Resonating Subjects: Music and Emotion in Victorian Evolutionary Thought

Piilonen, Miriam

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-a6se-gc82

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Resonating Subjects: Music and Emotion in Victorian Evolutionary Thought

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For much of the twentieth-century, English-language music scholars were reticent to speculate about the origins of music. In recent years, however, the study of music’s evolutionary origins has been revitalized. Resonating Subjects brings a critical-historical perspective to this renewed convergence of music studies and evolutionary science. Through close examinations of foundational music-evolutionary texts, I offer an interdisciplinary interpretive method that can be brought to bear not only on historical ideas but on contemporary musical thought. In Victorian Britain, thinkers like Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer invoked music in their evolutionary writings. My work closely examines their music-evolutionary claims and discovers a novel philosophical affordance for music that crystallized alongside nineteenth-century evolutionary science: music as a special kind of evolutionary boundary-drawing device, valued for its power to trace or obscure the conceptual borders between human and animal. I further demonstrate that music’s special adjudicative function was bound up with emerging ideas about emotion. Darwin, for one, posited a sexual selection origin for music where musical sensations are analogized with animalistic amorousness. Victorian paranormal psychologist Edmund Gurney organized his Darwinian account of music perception around the pleasure of listening to one’s favorite melodies. Resonating Subjects depicts resonances between the origins of music, Victorian evolutionary thought, and theories of emotion as they became entwined with anxieties about what it means to be human. I show that by invoking music as a key example of evolutionary forces in action, evolutionary thinkers like Darwin, Spencer, and Gurney attempted to naturalize what it feels like to be properly human.

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