Evolutionary themes in British music historiography

Abstract

Abstract The present paper was stimulated, in the first instance, by my reading of W. D. Allen's well-known volume, Philosophies of ‘Music History (1939),1 the only full-length book in English that examines in detail the intellectual underpinnings of music historiography. Allen’s work is today considered by musicologists to be somewhat dated. Nevertheless, it raised for me an interesting question that this paper seeks to resolve, namely, the nature of the relationship that exists between certain explanatory categories to be found in many nineteenth- and twentieth-century works dealing with music history and the wider intellectual community within which such works were written. The particular aspect of this relationship that I wish to examine here is to be found in the use of evolutionary and organic models in the structuring of music historiography and the way in which, in general terms, a biological way of thinking about music history was employed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The method of ...