Theorizing music evolution : Darwin, Spencer, and the limits of the human /

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Includes bibliographical references and index.Herbert Spencer Writes to Alfred Tennyson -- Charles Darwin VS. Herbert Spencer on the Origins of Music -- Sound Symbolism in Spencer's Evolutionary Thought -- The Darwinian Musical Hypothesis -- Edmund Gurney's Darwinian Music Formalism."Theorizing Music Evolution is a critical examination of ideas about musical origins, emphasizing both nineteenth-century theories of music in the evolutionist writings of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. What did historical evolutionists such as Darwin and Spencer have to say about music? What role did music play in their evolutionary theories? What were the values and limits of these evolutionist turns of thought, and in what ways have they endured in present-day music research? Author Miriam Piilonen argues for the significance of Victorian music-evolutionism in lights of its ties to a recently revitalized subfield of evolutionary musicology. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to music theorizing, Piilonen explores how historical thinkers constructed music in evolutionist terms and argues for an updated understanding of music as an especially fraught area of evolutionary thought"--