Theorizing Music Evolution

Abstract Theorizing Music Evolution is a critical examination of ideas about musical origins, emphasizing nineteenth-century theories of music in the evolutionist writings of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. What did Darwin and Spencer have to say about music? What role did music play in their evolutionary theories? What were the values and limits of these evolutionist turns of thought, and in what ways have they endured in present-day music research? The book argues for the significance of Victorian music-evolutionism in light of its ties to a recently revitalized subfield of evolutionary musicology. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to music theorizing, Piilonen explores how historical thinkers constructed music in evolutionist terms and argues for an updated understanding of music as an especially fraught area of evolutionary thought. Historical evolutionists such as Darwin and Spencer developed and applied a concept of music that served as a boundary-drawing device, used to trace or obscure the conceptual borders between human and animal. For Darwin, music served as a kind of proto-language common to humans and animals alike. Spencer viewed music as a specifically human stage of evolutionary advance, beyond language acquisition. These competing views established radically different perspectives on the origin and function of music in human cultural expression, while at the same time being mutually constitutive of one another. A groundbreaking contribution to music theory and histories of science, Theorizing Music Evolution turns to the idea of music evolution with an eye toward disrupting and intervening in these questions as they recur in the present.