of energy.”48 For Spencer, such sounds were merely precursors to expressions of emotion that would eventually become the cadences of speech and song. In the ensuing decade, Spencer reprinted his essay with further additions at least six more times before his death, cementing the perceived polarity between his work and Darwin’s. It was an opposition that generated a broad audience for musical evolutionism, building a tenuous musical bridge across the gap between biological evolution and human history.
SOCIAL EVOLUTION
Although the Darwin-Spencer debates appeared to be about sexual reproduction, in practice they were often about social evolution.49 For intellectuals like Sully, “the genesis of animal music is at the same time the explanation of the early developments of song in the human race.”50 In this approach, the songs of primitive human beings could be compared to the songs of advanced animal species. The result was, as science writer Grant Allen put it, a map of aesthetic evolution “from the simple and narrow feelings of the savage or the child to the full and expansive aesthetic catholicity of the cultivated adult.”51 Bird fanciers had long made comparisons between chicks raised by foster parents learning the foster species’ song, and human children learning the tongue of adoptive parents.52 References to Darwin’s and Spencer’s ideas became a way to channel such comparisons into an explicitly evolutionary, linear, hierarchical discourse about the relationship between birds, humans, races, and the forms of difference that lay between.
Evolutionary historian Peter Bowler has called social evolutionism “a system of cosmic progress,” while Timothy Ingold names it “the telos of an embodied purpose,” an inevitable forward-moving arrow of change that ranked race and species in order of development.53 The hierarchy of this arrow was permeated by the nationalist politics and colonial economies of nineteenth-century Europe, Britain, and America, becoming the dominant vehicle of approaches to biological evolutionism.54 Assumptions about race, class, and gender permeated musical explanations of human and animal difference. German evolutionist August Weismann compared the gap separating Beethoven from a “primitive” human musician to the distance between a parrot and a human, arguing that “we cannot suppose that any Beethovens were concealed among primitive men, or are running around among contemporary Australians or negroes,” because “savages are lower in mental development than civilized man.”55 American naturalist Henry Oldys praised birds by connecting them to the very same savages, arguing that “the songs of some birds must be ranked above the best music of many primitive races of today.”56 Even Cornish, in his lighthearted account of zoo animals, implied familiar racial stereotypes when he contrasted the European wolf’s “hideous sneer” on hearing music with the more “extreme and abject fear” of its Indian cousin.57
Social evolutionism’s racial stereotyping was compelling in part because it addressed a real need for historians and social scientists. Older historians such as Thomas Carlyle had argued that social change was the work of influential kings and geniuses, the “great man” theory of history.58 Biography, the main method of this approach, did little to explain changing communities or cultures; and by the end of the nineteenth century intellectuals ranging from Marx to Darwin sought alternative ways of understanding social change. While Darwin and many of his contemporaries espoused a social theory of groups rather than individuals, one of the most recognized theorists of this approach was Herbert Spencer. Spencer’s views on music were one facet of this larger sociological picture. Spencerian social evolution substituted an “enormous aggregate of forces that have been co-operating for ages” for older biographical historiography, replacing the “great men” of historians like Thomas Carlyle with social science.59 When Spencer asked his readers to understand music by comparing the sounds of a gentleman to those of a clown, or a refined lady to her servant, he argued that music was a mechanism of social change, defining—and potentially changing—human social classification.60
These themes of social aggregates, progressive change, and classification might have seemed like established facts to many music lovers. Nineteenth-century composers such as Wagner and Busoni had viewed music as both highest in rank among the arts, and forward moving in time. Spencer too thought music was “the highest of the fine arts,” an art form he believed would open the gates to universal human sympathy in due time, fulfilling the ultimate goal of social evolution’s direction.61 By the early twentieth century, modernist composers fused primitive and futurist idioms in works like Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring to create a musical language out of this evolutionary outlook.
Specialists in music’s history were particularly interested in social evolutionism’s emphasis on human development. They openly debated the relative merits of Darwin’s and Spencer’s theories, arguing whether speech or song came first and producing a wave of successful textbooks with names like The Evolution of the Art of Music and Music, Its Laws and Evolution.62 Most sided with Spencer’s belief in human uniqueness. Guido Adler, one of the founders of the field, wrote that music’s history was “a matter of natural selection,” suggesting that musical styles were subject to evolutionary forces that made the strong flourish and diminished the weak.63 Like Spencer, Adler advocated for a shift away from “great man” biographies to a history shaped by “epochs—large and small—or according to peoples, territories, regions, cities, and schools of art … without special consideration given to the life and effect of individual artists who have participated in this steady development.”64 But Adler was opposed to Darwin’s sexual selection theory, writing in 1911 that, “no musical artistry can be explained by monkey instincts.”65 Charles Hubert Parry, director of the Royal College of Music in London, explained the concept of music’s evolution at the end of the nineteenth century in a similar language of anthropological comparison:
The basis of all music and the very first steps in the long story of musical development are to be found in the musical utterances of the most undeveloped and unconscious types of humanity; … Such savages are in the same position in relation to music as the remote ancestors of the race before the story of the artistic development of music began; and through the study of the ways in which they contrive their primitive fragments of tune and rhythm, and of the principles upon which they string these together, the first steps of musical development may be traced.66
Parry’s approach favored racial rather than species development, deriding Darwin’s “childish theory” that music originated in birdsong.67
Yet birdsong remained a convenient point of reference for other music scholars. Adler’s student Robert Lach, who supported Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, developed a taxonomy of musical ornaments based on the calls and songs of birds.68 Lach even suggested that some of the great composers of the Italian baroque had birdlike taste, turning to the strophes of Caccini, Caldera, and Castello.69 Shortly after Lach, American composer and critic Daniel Gregory Mason opened one of the first general histories of music published in the United States with a transcribed version of a bird near his home in Massachusetts, whose adherence to a D major triad impressed the musician with the likelihood that primitive scales derived from a natural order perceptible to the other animal kingdoms.70
Naturalists looked even more closely at birds’ role in social evolution. Many saw hints of a parallel evolution in which “inferior singers” in the avian universe like the bullfinch or nuthatch contrasted with the more varied and creative minds of the thrush or the blackbird, just as advanced races contrasted with primitive ones.71 “Though the birds expressed themselves vocally ages before there were human ears to hear them,” wrote Simeon Pease Cheney, “it is hardly to be supposed that their singing bore much resemblance to the bird music of to-day.”72 By 1919, social cultivation among birds meant that “the characteristic songs of the species are preserved, just as primitive human language passes from individual to individual within the tribe, and as the folk-songs of the various races of men have been handed down from generation to generation.”73 Like
