Miriam Piilonen, <i>Theorizing Music Evolution: Darwin, Spencer, and the Limits of the Human</i> Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024. Pp. 168. ISBN 978-0-19-769528-9. £59.00 (hardback).

Williams shows, music has proved a beguiling subject for theories of evolution since their advent, and evolution an enticing framework for theories of music.In this compact book, Miriam Piilonen critically engages with this history of ideas, focusing primarily on its Victorian heyday and its recent revival: an unwelcome surprise in Piilonen's view.Piilonen's offers shrewd analyses of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer's writings on music.Spencer, who dominated Victorian culture but soon fell out of favour, receives a particularly thorough reappraisal.Piilonen ably negotiates Spencer's labyrinthine prose, offering useful insights into how his 'The origin and function of music' (1857), with its claim that music originates in impassioned speech, relates to the materialist and antidualist theory expressed in The Principles of Psychology (1855).Spencer radically claims a unity between emotion and cognition: music's origins lie in physical reflex actions to emotions.This exemplifies one of Piilonen's central claims: 'all evolutionary claims about music are also ontological claims' (p. 7).Piilonen engages various neglected aspects of Spencer's musical thought; Chapter 3, for example, assesses his contribution to theories of sound symbolism.Here, the ethical implications of Spencer's metanarrative -the unwavering advance of progress and complexity -and his 'situated understanding' (p.137) of music are made clear.For Spencer, emotional perception, expression and the well-suitedness of language to meaning distinguish certain 'advanced' groups from others along the lines of gender, race and class.Thus Spencer's theory functions as 'a technology of hegemony' (p.69).Chapter 1 concludes by evaluating Spencer's writings on musical 'earworms', another neglected aspect of his theory, although it is less clear how this 'analytical experiment' (p.11) serves the overall aims of the book.Piilonen's comprehensive approach to Spencer, interesting in its own right, serves a wider purpose: to challenge Darwinian hegemony.Piilonen considers Darwin no less unreliable an authority on music and highlights his own uncertainty regarding its evolutionary role.Darwin's ideas form part of his broader argument for continuity between humans and animals: music originates in sexual selection, though it is no longer a sexual characteristic in humans.Piilonen adeptly exposes the ethical problems with this adaptationist explanation; for example, 'if sexual selection drives musical diversity and difference then the so-called proper appreciation of musical beauty implies one's fitness for survival' (p.108-9).Piilonen's analysis of Darwin is bolstered by Darwin's contemporary, Antoinette Blackwell.