Darwin,music and evolution: New insights from family correspondence on The Descent of Man

Music and Darwin’s legacy

The history of science presents plentiful examples of the contribution made to knowledge of the world resulting from investigation into the properties of music. The theorising of Pythagoras and Boethius (Mark, 1982) established themes in acoustics that were revisited and resolved through observation and experiment in the work of the Galileis (father Vincento and son Galileo: Drake, 1970), Mersenne (1637/1957), Descartes (1961), Huygens, Newton (Dostrovsky, 1975), Euler, Bernoulli and Fourier (Darrigol, 2007). Music presents problems for biology no less significant than those that have been addressed in physics and mathematics; and this was fully recognised by Charles Darwin in his major publications of 1871 and 1872. ¹ As a new perspective has emerged within musicology informed by evolutionary theory (Ball, 2010; Bannan, 2012a; Levitin, 2006; Mithen, 2005; Sacks, 2007; Wallin, 1991; Wallin, Merker, & Brown, 2000), it has become clear that Darwin’s thinking on the topic of music, its function and origins, has until relatively recently been largely ignored or misunderstood.

Marking the centenary in 1959 of the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), the musicologist Peter Kivy (1959) presented a convincing discussion of the applications of Darwin’s theories of natural and sexual selection to music. His knowledge of Darwin’s writings proves extensive, his recognition of what Darwin clearly set out to achieve both generous and well-informed. Yet Kivy’s article seems to have appeared in isolation, and to have achieved little if anything by way of response even within his own field of musicology. Despite the importance Darwin himself accorded to music in his speculations on the origin of language in The Descent of Man (1871), this aspect of his work appears to have remained unexplored in a variety of disciplines one would have expected to address it.

Half a century after Kivy, on and since the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of Origin, the spotlight on Darwin’s achievement has begun to reveal a new interest in the influence of his theories of music. Nevertheless, the prevailing orthodoxy would still seem to imply that music was outside Darwin’s grasp (Pinker, 1997; Saul & James, 2011), with the implications that: (i) music has little significance in human evolution; (ii) that it was of little interest to Darwin himself; and (iii) that Darwin was not qualified to contribute to theorising about the role of music. This article sets out to question all three of these assumptions.

Marking the more recent Darwin anniversaries, Tecumseh Fitch (2009) reviewed the reception of Darwin’s theories in relation to music. By contrast with Kivy, Fitch’s tribute cites a rich literature of current work in archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, zoology, developmental psychology and human biology illustrative of an entirely different cultural and intellectual climate. Fitch (2009) concludes: “This year of Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday seems an opportune time for Darwin’s own model of language evolution to regain the prominence it deserves”. This prompts three questions: what had occurred during the intervening 50 years that has so dramatically reoriented the exploration of ideas derived from Darwin’s work? What may have caused such a reception of Darwin’s ideas to be so long delayed? And why does Fitch’s article, entitled “Musical protolanguage” (2009), end with a statement exclusively focused on the evolution of language, leaving the eventual role of music in human culture again unexplained?

The first question gives rise to some of the reflections that follow regarding the impact of Darwin’s ideas in his own time and in the generations immediately after his death. Kivy’s 1959 article appears almost from nowhere, though he acknowledges a continuing strand in the German-language literature (Ehrlich, 1881; Stumpf, 1885, 1911; see also Bühler, 1934; Hornbostel, 1905/1975; Moberg, 1986; Révész, 1941; Sachs, 1962; Tembrock, 1978) that, after two World Wars, may have been somewhat concealed from English-speaking readership. But the principal problem with Kivy’s analysis is that it sells its subject short. In opting – in preference to Darwin’s model of language emerging from an existing musical ability – for Herbert Spencer’s theory of music arising from impassioned speech, Kivy backed a less compelling evolutionary explanation for either music or language. Spencer’s proposal (1891) requires language to arise essentially ab nihilo, with music emerging subsequently. Darwin’s account, as set out in The Descent of Man, views musical vocalisation as a bridge between animal communication and language. For all his apparently detailed knowledge of Darwin’s work, Kivy’s account hardly encourages musicologists to engage with it more closely themselves: “Today Darwin’s theory of music remains merely a curiosity – an interesting but rather insignificant appendage to the theory of sexual selection” (Kivy, 1959, p. 48).

It is not obvious what initially awakened the first stirrings of a revisionist approach to Darwin’s writings, and the parallel investigations in various disciplines that have ensued. Two candidates for consideration would be the publication in consecutive years of Meyer’s groundbreaking analysis of music, meaning and emotion in 1956; and Chomsky’s 1957 Syntactic Structures, which elicited a new and forceful focus on human universals that challenged prevailing orthodoxy in the social sciences. If language could be studied as a human universal, then why not art, music, or religion? By the time D. E. Brown published his interdisciplinary overview of the study of universals in 1991, the old anathema of universality in a variety of disciplines had been at best removed, at least subjected to considerable challenge. Paul Ekman’s work (1973) on the universality of facial expression, explicitly acknowledged as arising from Darwin, prompted reflection on the universality of the emotions, and of the relationship between face-shape and acoustic production (for application of this to singing teaching, see Manén, 1981). In ethnomusicology, a new discipline that came into existence to formalise the study of music from different cultures, similar breakthroughs can be traced in key publications through the 1970s and 1980s (Blacking, 1977; Gourlay, 1984; Hood, 1977; List, 1971, 1984; Lomax, 1977; McAllester, 1971; Nattiez, 1977; Nettl, 1977).

Other influential contributions to the new synthesis of evolutionary theory with interdisciplinary practice included Hockett’s (1960) model of design features for language, which invited cross-species comparisons of communicative behaviours, and that also embraced some initial if less convincing speculations about music. A period of remarkable archaeological discovery coincided with the reception of such ideas about language, notably the unearthing of the remains of the Australopithecine “Lucy” in 1974 (Johanson & Edgar, 1996), followed by work on the earliest musical instruments by Stockmann (1986), Kunej and Turk (2000), Conard, Malina, and Münzel (2009) and d’Errico et al. (2003); and evidence for the role of dance in early modern societies (Gamble, 2012; Garfinkel, 1998).

A complementary agenda for the study of language also responsive to Chomsky’s ideas involved the study of the communicative capacities of apes and monkeys. Goodall’s work (1986) with chimpanzees in the wild, and Fossey’s (1983) with the mountain gorillas, provided new insights into the cultures and social behaviour of these species. Seyfarth and Cheney (1980) announced finding the equivalents of distinct “words” in vervet monkey alarm-calls. In the laboratory and the family home of researchers, attempts were made to teach language to chimpanzees and bonobos (Premack, 1986). Frustrated by the poor capacity for vocal control that might allow meaningful vocalisation in their subjects, researchers had better results with sign language and the use of computers. Nevertheless, data was generated systematically that permitted theory to be tested and behaviour analysed, illuminating both the considerable intellectual capacities and the vocal limitations of our nearest genetic relatives. Meanwhile, the superior capacity for vocal communication and cognition of an African Grey Parrot named Alex was carefully documented by Pepperberg (2002).

Other landmarks that contributed to a climate primed for the reappraisal of Darwin’s theories of music and language emerged in the 1970s in two newly-phrased questions: Livingstone’s Did the Australopithecines Sing? (1973); and Blacking’s How Musical is Man? (1973). Livingstone’s article elicited initially lukewarm response, but nevertheless remained in the consciousness of authors of, by the 1980s, a growing literature, and received a kind of acknowledgement in the title of Mithen’s major book (2005) on the origins of music and language, The Singing Neanderthals. Blacking’s writings made a key contribution to ensuring that theories of musical origins and purpose were informed by comparative study of the music of non-Western cultures, and in particular their means of transmitting the capacity for music to their children.

During the last two decades, the topic of the origins of music has at last received considerable attention, and the leading influences on a new paradigm are evaluated in Fitch’s anniversary article (2009: see also Donald, 1991; Lenneberg, 1967; Wallin et al., 2000; Zatorre & Peretz, 2001). The new interest in group behaviour as an evolved phenomenon that arose in the kin-selection theory of Hamilton (1971) has spawned an explanatory focus on the role of collective music-making (Jordania, 2011; Merker, 2000) that complements Darwin’s original focus on natural and sexual selection. But a second question then arises out of a comparison of the paucity of references in Kivy’s 1959 tribute and the comparative explosion of the field that Fitch was able to draw upon: what, in the century after the publication of his major works, may have caused the relative lack of interest in the application of Darwin’s ideas to music and language, compared to their prevalence in other fields, such as biology, zoology, botany and psychology? ² This is a central question that this article seeks to explore. One key issue may be the relationship between the topic of music in Darwin’s writings, and the role it is perceived to have played in his life: his personal credentials as an exponent. It would appear that an orthodox position has established itself in Darwin’s biographical treatment, and in commentaries that have relied upon this, that Darwin had no capacity for music and little interest in the field. This issue requires attention in exploring further the relationship between Darwin’s life and work that played a part in the development of the theoretical framework he devised.

Myths and memes in the historical treatment of Darwin’s achievement

The influence of Darwin’s ideas seems to have met with particular resistance in the humanities and social sciences. “Almost nothing commonly believed about Darwin is strictly true”, intones Fernández-Armesto (1995, p. 434): “The image projected by his friends and family of Darwin as the embodiment of Victorian philanthropy and natural charity was a propaganda device, a campaign promise of a candidate for hero-worship, honoured in the breach”. Fernández-Armesto’s spirited historiographic attack centres on his view of Darwin’s mistreatment of Alfred Russel Wallace in sharing with him credit for first publication of the theory of natural selection; on his “anti-clerical crusade”; and on lack of objectivity in his methods:

Nor was Darwin’s science more politically dispassionate, more socially disinterested, than any other. It was a product of its time and circumstances and served the interests of a particular race and class. (1995, p. 434)

Fernández-Armesto finds “no clear dividing line between ‘scientific’ and ‘social’ Darwinism”. As “a child of an inbred family and compounded by the tradition of marrying a cousin”, Darwin’s “interest in scientific breeding and the survival of the fittest had an obvious resonance in his own predicament”. This evaluation of the relationship between Darwin’s life and work has its roots in acknowledged facts, but the interpretation wilfully distorts the extent and nature of Darwin’s achievement, attributing to him personal responsibility for “social Darwinism” that, as Gould (1977, p. 36) confirms in a critical account of the subsequent literature, in fact emerged from the work of others.

In one respect, Fernández-Armesto’s contextualisation of Darwin’s motivation as representative of the prevailing culture may have a useful parallel. While there was a resurgence of interest in public music-making in 19th-century England, in which, as we shall see, Darwin was himself to some extent a participant, it remained the case amongst the middle and upper classes that musical accomplishment of males was frowned upon. ³ The German critic Schmitz (1914) described England as “the land without music”. Solie (2004), by contrast, illustrates how inappropriate this judgement was, in terms of the role of music in literature (e.g. Austen, Dickens, Eliot), in public performance, and the beginnings of a distinct national style of composition. However, from the perspectives of Darwin’s fields of expertise – initially geology, thence botany and zoology – the fledgling field of systematic musicology (G. Adler, 1885) must have seemed dauntingly remote. Ironically, Darwin’s achievements may not at first have led to substantive research into the origins of music, but they were themselves the subject of celebration in song and music theatre. Smocovitis (2009), while asserting that Darwin was tone-deaf, reviewed this productivity as evidence of the considerable influence on popular culture of evolutionary thinking and critique of its concerns.

Even biographers of Darwin sympathetic to his work and achievements have not always presented with accuracy the attributes of the man. A process of disentanglement of the biographical and the scientific in Darwin’s legacy is required in order to remedy prejudicial assumptions in the literature that can be seriously misleading. Moore and Desmond (2004) make a clear link between their view of Darwin’s realisation of his own deficiencies and the theory that forms the principal theme of The Descent of Man:

Fearing himself “repellently plain” and wondering what Emma saw in him, he considered how external (or “secondary”) sexual characteristics evolved. Again he used analogy: tone-deaf himself, he noted that “cock birds attract [the] female by song”, or with bright plumage. (2004, p. xxv)

The judgement that he was “tone-deaf” that we have already encountered in Smocovitis’s appraisal seems to have become populist shorthand for Darwin’s modest claims for his own musical ability, rigidified as they became in his admission that his response to the arts waned in old age. But this meme has found its way into the literature on music psychology as fact. Panksepp (2009) repeats it in an article on the emotional underpinning of human vocalisation: “Charles Darwin, although tone-deaf, was fascinated by our musical-emotional nature and thought that the ancestral roots may have been intimately linked to our sexuality and capacity for love” (p. 230). In a review of the practices of music therapy, Davidson (2004) references The Descent of Man to state “the pioneering evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin could not see the value of music”. Writing of the relationship in composition and performance between words and music in the song literature, Dunsby (2004, p. 22) footnotes the suggestion that musical vocality may have preceded language in evolution with the comment: “Charles Darwin himself was avowedly ignorant about the role of music in primitive human evolution”, suggesting that this explains the lack of coverage of music in later evolutionary literature. For many working in the field of the evolutionary psychology of music today, the gauntlet has been thrown down by Pinker, who, having written a book whose title echoes Darwin’s model, The Language Instinct (1994), went on in a later review of neural evolution (1997) to judge that Music is a capacity of no adaptive significance.

As is clear from the concerns of Fitch’s 2009 anniversary paper and its extensive bibliography of recent publications, there are researchers in diverse fields who have adopted a Darwinian approach to the issue of music and language origins quite at odds with Pinker’s viewpoint. This brings us to the third question prompted by Fitch’s article: the issue of priority, both in terms of chronology and significance:

Darwin’s view of language was ahead of its time, and his model and arguments remain surprisingly relevant to contemporary debates. … My conclusion is that, suitably modified in the light of contemporary understanding, Darwin’s model of language evolution, based on a “protolanguage” more musical than linguistic, provides one of the more convincing frameworks available for understanding language evolution. (Fitch, 2009)

Clearly, Fitch, while interested in the phenomenon of music, has set his own sights on devising a theory of language origins (Fitch, 2010), and this accords with the conclusion of his article. Nevertheless, the potential, both evolutionarily and actual, of music as a distinct phenomenon remains unexplained. While the debate regarding priority between language and music is about more than whether the monkey came before the organ-grinder, two issues continue to require attention with respect to the role of music: why, given the clear advantages of language as a communicative system, has music remained a cultural universal of great importance to individuals and societies? And how might the nature of a musical protolanguage be addressed by the tools of musicology rather than those of linguistics? Space precludes exploring these questions in depth in this article, though they may be borne in mind as we return to an examination of Darwin’s own works and their biographical context.

Music and the Darwin family: A biographical sketch

Given the negative views of Darwin’s engagement with music encountered above, a brief sketch of the role of music in his early life contributes to a very different picture. Charles recollected visits to the Wedgwood family home of his uncle Josiah II prior to the Beagle voyage:

My visits to Maer during these two or three succeeding years were quite delightful … Life there was perfectly free; the country was very pleasant for walking or riding, and in the evening there was much very agreeable conversation … together with music. (Clift, 2008, p. 76)

As a student at Cambridge, Charles regularly attended Evensong at King’s College Chapel with his friend John Herbert. Fifty years later, Herbert recalled: “what gave him the greatest delight was some grand symphony or overture, of Mozart’s or Beethoven’s, with their full harmonies” (Herbert, 1882).

Especially informative in its depiction of Charles’s support for the music-making of others is the following letter, posted from Cambridge to Charles on the Beagle in Rio de Janeiro. Its writer, the same John Herbert, had presented as a parting gift the microscope that was to prove such a treasured tool of Darwin’s research on the voyage:

My dear old fellow

… I was last at a Quarterly meeting of the Choral, which you used to patronise to such an extent, and if your old friend Keats was right, you will as you used to, feel a thrill thro’ your back-bone at the very sensation of some of your favourites, for “Heard melodies are sweet, But those unheard are sweeter”. The Choral is improved to a pitch that you would hardly credit, the different parts are so well sustained, and so exactly in tune, that you might fancy each of them huge individual voices; I doubt whether you can understand my meaning – we had first the overture to Esther; then a very judicious selection from the Dettingen Te Deum – then “O first created beam” out of Samson: Then “Let their celestial concerts all unite” which was sung so splendidly that you might as I said before believe it a Quartett by four tremendous voices. Then that elegant chorus from Solomon “May no rash intruder disturb their soft hours”; lastly the “Great and Glorious” chorus of Handel [sic] Haydn – The second part commenced with Handel’s overture to Rodelinda – very beautiful, and simple – then a splendid new Mass of Hummel’s. The whole concluded with the Saul chorus “Gird on thy sword”.

“There was a concert at Huntingdon last November at which the Choral sang: when the London great guns were highly delighted with the extreme precision with which they executed some very difficult lines of Harmony. Cambridge has been Music Mad this spring …”. (Herbert, 1832)

On returning from the Beagle adventure to which he devoted the best part of his marriageable 20s, Darwin turned to catching up on his establishment in society, as a scientist, and on his marriage prospects. His approach to the latter was characteristically objective. He wrote a list of the pros and cons of married life, with implications for the selection process that might ensue (Darwin, 1838; Stott, 2003, pp. 75–76), conducting a disputation with himself through arranging thoughts into two columns headed “Marry” and “Not Marry”. Significantly, the possibility of introducing music into his life makes two separate entries in the “Marry” column: he clearly desired a life partner who would provide regular musical diversion at a time when this depended on domestic performance.

Just as music played a part in Charles’s attraction to Emma as a suitable wife, Emma herself noted Charles’s interest in music. In a letter to her Aunt Jessie of 15 November 1838 revealing their plans to marry, she wrote:

The real crook in my lot I have withheld from you, but I just own it to you sooner or later. It is that he has a great dislike of going to the play, so that I am afraid we shall have some domestic dissensions on that head. On the other hand he stands concerts very well. (Litchfield, in Clift, 2008, p. 86)

Thereafter, Darwin lived in a musical household. His wife was an excellent pianist, who had taken lessons from Moscheles (Keynes, 2001, p. 14) and travelled overseas to play for Chopin (Healey 2001, p. 339). Emma performed every evening for Charles on the Broadwood grand piano they installed in Down House, and they both led their children in musical games and dancing. His children were brought up to play instruments: his son Francis, who participated on bassoon and piano in musical experiments with his father, remained an influential amateur performer (Godman, 1959, p. 14) while following an illustrious career at Cambridge in botany (Healey, 2001, p. 346). Francis became a friend and supporter of the musical antiquarian Francis Galpin and the folklorist Cecil Sharp, and wrote an erudite paper on the history of the pipe and tabor, including analysis of the botanical origins of the materials from which such a wind instrument could be made (F. Darwin, 1914/1917). Another son, George, who went on to be Plumian Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge, had also been involved in family support for his father’s work, providing notes on Hermann von Helmholtz’s theories intended for inclusion in the second edition of The Descent of Man (G. Darwin, 1872). These annotations the young George Darwin made from (a) a French translation of Helmholtz; (b) Herbert Spencer’s essay “On the Origin of Music” (1891); were intended to expand on the treatment of music in the reprinted edition. We have his father’s reply explaining that he can include no more details of the nature of music: “Many thanks for the sheets[,] which I will keep, but the subject of music is beyond me” (C. Darwin, 1872b). As we shall see, this judgement more likely refers to further discussion of music being beyond the scope of the reprint of the book than that Darwin had a limited understanding of the topic.

While we have to accept Darwin’s judgement of 1872 that he could enquire no more into the topic of music even though provided by his son with helpful suggestions regarding the perception of consonance, it would seem appropriate to wonder whether a possible cause may have been a change in Darwin’s own appreciation of music. To address this, we must turn to the literature on Darwin’s chronic illness, its possible origin, and the effect it may have produced on his sensory perception.

Darwin’s illness

Darwin was the son of a doctor, and his early training in Edinburgh prior to going up to Cambridge was in medicine. In old age, he was able to adopt a forensic view of his personal abilities as they changed over his lifetime:

I have said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music. Music generally sets me thinking too energetically on what I have been at work on, instead of giving me pleasure. (F. Darwin, 1887, p. 42)

This contrast in his health pre-Beagle and after is captured in the report of his granddaughter and editor of his Autobiography, Lady Barlow:

Charles Darwin’s forty years of invalid existence moreover were an unexpected sequel to his youthful vigour, for his strength and endurance were well above average, as Captain Fitzroy has recorded in his account of the various incidents during the Beagle voyage. (Barlow, 1958, p. 240)

Discussion of the nature and consequences of Darwin’s illness has, coincidently, paralleled the revisiting of his writings about music. In the same year as Kivy’s 1959 review, initial speculation regarding the cause of Darwin’s illness was sparked by an article by Dr Saul Adler in Nature, followed by a letter by the same author to the British Medical Journal of 8 May 1965. Adler, while recognizing that Darwin was aware of being viewed by friends as a hypochondriac, advocated the view that Chagas’ Disease was the likely cause of the symptoms reported. In his journal entry for 25 March 1835, while to the east of the Andes near Mendoza, Darwin had noted “an attack (for it deserves no less a name) of the Benchuca, a species of Reduvius, the great black bug of the Pampas” (Darwin, 1845, p. 343). A parasite carried by this beetle, T. cruzi, causes Chagas’ Disease (S. Adler, 1959, p. 67), the symptoms of which are partly consistent with the progressive deterioration in Darwin’s digestion, heart irregularity, intolerance of sense perception, and nausea. Chagas’ Disease remained endemic in the area Darwin visited (S. Adler, 1959, p. 67).

The nature and pathology of Darwin’s illness are open to interpretation. Woodruff (1965) proposed that Darwin had already suffered episodes of similar illness before departing for South America; and that several of his children exhibited similar symptoms, proving that the cause could not have been parasitic, but was more likely a psychological or psychosomatic disorder. Colp (1977) has expanded on and thoroughly investigated the likelihood of a stress-related neurosis, later updating this diagnosis (1998, 2000) to embrace panic disorder once this was classified in 1980, with symptoms possibly exacerbated by the parasitic invasion of T. cruzi or consistent with Systemic Lupus Erythematosus. Pasnau (1990) supported a psychosomatic interpretation, while F. Smith (1990) proposed that the cause could be allergic. A. K. Campbell (2003), relating Darwin’s illness to aspects of the evolution of milk in the human diet, suggested Systemic Lactose Intolerance, while Orrego and Quintana (2007) advocated Crohn’s Disease. While this literature presents a wide range of possibilities for the cause and course of Darwin’s illness, all admit to it being chronic, progressive and debilitating, at least in its worst episodes. Symptoms such as ringing in the ears, nausea and vomiting would seem to have been consistent with a reduced tolerance for music and the emotional reactions it provoked: and we may trust Darwin’s self-diagnosis in these respects.

Music in Darwin’s writings

Nevertheless, while Darwin’s engagement with music may have been affected by his illness, he referred to music throughout his writings. On occasion this took the form of employing musical knowledge by way of analogy:

If we suppose any habitual action to become inherited – and I think it can be shown that this does sometimes happen – then the resemblance between what originally was a habit and an instinct becomes so close as not to be distinguished. If Mozart, instead of playing the piano at three years old with wonderfully little practice, had played a tune with no practice at all, he might truly be said to have done so instinctively. (Darwin, 1959/1968, p. 235)

At other times he recorded the musical responses of humans and animals:

He asked himself whether animals had likes and dislikes like humans. Jenny the orang [in London Zoo] came to mind, and he wrote in the back of his notebook: “Do the Orang Outang like smells, peppermint and music?” He went to the Zoological Gardens in early September with a mouth organ, some peppermints and a sprig of verbena. He played the mouth organ to Jenny and she listened with great attention. He gave it to her and she “readily put it when guided to her mouth”. (Keynes, 2001, p. 45)

Of particular interest was the observation of musicality in his infant children:

Following his experiments with [the orang-utan] Jenny and the mouth organ, Charles watched carefully for Willy’s first signs of musical taste. At four months he believed he had “shown decided pleasure in music – his whole expression appearing pleased”. But Charles was not sure. Six months later he was still watching. Willy “cried when Emma left off playing the pianoforte”. He cried so often and showed “such decided pleasure as soon as she turned round to go back” to the piano, that Charles was “certain there was no mistake”. (Keynes, 2001, p. 56)

Working with the help of his older son Francis, he employed musical instruments in his experiments:

Worms do not possess any sense of hearing. They took not the least notice of the shrill notes from a metal whistle, which was repeatedly sounded near them; nor did they of the deepest and loudest tones of a bassoon. They were indifferent to shouts, if care was taken that the breath did not strike them. When placed on a table close to the keys of a piano, which was played as loudly as possible, they remained perfectly quiet. (Darwin, 1881, p. 41)

On the Beagle voyage, Darwin encountered unfamiliar instruments and styles, and included mention of these in his journal:

Charles loved good tunes, but had difficulty remembering them. … He remembered … a song that a Tahitian girl had sung to him when he landed there on HMS Beagle in 1835. He wrote in his diary at the time that “Numbers of children were playing on the beach, and had lighted bonfires which illuminated the placid sea and surrounding trees; others in circles were singing Tahitian verses. We seated ourselves on the sand and joined the circle. The songs were impromptu and I believe related to our arrival. One little girl sang a line which the rest took up in parts, forming a very pretty chorus. The air was singular and their voices melodious. The whole scene made us unequivocally aware that we were seated on the shores of an island in the South Sea”. (Keynes, 2001, pp. 84–85)

In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, the following passage provides, despite its author’s customary self-effacement as to its interpretation, a convincing introductory account of the relationship between the evolved characteristics of emotion, face-shape and acoustic production:

When the next full expiration follows, the mouth is slightly closed, and the lips, from causes hereafter to be discussed, are somewhat protruded; and this form of the mouth, if the voice be at all exerted, produces, according to Helmholtz, the sound of the vowel _O_. Certainly a deep sound of a prolonged _Oh!_ may be heard from a whole crowd of people immediately after witnessing any astonishing spectacle. If, together with surprise, pain be felt, there is a tendency to contract all the muscles of the body, including those of the face, and the lips will then be drawn back; and this will perhaps account for the sound becoming higher and assuming the character of _Ah!_ or _Ach!_ As fear causes all the muscles of the body to tremble, the voice naturally becomes tremulous, and at the same time husky from the dryness of the mouth, owing to the salivary glands failing to act. Why the laughter of man and the tittering of monkeys should be a rapidly reiterated sound, cannot be explained. During the utterance of these sounds, the mouth is transversely elongated by the corners being drawn backwards and upwards; and of this fact an explanation will be attempted in a future chapter. But the whole subject of the differences of the sounds produced under different states of the mind is so obscure, that I have succeeded in throwing hardly any light on it; and the remarks which I have made, have but little significance. (Darwin, 1872a, p. 103)

This brief sample of instances relating to music in Darwin’s writing provides an introduction to the central investigation of this article: the topic of music in The Descent of Man. Two features of Darwin’ self-expression should be taken into account in interpreting his writing. First, he had a tendency to self-deprecation where he feels personally unqualified to pursue a line of argument; second, he fears committing himself to judgement on matters that he has not subjected to empirical testing, or for which he is unable to cite evidence from the work of others that he takes to be equally rigorous. ⁴ It is important, especially where select quotations are mined from the sequential arrangement of extensive and closely-argued publications, to consider the implications of these questions of substance, style and presentation; and, above all, not to confuse them. Darwin can excuse himself for knowing little about a topic on one page, and deal with it confidently on a different page of the same book.

Music as a theme in The Descent of Man

Notwithstanding Darwin’s own judgement in response to his sons George, and by implication Francis, that he did not possess the ability to extend his theoretical framework to explain music, a close reading of the entirety of The Descent of Man could be taken to illustrate precisely the opposite. The crucial passages his son George wished to extend in order to provide a clearer synthesis of evolutionary principles with the work on acoustic perception achieved by Helmholtz (1885) occur both early in the book and in the final passages that explore human music and language:

With respect to sounds, Helmholtz has explained to a certain extent on physiological principles, why harmonies and certain cadences are agreeable. (Darwin, 1872/2004, p. 115) ⁵

In the later passages that prepare the way for human achievement, Darwin states that his son Frances heard the gibbon H. leuciscus “singing a cadence of three notes, in true musical intervals and with a clear musical tone” (p. 634). He then reports similar precise notation by a Rev. S. Lockwood of the consistent tonality in the singing of an American mouse, Hesperymus cognatus. In a passage clearly influenced by the musical researches of his sons Frances and George (pp. 634–636), Darwin presents what he understands from Helmholtz to be the constraints on human musical discrimination: the nature of the auditory system, and the capacity for perception across a wide range of species. The point at which he feels he can go no further is reached with the following:

Helmholtz has explained on physiological grounds why concords are agreeable, and discords disagreeable to the human ear; but we are little concerned with these, as music in harmony is a late invention. (p. 635)

This is where George Darwin (1872) urged that Helmholtz’s theories could be taken further, to better account for the phenomenon of music. What Darwin has missed, but which is apparent in Helmholtz’s work, is the extent to which the perception of concord and discord is associated with the discrimination of timbre that lies at the heart of language acquisition. ⁶

Despite this missed opportunity to extend the coverage of evolved musical characteristics in the 1872 reprint, musical terms abound in Darwin’s description of the social behaviour and acoustic capacities of a wide variety of species. What he says in the very final chapter about human music-making and its origins can only be fully understood in the light of this elaborate trail of images and ideas that convey the framework of the evolutionary argument into which his approach to human abilities is set. Where On the Origin of Species had introduced the theory of natural selection, the principal innovation of The Descent of Man is the definition and exemplification of the theory of sexual selection. While the latter book is explicitly focused in its overall structure upon explaining the nature of evolved human abilities, Darwin’s second major theory was essential to this purpose: natural selection alone was insufficient to explain the human condition. However, the majority of the book comprises a comprehensive application of sexual selection theory to the entire animal kingdom, from the snail via the insectivorae, fish and reptiles to mammals and finally back to humankind. It is within this central section of the book that we find the rich sequence of proto-musical behaviours that Darwin describes as variations on his theme. Miller’s (2000) compelling focus on sexual selection as essential to the explanation of the phenomenon of music acknowledges both Darwin’s presentation of it in relation to human development, and the manner in which this emerges from prior discussion of the connection between communication and mutuality of mate choice in the preceding 300 pages of The Descent. Darwin makes abundantly clear how the definition of his theory prepares the way for an eventual understanding of human behaviour derived from his presentation of animal evidence:

My object in this chapter is to shew [sic] that there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties … With respect to animals very low in the scale, I shall give some additional facts under Sexual Selection, shewing that their mental powers are much higher than might have been expected. (p. 86)

A more focused exemplification of Sexual Selection, introduces the kind of anthropomorphic metaphors that will feature in the central section of the book:

The sweet strains poured forth by many male birds during the season of love, are certainly admired by the females … If female birds had been incapable of appreciating the beautiful colours, the ornaments, and voices of their partners, all the labour and anxiety exhibited by the latter in displaying their charms before the females would have been thrown away …. (p. 115)

Discussion of a significant aspect of the nature of human music-making and its transmission, imitation, provides an insight into the cross-species comparisons Darwin will employ to set out his case. Himself no stranger to a neurological condition that affects sensory perception, Darwin’s extension of his schema to embrace the behaviour of human mental illness illustrates his confidence in the explicatory force he anticipates for his theory:

The principle of Imitation [emphasis in original] is strong in man, and especially, as I have myself observed, with savages. In certain morbid states of the brain this tendency is exaggerated to an extraordinary degree; some hemiplegic patients … unconsciously imitate every word which is uttered, whether in their own or in a foreign language, and every gesture or action which is performed near them. … No animal voluntarily imitates an action performed by man, until in an ascending scale we come to monkeys, which are well known to be ridiculous mockers. Animals, however, sometimes imitate each other’s actions: thus two species of wolves, which had been reared as dogs, learned to bark, as does sometimes the jackal, but whether this can be called voluntary imitation is another question. Birds imitate the songs of their parents, and sometimes of other birds; and parrots are notorious imitators of any sound which they often hear. (pp. 93–94)

Darwin proceeds to relate the natural selection analogy, whereby languages themselves evolve by gradual steps, to the significant factor of vocal learning, which he identifies in birds as well as humans:

No philologist now supposes that any language has been deliberately invented; it has been slowly and unconsciously developed by many steps. The sounds uttered by birds offer in several respects the nearest analogy to language, for all the members of the same species utter the same cries expressive of their emotions; and all the kinds which sing, exert their power instinctively; but the actual song, and even the call notes, are learnt from their parents or foster-parents. (p. 108)

In accounting for the difference in vocal production between the apes and humans, Darwin presciently focuses on the evolution of the brain:

The fact of the higher apes not using their vocal organs for speech, no doubt depends on their intelligence not having been sufficiently advanced. The possession by them of organs, which with long-continued practice might have been used for speech, although not thus used, is paralleled by the case of many birds which possess organs fitted for singing, though they never sing. Thus, the nightingale and crow have vocal organs similarly constructed, these being used by the former for diversified song, and by the latter only for croaking. (p. 112)

A telling comparison between ape and human behaviours links manual dexterity to an initial suggestion as to the nature of vocal development:

One can hardly doubt, that a man-like animal who possessed a hand and arm sufficiently perfect to throw a stone with precision, or to form a flint into a rude tool, could, with sufficient practice, as far as mechanical skill alone is concerned, make almost anything which a civilised man can make. The structure of the hand in this respect may be compared with that of the vocal organs, which in apes are used for uttering various signal-cries, or, as in one genus, musical cadences; but in man the closely similar vocal organs have become adapted through the inherited effects of use for the utterance of articulate language. (p. 69)

Already we are asked to view language as like tool-use, having developed from something more instinctive and emotional closer to the condition of music. As early as this introductory sketch of the development of humans, Darwin provides a foretaste of what will, some five 500 pages later, be his conclusions. Building on the above quotation, the treatment of the theme of acoustic communication reminds the reader of the anthropocentric destination of our comprehension. The journey towards this return to considering the musical role of vocalisation in our species, and its place in the development of language, focuses in its employment of simile and metaphor, on preparing our understanding of the unity of the evolutionary processes described, underpinning the most daring and revolutionary application of evolutionary theory: that as much as it can account for anatomical design, it can also explain music, language and culture. The manner in which this is achieved is revealed by a close reading of the intervening pages.

A key idea is introduced whereby the development of communication from an unformed stage is compared to the acquisition of consciousness in the individual; the classic recapitulation of phylogeny in ontogeny:

At what age does the new-born infant possess the power of abstraction, or become self-conscious? We cannot answer; nor can we answer in regard to the ascending organic scale. The half-art, half-instinct of language still bears the stamp of its gradual evolution. (p. 151)

Nevertheless, we are reminded of the implications of On the Origin of Species, drawing on the advocacy of Sir George Mivart, that mankind is descended from non-human antecedents:

No doubt man, in comparison with most of his allies, has undergone an extraordinary amount of modification, chiefly in consequence of the great development of his brain and his erect position; nevertheless, we should bear in mind that he “is but one of several exceptional forms of Primates”. (p. 181)

Towards the end of his introductory section, Darwin employs a further proposal regarding the evolutionary origins of human vocalisation as a means of turning our attention towards the role of sexual selection:

I cannot doubt that language owes its origin to the imitation and modification of various natural sounds, the voices of other animals, and man’s own instinctive cries, aided by signs and gestures. When we treat of sexual selection we shall see that primeval man, or rather some early progenitor of man, probably first used his voice in producing true musical cadences, that is in singing, as do some of the gibbon-apes of the present day; and we may conclude from a widely-spread analogy, that this power would have been especially exerted during the courtship of the sexes, – would have expressed various emotions, such as love, jealousy, triumph, – and would have served as a challenge to rivals. It is, therefore, probable that the imitation of musical cries by articulate sounds may have given rise to words expressive of various complex emotions. (p. 109)

Near the end of the book, and in a firm refutation of Spencer’s alternative theory, Darwin reiterates his proposal as to the emotionally-motivated, musical properties of proto-human vocalisation prior to the development of language:

All these facts with respect to music and impassioned speech become intelligible to a certain extent, if we may assume that musical tones and rhythm were used by our half-human ancestors, during the season of courtship, when animals of all kinds are excited not only by love, but by the strong passions of jealousy, rivalry, and triumph. From the deeply-laid principle of inherited associations, musical notes in this case would be likely to call up vaguely and indefinitely the strong emotions of a long-past age. As we have every reason to suppose that articulate speech is one of the latest, as it certainly is the highest, of the arts acquired by man, and as the instinctive power of producing musical notes and rhythms is developed low down in the animal series, it would be altogether opposed to the principle of evolution, if we were to admit that man’s musical capacity has been developed from the tones used in impassioned speech. We must suppose that the rhythms and cadences or oratory are derived from previously developed musical powers. We can thus understand how it is that music, dancing, song, and poetry are such very ancient arts. We must go even further than this, and, as remarked in a former chapter, believe that musical sounds afforded one of the bases for the development of language. (p. 638)

Linking these passages in the body of the sexual selection material is a series of vignettes set out in “ascending” order of the tree of life, leading “back” to man as at the apex. The following discussion of Darwin’s reference to musicality in a variety of species presents only a sample of this recurrent theme.

Ever the empiricist, Darwin commences his account of sexually selective characteristics by illustrating their presences even in a hermaphrodite species such as the snail (p. 303). In keeping with the anthropomorphic viewpoint whereby the reader was thus invited to consider the human parallels to what was observed, Darwin employs the highly poetic French of his informant, Agassiz, in capturing the erotic in snails’ courtship behaviour: “les amours des limaçons … la séduction … les allures … le double embrassement”. Spiders are his next topic:

The males of several species … have the power of making a stridulating sound, whilst the females are mute … Spiders are attracted by music … we may feel sure that the stridulation serves … to call or to excite the female; and this is the first case known to me in the ascending scale of the animal kingdom of sounds emitted for this purpose. (p. 315)

In examining the means by which locusts and beetles make purposeful sounds, Darwin considers the engineering properties of musical instruments:

In the Locustidae the two wing-covers gradually became differentiated and perfected, on the principle of the division of labour, the one to act exclusively as the bow, and the other as the fiddle. … The species of Pneumora have been more profoundly modified for the sake of stridulation than any other orthopterous insect; for in the male the whole body has been converted into a musical instrument, being distended with air, like a great pellucid bladder, so as to increase the resonance. (pp. 328–331)

He goes on to describe the stridulation of beetles, presenting various species as possessing differing arrangements of “rasp” and “scraper”, like performers on Latin percussion instruments such as the guiro (pp. 344–349). He continues:

In two families of the Homoptera and in three of the Orthoptera, the males alone possess sound-producing organs in an efficient state. These are used incessantly during the breeding-season, not only for calling the females, but apparently for charming or exciting them in rivalry with other males. No one … will … dispute that these musical instruments have been acquired through sexual selection. (p. 373)

Music in the medium of water rather than air also captures his attention:

Fishes are known to make various noises, some of which are described as musical … Sounds are voluntarily produced in several ways by different fishes: by the friction of the pharyngeal bones – by the vibration of certain muscles attached to the swim-bladder, which serves as a resounding board – and by the vibration of the intrinsic muscles of the swim-bladder. By this latter means the Trigla produces pure and long-drawn sounds which range over nearly an octave. (p. 395)

Amphibians, as one would expect, make their contribution:

Frogs and toads offer one interesting sexual difference, namely, in the musical powers possessed by the males; but to speak of music, when applied to the discordant and overwhelming sounds emitted by male bull-frogs … seems, according to our taste, a singularly inappropriate expression. Nevertheless, certain frogs sing in a decidedly pleasing manner. Near Rio Janeiro I used often to sit in the evening to listen to a number of little Hylae, perched on blades of grass close to the water, which sent forth sweet chirping notes in harmony. (p. 398)

The sound of the rattlesnake is explained on sexual selection lines:

Professor Aughey … watched from a little distance, a rattle-snake coiled up with head erect, which continued to rattle at short intervals for half an hour: and at last he saw another snake approach, and when they met they paired. (p. 402)

As we are already aware, Darwin suggests the closest parallel to the means by which human communication evolved is to be found in birdsong. He also found instances of what he termed “instrumental” performance:

Male birds … charm the female by vocal or instrumental music of the most varied kinds. … On the whole, birds appear to be the most aesthetic of all animals, excepting of course man, and they have nearly the same taste for the beautiful as we have. (pp. 407–408)

As in humans, communication is motivated by emotion:

With birds the voice serves to express various emotions, such as distress, fear, anger, triumph, or mere happiness. (p. 417)

Nevertheless, the accomplishment of singing is not acquired without effort:

It has … been argued, that the song of the male cannot serve as a charm, because the male of certain species, for instance of the robin, sing during the autumn. But nothing is more common than for animals to take pleasure in practising whatever instinct they follow at other times for some real good. … Singing is to a certain extent an art, and is much improved by practice (pp. 419–420)

Darwin goes on to explain his intriguing phrase “instrumental music” by giving details of the ways in which various species of bird produce sound: peacocks rattling their quills; turkey-cocks scraping their wings against the ground; grouse drumming their wings together; black-weavers quivering their wings in flight; and the drumming beaks of woodpeckers. He gives details of the modifications to feather proportions responsible for a range of sounds (pp. 424–429). Musing upon the capacity for sexual attraction of this battery of sonic performances, he concludes:

But we must not judge of the tastes of distinct species by a uniform standard; nor must we judge by the standard of man’s taste. Even with man, we should remember what discordant noises, the beating of tom-toms and the shrill notes of reeds, please the ears of savages. (p. 429)

The cumulative power of these examples of sexual selection theory requires underlining in an interim conclusion that will paint Darwin into a corner when he later applies this interpretation to men and women:

When the sexes differ in beauty, or in the power of singing, or in producing what I have called instrumental music, it is almost invariably the male who surpasses the female. (p. 455)

Another theoretical problem arises as Darwin reaches the first instances of communication in mammals, a Lamarckian assumption that use can be inherited:

The loud voice of the stag during the breeding-season does not seem to be of any special service to him, either during his courtship battle, or in any other way. But may we not believe that the frequent use of the voice, under the strong excitement of love, jealousy, and rage, continued during many generations, may at last have produced an inherited effect on the vocal organs of the stag, as well as of other male animals? (p. 590)

Amongst gibbons and New World monkeys, Darwin perceives vocalisation closer to human music:

H. agilis is remarkable from having the power of giving a complete and correct octave of musical notes … The males [of the American Mycetes caraya] begin their dreadful concert, and often continue it during many hours, the females sometimes joining in with their less powerful voices. (p. 590)

In a later paper that recorded close observation of the infant behaviour of one of his younger sons, Darwin made a comparison with the reported nature of gibbon vocalisation that illustrates his thinking on lines that relate the development of ontogeny (acquisition of voice in the human infant) to phylogeny (the similarity of human infant to adult gibbon abilities):

The interrogatory sound which my child gave to the word mum when asking for food is especially curious; for if anyone will use a single word or a short sentence in this manner, he will find that the musical pitch of his voice rises considerably at the close. I did not then see that this fact bears on the view which I have elsewhere maintained that before man used articulate language, he uttered notes in a true musical scale as does the anthropoid ape Hylobates. (Darwin, 1877, p. 293)

Finally, Darwin is ready to apply sexual selection to the condition of mankind. Listing the difference between the sexes in humans, he includes “His body, and especially his face, is more hairy, and his voice has a different and more powerful tone” (op. cit., p. 621). Here, in commencing explanation of the human capacity for language and music, the weight of Darwin’s cumulative evidence for an exclusively sexual selection model demands the presentation of conclusions that seem today unbalanced. He acknowledges the influence of Galton (1869) on the heritability of intelligence (p. 629) before proceeding to the following:

The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shewn by man’s attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can woman – whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands. If two lists were made of the most eminent men and women in poetry, painting, sculpture, music (inclusive both of composition and performance), history, science, and philosophy, with half-a-dozen names under each subject, the two lists would not bear comparison. (p. 629)

What Darwin’s model failed to embrace is the role of human vocal communication in child-rearing, and the verbal and musical complementarity this confers on the human female, as well as the manner in which it benefits both male and female infants as their initial engagement with vocality. ⁷ Nevertheless, he clearly found his conclusions uncomfortable, proceeding to suggest developments in female education that might redress this balance (pp. 630–631). His own consciousness after her death of the painful loss of his daughter Annie at the age of only 10 (Keynes, 2001), of the many talents she possessed – music, dancing, philology, geography (m/s memoir, 30 April 1851; Darwin, 1985, pp. 540–542) – that were to remain unfulfilled, underpins much of his mature work. One should also consider the implications of these conclusions of male superiority for Darwin’s evaluation of his wife Emma’s musicality. Maybe this, too, played a part in his self-deprecation regarding the topic.

This brings us to consideration of the explicit treatment in The Descent of Man of music itself as an integral feature of human culture. Perhaps the most notorious passage in the book, certainly the most misleadingly quoted out-of-context, is the following:

Human song is generally admitted to be the basis or origin of instrumental music. As neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least use to man in reference to his habits of daily life, they must rank amongst the most mysterious with which he is endowed. (p. 636)

But a reader who has encountered the instrumental music of birds, the courtship of snails, the voices of spiders, locusts, gibbons and mice, and their implied role in the fit survival of these species, will realise that Darwin has his tongue here clearly in his cheek. For he goes on, after a brief reminder that the musics of different human cultures can be mutually unintelligible, to assert:

Whether or not the half-human progenitors of man possessed, like the singing gibbons, the capacity of producing, and therefore no doubt of appreciating, musical notes, we know that man possessed these faculties at a very remote period. (p. 636)

Far from the admission that the “most mysterious” passage has been taken to be of Darwin’s inability to account for the phenomenon of music, it is evidently a challenge to the reader to accept that this, too, can be explained by the evolutionary theory set out in this enormous book, especially given the focus on sexual selection that precedes these concluding remarks on the human condition.

Indeed, Darwin’s continuation after this passage of discussion of the phenomenon of music is by no means consistent with the view that he had nothing to say. In contrast, he weaves together themes from earlier in the book related to the origin of language and the role of acoustic communication in animal behaviour to represent a theory of the purpose and evolution of music that remains robust in defining the principal concerns of research today (see also Fitch, 2009). Darwin (pp. 635 ff.) reports the discovery of a bone flute that provides the earliest evidence of an instrument-making culture that has received considerable attention with more recent archaeological discoveries (Conard, Malina, & Münzel, 2009; d’Errico et al., 2003; Kunej & Turk, 2000; Morley, 2006). In keeping with the implications of his theory that music predates language, he states: “Poetry, which may be considered as the offspring of song, is likewise so ancient, that many persons have felt astonished that it should have arisen during the earliest ages of which we have any record” (p. 635; see also Bowra, 1962).

Conclusions: The agenda for music and evolutionary thought

In returning at the conclusion of The Descent of Man to an exploration of the phenomenon of evolved human vocality, and its role in the development of both music and language, Darwin devotes seven pages (pp. 632–639) to the manner in which natural and sexual selection can explain it. These passages overtly refer back to the cases examined in the previous sections on animal behaviour, which are clearly intended both to demonstrate the evolutionary continuity of proto-musical abilities, and to persuade the reader that the study of animal acoustic communication and its motivation (courtship, rivalry, imitation) can illuminate its human equivalent. Given Darwin’s nervousness in publishing The Origin of Species in 1859, this helps illustrate his stiffened resolve 12 years later in presenting a model whereby language, far from being the uncrossable Rubicon that separates Homo from all other species (Müller, 1861), can be seen as a heightened form of behaviour with its roots in vertebrate instinctive responses.

In the 50 years that separated Kivy’s 1959 article from Fitch’s of 2009, the concerns of Darwin’s models have been revisited in a variety of disciplines, including those such as neurology (Parsons, 2001), computer-simulation of acoustic (Sundberg, 2000) and cognitive processes (de Boer, 2000; Kirby, 1999), genetics (Dawkins, 1976; Dobzhansky, 1937; J. Smith, 1989) and endocrinology (Campbell, Satoh, & Degnan, 2004) that had yet to arise at Darwin’s time. Similarly, the contribution to understanding group behaviour influenced by Hamilton’s group selection theory (1971) has extended the explanatory range of Darwin’s foundational theories of natural and sexual selection, with consequences for our understanding of the simultaneity of much human music-making and social communication (Bannan, 2012b; Dunbar, 1998; Merker, 2000). But in Darwin’s writings we find much that traces the direction in which subsequent research may be achieved: in psychology, in ethnomusicology, in child development, in embryology and linguistics. The Darwinian viewpoint has influenced the establishment of new branches of musicology: zoomusicology (Martinelli, 2008; Taylor, 2008); and memetic analysis (Jan, 2007), which applies to musical morphology Dawkins’ (1976) coining of the term “meme” to propose an extension of Darwinian processes of selection beyond biology.

Darwin’s evaluation of the effects of music pre-empts the development of systematic music psychology while, again, defining its field:

Music arouses in us various emotions, but not the more terrible ones of horror, fear, rage, & c. It awakens the gentler feelings of tenderness and love, which readily pass into devotion. In the Chinese annals it is said, “Music hath the power of making heaven descend upon earth.” It likewise stirs up in us the sense of triumph and the glorious ardour for war. These powerful and mingled feelings may well give rise to the sense of sublimity. (p. 637)

These are not the opinions of a man who assigned no value to music. Rather, what we have to take from Darwin’s theory is the realisation that, without music as a communicative system at an early stage in the evolution of our species that contributed to our survival and successful reproduction, we would not be here. As Ian Cross puts it, music may be “the most important thing we ever did” (Cross, 1999). The extrapolation from Darwin’s account of the musical foundations of language is beginning to provide a robust model of how language may have evolved. The challenge to musicology is to consider the independent flourishing of musical behaviours in every known culture of Homo sapiens, and to devise a parallel explanatory framework for the descent of musicality from the ancestral state Darwin proposes.