Bennett Zon

Evolution and Victorian culture

In this collection of essays from leading scholars, the dynamic interplay between evolution and Victorian culture is explored for the first time, mapping new relationships between the arts and sciences. Rather than focusing simply on evolution and literature or art, this volume brings together essays exploring the impact of evolutionary ideas on a wide range of cultural activities including painting, sculpture, dance, music, fiction, poetry, cinema, architecture, theatre, photography, museums, exhibitions and popular culture. Broad-ranging, rather than narrowly specialized, each chapter provides a brief introduction to key scholarship, a central section exploring original insights drawn from primary source material, and a conclusion offering overarching principles and a projection towards further areas of research. Each chapter covers the work of significant individuals and groups applying evolutionary theory to their particular art, both as theorists and practitioners. This comprehensive examination of topics sheds light on larger and previously unknown Victorian cultural patterns.

Bedazzled by Breakthrough: Music Theology and the Problem of Composing Music in Words

MUSIC and theology remain largely separate disciplines, despite sharing a long and frequently interrelated history. Early medieval works such as Augustine’s De musica (late fourth, early fifth century) or Boethius’s De institutione musica (early sixth century) reveal a profoundly unified basis in concept and method, but from the late Middle Ages this unity became attenuated as increasingly scientific models of specialization engendered theoretical and practical divisions. Daniel Chua looks to the high Renaissance as a point at which music’s ‘supernatural aura [was] demystified as natural and its inaudible, invisible essences dismissed as non-existent’. Today, as modern composers, performers, listeners and writers return to more holistic interpretations of the relationship between music, religion and theology, recent research of the kind exemplified in Sander van Maas’s The Reinvention of Religious Music: Olivier Messiaen’s Breakthrough Toward the Beyond is assessing, interrogating and effectively healing the divisive nature of this historical process. Composer John Tavener is emblematic; for him music is iconic, ‘beyond art, a real presence that we venerate’. The Anglican Archbishops’ Commission on Church Music (1992) echoes this, claiming that music ‘expresses something of the mystery [of God], the order and glory of creation and its Creator’. Current research, to which Van Maas’s book is a recent addition, is developing a new interdisciplinary discourse under the guise of ‘music theology’. One might even call music theology an ‘interdiscipline’, if we accept Willard McCarty’s definition of that term: ‘constituted precisely by that unifying perspective on what happens at the intersection of two or more fields, [. . .] the interdiscipline [gives] integrity and a basis for its own research

“LOATHSOME LONDON”: RUSKIN, MORRIS, AND HENRY DAVEY'S HISTORY OF ENGLISH MUSIC (1895)

The dystopia of the Victorian city is ubiquitous as a trope of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature, appearing across a wide array of literature in fiction, poetry, pamphlets, articles, reviews, socio-demographic works, socialist tracts, and miscellaneous papers. Anti-urbanism plays a prominent role in Dickens, Kingsley, and Gissing, to name but a few, and emerges in more pointedly sociological titles such as Andrew Mearnss The Bitter Cry of London (1883); Thomas Escotts England: Its Peoples, Polity, and Pursuits (1885); Charles Booths Life and Labour of the People of London (1889–1902); Ford Madox Fords The Heart of the Empire (1905); and W. W. Hutchings London Town Past and Present (1909) (Lees, in Fraser and Sutcliffe, 1983: 154; Hulin and Coustillas, 1979: passim). Themes of urban degradation, overpopulation, squalor, unemployment, lack of education, despair, and pollution fill their pages.

Evolution and Victorian Musical Culture

This engaging book explores the dynamic relationship between evolutionary science and musical culture in Victorian Britain, drawing upon a wealth of popular scientific and musical literature to contextualize evolutionary theories of the Darwinian and non-Darwinian revolutions. Bennett Zon uses musical culture to question the hegemonic role ascribed to Darwin by later thinkers, and interrogates the conceptual premise of modern debates in evolutionary musicology. Structured around the Great Chain of Being, chapters are organized by discipline in successively ascending order according to their object of study, from zoology and the study of animal music to theology and the music of God. Evolution and Victorian Musical Culture takes a non-Darwinian approach to the interpretation of Victorian scientific and musical interrelationships, debunking the idea that the arts had little influence on contemporary scientific ideas and, by probing the origins of musical interdisciplinarity, the volume shows how music helped ideas about evolution to evolve.

The Cambridge Companion to Richard Strauss

Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Oscar Wilde inhabit a late-Victorian world of dandyism, ennui, and “male surveillance,” in which caricature has become “the art form of the club,” and a cultural cul-de-sac is reached as Wilde “recasts clubland as the new vulgarity,” in De Profundis. This sense of an ending intensifies in chapter 6, “A World of Men: An Elegy for Clubbability,” which takes the reader through The Forsyte Saga (1922) and its mapping of dynastic disintegration, with late-Victorian clubs used as prominent landmarks. For Galsworthy, Black claims, clubland represents Old England, and is the object of nostalgia: The deserted clubhouse represents a world in decline. The fact that Galsworthy was a Nobel Laureate has long bemused the academy. Closer attention by Black, however, to the bridge passages between the Forsyte novels, which depict both boyhood and the masculine “fourth age” with unrivalled sensitivity, might have helped to explain the award, and provided a foil to the externalized social world which is her subject. The inner life—the subject of much mainstream Victorian fiction and poetry—is not her subject, as it is outside the realm of “clubbiness.” Or at least, it is in the gentleman’s clubs. A coda to A Room of His Own glances at Her Room, in the shape of the women’s clubs in the late nineteenth century, such as the highly successful Pioneer, Alexandra, and Empress. For many of the “chaps” who belonged to “gentlemen’s” clubs, these new institutions “tolled the end of the old order.” Professor Black is keen to suggest, however, that “clubs” are always with us, whether they be an Internet Scrabble Club or even Facebook, and that men and women create different kinds of “clubs,” formally or informally, throughout their lives. This reviewer hopes that, on her next visit to London, she gets in touch and joins him for tea at his own club, which, to use her term, is strictly “coed.”

The music of non-Western nations and the evolution of British ethnomusicology.

According to Philip Bohlman, “national music reflects the image of the nation so that those living in the nation recognize themselves in basic but crucial ways. It is music conceived in the image of the nation that is created through efforts to represent something quintessential about the nation” (Bohlman 2004, 82–3). Like all nations, Britain conceived of music in its own image, whether indigenous or foreign, and while the British Empire expanded from the seventeenth century onward, so too did its characterization of its own, and the world’s, national music. Until the middle of the nineteenth century this characterization was premised on an early anthropological model called developmentalism, but, from that time forward, evolutionary models increasingly challenged its hegemonic position. This chapter explores the relationship between anthropological theory and the representation of non-Western music from the heyday of the British Empire to its decline after World War I. It sets the scene by tracing the often-fraught history of anthropology from developmentalism to evolutionism, highlighting important developmental paradigms, such as monogenism, polygenism, the comparative method, and slightly later the evolutionary models of Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin. It then situates these developmental and evolutionary templates with contemporary representations of world musics, providing in fine a suggested explanation for their adoption and abandonment.

From great man to fittest survivor: Reputation, recapitulation and survival in Victorian concepts of Wagner's genius:

The transposition of the Great Man into the Fittest Survivor is at the very root of an endemic interchange between the sciences and the arts in late Victorian culture, giving rich metaphoric substance to more heavily concretised scientific terminology. Herbert Spencers famous phrase, “survival of the fittest” is, arguably, one of the most commonly transposed and consequently influential scientific expressions of the Victorian period, and as such, one of its most malleable idioms. In Victorian musicology this influence is especially obvious in biographical works which privilege Richard Wagner as the greatest genius of musical history. Thus in Mezzotints in Modern Music (1899) James Huneker declares that “Wagner carried within his breast the precious eucharist of genius. ” It is the attitude of Huneker and like-minded musicologists, like C. Hubert H. Parry, William Wallace, Francis Hueffer and Richard Wallaschek, which forms the basis of a three-part exploration of Wagners genius, covering (1) the role of “endurance” in Victorian definitions of genius, from Carlyle and Sully to Galton; (2) the influence of German morphology on evolutionary terminology in Britain, with particular reference to ontogeny, phylogeny and recapitulation; and (3) Spencers adaptation of German morphology and his influence on Victorian perceptions of Wagners genius. These collectively argue through the paradigm of Wagner that the formulation of late Victorian musical genius was incomplete without recourse to evolutionary terminology of survival. Indeed, for Victorian musicology, Wagner, the Great Man, had evolved Into Wagner, the Fittest Survivor.

Disorienting Race: Humanizing the Musical Savage and the Rise of British Ethnomusicology

Although definitions of orientalism and racism seldom achieve consensus, the significance of their interplay is universally acknowledged amongst theorists of non-Western cultures. Tony Ballantyne, in his recent Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire , describes their relationship in terms of mutuality, and Ziauddin Sardar, in Orientalism , describes them as ‘circles within circles’. Edward Said, of course, deals with their relationship exhaustively in Orientalism , and describes them as inextricably linked. Writing of the nineteenth century, he suggests that ‘Theses of Oriental backwardness, degeneracy, and inequality with the West most easily associated themselves early in the nineteenth century with ideas about the biological bases of racial inequality.’