Herbert Spencer on Music

Over the next few days, I'm expecting to finish an essay that's due for publication sometime later in the year.  One of the surprising turns the research has taken is that I'm now looking once again at Herbert Spencer.  For me, Spencer has been something of an interesting intellectual byway in the world of late-nineteenth century musicology, yet I am beginning to build him into the picture as my work proceeds in new directions.

Spencer was the father of modern social science, and his writings in this area and across a range of other subjects was prolific.  Like so many Victorians, it seems like he had a taste for anything he could lay his hands on.

One area where Spencer courted controversy was in his attempt to put forward a theory of the origins of music.  He accepted that music was a feature of human evolution, and argued that music proceeded from the muscular stimuli which produce impassioned speech.  This is known as the speech theory.

Spencer's clashes with various English musical writers, including Edmund Gurney and Ernest Newman, have been amply documented by John Offer and Peter Kivy, among others.  What interests me is how he applied his thinking to the place of music in general education.  In an essay on education, titled What Knowledge is of Most Worth?, Spencer divided the types of knowledge imparted through education into five areas.  These were: knowledge which has to do with self-preservation; knowledge which is necessary for living well (i.e: earning a living, using the resources of the earth to increase production); knowledge required to rear and discipline children; knowledge which supports the operation of the state; and knowledge which can be used for leisure pursuits.

Needless to say, music is classified into the latter group.  In discussing painting, sculpture, music, and poetry, Spencer asserts that they each tap into different areas of scientific knowledge (in the sense of the natural and observational sciences).  He argues that "not only does science underlie sculpture, painting, music poetry, but...science is itself poetic."

Here's what Spencer says about music in this essay:

To say that music...has need of scientific aid will cause still more surprise.  Yet it may be shown that music is but an idealization of the natural language of emotion; and that consequently, music must be good or bad according as it conforms with the laws of this natural language.  The various inflections of voice which accompany feelings of different kinds and intensities, are the germs out of which music is developed.  It is demonstrable that these inflections and cadences are not accidental or arbitrary; but that they are determined by certain general principles of vital action; and that their expressiveness depends on this.  Whence it follows that musical phrases and the melodies built of them, can be effective only when they are in harmony with these general principles.  It is difficult here properly to illustrate this position.   But perhaps it will suffice to instance the swarms of worthless ballads that infest drawing-rooms, as compositions which science would forbid.  They sin against science by setting to music ideas that are not emotional enough to prompt musical expression; and they also sin against science by using musical phrases that have no natural relations to the ideas expressed: even where these are emotional.  They are bad because they are untrue.  And to say they are untrue, is to say they are unscientific.

"We do not for a moment believe that science will make an artist," says Spencer, although science may make artists and audiences better.

What intrigues me here is that Spencer is making a very big argument about the relationship of music and science.  Essentially, he is looking at music as science.  There can be no doubt that distortions are involved in Spencer's perspective.  For instance, I have yet to find any reference to the contemporary work of Helmholtz in acoustics and musical cognition, and Spencer seems not to have taken on board much of Gurney's argument about what constitutes musical perception.  Given that the big argument in introducing higher studies in music during the nineteenth century was that it constituted either a science or a literature, this is an interesting and odd gap.