Content area
Full Text
Zon Bennett., Evolution and Victorian Musical Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). x + 365 pp. £ 90.00.
Nineteenth-Century Music Reviewprofiles books that reflect a diversity of nineteenth-century music research, highlighting subject areas deemed to be under-emphasized by reviews sections of other musicological journals. Like all book reviews inNineteenth-Century Music Review, this one has been edited impartially without consulting the book’s author.
It must be stated at the outset that this monograph is not to be confused with another recent Cambridge University Press book bearing Zon’s name, Evolution and Victorian Culture, published in 2014, which he edited with Bernard Lightman. Zon’s own chapter there has been reinforced in his new magnum opus, but the rest of that compilation’s contents were quite different.
Magnum opus it is, distilling a lifetime’s reading and conceptual thought into a single argument. One does not expect, therefore, knowing Zon, that it will begin with the word – indeed the sentence – ‘Cheesecake’ (p. 1). Alas, the ploy of reader seduction feels desperate and within two or three pages becomes all too transparent, for this is a difficult book that no amount of gimmickry can disguise: nor does it try to, past the first paragraph.
The author’s interest is in how, in Victorian Britain, the various strains of scientific argument about evolution as a process of nature over huge spans of time either brought in music, as evidence or as object of study, or led to or were somehow paralleled by thinking within musical discourse and activity that reflected the evolutionary mindset of the period. A repertoire of ideas very soon emerges, though it has to be said that it could have been introduced more clearly and helpfully in the book’s opening chapter (‘Introduction’). What is presented clearly is the book’s structural pattern. Zon’s own invention, this is the re-utilization of the traditional concept of the Great Chain of Being to frame the staging posts of evolution. It is clever and logical: the Victorians pretty much unquestioningly saw life as a sequence of entities ascending in value and in order from other animals to other peoples, other...