Charles Darwin vs. Herbert Spencer on the Origins of Music

Abstract Chapter 2 compares Darwin’s and Spencer’s 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 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. This chapter highlights finer points of agreement and disagreement between these two. If Darwin and Spencer had a debate, who was the winner? This chapter is interested in resisting the “Darwin-ization” of music-evolutionist history: the tendency to treat Darwin as the only relevant historical figure. Rather than adjudicate Spencer and Darwin’s musical debate, this chapter demonstrates that their positions were mutually constitutive, and that ultimately their differences dissolved into a shared position that opposes a more historicized view.