Unsound: A Cultural History of Music and Eugenics

Abstract

This dissertation explores the prominent role of music in British and American eugenics movements in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Examining a range of historical texts, from the first writings of eugenics founder Sir Francis Galton to those of modern-day inheritors like Bell Curve author Charles Murray, it identifies a persistent trope concerning musical ability: that it was an especially obvious example of a hereditary gift, and that it therefore provided evidence for the heredity of other intellectual or cultural phenomena, such as criminality, so-called “feeble-mindedness,” or general intelligence. Drawing on original archival research, and interdisciplinary studies of science, race, ability, reproduction, and labor, the dissertation explores how music’s entanglements with eugenics shaped notions of race and whiteness during an historical period in which those categories were in constant flux. The dissertation begins with the assertion of Francis Galton (1822–1911), coiner of the term “eugenics,” that the inheritance of musical ability was “notorious and undeniable.” I show how this supposition was transformed over Galton’s career: from subjective assertions based on lineages of great musicians, to statistical measures of psychophysical traits associated with music-making, such as pitch perception. Later chapters explore how Galton’s ideas were reworked by biologist Charles Davenport (1866–1944), a major popularizer of eugenics in the United States, and by Carl E. Seashore (1866–1949), pioneering music psychologist and board member of the American Eugenics Society. I show how Seashore brought together concepts from eugenics and scientific management in developing his Measures of Musical Talent, a test for purportedly inherited musical ability that was deployed in schools from 1919, and how the implementation of the Measures at the Eastman School of Music was used as a model for national eugenic education policy. The final chapter offers an analysis of how Seashore’s Measures were used in racialized experiments in the 1920s and ‘30s, showing how attempts to find racial differences in musical ability were used as a proxy for the investigation of racial differences in intelligence, and how these studies have found a new life in the literature of the present-day far right.