Piilonen, Miriam - Theorizing Music Evolution
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  • Piilonen, Miriam - Theorizing Music Evolution

Piilonen, Miriam - Theorizing Music Evolution

Catalogue No: 9780197695289
Darwin, Spencer, and the Limits of the Human

Product FormatBook
AuthorPiilonen, Miriam
£59.00
Typically dispatched in 3-4 working days
SeriesOxford Studies in Music Theory
Pages168
Publication Date07 March 2024
ISBN9780197695289 (0197695281)
EAN9780197695289

    Provides critical perspectives on the history of music-evolution and the resurgent field of evolutionary musicology
  • Offers critical readings of music-evolution texts by Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and Edmund Gurney, among others
  • Brings together music theory and music cognition, as well as evolutionary biology, historical musicology, gender/sexuality studies, post-colonial studies, and affect theories
  • Demonstrates music's treatment as an especially fraught subject of evolutionary thought

Theorizing Music Evolution is a critical examination of ideas about musical origins, with emphasis on nineteenth-century music-evolutionary texts by Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. In a ground-breaking contribution to music theory and histories of science, author Miriam Piilonen argues for the significance of this Victorian music-evolutionism in lights of its ties to a recently revitalized subfield of evolutionary musicology.

Contents

  1. List of Figures
  2. Introduction - Music and Evolution Revisited
  3. The Revival of Evolutionary Musicology
  4. Historicizing Music as a Deconstructed Thing
  5. Evolutionary Claims are Ontological Claims
  6. Book Structure and Chapter Summaries
  7. Chapter 1 - Herbert Spencer Writes to Alfred Tennyson
  8. Spencer the Evolutionist
  9. Spencer Writes to Charles Darwin
  10. The Shifting Terrain of Victorian Evolution Theories
  11. Spencer's Earworm
  12. Chapter 2 - Charles Darwin VS. Herbert Spencer on the Origins of Music
  13. Music in Darwin's Early Notebooks and The Descent of Man
  14. Music in Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
  15. Spencer's Theory of Music Perception
  16. Spencer and Darwin's Entwined Theories of Music
  17. A Debate Without a Winner
  18. Chapter 3 - Sound Symbolism in Spencer's Evolutionary Thought
  19. Spencer's Evolutionary Theory of Music - Basic Theses
  20. Sound Symbolism as Imperial Metaphor in Spencer's Evolutionary Thought
  21. Music and Language as Constructed through Theories of Origins
  22. Plato's Contribution: Centering Sound Symbolism
  23. Implications and Consequences of Spencer's Sound Symbolism
  24. Evolutionary Voices and Non-Linear Histories
  25. Chapter 4 - The Darwinian Musical Hypothesis
  26. What is the Darwinian Musical Hypothesis?
  27. Antoinette Brown Blackwell's Feminist Critique of Darwin
  28. Problems with Applying Darwin's Theory of Sexual Selection
  29. Darwinian Musical Aesthetics
  30. Against Adaptationism
  31. Chapter 5 - Edmund Gurney's Darwinian Music Formalism
  32. Gurney's Evolutionary Music Theory as Idealized Model
  33. Gurney, Darwin, and Association
  34. Problematizing Gurnian Formalism
  35. Conclusion - Post-Darwinian Music Theory
  36. A Personal Postscript
  37. Acknowledgements
  38. References
  39. Index
9780197695289