SEMINAR: School of Music: Postgraduate Seminars - Semester 2

Assistant Professor Nicholas Bannan will be presenting is seminar on Darwin, music and the evolution of human culture.

The impression has formed in the literature dealing with Darwin’s achievement that he was himself unmusical, and that his theories have offered little help in understanding or valuing the role of music in human society. This paper draws on biographical information relating to Darwin’s family and household to illustrate that he was surrounded by music throughout his life. His wife was a noted pianist; his children brought up to be professional-standard orchestral instrumentalists. While Darwin’s deterioration in health may have reduced his ability to appreciate music in later life, he was clearly much involved in music as a young man. He also employed music in several of his experiments in animal behaviour. A close reading of The Descent of Man illustrates the extent to which, throughout the book, Darwin made reference to musical behaviours in defining his themes of natural and sexual selection. Correspondence with his sons, who acted as informed advisors on the subject, conveys the difficulty he had in dealing fully with music as a human capacity in its own right. In this context, it becomes clear that the often-quoted passages that deal with specifically human music-making in the final section of the book have been misunderstood. Far from having little to say about music, Darwin’s theories robustly define the research agenda for exploring the purpose of music and its relation to language: a project that recent developments in neurology, anthropology and linguistics have begun to reveal in a new light.