Animal Musicalities. Rachel Mundy
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 a crankshaft turning a pair of connected wheels, this telos of musical progression drove the evolutionary parallels between child and chick, bird and human that Spencer, Oldys, Sully, Weismann, and so many others believed in. It was a machinery binding humans to animals, and culture to biology, all through the power of beauty. “To those who like to think of the human race as closely bound to the rest of the animal world,” wrote Sully, “it will be a very grateful thought that o’ the pleasure which our ear drinks in from divine melody … even the tiny and fragile warbler of the woods has its own appropriate experience.”74
ANIMAL AESTHETICS
At the crux of these debates about birds and humans was the question of that tiny warbler’s experience. “If our great biologist is correct,” wrote science writer Grant Allen, “this theory of sexual selection thus becomes of the first importance for the aesthetic philosopher, because they are really the only solid evidence for the existence of a love for beauty in the infra-human world.”75 Could animals have an aesthetic experience? Did they have taste, sensibility, artistry? Did sexual selection mean that animals cared about what was beautiful? These questions guided many notions of animal behavior at the end of the nineteenth century toward a reductive view of animals as machines, with music situated in a uniquely human domain of moral development.
Aesthetic theory since the eighteenth century had constructed aesthetics to be deeply entangled in civil and moral development. Lord Kames reminded art critics in the 1760s, “We need only reflect, that delicacy of taste necessarily heightens our feeling of pain and pleasure; and of course our sympathy, which is the capital branch of every social passion.”76 Nineteenth-century concepts of aesthetics built on this theory that, to quote historian Marjorie Garson, “sensibility adopts and elaborates on the link between aesthetic responsiveness and social feeling.”77 Thinkers such as Hegel, Helmholtz, and Fechner speculated broadly about the ties binding together aesthetics, society, and morality.78 Taste was the mark of moral cultivation and social bonding; according to historian John Finney, it was common knowledge that music “civilized, formed character and educated morally” those who learned it.79 In Spencer’s essay on music, these themes of moral and social development were very explicit. Music was “the basis of all the higher affections” because it had evolved to make humans sympathetic, “sharers in the joys and sorrows of others.”80 The ties between music, sociality, and moral sense were what made music “the difference between the cruelty of the barbarous and the humanity of the civilized.”81
Evolutionists opposed to animal