal, thus “the young and the old of widely different races, both with man and animals, express the same state of mind by the same movements” (352). In positing a direct connection between emotion and muscular movement, and by extending that principle to humans and animals alike, Darwin aligns himself once again with Spencer. Together the two can be seen as departing from the “surprising nonsense” (Darwin’s words; 5) that had previously been published on the subject of emotion. One of the targets of Darwin’s charge is Sir Charles Bell. Bell had argued that human feelings are distinct from those of animals. Through his synoptic aphorism—​“Expression is to the passions as language is to thought” (1806)—​ he suggested that language is an accurate translation of mental processes, and thus an indication of relative advancement. In this way, Bell juxtaposes the primitive passions of animals with the rationality and precision of human language and thought. Darwin, on the other hand, suggests that “the force of language is much aided by the expressive movements of the face and body,” suggesting an equally close connection between language and expression, and between thought and embodied sensation. Furthermore, because man and animals are not “independent creations” (1872, 12), language too has ties to animal emotion and expression. Darwin also critiqued Bell for claiming that specific emotions are tied to their corresponding muscles but failing to demonstrate how different muscles are brought into action under their respective emotion. Darwin wonders, “why for instance, the inner ends of the eyebrows are raised, and the corners of the mouth depressed, by a person suffering from grief or anxiety” (1872, 2–​3).

12 On this point, Darwin cites Spencer, who has “drawn a clear distinction between emotions and sensations, the latter being ‘generated by our corporeal framework.’ He classes as Feelings both emotions and sensations” (1872, 27).

The Darwinian Musical Hypothesis  107 Instead, Darwin advances a theory of emotional expression as being primarily about muscular movements of the face and body. In service of this hypothesis, he offers three general principles of expression: 1. “The principle of serviceable associated Habits.” For Darwin, the force of habit helps to fuse certain movements to certain states of mind. If something is done enough times, a conventional form of signifying builds up. 2. “The principle of Antithesis.” This principle implies that certain states of mind naturally lead to certain habitual actions. 3. “The principle of actions due to the constitution of the Nervous System, independently from the first of the Will, and independently to a certain extent of Habit.” This principle is concerned with the actions of the nervous system that do not fall easily under the headers of Will or Habit; for instance, Darwin tells us that a great deal of nerve force is generated when the sensorium is excited. (1872, 28–​29) These principles imply an approach to reading for emotion that treats emotion’s physical manifestations (on the face, in bodily movements, or in vocal expressions) as immutable forms to be read. In turn, this theory implies that music, like all of the forms of emotive expression that Darwin addresses, enact meaningful symbols that may be interpreted according to a stable system. Darwin’s theory of emotion’s universality claims that these feelingful symbols may be read meaningfully the same way by anyone, regardless of time and place—​an objectivity of feelings. Emotion’s presumed universal legibility, thus, is justified as a product of all things’ mutual entwinement in matter, where all forms of expression find a shared natural origin in the three simple principles quoted above. This is how Darwin naturalizes the meanings of music: (1) Music means erotic instinct, which may or may not be audible at first listen. (2) Vocal sounds are credible signals of immutable thoughts and feelings. His hearing of birdsong as an evocation of the opera house shores up his own distinctly aestheticized love of natural order, just as it naturalizes and biologizes a narrow band of sounds as beautiful music, the rest noise. This projection of nature extends to his views on music and race. Darwin went on to suggest that music is present in all human cultures but that each has its own distinct “tastes.” In Descent, he writes, “[Musical notes] are present, though in a very rude and, as it appears, almost latent condition, in

108  Theorizing Music Evolution men of all races, even the most savage; but so different is the taste of the different races, that our music gives not the least pleasure to savages, and their music is to us hideous and unmeaning” (1871, vol. 2, 333). Again, an aesthetics undergirds a racist hierarchy that does not need an evolutionary teleology to find room for expression. Even without explicit hierarchization, Darwin’s evolutionary model of beauty denigrates swiftly what it does not understand. For instance, he observes that “Hottentots and Negroes” will “readily become excellent musicians, although they do not practise in their native countries anything that we should esteem as music” [1871, vol. 2, 334]. While he is satisfied to refer to birdsong as music he is less persuaded by the sonic stylings of other cultures. Darwin’s racist theorization of music thus admits the other onto the scene of music in a primitive guise but stops them just short of the “beautiful.” So goes Darwin’s taxonomy of the musical in various species, where birds, gibbons, and mice become audible as music by virtue of their adherence to Darwin’s standard of beauty. Occasionally his implicit evocation of “music” becomes explicit enough to warrant notation in the classical style (Figure 4.4). Here, Darwin transcribes Mr. Waterhouse’s notation of gibbons’ whooping (copied in Martin 1841, 432) in his discussion of musical powers (1871 332–​33). The “primitive” nature of music in Darwin’s account reflects his beliefs about the purposes of music. For him, music is tethered to basic perceptual instincts as well as a higher apprehension of the beautiful. This highly deterministic yet flexible definition of music sits at the core of Darwin’s music theory, which is filled with such idiosyncrasies such as the gibbon’s musical score. Darwin’s definition of music took on additional ethical problems when joined to the theory of sexual selection. If sexual selection drives musical

Figure 4.4  Mr. Waterhouse’s notation of gibbons’ whooping, cited by Darwin in his discussion of musical powers (Darwin 1871, vol. 2, 332–​33)

The Darwinian Musical Hypothesis  109 diversity and difference, in Darwin, then the so-​called proper apprehension of musical beauty implies one’s fitness for survival. The problem was, even Darwin seemed to suspect that he was going too far with such a theory, insisting that when it came to music he “had nothing worth saying.”13 The musical theory of Darwin was left unfinished, a tantalizing hint for his followers to imbue with new meanings.

Against Adaptationism Darwin was aware that his theory of music had many limitations. Given his stated hesitations about music—​his frustration with the need to mention music in the first place, his sense that readers would blush at the idea of a sexual character for music, and his later ambivalence about the adaptive power of sonic expressions—​it is not surprising that Darwin’s musical ideas never took a strong hold in the popular imagination, even during his lifetime. What is surprising is that the Darwinian musical hypothesis is gaining new traction now. Darwin’s tentative claims about music as an adapted trait have re-​emerged as an important source in a new wave of theories about music as an adaptation, as we have already seen. Some of these theories are strict readings, figuring music as a tool in a competitive mating strategy. Others generously read Darwin to be offering something more than a speculative account of music’s role in mating behaviors, reading him as saying that music might be an adaptation for something. However, it is important to recognize that all of these theories of music adaptationism are fundamentally flawed for at least two reasons. First, as music theories, they impose a unified and utilitarian “music” that falls apart under the slightest pressure. Second, as evolutionary theories, they scan as a step backward, to the selfish gene theory of Richard Dawkins (1976) and to 1970s–​1980s debates over the concept of adaptedness.14 Theories of music adaptation bring to mind especially strong forms of adaptationism, where natural selection is said to act with impunity to preserve the most adapted traits. Such “adaptationist fundamentalisms” 13 See c­ hapter 2 for review of Darwin’s letter of complaint about his own theory of music. Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 8089,” accessed April 15, 2022, http://​www.darwin​proj​ect. ac.uk/​DCP-​LETT-​8089. 14 In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins advances a gene-​centered view of evolution. According to this view, heritable information is passed primarily or exclusively by genes. Natural selection and evolution are thus approached from a proverbial gene’s-​eye view, rather than focusing on organisms or groups.

110  Theorizing Music Evolution mistakenly equate natural selection with evolution itself, while shoring up a truncated account of how species evolve.15 In this section, I discuss and critique the post-​1990s revival of music adaptationism. The problems with this revival are threefold: its loosely evolutionist framework, its utilitarian ontology of music, and its questionable Darwinian influence. I further unpack the problems of adaptationism by questioning the extent to which specific traits or behaviors may be targeted for preservation by natural selection, and by questioning whether scientists possess the evidence needed to substantiate such theories. By drawing attention to the empty rhetoric, appeals to authority, and cherry-​picked data of music adaptation research, I point to the unscientific nature of organizing research programs around searches for adaptations. Consider Darwin’s relatively balanced position on the matter. Darwin theorized that different species possess distinct evolved features that are the result of evolution by natural selection. One of his best-​known examples of adaptation by natural selection is his observation about species of Galápagos Finches, as discussed in Origin of Species (1859). Darwin observed that these finch species were differentiated according to beak shape. Recognizing that the different environments within the Galápagos varied in the variety of seeds they contained, which matched the beak shapes of the varieties of Finches, Darwin concluded that the species whose beaks were better suited to cracking the shells of seeds in a particular environment had flourished there. The evolutionary mechanism known as natural selection is how Darwin explained their flourishing. Darwin never argued, however, that adaptedness pervades all of nature, nor that adaptations are easy to spot. Darwin marvels at the well-​ designedness of the bird beaks, but nevertheless warns that many aspects of nature are abhorrent to his own ideas of fitness. He insists that these are not evidence against natural selection. He writes: We need not marvel at the sting of the bee causing the bee’s own death; at drones being produced in such vast numbers for one single act, and being then slaughtered by their sterile sisters; at the astonishing waste of pollen by our fir-​trees; at the instinctive hatred of the queen bee for her own fertile

15 I borrow the term “adaptationist fundamentalism” from Jonathan Kramnick as he employs it in “Against Literary Darwinism” (2011, 443; 2012).

The Darwinian Musical Hypothesis  111 daughters; at ichneumonidae feeding within the live bodies of caterpillars; and at other such cases. (1871, 472)

Nature can be illogical, even grotesque, he notes. If the things he judges to be aesthetically or morally displeasing provide no evidence for or against natural selection, there can be no causal link between a specifically human mode of aesthetic judgments and evolutionary processes. Darwin realized that his account of evolution is bigger than his own understanding of human morals or beauty. Although he advocated a stronger adaptationism in his writings on sexual selection, the idea of a noncausal evolution is nevertheless present throughout his writings. Darwin’s theory of adaptation was a cautious one. Less cautious accounts began to flourish in the twentieth century. In the 1970s, backlash against adaptationism began with the publication of two watershed papers. These papers argued against appeals to “optimality” in evolution research (Maynard Smith 1978) and against the idea that individual traits are selected for their superior fitness (Gould & Lewontin 1979).16 A period of debate among evolutionists followed, about the importance of natural selection relative to other evolutionary factors. In the 1990s, adaptationism was among the “most heated areas of controversy” in evolutionary biology (Brandon & Rausher 1996, 189). Proponents of extreme forms of adaptationism were charged with smuggling in theological notions of intelligent design by theorizing natural selection’s power to choose more optimal beings.17 Eliot Sober defined adaptationism as a “tendency of thought,” wherein a complete understanding of natural selection would theoretically lead to a complete understanding of evolution (2000, 124). Of course, as Sober notes, natural selection is not the only mechanism relevant to evolution. Evolutionary biologists have identified numerous relevant mechanisms: patterns of mating, migration, gene mutation, gene drift, gene recombination (changes in the frequencies of genetic combinations), environmental and historical contingencies, and a wide range of biocultural factors are the most discussed. In Richard Prum’s words, “evolution is frequently far quirkier, stranger, more historically contingent, individualized, and less predictable and generalizable than adaptation can explain” (2017,

16 See also Lewontin’s “Sociobiology as an Adaptationist Program” (1979), Lewontin and colleagues’ Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature (2017). 17 For comparative discussions of adaptationisms, see Godfrey-​Smith (2001) and Lewens (2009).

112  Theorizing Music Evolution 11). That these complicating factors exist is one reason why it can be tricky to describe any specific behavior or trait as having been targeted by natural selection as an adaptation. If adaptationism has gained a reputation of controversy in biological research, why has it found a more welcoming home in evolutionary musicology? One reason has to do with the rise of music cognition within North American music research since the 1970s and 1980s. Scholars such as Leonard Meyer had already set the scene for a cognitively inclined field of music theory in the decades prior—​see especially Meyer’s Emotion and Meaning in Music (1956). As linguists were turning to Chomskyan notions of universal grammar, music scholars advocated for and against similarly universalizing theories of musical grammar, alternately embracing and rejecting the music-​language metaphor. Within this complex discursive field, theories of music-​as-​adaptation re-​emerged in the 1990s and 2000s, with studies by Anne Fernald (1992), Steven Mithen (1996; 2006) Ian Cross (2001; 2003; 2005; 2009), and others. Some of the best-​known theories of music adaptation were sparked by a provocation from linguist Steven Pinker. Pinker ignited debate about the evolutionary utility of music by suggesting that music has no evolutionary significance. For Pinker, music is a nonfunctional, decadent human invention or “cheesecake”—​“music is useless” (Pinker 1997, 528). This statement inspired a wave of responses. Sandra Trehub (2000) responded to Pinker by taking issue with his conception of music. Aniruddh Patel (2008; 2010) responded to Pinker by introducing the terms “adaptationism” and “nonadaptationism” in order to distinguish between music-​evolutionary theories that treat music as a product of natural selection, on the one hand, or as a human invention that offers no adaptive advantage, on the other (as in Pinker’s cheesecake).18 Patel described Darwin as the original adaptationist, and Spencer as the original nonadaptationist.19 While Patel’s is a flawed summary of Darwin’s approach (which is only tentatively adaptationist) and Spencer’s approach (which occasionally resembles an ultra-​adaptationist theory of music), it 18 Patel claims that evolutionary questions about music “originate with Darwin’s discussion of the topic in The Descent of Man (1871)” (2010, 91). Spencer of course beat him to the punch, as did thinkers like Joseph Goddard and Erasmus Darwin with their proto-​evolutionary theories of music (see my c­ hapters 1, 2, and 3). 19 In another example of a nonadaptationist position, William James in The Principles of Psychology (1890) speculates that the emergence of music is “a mere incidental peculiarity of the nervous system” (vol. 2, 419). He writes, “It has no zoological utility . . . it is a pure incident of having a hearing organ . . . it has entered the mind by the back stairs, as it were, or rather [has] not entered the mind at all, but got surreptitiously born in the house” (vol. 2, 627). Discussed in Patel (2010, 101).

The Darwinian Musical Hypothesis  113 works as a way of diagnosing the contemporary field of evolutionist theories as a series of debates over musical functionality. Ultimately Patel rejects both adaptationism and nonadaptationism as organizing paradigms. His own evolutionary theory defines music as a “transformative technology of the mind” and aims to transcend the adaptationist and nonadaptationist dichotomy. There have been a number of additional critiques of music adaptationism from within evolutionary musicology. For instance, Ian Cross and Iain Morley’s “The Evolution of Music: Theories, Definitions, and the Nature of the Evidence” (2009) offers helpful complications of adaptationist paradigms on the grounds that there is limited evidence from archaeology and anthropology to substantiate such theories. In a different register, Patel’s problem with adaptationism is its failure to account for ways in which music may influence the structure and function of the brain over the course of a lifetime, as opposed to over the course of multiple generations (2010, 121–​28). What Patel offers instead is a recursive model of how musical traits and behaviors change and persist across generations. In Patel’s view, the Darwinian musical hypothesis does not go far enough to explain what he sees as music’s unique adaptive potentials. Alternately, one might argue that Darwin, as careful as he was, nevertheless goes too far with his adaptationism. By thinking of music as something that does something for evolution, he constructs music in adaptationist terms. Music thus becomes singular, monolithic—​a reified object with a reified origin story. As we saw in c­ hapter 3, this happens to be Gary Tomlinson’s critique of musical adaptationisms. Tomlinson finds music adaptationism wholly untenable. “Alone or together, these hypotheses fail as explanations and always for the same reason: Each seeks a unilateral explanation for a manifold phenomenon,” he writes (2015, 33). For Tomlinson, “the full range of capacities recruited in modern musicking will not be explained—​ in principle cannot be explained—​as music-​induced evolutionary developments” (2015, 32). He notes, “Evolutionary biologists deride such global imprecise and teleological accounts as ‘just-​so’ stories—​in this case, How the Human got His Music” (2015, 33–​34). Thus, the question, “Is music an adaptation?” is “in a basic way meaningless” to Tomlinson (2015, 34). Patel’s nor Tomlinson’s theories can escape their own antiadaptationist critiques. Even as they work to avoid the pitfalls of adaptationism, both Patel’s transformative technology of the mind and Tomlinson’s nonlinear history of music evolution occasionally dip into the verbiage of music as an adapted trait (or concert of traits). Indeed, it is especially difficult to think of

114  Theorizing Music Evolution music evolution without adaptationism. This is because music is not a population or a species, but rather a shifting rubric of traits and behaviors. Even the most nuanced evolutionary theories of music are at least partially rooted in adaptationist fundamentalism because they begin with a presumption that music is a coherent subject for evolutionist analysis in the first place. Seeing the problem of adaptation as insurmountable, music cognition scholar David Huron (2001) suggested it is possible to informedly opt out of music-​ evolutionist debates altogether. For Huron, evolution is too distal a theory to be applied to something as nebulous as music. Following debates over adaptationism in evolutionary biology, a series of papers was published to clarify the meaning of an adaptation. Scholars such as Gould and Elisabeth Vrba distinguished between adaptations (specific traits selected for a specific function) and exaptations (traits selected for one function but used for another one).20 For theorists of exaptation, the relevant dichotomy is not between adaptationism and nonadaptationism, but between theories of music as adaptation and theories of music as exaptation.21 If music is not an adaptation, it might be related to or composed of other adaptations—​here we have the utility list approach to music evolution, where compendia of musical traits and their uses for survival and reproduction are assembled.22 In such theories, “music” might be defined as any (or any combination) of the following: (1) vocal sounds, (2) body percussion, (3) gestural utterances, (4) instrument-​ produced sounds, (5) vibrations, (6) infant-​ directed vocalizations, (7) mimetic behaviors, (8) beat entrainment (the ability to synchronize with an external rhythm), (9) social dancing, (10) the production of pitched sounds, (11) the ability to detect pitches and/​or intervallic relationships between pitches, (12) the production of scale patterns of pitches, (13) the appearance of tuning systems, (14) cognitive competencies such as time-​based hierarchical thinking, (15) embodied competencies such as bipedalism, (16) forms such as songs and chants, (17) group-​based interactions, (18), sensitivity to feelings, and (19) many 20 See for instance Stephen Jay Gould and Elisabeth S. Vrba’s “Exaptation—​A Missing Term in the Science of Form” (1982). 21 In Tomlinson’s account, Steven Pinker again appears, this time as the misguided proponent of a reductive exaptationist view (Tomlinson 2015, 32). 22 See, for instance, Arcadi (2000), Brown (2000; 2004), Davies (2012), Falk (2004), Hauser and McDermott (2003), Honing et al. (2015), Iverson (2016), Justus and Hustler (2005), Killin (2016), McDermott and Hauser (2005), Morley (2002; 2013), Panksepp (2009), Patel et al. (2009), Peretz (2006), Ravignani et al. (2014), Savage et al. (2015), Schulkin and Raglan (2014), Snowden et al. (2015).

The Darwinian Musical Hypothesis  115 more. Such theories implicitly or explicitly define music as a constellation of traits, whether figured as small as an infant’s suckling or as large as the universe. Proposed adaptive functions for the above include: music (1) as a courtship display, (2) as a communicative imitation of animal cries, (3) as a vocal learning strategy, (4) as a means for group formation and social bonding, (5) as credible signaling, (6) as infant-​directed speech, (7) as a means for developing a theory of mind, and (8) for expressive purposes, among others. Each of these hypotheses suggests an evolutionary scale of causality, through which music directly affected the evolution of the human species. Therein lies an important aftereffect of Victorian music-​evolutionism: the idea that music is in some way responsible for human evolution. We are a long way away from being able to substantiate such theories with evidence. As nice as they sound, they are advertisements for music, not testable hypotheses. Theories of musical adaptation (and their nonadaptationist counterparts) are essentially making the same point: that music may be theorized in relation to evolution because music has a function (or nonfunction) for evolution. The circularity of this position enables music to be sliced many different ways, but always adding up to the same kind of frame. The details hardly matter, as that frame is determined in advance. The problem is that none of these theories tell the whole story, nor can they be substantiated with evidence, yet they hinge on their power to do just that. For contemporary scholars, what matters is not whether music is or is not an adaptation, but whether music is a suitable subject for evolutionary analysis in the first place. The relevant choice is not between adaptationism and nonadaptationism, nor between adaptation and exaptation, but between opting into or opting out of a circular conversation with no end in sight. Music psychologist Elizabeth Margulis noted that “the [evolutionary] theories in vogue at a particular moment can reveal much about cultural attitudes to the subject under inquiry” (2013, 3). We can look to Darwin’s theory, as well as to revivals of the Darwinian musical hypothesis, to better understand how such valuations about the forms and functions of music get theorized and circulated by people. As we have seen, Miller’s detour into 1960s American rock ‘n’ roll was more so a reflection of what “Hendrix,” “Clapton,” and “Garcia” meant to Miller at the time of writing than it was a persuasive evolutionist argument. Darwin’s theory too was part and parcel of his quintessentially Victorian attitudes toward music and sexuality. In the present, theories of musical adaptation continue to beg the question. At

116  Theorizing Music Evolution best, they reinforce trivial truths. At worst, they reduce music to amatory impulses, and musicians like Hendrix to a reified bundle of selfish genes. Such reductivism is unfortunate because it essentializes what music might be and excludes or denigrates a vast array of traits and behaviors that are apparently useless for species propagation or survival, and because it ignores how practitioners articulate meanings on their own terms. The revival of Darwin’s sexual selection hypothesis for music is the most obvious indication that something more than music theory is at stake. Too often these mating theories encode a cultural nostalgia for a bygone Victorian heteropatriachy, defined as it was by competition for mates, oppressive marriage contracts, and a division of labor determined at birth. Darwin enacted a theory of sexuality that many have interpreted as promoting dangerous biopolitical ideals: the social division of the sexes, the entrapment of women and men in inflexible social roles, the exclusion of nonconforming people, and what would in the twentieth century come to be recognized as eugenicist programs based in arbitrary measures of fitness. Together these variables make up a potent biopolitical cocktail; I use the Foucauldian term “biopolitics” to signal political determinations about who may be granted a right to life.23 Additionally, my method contributes to histories of knowledge by considering the extent to which Darwin’s epistemological context was fundamentally formed on eugenicist ideas of hierarchy and procreative experimentation.24 We have to take this context into consideration. If researchers want to exhume a tired Darwinian theory of sexual selection, they need to also address the extent to which they are advocating a Darwinian biopolitics. Darwin’s proposed natural order of superior male traits passed between generations is just one example of the conceptual limits of his creative view of nature. Under such utilitarian views of music as a means to species propagation, we find evolutionism wielded as a technology of hegemony, this time as an aesthetic theory that transcribes fitness for life onto certain kinds of bodies. What makes Darwinian biopolitics as baseless as they are threatening has to do with their embedded theories of adaptation. Under the sway of such 23 Foucault (1978 [1976]; 1994 [1966]). 24 The first chapter of Darwin’s Origin of Species is concerned with “variation under domestication,” and much of what follows is gleaned from selective breeding in animals such as cattle, sheep, and dogs. What we now understand as eugenicist projects defined the Victorian cultural appetite for specialized animal breeds, which led to a genetic bottleneck of singular narrowness. In Origin, Darwin is citing what is going on around him with regard to experimental breeding as a point of proof for his ideas.

The Darwinian Musical Hypothesis  117 theories, it is all too easy to shore up a circular definition of music: “What is music’s evolutionary function? I examined X examples of music’s function.” Under adaptationist fundamentalism, it becomes possible to argue that what makes something an adapted trait will be apparent in the design of that trait, and advocate targeting such traits for their presumed fitness. Even Darwin was skeptical of such a strict framing.

5 Edmund Gurney’s Darwinian Music Formalism We now turn to one of the first to apply the Darwinian musical hypothesis, Edmund Gurney, English paranormal psychologist. In addition to his interests in séances, ghosts, and telepathy, Gurney had training in music, medicine, and the law, and brought his pen to bear on a wide range of subjects from hypnotism to music psychology. I quote from Gurney’s monumental book, The Power of Sound: [I]‌t is well worth noting that at every stage which comes under our observation, Music seems capable of stirring up the strongest excitement that a being who musically typifies that stage can experience. This enjoyment to the utmost of the best that can be got is exemplified equally in the case of singing-​birds, and of the gibbon, moved with rapture at his own performance of the chromatic scale, and of the savage repeating over for hours his few monotonous strains and maddened by the rhythmic beat of the drum, and of the ancient Greek spellbound by performances for the like of which we should probably tell a street-​performer to pass on, and of a circle of Arabs sobbing and laughing by turns in ecstasies of passion at the sound of their native melodies, and of the English child to whom some simple tune of Mozart’s reveals the unguessed springs of musical feeling, or of the adult in his loftiest communings with the most inspired utterances of Beethoven. (Gurney 1880, 315)

Gurney’s treatment of Darwin’s theory of music is quite Spencerian in its evocation of a racist hierarchy from birdsong to gibbons to “savages” to ancient Greece to Arabic people to English children and finally to Beethoven, all figured as relative stages of advance.1 This quintessentially Victorian idea of a cosmic chain or hierarchy of musical life sets the scene for Gurney’s 1 This chain of fitness is historicized by Zon (2012; 2013; 2014a; 2014b).

Theorizing Music Evolution. Miriam Piilonen, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2024. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197695289.003.0006

Edmund Gurney’s Darwinian Music Formalism  119 “scientific” treatment of music psychology—​just one example of how the Darwinian musical hypothesis was immediately applied to creative and catastrophic ends. This chapter offers a critical reading of Gurney’s The Power of Sound and its Darwinian influence. The music theory of Gurney is here read as an example of what Charles Mills calls “ideal theory-​as idealized-​model,” that is, Gurney’s representation of how he believes reality should be that is based in the ideals of a specific culture or group (2005, 166). In Gurney’s case, he theorizes an idealized state of musical nature that is implicitly grounded in English and European musical forms, as Darwin’s account did, thereby elevating and naturalizing them to adaptive status.2 “What distinguishes ideal theory is the reliance on idealization to the exclusion, or at least marginalization, of the actual,” Mills writes (168). Gurney’s theory exemplifies what Mills terms “idealized capacities” in that he theorizes his own ways of listening as natural and ideal, while implicitly treating other listening capacities as less evolved, disabled, or unthinkable as musical. Gurney primarily sought to explain the forms and functions of music from a scientific perspective, and secondarily to explain the sense of enjoyment that he experienced when listening to “impressive music”—​his technical term for music that implies a powerful emotional effect, as differentiated from “expressive music.” To explain the emotional effect of impressive music, Gurney borrowed directly from Darwin’s theory of music and sexual selection. Quoting Darwin’s Descent of Man, Gurney writes: From its employment “during the season of courtship, when animals of all kinds are excited by the strongest passions,” what was primarily a simple ultimate pleasure which the organism was adapted to receive, might well become in time capable of opening the floodgates to mighty emotions, which, by the very extent to which they baffle analysis, might lead us to suspect their connection with the earliest and most universal of instincts. (1880, 121)

In this passage, Gurney brings the focus to musical pleasure. For him, when a listener hears impressive music, they are inspired into a state of innate 2 Although Mills’s focus is on instances of ideal theory (“ideal-​as-​model”) in ethics, he notes that such instances are “not at all peculiar to ethics, but can be found in other branches of philosophy, and is indeed shared more generally (if not usually in quite the same way) with both natural and social science” (2005, 166).

120  Theorizing Music Evolution emotionality that dimly reflects primal scenes of erotic courtship. By his account, music can be called impressive when it inspires this distinct kind of feeling, that is, when it recalls a “simple ultimate pleasure” (121). By taking up Darwin’s evolutionary frame, Gurney offered an idealized account of music psychology, as well as an accompanying set of formalist analytical tools for reflecting on one’s own experiences listening to music. This practical affordance of Gurney’s music theory—​as a kind of program for listening to one’s favorite music—​is partially what has allowed it to re-​ enter musical conversations of late. No specific knowledge of music is required to appreciate music in this aesthetic way, under Gurney’s treatment; one need only attend to the musical surface. This sort of radical amateurism has appeal as a mode of music criticism for thinkers like Jerrold Levinson (1997), who developed Gurney’s treatment into a theory of listening to “concatenations”—​small bits of music. By Gurney’s account, “pleasure in the whole has no meaning except as expressing the sum of our enjoyments from moment to moment” (1880, 214). Thus, judging the quality of a piece of music by its total structure “involves a contradiction in terms—​to enjoy something the essence of which is a succession of impressions by a simultaneous review of all the impressions” (214–​15). In this way, Gurney and his followers depart from views of musical quality that rely on the “proper” arrangement of parts into an idealized whole. A pleasing musical surface is all that is required to make a piece of music impressive, and only the individual listener is capable of determining what is pleasing to them—​there is no objectively “good” music. Again, this has made Gurney’s music theory the subject of renewed interest in recent decades, as a way of listening across musical backgrounds and skill levels.3 While this sounds nice in theory, here I want to push back against the idea of a Gurnian listening orientation as musically democratic, or universally applicable. What Gurney had to say is more complicated and less generalizable than it appears as a system for listening and cataloguing musical enjoyment.

3 My critical engagement with Gurney’s music theory is indebted to earlier readings by Jerrold Levinson (1997), Rollo Myers (1972), and Malcolm Budd (1985). Levinson’s retrieval of Gurney is constructive; his Music in the Moment develops a Gurnian theory of music perception that highlights the ways that listeners, regardless of skill level or experience, derive enjoyment simply from listening closely to the moment-​to-​moment unfolding of musical forms—​a “concatenationist” listening praxis (1997, 13–​21). Myers and Budd are more critical. Myers finds Gurney’s whole enterprise less scientific than Gurney insists. Budd’s main problem with Gurney is his tendency to separate musical emotion from nonmusical emotion and aesthetic modes of listening from nonaesthetic ones.

Edmund Gurney’s Darwinian Music Formalism  121 On the one hand, Gurney’s account appears liberatory in the way it places power in the hands of the individual listener to assess what constitutes good music for them. On the other hand, the broader apparatus that Gurney constructs (via Darwin) flattens out music histories and naturalizes a set of listening practices drawn from continental art music culture, while claiming to speak from an orientation of neutrality. Like Darwin and Spencer, he could not help but apply his situated understanding of music to his theory of evolution, which leads to a number of ethical problematics. In unpacking both the productive and the problematic dimensions of Gurney’s evolutionary music theory, I adopt two convergent lines of questioning, one music-​theoretical and one historical. The music-​theoretical line of questioning problematizes Gurney’s tendency toward ideal theory. The historical line of questioning considers his place in nineteenth-​century continental aesthetics and asks what relevance his music formalism continues to hold, if any.

Gurney’s Evolutionary Music Theory as Idealized Model In the beginning of The Power of Sound, Gurney promises a rigorous treatment of music through an interdisciplinary lens comprising acoustics, physiology, psychology, and Darwinian evolutionary theory. The first sentence of this text captures its ambition and density: It is now generally admitted that our organs of special sense, the channels by which we keep up our constant and various intercourse with what we call the external world, have been formed in past ages by gradual processes in correspondence with stimuli which that external world supplied; and that as the physical organs themselves are the highly modified descendants of undifferentiated and comparatively simple tissues, so the embryonic stage of evolution, by something analogous to those modes of feeling which we find in ourselves to be the simplest, the least differentiated, and the most crudely suggestive of actual bodily affection. (Gurney 1880, 1)

With this single-​ sentence description, Gurney introduces his evolutionary account of aesthetic perception, which is centered on the emotional affordances of the so-​called higher senses (vision and hearing). Having deemed prior metaphysical accounts of musical aesthetics to be too speculative, Gurney offered what he saw as a rare scientific treatment of music and its

122  Theorizing Music Evolution effects. Like Herman von Helmholtz in Germany, he established a physiological basis for musical expression.4 And borrowing from Darwin, he treated the meanings of musical experiences as functions of their place in biological life. Significantly, he extracts from Darwin an evolutionary psychology and uses it to read for musical experiences according to their relative degrees of evolutionary advance. His musical examples are principally drawn from a canon of “masterworks” by Ludwig van Beethoven, Anton Rubinstein, and others. His work amounts to what Mills has termed an “idealized cognitive sphere” (2005, 169) for the realm of music perception, meaning he is invested in theorizing a unified mode of aesthetic perception based in so-​called universal cognitive principles which are in fact signals of illicit group privilege. Gurney only appears to account for listener difference with his concept of “impressive” music. For Gurney, listening to one’s favorite music arouses a special aesthetic mode of feeling, distinct from the feelings associated with everyday life. This special aesthetic mode of feeling defines his experience of impressive music, which is distinguished from a more common experience of music as expressive. Whereas the former designates an ineffable state of arousal, the latter designates the “means of expression, of creating in us a consciousness of images, or of ideas, or of feelings, which are known to us in regions outside Music,” Gurney writes (1880, 312). In other words, the impressive nature of music comes down to a personal, ineffable experience of primal pleasure, while the expressive nature of music refers to representations of things we experience in other parts of our lives, such as strength, humor, romance, vigor, simplicity, or melancholy (312–​48). Because expressive music is generalizable and impressive music is personal, he treats the latter as unanalyzable. The “unanalyzability” of impressive music is one less-​obvious way in which the book functions as ideal theory. Rather than attempt to explore the ways that music perception may actually differ between listeners or groups, Gurney sweeps all differences together under the umbrella of the unanalyzable.5 More on this soon. In The Power of Sound, the principal element of music is melody, rather than large-​scale form—​Gurney characterizes this as the only relevant dichotomy. Gurney writes, “In Music the notion of a larger and more essential design, in reference to which shorter individual strains are details in the 4 Gurney mentions that he and Helmholtz differ in their approaches to aesthetics but otherwise agree on such a physiological basis for music (1880, vi). 5 “The unanalyzable” is my term for what might otherwise be called “the ineffable” in music. For an extended philosophical engagement with concepts of ineffability in music, see Gallope (2017).

Edmund Gurney’s Darwinian Music Formalism  123

Figure 5.1  The primary theme of Beethoven’s Pathétique sonata (left) and Gurney’s recomposition of it (right) (1880, 152)

Figure 5.2  The theme of Beethoven’s Leonore overture (top) and Gurney’s two recompositions of it (bottom) (1880, 152)

sense of being less essential, has no applications. The scheme has no value apart from the bits” (1880, 216). For Gurney, these “bits” are successions of tones in a specific temporal arrangement. Gurney claims that melody is the principal musical element, even though rhythm and melody are inseparably united in his account of melodic form. He “proves” this by presenting a series of familiar melodies with their rhythms altered, pointing out that no reader would mistake these recomposed melodies for their more famous originals. In Figure 5.1, we find Gurney’s transcription of the primary theme of Beethoven’s Pathetique sonata (left) and Gurney’s recomposition of it (right) (152). Figure 5.2 shows the theme of the Leonore overture (top) and Gurney’s two recompositions of it (bottom) (152). Gurney continues by recomposing a series of well-​ known musical examples, trading slow rhythms for quick and lively ones, and vice versa. For instance, “few would recognize in this wretched jig . . . the fascinating opening of the rondo in G major concerto” (1880, 153). He is referring to the opening of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major, Mvt. III) and his own recomposition of it. In another sample recomposition of a Barcarole by Anton Rubinstein, Gurney replaces a 3/​4 time signature with 6/​8 time.

124  Theorizing Music Evolution Gurney means to demonstrate the importance of rhythm for the apprehension of impressive music. He explains that musical pleasure is never ascribed solely to the apprehension of a collection of pitches: For all vivid pleasure, for any individual and possessing motive of whatever sort, this definiteness of time is (save in the most exceptional cases) as truly essential as variety of pitch; it is present in nine hundred and ninety-​nine parts out of a thousand of the Music which on any given day gives delight to the human race; and without it a prolonged succession of the most beautiful sounds is no more melody than a block of Parian marble is a statue. (155)

In this sense Gurney goes against thinkers such as Richard Wagner, whom Gurney says “shows again and again in his writings how little he recognizes the deeply-​seated nature and artistic place of the rhythmic impulse” (159). Still, Gurney does not consider whether rhythmic detail might be more salient than pitch. For instance, he does not reverse the exercise by altering the pitches in a well-​known melody and retaining its rhythms. Gurney’s approach to pitch, though presented as natural, has a history of its own. Gurney implicitly refers to a hierarchically arranged set of pitch relations, motivated by semitonal motion and arranged on staff notation emphasizing intervals of a third. The European art music tradition constructed this system of classical staff notation gradually over centuries. Such tuning systems became instruments of colonialism, as Kofi Agawu put it in “Tonality as a Colonizing Force in Africa” (2016). Gurney does not consider the extent to which his favored tonal systems might be constructions in their own right, opting instead for an evolutionary theory of pitch supremacy. Gurney explains that when a listener experiences a given melodic form as impressive, they are responding to the ways that particular melody yields a special kind of embodied impulse, which he terms “Ideal Motion.” He writes, “Melodic form and the motion in question are aspects of the same phenomenon; and no confusion need attend the use of the two sets of terms, as long as it is recognized that our sense of the characteristics of melodic forms cannot be abstracted from the continuous process by which alone we perceive them, or rather which constitutes our perception of them” (1880, 165). Gurney distinguishes his use of the term “ideal” from a painterly sense of idealization. He claims that his usage refers to the Greek sense of idea, “ideal as yielding a form” (165), which thus “lends itself to terms of physical motion” (166). He writes,

Edmund Gurney’s Darwinian Music Formalism  125 There is one characteristic of melody which attention to its aspect as motion brings out with special clearness; and that is our sense of entire oneness with it, of its being as it were a mode of our own life. We feel in it, indeed, an objective character, inasmuch as we instinctively recognise that it has for others the same permanent possibilities of impression as for ourselves; but our sense of it nevertheless is not of an external presentation, but of something evolved within ourselves by a special activity of our own. (166)

Gurney sees ideal motion as “essentially indescribable” (165). Although ideal motion is enlisted as a universal category of musical experience, each listener will only experience it when listening to certain melodies—​those they find uniquely impressive. For Gurney, impressive music makes no reference to things beyond itself—​it is an entirely “aesthetic” form of pleasure. In order to justify the distinction between aesthetic and nonaesthetic forms of sensation, Gurney spends many pages outlining a treatise on sensory perception, with reference to the leading theories of physiology. He devotes early chapters to the terms of sense perceptions, the nature of “unformed sounds,” and the basic elements of a work of art. For Gurney, all bodily sensations are alike in kind, if not in degree—​“the region of sensation which has aesthetic possibilities is also the region of variety of taste” (1880, 3)—​but only those highly specialized senses like sight and hearing are elevated to the level of aesthetic sensibility.6 He ranks the senses in order from high to low: sight and hearing at the top, touch in the middle, smell and taste at the bottom (2–​3). Although these senses are meaningfully differentiated from one another in his account, he suggests ways that they each can mix with the broader categories of pain and pleasure. Works of art, he suggests, stimulate the so-​called higher senses in a special way. In Gurney, works of art appeal to the higher senses “by dint of form,” he writes (1880, 49). This appeal to the higher senses is a “direct appeal” rather than a “mere calling into activity” (49). Music appeals directly to the higher senses in part by recalling the motions needed to produce those sounds: “Sound is the result of motion, usually of visible motion, and even when the same series of sounds is repeated and is familiar to us, we still are 6 Gurney hedges regarding the higher aesthetic potentials of touch. He makes reference to a sightless boy who “found it the height of luxury to stroke velvet” (1880, 3, fn. 1). He similarly mentions that many “lower” animals differ from humans in their variety of touch organs; “but whether this involves superior specialisation and variety in their tactile sensations we cannot tell” (1880, 3, fn. 1).

126  Theorizing Music Evolution conscious of its dependence on movements in its source, movements which lay within the option of ourselves or of another to make or not to make” (13). When we feel that a piece of music has risen to the level of ideal motion, it evokes a special kind of pleasure: Pleasure, in a distinct and positive form, appears on the scene, and also where varieties and modifications of likes and dislikes become prominent facts; and in these more differentiated regions we begin to be able to mark off certain feelings and sets of feelings by the word aesthetic, and to reason or dogmatise about higher and lower and more or less cultivated tastes. (3)

This pleasure itself is an aesthetic form of pleasure, available only to the higher senses. The proposed psychological feature that plays into this form of pleasure is what Gurney terms “Association”—​an idealized account of sense perception that he borrows directly from Darwin.

Gurney, Darwin, and “Association” We will next consider Gurney’s references to Darwin systematically so as to better understand this concept of association. Gurney first invokes Darwin in “Chapter 1: The Higher Senses,” where Gurney discusses the eye’s sensitivity to colors in a footnote. He next turns to Darwin in “Chapter 4: Abstract Form as Addressed to the Eye,” to explain the impressive nature of architecture, which, as he put it, “may rival even that of Nature’s vaster handiwork” (1880, 75). Gurney notes that Darwin suggested that the “sense of sublimity excited by a grand cathedral may have some connection with the dim feelings of terror and superstition, experienced by our savage ancestors when they entered a great cavern or gloomy forest” (75). Gurney emphasizes that the impressive nature of these architectural wonders is not merely a product of their size, detail, weight, or other formal qualities. Rather, the emotional aspect of experiencing the work is also paramount. He writes, “a peculiar emotional force profoundly affect[s]‌the whole nature of our admiration and delight” (76). It is in Gurney’s “Chapter 6: Association” that he delves most deeply into the Darwinian musical hypothesis. “Association” is Gurney’s term, borrowed from Darwin, for the connection between an object’s form and the pleasure taken in it. Association is “the main source of the pleasurable feeling”; it is

Edmund Gurney’s Darwinian Music Formalism  127 the special ability to combine past experiences of pleasure with the formal features of a given aesthetic object. Gurney explains that this special aesthetic form of association is often confused with the more general category of “habit” (1880, 113). While associations often resemble habits, specifically aesthetic forms of association require a measure of “self-​consciousness” and are notably exclusive to the human species: The sort of habit, on the one hand, which is truly associational in nature, involves ideal elements and a large amount of self-​consciousness; for the enjoyment in its case is not merely a faint mental revivification of the various events and feelings which have stood out as enjoyable on a background of the general sensuous impression, colour or sound, or whatever it may be, but seems to involve in varying degrees a much more abstract and recherché element, a vague suffusive conception of existence as on the whole good. It follows that this latter sort of effect must be a matter of very late and refined development; for we certainly do not conceive brutes to have any idea of existence as a whole, or any suffusive sense of enjoyment. (114)

Aesthetic association is, for Gurney, an exclusively human trait, requiring as it does an amount of “self-​consciousness” that “brutes” appear to lack. Anyone who does not experience the impressiveness of music is thus a bit of a brute (a bigoted term), in Gurney. Gurney further references Darwin as a means to account for the evolution of abilities used to discern differences in aesthetic forms. By Darwin’s account, learning what excites the senses of others was a crucial element in the struggle for survival. Gurney sees it as a given that there are no objectively beautiful forms; rather a creature must develop sensitivity to others’ experiences of pleasure through association. This is said to be especially important in courtship displays, Gurney writes: A mode of such active display is provided in the voice: and the fact, noticed by Mr. Darwin, that almost all male animals use their voices more under the influence of sexual emotion than in any other circumstances, leads up naturally to his important theory as to the origin of vocal, and so of musical, phenomena. . . . Mr. Darwin suggests as probable that the frequent use of the voice under the strong excitement of love, jealousy, and rage, continued during many generations, may at last have produced an inherited effect on the vocal organs. . . . So that, apart from any pleasurable abilities, we might expect that any voluntary production of striking sound, especially

128  Theorizing Music Evolution by a single individual, would reap the benefit of the exciting emotions with which in past ages such a mode of manifestation has been perpetually connected. (116–​17)

Gurney invokes the vocalic origins of music, combined with Darwin’s comments about courtship displays (“male animals use their voices under the influence of sexual emotion”), plus a Spencerian theory of sound symbolism (“any voluntary production of striking sound . . . would reap the benefit of the exciting emotions with which in past ages such a mode of manifestation has been perpetually connected.”). Gurney suggests that music arouses pleasure through its “association” with earlier forms of embodied passion, aroused in primal scenes of erotic courtship and the “indescribable and infinitely deeper emotional effect of certain ordered successions of sounds” that distinguishes aesthetic experiences with music from more ordinary listening experiences (121). Although Gurney invokes Darwin in his account of musical pleasure, his thinking differs from Darwin’s in significant ways. For instance, Gurney argues that the higher senses are unlike other realms of sensation because they do not directly contribute to the survival of the organism. “[T]‌he pleasures of sight and hearing are unconnected with any directly life-​serving function, and that in the outlet to nervous force which they give without being clogged by prosaic utilitarian aims, they partake of the nature of play,” he writes (1880, 7). Absent the burden of “life-​serving functions,” vision and hearing are free to indulge in playful activities. Darwin’s theory, as we have seen, occasionally claims that music’s purpose was specifically life-​serving, due to its direct participation in the courtship rituals that lead to sexual reproduction. Gurney’s extended Darwinian account has a disturbing moral imperative. If the ability to discern aesthetic from nonaesthetic experiences maps with the distinction between the sophisticate and the brute, the ability to experience music as impressive becomes a litmus test for one’s more general cognitive capacity. For Gurney, the value of a given musical work can be determined by the amount of pleasure it evokes. “The prime characteristic of Music,” Gurney writes, “the alpha and omega of its essential effect [is] its perpetual production in us of an emotional excitement of a very intense kind, which yet cannot be defined under any known head of emotion” (1880, 120). This implies a method for assessing the quality of musical works. “[T]‌he word bad may be fairly used (absolutely or relatively) of music (1) which gives no

Edmund Gurney’s Darwinian Music Formalism  129 pleasure, (2) which gives extremely slight and transitory pleasure, (3) which gives pleasure superior in these respects, but shown by experience to be incompatible with more deep and lasting pleasure given by other music” (530). Gurney’s notion of bad music is whatever one finds displeasing, or finds only slightly pleasing. Gurney does not insist that a given piece of music can be objectively bad. Badness is an expression of personal preference. Listeners need not possess any special traits or expertise in order to assess the value of a given musical work. They need only a passive emotional sense of abstract proportion. For this reason, musical pleasure is not analyzable in itself, in Gurney’s account. “Music is perpetually felt as strongly emotional while defying all attempts to analyse the experience or to define it even in the most general way in terms of definite emotions” (316). While this apparent admittance of the individuality of listening experience may be read as empowering to the listener, in the context of Gurney’s broader account of music perception it ultimately reinforces his idealization of his own listening practices. Gurney’s spares no energy for the ways that listeners may differ in their experiences with music. Rather he treats their differences as ultimately unanalyzable. To further clarify the terms of Gurnian musical aesthetics, compare his evolutionary theory of musical pleasure to Spencer’s theory of emotive expression. They differ in three key ways. First, Gurney works to distinguish musical emotion from all other forms of emotion (including emotions aroused by vision and the visual arts), whereas Spencer demonstrates a physiopsychological continuity to all emotional experience. Second, Gurney does not treat music with the same ethical injunctions that Spencer does. Spencer lauded music in OFM as “the chief media of sympathy,” the art form that “more than any other, ministers to human welfare” (1857, 407–​408). And he had very specific ideas about which musical styles were best suited for the cultivation of civilized sensibilities (recall his admiration for Meyerbeer’s music). Gurney’s discussion of “vulgar” music refers only to music that does not satisfy one’s personal sense of pleasure—​in other words, music one does not find “impressive” (1880, 378).7 Third, Gurney—​like Darwin—​rejects Spencer’s theory that music arises from impassioned speech. Gurney criticized Spencer’s ideas about music in an article titled “On Some Disputed Points in Music” (1876) and again in The Power of Sound 7 Budd’s description of Gurney’s music aesthetics: “Ethics and aesthetics are here two, not one” (1985, 181).

130  Theorizing Music Evolution (1880, 476–​97). First of all, Gurney critiqued Spencer’s theory of music by insisting that music and impassioned speech were entirely distinct phenomena. For Gurney, counter-​Spencer, “Music was a separate order, an adjustment of proportional elements of which speech knows nothing” (1880, 492).8 Gurney targets Spencer’s five characteristics of song that distinguish it from emotional speech (loudness, timbre, pitch, interval distance, and rate of variation). For Gurney, none of these five characteristics is essential to song, nor are they different enough from speech to explain the kinds of direct connections between the two as posited by Spencer. Gurney criticized Spencer for treating recitative as a middling stage between speech and song. If a greater degree of pitch variation constitutes a higher level of evolution in song, Gurney notes, then how can Spencer explain the fact that many recitatives actually display less pitch variation than speech? Spencer replied to this and other similar critiques thus: But Mr. Gurney overlooks the fact that while, in recitative, some traits of developed emotional utterance are not present, two of its traits are present. One is that greater resonance of tone, caused by greater contraction of the vocal chords, which distinguishes it from ordinary speech. The other is the relative elevation of pitch, or divergence from the medium tones of voice: a trait similarly implying greater strain of certain vocal muscles, resulting from stronger feeling. (Spencer 1890, 459–​60)

Spencer’s and Gurney’s disagreement highlights a key difference between the two regarding the ways they heard music as evocative of evolutionary processes. Spencer heard the style of music itself as evidence of evolutionary advance, while Gurney was closer to Darwin than to Spencer with regard to his aesthetics of music as a more general category. For Gurney, going further even than Darwin, music is a special category of expressive phenomena. Music stands apart from ordinary life. This formalist attitude became the subject of critique by music scholars such as Malcolm Budd. In Budd’s chapter “Sexual Emotion in Ideal Motion” (1985), he recounts the Darwinian influence in Gurney’s musical aesthetics and critiques the various conceptual knots that Gurney gets himself into in his effort to prove Darwin right. “Gurney wished to make use of Darwin’s theory to explain the characteristic pleasurable emotion, the distinctive but 8 See Levman 2000 (191–​92) for further discussion of Gurney’s critique.

Edmund Gurney’s Darwinian Music Formalism  131 indefinable emotional excitement, of impressive music,” Budd writes (1985, 57). In Budd’s reconstruction of Gurney’s aesthetics, music is said to recall the inarticulate sound of the voice during sexual arousal. Budd finds Gurney’s aesthetics to be untenable due to its separation of aesthetic and nonaesthetic sense perceptions, writing, “the experience of a specifically musical emotion would not be secured by the existence of a specifically aesthetic manner of deriving pleasure from a musical work by attending to it in a certain way” (61–​62). It is not just Gurney’s separation of aesthetic and nonaesthetic perception that Budd finds difficult. He also questions Gurney for being inconsistent in his descriptions of how music expresses emotion. At times Gurney claims that music is emotional when it arouses emotion in the listener. At other times he claims that music is emotional when it represents an emotion. According to Gurney, when we hear music as impressive, we are inspired into a state of personal, indescribable, and innate emotionality that reflects feelings associated with a bygone environment. Like Darwin, Gurney held that contemporary musical experiences retain some of the emotional meanings possessed by music in a long past age. But, as Budd suspects but never says outright, Gurney went beyond Darwin, developing Darwin’s ideas into a theory of inherited associations where music literally recalls feelings inspired by primal courtship rituals.

Problematizing Gurnian Formalism Gurney’s construction of capital M Music continues to have import not necessarily as an evolutionist treatment but as a formalist one. His music formalism is the subject of this final section, particularly as it raises questions that bear on modern music theory and the revitalized field of evolutionary musicology as separate but neighborly studies of musical forms. According to Gurney, music makes no recourse to the extramusical world because its forms and meanings are contained entirely within itself. Gurney writes, “to say what Music expresses except in music is essentially impossible” (1880, 125). Music expresses music, so it is best analyzed on its own terms, as musical forms, according to Gurney. This formalist position lent rhetorical force to his sense that musical pleasure is separate from everyday emotional experiences. Accordingly, he admits no unilateral criteria that can explain why a particular listener enjoys the music they do. One’s taste is neither

132  Theorizing Music Evolution definable nor generalizable. This ineffable quality of musical pleasure is guaranteed by music’s unique status among the arts. Music philosophers have aligned Gurnian aesthetics with the formalisms of critics such as Eduard Hanslick and Clive Bell (Kivy 1962, 320). As Gurney wrote, “the world of Beauty is preeminently the world of Form” (1880, 14). In the wake of musicological critiques of formalism beginning in the 1960s, music theorists have had to do more to justify and contextualize their turns to form, and not always to the satisfaction of musicologists and ethnomusicologists.9 For instance, a critique of formalism-​as-​music analysis was launched by Joseph Kerman in “A Profile for American Musicology” (1965) and then sharpened in his polemical essay “How We Got into Analysis, and How to Get Out” (1985).10 Kerman initially argued as such: “Analysis seems too occupied with its own inner techniques, too fascinated by its own ‘logic,’ and too sorely tempted by its own private pedantries, to confront the work of art in its proper aesthetic terms” (1965, 65). In other words, music analysts cannot help but read into their analyses, absent any historical contextualization. In a later essay, Kerman suggested that the problems with music analysis were threefold: (1) music analysis cleaves musical form from its sociohistorical contexts, (2) it overinvests in a privileged canon of composers and works, and (3) it aspires to “the objective status and hence the authority of scientific inquiry” (1980, 313). Gurney does all three of the above in his efforts to exclude nonmusical things from his analyses. In Peter Kivy’s description, Gurney is a consummate formalist because he “attempts as much as possible to exclude ‘life-​values’ from the work of art, emphasizing its formal self-​contained character” (Kivy 1962, 320). Still, as we have seen, Gurney smuggles in all sorts of life values under the guise of a formalist view of music as separate from life. A key idea that enables such a sleight of hand is Gurney’s sense of what constitutes the “inside” or “outside” of a musical work. For some critics, critiques of formalism are hypocritical because they fail to recognize that there is no outside-​text. For others, formalism is the mistaken assumption for it treats analyzing a piece of music’s form as the same as unpacking its meanings. For still others, the problem with formalism lies in its emphasis on so-​called lifeless musical 9 In “Formalism, Fair and Foul” (2013), Patrick McCreless offers a comparative study of formalisms, recounting six prominent examples of formalist paradigms. He tentatively offers the following superdefinition: “formalism is the claim that the essence of any art resides in relationships of elements within an artistic work itself, not in relationships to anything outside the work” (3.2). 10 Kofi Agawu offered the rejoinder, “How We Got Out of Analysis, and How We Can Get Back In Again” (2004).

Edmund Gurney’s Darwinian Music Formalism  133 forms over human meaning. The anxiety here is that if analysts are only attending to formal structure, they are failing to engage fully with the musical object, and if music is only form, it has no vitality, no life. Again, for Gurney—​both a formalist and “one of organicism’s greatest exponents” (Zon 2017, 68)—​ embodied life is directly tied to musical emotions, and musical emotions are said to occupy the inside of the work. Although someone like Suzanne Cusick (1994) would find fault with a music formalism that enacts metaphors of a disembodied “mind–​mind” game between composer and listener, Gurney’s formalism thematizes mind–​body connections. While Richard Taruskin (2011) once distinguished between music historians as good “evolutionists” and music formalists as naughty “creationists,” Gurney is an example of how nineteenth-​ century music psychologists tried to have it both ways. For Gurney, it was not paradoxical to treat music’s embodied and emotional affordances as essentially musical and therefore inside the work. Because Gurney treated certain musical emotions (those associated with impressive music) as distinct from ordinary feelings and sensations, he was free to analyze these emotional elements as qualities of music. This appears significantly different from the cold, emotionless, accounts of formalism described by thinkers such as Cusick, Taruskin, or Kerman. By capturing emotion as a kind of musical element—​one that sometimes remains beyond the realm of analysis—​Gurney represented both a historically typical subtype of musical formalism and a recurrent one. This Gurnian formalism includes a concept of emotion as a musical element. We can look to music studies and beyond for interdisciplinary insights into such formalisms of the affects.11 These debates have different meanings in the realm of affect theory. In The Female Complaint (2008a), Lauren Berlant responds to readers who read into their research “a decision to advance formalism over historicism,” writing: Often, debates about formalism versus historicism locate politically good work in historical contextualization while casting formalism as merely a quietus or precious fantasy of the artwork’s specialness or autonomy: but both sets of association underdescribe the dynamics of contextualization and exemplification that shape the analytic work a critical text can do. The question should not be whether or not formalism can advance the analysis



11 The term is partially a reference to Eugenie Brinkema’s The Forms of the Affects (2014).

134  Theorizing Music Evolution of history or power, as a realist analytic can do, but whether or not it is possible not to be formalist. (265)

In this passage, Berlant neither defends formalism nor dismisses it. Berlant prompts us to consider the ways that the forms of things act like contextualizing agents. They consolidate details from their own time and place. Even historians are formalists, Berlant suggests, because historical objects and events appear as forms to be read. Roland Barthes too stressed the usefulness of formalism, if only critics could feel unafraid of it. “Less terrorized by the spectre of ‘formalism,’ historical criticism might have been less sterile; it would have understood that the specific study of forms does not in any way contradict the necessary principles of totality and History,” Barthes writes (1972 [1957], 110–​11). In their ways, Berlant and Barthes each suggest that formalism and historicism are linked. At the same time, this leads to a sense that form itself cannot be meaningful unless it is properly contextualized. James Currie (2012) identifies logical fallacies implicit in such a line of thinking: (1) If music only becomes demystified through contextualization, there can be no transhistorical claims, including no transhistorical claims about music’s need to be defined by context. (2) If postmodern musicology can reject formalism for being an ideology of exclusion, its own indulgence in transhistorical claims about music must themselves be understood as ideological, used transparently to further a different kind of politics of exclusion (x). Currie’s points are useful for thinking about how Gurnian formalism can function as a politics of exclusion, as well as why contextualization becomes a wholly different matter with an evolutionary timeline. The history that Gurney gathers into his account of formalism is a massive and unwieldy prehistory of music and courtship rituals, but nevertheless he is fulfilling the new musicological demand to be historical. So, what is the real problem? The problem is the ways in which Gurney uses evolution and stages of life as a stand-​in for history. By replacing history with a timeless model of advancement from primitive to civilized, the dialectical relationship between history and form disappears, replaced by a nondialectic where musical form and evolutionary form coconstitute one another. Evolutionary formalism appears in this guise as a self-​justifying and naval-​gazing analytical method. Martin Scherzinger (2004), like Currie, questions such an axiomatic subordination of musical form beneath social context, while arguing that it is only possible to privilege context (or musical form) as the end-​all ground of musical

Edmund Gurney’s Darwinian Music Formalism  135 meaning when context and musical work are construed as separate from one another. “In this construal,” he writes, “the dialectical relations between them dwindle and musical ‘formalism’ becomes falsely understood as . . . a ‘self-​ identical’ repressive practice” (2004, 254). Scherzinger demonstrates that Jameson’s oft-​cited adage, always historicize, is less straightforward than its six declamatory syllables reveal on their own: Just as Fredric Jameson’s call to “Always historicize!” is menaced by his observation that history “is inaccessible to us except in textual form,” . . . so too is the rush to historicize (or socially contextualize) musicological inquiry substantially complicated by the fact that historical and social content too is patterned by an aesthetic form. In short, getting rid of formalism in music studies does not get rid of the problem of form. (2004, 254)

As Eve Sedgwick wrote, “What could have less to do with historicizing than the commanding atemporal verb ‘always’?”12 For Scherzinger, like Berlant, historical-​cultural meanings are accessible through form, and form is accessible through historicization. Gurney’s formalist method skates past the dialectic of history and form by opting for an especially timeless prehistory of music as a march through stages of life. Evolutionary history becomes pure form, just as musical form becomes pure form. Pure form is precisely what is postulated when Gurney summarizes the power of sound as such: “Music seems capable of stirring up the strongest excitement that a being who musically typifies that stage can experience” (1880, 315). Gurney defines music as a mark of progress, as Spencer did, while using Darwinian sexual selection as a formula for an ever-​present musical feeling. Mills helps us recognize the ways in which Gurney’s politics of exclusion is a racialized one; the audibility of whiteness figures into Gurney’s treatment of the so-​called highest forms of musical pleasure and evolution. Debates over formalism help us locate Gurney in a history of ideas about musical form and how it might be read. For Gurney, musical experiences of pleasure are not always reduced to specific musical features, such as relative pitch heights, or to qualities such as amount of variation. They are instead explained through a quasi-​historical evolutionary account of human nature—​thus evolution

12 This often-​quoted witticism is from Sedgwick’s chapter “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading” in Touching Feeling, cowritten with Adam Frank (2002, 125).

136  Theorizing Music Evolution becomes instrumentalized to explain artistic form through the lens of an immutable hierarchy. Under new musicological conditions, formalism is often said to reinforce the “masterpiece status” of canonical works by “lavish[ing] its whole attention on the demonstration of inner coherence” (Kerman 1980, 313). But in Gurney’s The Power of Sound, any sense of inner coherence is irrelevant. All that matters to him is the perceived impressiveness of the musical surface. Any sense of what is impressive is specific to each individual listener and thus not generalizable. While Gurney may offer a music-​analytical program where aspects of individual experience are permitted, he nevertheless affirms the anxieties of formalists and antiformalists alike by treating bits of his own musical experience as natural laws. Instead of exploring ways that listening practices may differ between listeners or groups of listeners, he collapses those differences into unanalyzability and avoids theorizing them directly. From there, he frees himself to draw on his own tastes as evidence of the whole of human experience. In reconstructing Gurney’s evolutionary account of music perception, we have seen how his ideas were inscribed within a broader field of Victorian evolutionisms and continental music aesthetics, as well as ways in which his ideas tended toward an ideal-​as-​idealized-​model, in Mills’s sense that it presumes to prescribe how things should be according to the ideals of a privileged group. Gurney’s theory implicitly makes a case for what music is, as well as who is capable of perceiving it based on an artificial chain of progress. The political consequences of a theory like this are dire. For those who do not feel music in the way that Gurney idealizes, the implication is not simply that they are bad listeners but also that they are less evolved. In short, Gurney believed Darwin when he said that music exists because it has evolutionary utility, adding that this utility is something one should be able to sense for themselves whenever they judge music to be impressive. Absent such an experience, however, it is difficult to locate oneself in Gurney’s grand evolutionary theory of sonic power.

Conclusion Post-​Darwinian Music Theory

When Charles Darwin invoked his experience of “backbone shivers” while listening to music, it was to explain that the pleasures of music were felt in the body as much as they were heard (1888, 49). These youthful observations became somber reflections in late writings, as Darwin laments the “atrophy” of his musical sensibilities. His mind had become too occupied with scientific matters, he writes, having been transformed into a “machine for grinding general natural laws out of large collections of facts” (101). “The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness,” he continues, “and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature” (102). Having theorized a dichotomy between science and music (and found himself on the side of science) he worries about an associated decline in his own happiness, as well as a loss of moral and emotional faculties. What may be further deduced from this passage has to do with the core argument of this book: How Darwin ontologized music reflected how he listened to music, which changed over the course of his life. This book has shown how Victorian evolutionists such as Darwin, Spencer, and Gurney constructed their unique ontologies of music that were also reflected in their listening habits. These imaginative turns to music were enmeshed within a decidedly Victorian musical milieu, one that maintained ties to Romantic idealism and natural theology, while also participating in an emergent, arguably modern, evolutionist perspective on the human species. This book has unpacked how these Victorian music-​evolutionists invoked music as a boundary-​drawing concept that was both flexible and sensual in its ways of clarifying what makes the human species different (or not so different) from other species. Pouring their own situated understandings of music into their writings, they worked to create and circulate the idea of music as an evolutionary borderland. I have also drawn on this history to think critically about the recent revival of evolutionary musicology as a subfield. While far from a comprehensive Theorizing Music Evolution. Miriam Piilonen, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2024. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197695289.003.0007

138 Conclusion history of music-​evolution ideas, this book has laid the groundwork for a new critical intervention into these discussions. Rather than adjudicate available music-​evolutionary theories as more or less correct, I dissolved the debate into an interconnected subfield of evolutionary musicologies. In these concluding remarks, I offer additional reflections on a rarified post-​ Darwinian impulse in music scholarship. Readers may wonder why I say “post-​Darwinian” rather than “post-​Spencerian” or “post-​evolutionist.” I have argued that we ought to resist the Darwin-​ization of music-​evolutionary history. I have reintroduced Spencer and other non-​Darwinian thinkers where they are often forgotten, while also pointing to more rhizomatic connections not yet traced. So why center Darwin once more? My point is that we should be wary of the ways in which a reference to Darwin can lessen the demand for evidence and replace historical contingency with vague universals and dogmatic absolutes. A historically constructed Darwin has come to serve as a potent authority figure and a blunt-​edged symbol of power. We should recognize this symbolic Darwin for the dog whistle that it often is. As this book has shown, scholars as early as Gurney began to imagine themselves to exist in a post-​Darwinian world, where everything had become Darwinian—​even Spencer. This retroactive ascendance of Darwin in the evolutionary imagination was not a straightforward result of scientific acceptance of his signature claims but also a result of changing cultural narratives. Darwin came to personify science as an adventure toward discovery, while other thinkers faded to the background. Spencer may have ignited an evolutionary movement but Darwin still became the so-​called father of evolution. Over time, this iconic Darwin exerted his influence over understandings of nature as well as over history. This normalization led to a wave of questionable post-​Darwinian music theories in the twentieth century. Alan Lomax, for one, drew from evolution to justify his own objectivity of feelings known as “Cantometrics” (Lomax & Arensberg 1977). John Blacking, on the other hand, took a more measured approach: “The term ‘Spencerism,’ like ‘Darwinism’ or ‘Marxism’ or any other ‘personal-​name-​ism,’ suggests dogma and invites polemic rather than scientific discussion, testing and refinement.”1 Blacking was right that we should avoid contributing to a falsely heroic portrait of the field as post-​ Darwinian (or post-​anyone-​in-​particular). In other words, we should move beyond Darwin rather than center him. I would add that we should avoid 1 From John Blacking’s comment in Freeman et al. (1974, 222).

Conclusion  139 lionizing evolutionist thinkers lest the most impactful historical lessons be reduced out. Reading these texts from a present perspective raises many questions: What ideologies have been able to thrive because of narrative resources borrowed from Victorian evolutionary thought? There was more than a hint of the imperial in nineteenth-​century evolutionary treatises, situated as they were within the seat of British imperialism, and reflective as they often were of colonial narratives about musical conquest and domination, how people and societies should be, and whether human and animal expressions may be read like a musical score. Do such narratives persist in the revitalized scene of evolutionary musicology? At times, yes. Rather than sweep these matters under the rug, we should confront them directly, beginning with the ways historical figures idealized the musical forms and practices of a privileged few, while calling what they did a science of Music in the broadest sense of the term. There are reasons why midcentury music scholars tended to avoid direct theorization of musical origins. Partially this was because music scholars had little need for a shared evolutionary definition of music, and partially because evolutionary methods were frequently criticized for being too generalizing and normalizing. For such a crowd, the question, “How did music evolve?” was too broad and speculative to ground any serious study. Does the revival of evolutionary musicology imply that evolutionary science has advanced to a point where questions of musical origins have become settled? I am not so sure. Nor do I think consensus should be the goal. Some have called to unite the vast field of music studies under the banner of evolution, but in my view such a hypothetical scholarly turn (in which all theories of music would need to be consistent with a shared evolutionary model) would be so flattening as to be meaningless, and so impractical as to be stultifying. In other words, evolutionary frameworks do not tell us everything that is interesting or true about music. Nor are evolutionists necessarily the ones best equipped to theorize music. Evolution could well be a music-​ analytical tool, but neither is it the best nor the only tool. We may have to be satisfied to say “humans evolved to be musical” and know very little else about how (or why). In the meantime, there is a great deal to say about the actual lives of “musical” people throughout history (musicology), around the world (ethnomusicology), and how people create and express through different sounds and structures (music theory). In other words, evolutionism should be acknowledged as an especially blunt method of theorizing music. When all you have is a hammer, everything

140 Conclusion looks like a nail. Not everything responds well to being hammered. Armed with such universalizing and normalizing apparatuses, evolutionists risk blasting through musical conversations with rich histories of their own. They risk reifying the same kinds of clichéd narratives that have long fed into, and that continue to haunt, music-​evolutionist thought. It is important to confront these historical realities and acknowledge the limits of evolutionist speculations. Their limits are exhibited in part by the range of ways that musical meaning has been generated without recourse to evolution, in part by the paucity of available archaeological and anthropological evidence, and in part by the ways that ideas about music-​evolution are themselves inscribed in histories. Where does this leave us? The challenges of theorizing music evolution are not going to be solved anytime soon and should not be taken for granted, particularly by active evolutionary musicologists. One course of action for scholars active in this field is to become knowledgeable of the subfield’s histories, and to critically situate their own work critically within such histories. Anyone can take up this challenge by asking critical questions such as: Question 1: How am I framing the idea of musical origins? Am I acknowledging how theories of music evolution have also served as ontologies of music, which actively participate in the construction of a reified “music”? How am I modeling music-​evolutionary processes? How do I distinguish between evolution and historical events? Question 2: How am I constructing music? Do I define music explicitly or implicitly? What is included in this construction? What is excluded? How might my conclusions be different under another conception of music? Am I arguing (implicitly or explicitly) for how music should be? Do I historicize music as a deconstructed thing? Question 3: How am I conceptualizing a musical being? Who is excluded, or rendered disabled or unthinkable, if they do not conform to the definition at hand? Am I arguing (implicitly or explicitly) for how musical beings should be, or how they should behave? Am I minding prior injunctions about monolithic treatments of “the human”? Question 4: Do I treat evolutionary claims as politically neutral? What are my political values and goals? How do I implement them in this research? Do I presume an apolitical frame of music-​evolution analysis? How do I gather data and assess sources? How am I approaching people as subjects of research? Do I engage in extractionism?

Conclusion  141 These are just a handful of examples of critical questions that one may elect to ask. My own work does not escape these calls for deeper questioning and problematization. To be “post-​” something can mean after, later, following, subsequent, behind, because of, in the wake of, something. We might be referring to a prior, or perhaps to a successor; we are locating ourselves in time, in a history. To use the term “post-​” can mean aspiring to the leading edge, to move ahead or beyond. Lauren Berlant referred to “Beyonding” as a rhetoric we use when we do not want to be stuck.2 My own desire not to get stuck in a Darwinian process is part of the subtitle of these conclusions. If evolutionary biologists have questioned whether “music” is a suitable subject of analysis, and if music scholars have criticized such methods for their ahistoricism and unearned universalizing, then music-​evolutionary ideas would appear to have a strained relationship to facts. Better to characterize them as myth, allegory, or religion in their own right. I have explored in this book how evolutionists repeatedly constructed music in utilitarian terms as they reestablished the conceptual borders between human and nonhuman, which frequently involved the reduction of people and practices to normalizing stereotypes. In so doing, I have carved a path for moving beyond music-​evolutionism by evacuating such theories of any remaining claims to comprehensiveness or political neutrality. At times this has meant taking seriously the non-​Darwinian figures who helped define the historical terrain of music-​evolution theories. At times it has meant reading figures like Spencer, Darwin, or Gurney closely enough that the implications of their music theories may be confronted and their colonial logics unpacked. At times it has meant experimenting with auxiliary evolutionist ideas about earworms, vocal expression, sound symbolism, the concept of adaptation, sexuality, or musical forms, in order to discover further analytical results of such theories, such as by bringing them into contact with feminist and queer theories that negate or decentralize heteropatriarchal logics. Rather than recuperate these ideas, I have been interested in how they appear in a long history of ideas about music’s possible origins and functions, while contributing critical tactics to conversations about music evolution. I think of these as de-​escalation tactics. Rather than work to create more evolutionary theories of music, we can use our knowledge to critically address 2 Berlant’s exact words are, “Beyonding is a rhetoric people use when they have a desire not to be stuck” (2011b, 80).

142 Conclusion music-​evolutionism as a historical happening and to make sure its harms do not continue. De-​escalation is paramount if we are to combat the spread of false evolutionary narratives. In music evolution texts, we see how science incorporates rhetoric, allegory, and argument in order to elevate perceived truths, which is not the problem in itself. The problem is how music evolution research has continually been used to authorize a mechanistic and even dehumanizing logic. When evolution and music are haphazardly coupled together, cartoonish conceptual hybrids are easily created: an evolutionary theory of why sexy men play guitar; evolution-​based parenting advice for how people should sing to babies; a self-​help product with an evolutionary promise to heal your DNA; references to folk song adaptations as metaphors for species adaptations; a theory of modern dating that revolves around having good rhythm or a pleasing voice; an aesthetics of musical progress that reinforces an illicit canon. These examples may strike us as silly, but they are real examples of music-​evolution ideology that are gaining an aura of truth by being circulated among a newer cohort of influencers. On the Internet, for instance, the music-​evolution idea travels via a combination of popular journalism, social media, and scholarly discourse.3 In online spaces, often these delicate matters are bluntly portrayed as a science race with winners and losers, reductively framed by a Darwin-​ized history of music evolutionism, or otherwise reduced to a thin line “from bone flutes to Beyoncé.”4 We need not take such hyperbole seriously. The music-​ evolution project will never be finished—​ an intriguing thought. It is the impossibility of such a project that most intrigues me. Music (whatever that might be) may very well continue to exceed or bypass the evolutionary frame. Such an embrace of ambiguity of beginnings can mean recognizing that the realm of the musical is an especially cloudy arena of evolutionary inquiry, and that evolution is an especially fraught lens for theorizing that nebulous music. By opting for an attitude of ambivalence, one may find that there is no need to develop a theory to explain an origin or function for music after all. Matters of origins would then remain a mystery; we do not yet know what music has been or might be; there may never be any clear purpose or unified function for what gets called music. 3 My chapter “Music Theory and Social Media” (2022) offers an overview of how music theories circulate online. 4 “From bone flutes to Beyoncé” is Michael Spitzer’s turn of phrase, in an interview with Open Culture (August 2022). https://​www.open​cult​ure.com/​2022/​08/​the-​evolut​ion-​of-​music-​40000-​ years-​of-​music-​hist​ory-​cove​red-​in-​8-​minu​tes.html.

Acknowledgments It was a pleasure to write this book. I am grateful to many people for making it so. Thanks to Steven Rings, Norm Hirschy, Lavanya K, and Rachel Ruisard at Oxford University Press for guiding this project through to publication. Heartfelt thanks as well to the two anonymous peer reviewers, whose support and critical commentaries meant a great deal to me. Mark Butler, Bob Gjerdingen, and Ryan Dohoney—​my PhD committee members—​each provided generous scholarly guidance for which I am deeply grateful. Thanks to Branka Arsić for encouraging my interest in Victorian evolutionary theories through her course on the history of vitalism at the Cornell School of Criticism and Theory in 2016. I extend my gratitude to colleagues who generously read, discussed, or otherwise engaged this research: Rosa Abrahams, Bruno Alcalde, Ric Ashley, Linda Austern, A. J. Baginski, David John Baker, Janet Bourne, Sara Bowden, Caitlin Cawley, Marie Comuzzo, Stephen Hill, Jason Hooper, Gary Karpinski, Kristina Knowles, Jacob Leveton, Thomas Love, Maryam Moshaver, Cora Palfy, Tyrone Palmer, Marianna Ritchey, Jason Rosenholtz-​ Witt, Olga Sánchez-​ Kisielewska, Dan Shanahan, Andrew Welch, Chris White, everyone who attended my talks on this material, and everyone with whom I shared a seminar space. This research was supported by an SMT-​40 Dissertation Fellowship from the Society for Music Theory, a Franke Humanities Fellowship, and a research grant from Northwestern University for archival visits to the British Library and Senate House Library in London. Support from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the Massachusetts Society of Professors enabled me to complete the final stages of writing. An earlier version of the section “Evolutionary Voices and Nonlinear Histories” was published as “Evolutionary Voices in Gary Tomlinson’s A Million Years of Music” (2020) in Empirical Musicology Review. I thank EMR for permission to republish a portion of this essay as it appears here.

144 Acknowledgments Special thanks to Ben Court, my sweetheart, and to my bandmates Pam Buschbacher, Kelsey Henke, Kelli Maestro, Whitney Milikin, and T-​Rah Shedor. Thanks to friends Alex Kalamaroff, Brandi Morton, Maya Renfro, Victoria and Bernard Ross, and Lucia Stavros. I dedicate this book to my parents, Ellen Shulman Piilonen and Leo Piilonen, and to my brother, Eli Piilonen.

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Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–​53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Figures are indicated by f following the page number adaptationism, 12–​13, 80, 87–​88, 89, 101, 103, 104, 109–​17 adaptation vs. exaptation, 114–​15 animal expression, 4–​5, 11, 20, 32–​35, 40, 60–​61, 89–​90, 93, 101, 103, 104–​5, 107, 108, 108f, 118–​19 See also birdsong Barthes, Roland, 6–​7, 134 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 7–​8, 13, 27–​28, 63, 118–​19, 121–​22, 123f birdsong, 4–​5, 20, 32–​33, 40, 60–​61, 89–​90, 93, 101, 103, 104–​5, 107, 108, 118–​19 See also animal expression Blackwell, Antoinette Brown, 8, 93–​100, 97f, 98f, 99f Chopin, Frédéric, 33, 63 comparative musicology, 5–​7 consciousness, 11, 23–​24, 29–​30, 31–​32, 46–​47, 49, 51–​52, 82–​85, 122, 125–​28 See also unconscious Darwin, Charles, 1, 3–​4, 5–​6, 8, 10–​14, 19–​ 20, 21, 22–​23, 31–​41, 42–​44, 47–​48, 50–​52, 53–​54, 60, 68, 83, 87–​94, 96–​ 101, 103–​13, 108f, 115–​17, 118–​22, 126–​31, 135–​36, 137–​39, 141, 142 Darwin, Emma, 33 Darwin, Erasmus, 40, 53 Darwin-​ization, 11–​12, 31, 32, 53–​54, 137–​38, 142 Derby, England, 18 earworm, 11, 23–​26, 28–​30, 141–​42 See also stuck song syndrome

Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans), 4–​5, 18 evolutionary claims as ontological claims, 2, 6–​8, 69–​70, 89, 109–​10, 140–​41 extractionism, 7–​8, 69, 140 false evolutionary narratives, 3–​4, 7–​8, 10, 22–​23, 52–​53, 55–​56, 69–​70, 113, 118–​19, 121, 134–​35, 138, 139–​ 41, 142 Galápagos, 5–​6, 110 Gaudry, Adam J. P. 7–​8, 69 Goddard, Joseph, 4–​5, 51 “Great Chain of Being,” 18–​19, 21, 118–​19 Gurney, Edmund, 1, 3–​6, 8, 13–​14, 118–​36, 137–​38, 141–​42 Hendrix, Jimi, 9, 88–​89, 115–​16 ideal theory, 8, 119, 121, 122 James, William, 15–​16, 17 Lamarck, Jean-​Baptiste, 22–​23 Leibniz, Gottfried, 12, 47, 73–​74 Lewes, George Henry, 16–​17, 18 Litchfield, Henrietta, 32, 43, 45f Litchfield, Richard Buckley, 43–​44 Locke, John, 12, 73 London, England, 7–​8, 10–​11, 18–​19, 43, 57, 67–​68 Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 7–​8, 62–​63, 129 Miller, Geoffrey, 3, 9, 88–​89, 102, 115–​16 Mills, Charles, 8, 119, 121–​22, 135–​36

160 Index Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 7–​8, 33, 62–​63, 118 Müller, Max, 12, 70–​71, 75–​76 music as ambiguous, 1–​2, 6, 9, 41–​43, 47–​ 48, 79–​81 as boundary-​drawing-​device, 1, 42, 137, 141–​42 as cure for illness, 18, 44–​46 as evolutionary stage beyond language, 4–​5, 11, 12, 18–​19, 31–​32, 36, 42, 68 as imperial metaphor, 5–​6, 7–​8, 65–​70 as proto-​language, 4–​5, 11, 31–​32, 36, 42, 51–​52, 90–​91 as scientific evidence of evolutionary history, 1–​2, 3–​4, 9, 11, 37, 38–​40, 59–​62, 68–​69, 78, 87–​89, 103–​4, 129–​30, 136 as universal good, 11, 52 natural theology, 21, 137 non-​Darwinian, 10–​11, 21–​22, 51, 137–​ 38, 141–​42 nonlinear history, 9, 79–​86 “note” vs. “noise,” 11, 29, 42, 103–​4, 107 ontology of music, 2, 6–​7, 29, 69–​70, 137 Patel, Aniruddh, 3, 14, 40–​41, 112–​13 Pater, Walter, 4–​5, 64–​65 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 9, 65–​66 Plato, 12, 56, 65–​66, 70, 71–​74, 77, 78–​79 post-​Darwinian, 3–​4, 9, 13, 100, 137–​38 Priest, Eldritch, 25–​26, 29–​30 reflex action, 20–​21, 57–​58, 59, 64, 66–​ 67, 78 Rousseau, Jean-​Jacques, 38, 70, 83 scientific imperialism, 2–​3, 5–​6, 7–​8, 9–​10, 41, 59–​64, 65–​71, 75–​76, 107–​9, 118–​ 19, 126–​27, 135–​36, 139

sexual selection, 3, 9, 12–​13, 21, 31–​32, 34–​36, 87–​103, 104–​9, 111, 115–​17, 119–​20, 127–​28, 130–​31, 135–​36 Social Darwinism, 10–​11, 53–​54 sound symbolism, 12, 55–​86, 128 Spencer, Herbert, 1, 3–​4, 5–​8, 10–​12, 13–​14, 15–​21, 22–​24, 25–​27, 28–​30, 31–​32, 36, 37–​38, 42, 43–​52, 53–​54, 55–​70, 72, 74–​79, 83, 90, 93, 95, 96–​100, 104–​5, 106, 112–​13, 118–​19, 121, 128, 129–​30, 135–​36, 137–​ 39, 141–​42 Spencerism, 22, 138–​39 stuck song syndrome, 11, 23–​26, 28–​ 30, 141–​42 See also earworm “survival of the fittest,” 22–​23, 68 teleology, 8, 12, 21–​22, 28–​29, 55, 78, 80–​ 81, 82, 83, 113 Tennyson, Alfred, 10–​11, 15, 16–​17, 22 Terada, Rei, 26, 47–​49 Tomlinson, Gary, 3, 9, 12, 14, 56, 79–​ 86, 113–​14 unconscious, 11, 23–​24, 31–​32, 51–​52 Victorian Britain, 1–​4, 9–​11, 13–​14, 16, 18–​19, 20, 21–​23, 33, 34, 35–​36, 47, 51–​52, 54, 56, 65, 67, 91–​93, 100, 103–​4, 114–​16, 118–​19, 136, 137, 139 Victorian mental science, 10–​11, 15–​16, 67, 103–​4 Victorian musical culture, 10–​11, 13–​14, 18–​19, 20, 22, 23–​24, 47, 54, 56, 65, 114–​16, 118–​19, 136, 137, 139 vocal expression, 9, 12, 20, 32–​33, 34–​41, 42–​43, 55–​86, 90, 91–​93, 105–​7, 114–​ 15, 127–​31, 141–​42 Wynter, Sylvia, 7–​8, 69–​70