Piilonen M. Theorizing Music Evolution: Darwin, Spencer, and the Limits of the Human

Oxford University Press, 2024. — 169 p.Introduction: Music and Evolution Revisited
The Revival of Evolutionary Musicology
Historicizing Music as a Deconstructed Thing
Evolutionary Claims Are Ontological Claims
Book Structure and Chapter Summaries
Herbert Spencer Writes to Alfred Tennyson
Spencer the Evolutionist
Spencer Writes to Charles Darwin
The Shifting Terrain of Victorian Evolution Theories
Spencer’s Earworm
Charles Darwin vs. Herbert Spencer on the Origins of Music
Music in Darwin’s Early Notebooks and The Descent of Man
Music in Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
Spencer’s Theory of Music Perception
Spencer and Darwin’s Entwined Theories of Music
A Debate without a Winner
Sound Symbolism in Spencer’s Evolutionary Thought
Spencer’s Evolutionary Theory of Music—​Basic Theses
Sound Symbolism as Imperial Metaphor in Spencer’s Evolutionary Thought
Music and Language as Constructed through Theories of Origins
Plato’s Contribution: Centering Sound Symbolism
Implications and Consequences of Spencer’s Sound Symbolism
Evolutionary Voices and Nonlinear Histories
The Darwinian Musical Hypothesis
What Is the Darwinian Musical Hypothesis?
Antoinette Brown Blackwell’s Feminist Critique of Darwin
Problems with Applying Darwin’s Theory of Sexual Selection
Darwinian Musical Aesthetics
Against Adaptationism
Edmund Gurney’s Darwinian Music Formalism
Gurney’s Evolutionary Music Theory as Idealized Model
Gurney, Darwin, and “Association”
Problematizing Gurnian Formalism
Conclusion: Post-​Darwinian Music Theory
Acknowledgments
References
Index