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 others’ ardent passions during their courtship and rivalry.”34 Darwin’s theory was popularized by figures ranging from the fictional Holmes to psychologists such as James Sully and Edmund Gurney, and musicologists such as Jules Combarieau and Robert Lach, gaining a considerable number of adherents by the early twentieth century.35
But sexual selection was a very different story from the cold and random chance of natural selection. Many intellectuals, however respectful of Darwinian evolution, were troubled by the theory that aesthetics’ origins lay in the loves, choices, and passions of animals. For many, it was simply too difficult to reconcile the impersonal forces of nature that dominated evolutionary theory with the personal, fickle individuals creating emotions that led to choosing a mate whose offspring would then choose future generations. The first-ever book on birdsong’s evolution, Charles Witchell’s The Evolution of Bird-Song, with Observances on the Influence of Heredity and Imitation of 1896, devoted almost all of its opening chapter to a critique of Darwin’s theory of musical evolution, concluding that despite certain compelling features of sexual selection, the songs of birds could not “reasonably be considered to be directly occasioned by the emotion of love.”36 The biologist Alfred Russel Wallace, who had independently engineered his own natural selection theory, argued that Darwinian sexual selection in which animals seemed to “consciously” choose their future was wrong, and should be replaced with natural selection.37 Wallace’s colleague August Weismann agreed, writing that “the musical sense is not a result of sexual selection,” and arguing instead for a nineteenth-century version of Steven Pinker’s description of music as deliciously unnecessary “auditory cheesecake”—a delightful coincidence of acoustic development useless in survival terms.38
Darwin’s most visible opponent on the matter of musical evolution was his contemporary Herbert Spencer. Spencer, a British social and political philosopher, had been a public advocate for Darwinian natural selection. Both Darwin and Spencer thought music might offer new ways to understand human differences. But while Darwin’s work was rooted in theories of biological reproduction, Spencer’s approach was framed by sociology. His writings about music, which located aesthetics in human social life rather than biological history, became the public foil for Darwin’s thinking on aesthetics, with “Mr. Darwin’s and Mr. Herbert Spencer’s” theories becoming polar twins in the discourse of music’s origins.39
The first of Spencer’s texts on music actually predated the Descent, becoming newly relevant after Darwin’s controversial book was published. Written in 1857, two years before the publication of On the Origin of Species, Spencer’s “The Origin and Function of Music” put forward an argument very similar to Herder’s from the previous century, treating music as the emotional component of early language. Spencer approached all animal sounds as exclamations or “impassioned utterances” caused by restless emotional energy. Birdsong was, in his view, functionally equivalent to barking dogs, purring cats, roaring lions, and any other shrieks and moans of pain, joy, or suffering.40 Human vocalizations, on the other hand, were uniquely rational, developing into speech, chant, and song. The evolution of these utterances could be explained as a side effect of environmental pressures and local competition, but had nothing to do with choice, aesthetics, or, especially, sexual reproduction. Spencer’s take on music was fundamentally a sociological one, connecting aesthetics to prevailing beliefs about reason, language, and the emotions. It was about human experience, not biological history; Spencer’s theory was entirely disinterested in the development of the syrinxes, tongues, mouths, and ears that accompanied song.
Darwin had briefly referenced Spencer’s essay in the Descent, but he provided a more vigorous response in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). Though respectful of Spencer’s general ideas, Darwin argued that in treating all animal sounds as the same type of sound, Spencer and those like him had essentially missed the point. Spencer’s pig uttered generic exclamatory grunts; Darwin’s pig uttered a special “deep grunt of satisfaction … when pleased with its food, [that] is widely different from its harsh scream of pain or terror.”41 The barking dog that opened Spencer’s essay had yet another way of making sounds: “But with the dog … the bark of anger and that of joy are sounds which by no means stand in opposition to each other; and so it is in some cases.”42 Spencer and other advocates of the natural-selection approach to music, Darwin implied, simply failed to recognize musicality as a distinct mode of sound production, thereby failing to recognize what everybody else knew: “that animals utter musical notes is familiar to every one, as we may hear daily in the singing of birds.”43 Psychologist Edmund Gurney’s The Power of Sound (1880) added further rankle to Darwin’s criticisms, claiming a Darwinian approach was “directly opposed” to Spencer’s theories.44 Gurney even parodied Spencer’s idea that melody originated in speech cadences, with a mock example tracing J. S. Bach’s cantata Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott to pseudo-evolutionary origins in the English exclamation “Heigh-ho!”45
In response to his critics, Spencer had his essay reissued in 1890 with a special postscript responding to Darwin and Gurney. “Mr. Darwin’s observations are inadequate, and his reasonings upon them inconclusive. Swayed by his doctrine of sexual selection, he has leaned towards the view that music had its origins in the expression of amatory feeling.”46 “Mr. Gurney,” in his turn, suffered from “deficient knowledge of the laws of evolution” in his support for Darwin.47 Objecting to the suspicious developmental gap between birds and primates in Darwin’s explanation, Spencer attacked the idea of birdsong as a courtship ritual, calling it “untenable” and adding, “What then is the true interpretation? Simply that like the whistling and humming of tunes by boys and men, the singing of birds results from overflow 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