Miriam Piilonen's "Theorizing Music Evolution"

Miriam Piilonen is a music theorist, composer, and multi-instrumentalist based in Western Massachusetts. She teaches music theory and aural musicianship at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Piilonen applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Theorizing Music Evolution: Darwin, Spencer, and the Limits of the Human, and reported the following:

Theorizing Music Evolution explores historical ideas about music's origins, with emphasis on a nineteenth-century debate between Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. A reader turning to page 99 may not immediately recognize the central themes of the book.

Page 99 reproduces an image from the book The Sexes Through Nature (1875) by Antoinette Brown Blackwell, an American scientist, abolitionist, and advocate for women’s rights. By including texts like Blackwell’s, my goal was to add detail to the history of music-evolutionary ideas and to decentralize Charles Darwin. Blackwell challenged Darwin’s and Spencer’s theories of evolution for their sexist views of human nature. For instance, she criticized Darwin’s theory of sexual selection for its suggestion that the male is the normal type of the species, and that advantageous traits pass strictly between males. The image reproduced on page 99 is Blackwell’s “table of equations,” where she depicts an “organic equilibrium” of the sexes. She further suggests that every creature, sexed or not, contains elements of both sexes: “the feminine and masculine, with their opposed tensions and polarities of forces, are combined in every organism,” Blackwell 1875, 43.

The chapter of my book from which this is drawn—“The Darwinian Musical Hypothesis”—historicizes Darwin’s evolutionary theory of music and critiques its recent revitalization among some music scientists. Darwin’s theory of sexual selection—the one that Blackwell was criticizing for its sexism—was central to his theory of music. At first, Darwin suggested that music evolved as a courtship display among animals. Later, he abandoned his theory of music, leaving the matter to more musically-inclined thinkers such as Spencer, whose competing account of music evolution was published two years before Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859).

As I show in the book, this is a debate without a winner. Still, it is worth studying afresh, in order to better understand the contexts in which these ideas were written down, and to avoid reproducing the mistakes of early evolutionists. The goal should not be to arrive at a unified evolutionary theory of music, but rather to historicize these ideas and to recognize that such evolutionary theories of music are ontologizing by design—they construct as they explain.

Visit Miriam Piilonen's website.

--Marshal Zeringue