Miriam Piilonen is Assistant Professor of Music Theory at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research has appeared in Critical Inquiry and Empirical Musicology Review, and her chapter "Music Theory and Social Media" appears in The Oxford Handbook of Public Music Theory.

• List of Figures


• 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


• Chapter 1 - Herbert Spencer Writes to Alfred Tennyson


• Spencer the Evolutionist


• Spencer Writes to Charles Darwin


• The Shifting Terrain of Victorian Evolution Theories


• Spencer's Earworm


• Chapter 2 - 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


• Chapter 3 - 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 Non-Linear Histories


• Chapter 4 - 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


• Chapter 5 - 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


• A Personal Postscript


• Acknowledgements


• References


• Index

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.