Nineteenth-Century Music Review profiles 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 classes, little people (children), whole people, whole groups of people over time, and God. This gives Zon his succeeding chapters, on zoomusicology, ethnomusicology, folk musicology, music pedagogy, music biography, music history, and music theology. Zon has published on most of these topics before, and one can now see where, rather like the Chain itself, it all was leading. If it seems odd that he should revive a concept generally abandoned as outmoded by the twentieth century, not least for reasons of what we would now call political correctness, he has Arthur Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea of 1936 to lean on, which he does.Footnote ¹

Beyond this, the recurrent concerns are less easy to get straight, but if I have understood correctly, the Victorians’ squaring of their unshakeable belief in progress with acceptance of evolutionary principles gave rise to what Zon frequently alludes to as the ‘non-Darwinian revolution’, though this is never simply defined (and p. 115 left me more confused than ever). It is certainly true that those who were the most determined to find vindication of ideas about life and societies as being disposable into hierarchical stages of development would turn to the likes of Herbert Spencer rather than to Darwin, and this is borne out many times in Zon’s own penchant for finding a concordance. What interests Zon most of all is the evolutionary concept of recapitulation, which in this book has nothing to do with sonata forms but refers to the notion that the individual organism repeats in miniature what the larger entity, be it a civilization or a long-term development in nature, accomplishes over a massive timescale. This was what now seems an unacceptable idea when applied for example to the ‘primitive’ music of a non-western tribe, simply waiting to catch up with centuries of western culture for its proper fulfilment. Conversely, Zon frequently finds himself having to work out how to position the ideologies of his subjects, such as Cecil Sharp, vis-à-vis the theories of Darwin, when Sharp’s elevation of folk song was precisely that of the survival of the unfittest. It is all too easy to trivialize these concepts, and to his credit Zon never does this, though the price paid is many an indigestible sentence or paragraph and a tendency to generate a statement such as this as the solution to whatever historical equation he has been exploring: ‘ethnomusicology proved again and again that savage races existed in a teleological space and time ontogenically related to the phylogeny of civilization’ (p. 111). Thirty pages later, phylogeny and ontogeny are explained as, respectively, ‘the growth of the race’ and ‘the growth of an individual’.

There is a proper musical focus somewhere in each chapter, though the reader frequently has to work nearly as hard as Zon has done in order to reach it: for Zon seems to have read everything the Victorians ever wrote with evolutionary implications, in multiple disciplines, in addition to all the academic commentary on their work ever since. He has an amazing capacity for taking it all in and deciding how to argue it through, but only a modest ability to help less specialized readers develop and retain a working understanding and interest. His overall effect can be rebarbative, which is a pity. Nevertheless, that musical focus is there and can be consulted in what in the end is a necessary and useful book. The zoology chapter recapitulates (whoops!) the evolutionary arguments about the function of birdsong; the ethnomusicology chapter covers a lot of ground, from William Jones to Sourindro Mohun Tagore;Footnote ² the first English folksong revival is given new twists (it seems fated to suffer these endlessly); and the pedagogy chapter offers fresh perspectives on sight-singing methods and a fascinating section on piano tutors, introducing us in particular to the colourful Henry Keatley Moore. The chapters on biography and music history approach less sharply a point of arrival, and Zon’s default exemplar is too often Hubert Parry; but Henry Davey puts in a deservedly lively appearance. The chapter on music theology briefly alights on Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius and, to my mind, fails to engage us much with the relevant implications or specifics of hymnology, before moving on to a beguiling and detailed exposition of John Henry Newman’s battle with a recalcitrant colleague in Birmingham, Rev Henry Formby, over the theology of plainchant, which it is hardly exaggerating to say that Formby promoted as the solution to every equation of life, though it is Zon who couches this viewpoint in the words of Friedrich Schleiermacher to arrive at plainchant ‘as the incarnation of the Son of God’ (p. 285). But the best chapter is the Epilogue, in which Zon turns to Walter Pater and his commentators to suggest that for the Victorians and indeed for us, ‘the beauty of music helps individuality survive the ordeal of evolution’ (p. 308).

I found this page very moving, but what it implies is not a comfortable thought: that we still have to work through many if not all of the things the Victorians had to work through. Zon never bluntly positions us in relation to them, while tut-tutting in all the expected and necessary places at their now unacceptable views. But there are many moments at which a thoughtful reader of his book will be forced to do so. To take just one example, Spencer’s description of ‘primitive man’: ‘intellectually he is unable to conceptualize general facts because he cannot conceptualize beyond particular truths. He is … unlikely to develop abstract ideas such as cause, property, uniformity and truth; and his imagination merely receives and repeats without originality’ (p. 84). The essay culture of the British higher education system continues to believe and rectify all this, with the result that ‘primitive man’ flocks to the UK from every corner of the globe each autumn to spend his thousands of pounds on university fees. Are we still supremacists?