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

Summary

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 traces the history of anthropology from developmentalism to evolutionism, highlighting important developmental paradigms, such as monogenism, polygenism, the comparative method, and the evolutionary models of Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin. Although Tylorian anthropology would set the scene for modern British ethnomusicology, the history of ethnomusicology in Britain begins much earlier, in the eighteenth century, much of it in travel literature translated from other languages. Spencer's influence in music begins with his hugely controversial article The Origin and Function of Music and continues into the early twentieth century with numerous related, and equally contentious, articles. Acolytes of developmentalism persisted in increasingly unsupportable anthropological views, yet Darwinians struggled to substantiate evolutionary theory.