AMBIVALENCES AND INFLUENCES

How does Darwin's Darwinism relate to social Darwinism and eugenics? Like many foes of Darwinism, past and present, the American populist and creationist William Jennings Bryan thought a straight line ran from Darwin's theory ('a dogma of darkness and death') to beliefs that it is right for the strong to crowd out the weak, and that the only hope for human improvement lay in selective breeding. Darwin's defenders, on the other hand, have typically viewed social Darwinism and eugenics as perversions of his theory. Daniel Dennett speaks for many biologists and philosophers of science when he characterises social Darwinism as 'an odious misapplication of Darwinian thinking'. Few professional historians believe either that Darwin's theory leads directly to these doctrines or that they are entirely unrelated. But both the nature and significance of the link are disputed.

This chapter examines the views held by Darwin himself and by later Darwinians on the implications of his theory for social life, and it assesses the social impact made by these views. More specifically: section II discusses the debates about human evolution in the wake of Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859).3 Sections III and IV analyse Darwin’s ambiguous contribution to these debates. Sometimes celebrating competitive struggle, he also wished to moderate its effects, but thought restrictions on breeding impractical and immoral. Sections V and VI see how others interpreted both the science and social meaning of Darwinism. Darwin’s followers found in his ambiguities legitimation for whatever they favoured: laissez-faire capitalism, certainly, but also liberal reform, anarchism and socialism; colonial conquest, war and patriarchy, but also anti-imperialism, peace and feminism.

SIGNS OF THE TIMES

Darwinism has long been in the thick of science-religion debates, and never more so than today. Among the latest of a series of American states to legislate in a manner unfriendly to Darwinism is Oklahoma, insisting that science textbooks carry an explicit statement that 'human life was created by one God of the Universe'. Not all religious believers feel so threatened by evolutionary ideas, of course. Pope John Paul II - hardly a man to take doctrine lightly - has sent out a letter endorsing not just evolution per se, but modern theories of organic change. In the same spirit, Keith Ward, Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, speaks of natural selection as a 'simple and extremely fruitful theory', and goes on to say that there is 'every reason to think that a scientific evolutionary account and a religious belief in a guiding creative force are not just compatible, but mutually reinforcing'. Nevertheless, even liberal Christians often feel the need to supplement the theory of evolution through natural selection with other special mechanisms.

For their part, many of those on the science side of these debates think that Darwinism sounds the death knell for Christianity and other theistic systems. Writing with the passion of Savonarola, the well-known Darwinian Richard Dawkins (author of The Selfish Gene) regrets that a ‘cowardly flabbiness of the intellect afflicts otherwise rational people confronted with long-established religions’. As a Darwinian, he wants no compromise or mutual embrace. ‘Given a choice between honest to goodness fundamentalism on the one hand, and the obscurantist, disingenuous doublethink of the Roman Catholic Church on the other, I know which I prefer.’

HUMAN EVOLUTION THROUGH HUMBOLDTIAN EYES

From the beginning of his theorising about species, Darwin had human beings in view. In the initial pages of his first transmutation notebook (Notebook B), he observed that 'even mind & instinct become influenced' as the result of adaptation to new circumstances. Considering matters as a Lyellian geologist, he supposed that such adaptations would require many generations of young, pliable minds being exposed to a changing environment. After all, Captain FitzRoy had attempted to 'civilise' the Fuegian Jemmy Button by bringing him to London and instructing him in the Christian religion; but back in South America, Button reverted to his old habits, demonstrating, in Darwin's words, that the 'child of savage not civilized man' - transmutation of mind was not the work of a day. Darwin had nonetheless quickly become convinced that over long periods of time human mind, morals and emotions had progressively developed out of animal origins. As he bluntly expressed it in his first transmutation notebook: 'If all men were dead, monkeys make men. - Men make angels.' Presumably the transmutation of human beings into those higher creatures remained far in the future.

From July 1837, when he jotted these remarks in the first few pages of his Notebook B, to the early 1870s, with the publication of his Descent of Man and Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin gradually worked out theories of the evolution of human mentality that, in the main, we still accept. In the case of moral behaviour, he produced a theory of its evolution that stands as a most plausible empirical account, and displays the range and subtlety of his thought. These theories merit close examination in their own right.

GENTLEMANLY GENERATION

In the summer of 1838, Charles Darwin considered marriage. The disadvantages included losing the 'freedom to go where one liked', while staying single would mean avoiding 'the expense & anxiety of children'. But then, he reflected, 'only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music perhaps'. Not to mention an 'object to be beloved and played with. better than a dog anyhow'. Wedlock won; within months he was engaged and then married to his cousin, Emma Wedgwood. The pairing brought anxieties, however, especially over whether marriage between such close relatives would issue in unhealthy children.

As a philosophical naturalist, Darwin had long been interested in reproduction or ‘generation’, to use the term of the day. Generational issues would eventually lead him to study subjects as diverse as barnacles, flowers, pigeons and domestic animal and plant breeding. His hypothesis of pangenesis, probably first formulated in 1841 but only published in 1868, was an attempt to give a unified account of all kinds of generation, from the healing of wounds in trees, to propagation by buds and grafting, to sexual pairings and fertilisation. Moreover, in Darwin’s view, since sexual pairings – whether decided by male combat or female choice – were selective, they enabled a selectional evolutionary process separate from, and sometimes in tension with, natural selection. His theory of sexual selection argued that something like a peacock’s tail, while lowering the peacock’s chances of survival, might give him a reproductive advantage as long as peahens choose the males with the finest tails.

Valéry's 'Variation sur Descartes' excellently evokes the vanishing act that has haunted philosophy ever since Darwin overturned the Cartesian tradition. If my body is composed of nothing but a team of a few trillion robotic cells, mindlessly interacting to produce all the large-scale patterns that tradition would attribute to the nonmechanical workings of my mind, there seems to be nothing left over to be me. Lurking in Darwin's shadow there is a bugbear: the incredible Disappearing Self. One of Darwin's earliest critics, Robert MacKenzie, saw what was coming and could scarcely contain his outrage:

This ‘strange inversion of reasoning’ promises – or threatens – to dissolve the Cartesian res cogitans as the wellspring of creativity, and then where will we be? Nowhere, it seems. It seems that if creativity gets ‘reduced’ to ‘mere mechanism’ we will be shown not to exist at all. Or, we will exist, but we won’t be thinkers, we won’t manifest genuine ‘Wisdom in all the achievements of creative skill’. The individual as Author of works and deeds will be demoted: a person, it seems, is a barely salient nexus, a mere slub in the fabric of causation.

FROM THE BEAGLE YEARS TO THE LAWS OF LIFE

In March 1837, five months after returning from the Beagle voyage, Darwin settled in London. He was to live in the capital for five years. They were by far his most productive years intellectually. During them, he formulated almost all the main theories later published in the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s: his theory of the origin of species - natural selection; his theory of generation or reproduction and heredity - pangenesis; his theory of the origin of the moral sense in man from ancestral animal social instincts; and his interpretation of the expression of the emotions in man and animals. Of his prominent intellectual productions only two - the theory of sexual selection and the principle of divergence of varieties and species - came later, and they were conceived as elaborations of the theory of natural selection.

In these five London years, two periods were quite exceptionally consequential: the spring and early summer of 1837, immediately after his move to London, and the summer and early autumn of the following year, 1838. At each of these times Darwin made vast escalating moves in his thinking and his theoretical ambitions. By mid- September 1838, indeed, his ambitions had reached a peak never later to be surpassed. One can therefore read the rest of his life as so many sequels to the brainwork of these months.

The work was mostly done in a series of small leatherbound notebooks. In or about July 1837, Darwin opened two notebooks. One, ‘A’ as he labelled it, was devoted to geology; the other, ‘B’, was headed ‘Zoonomia’ and devoted to the laws of life.

Introduction

Why does one try to ‘read a score’, and what does it mean to do so? Conductors have two main reasons for undertaking this activity. The first is that the written or printed score is the key to understanding what happens in the music. As a conductor's principal task is to rehearse the music for performance, knowledge of the forces involved, the style, structure, and main features of the piece are vital in planning the various practical tasks that make up the rehearsal.

The second is to find out in detail what the piece sounds like, creating an aural image – ‘hearing the music in one's head’ – so that the conductor knows in advance what sounds the orchestra should make and, more specifically, the required details of balance, articulation, rhythm, tempo, and so on that distinguish a performance from a mere play-through of the notes. Some conductors go through this process of auralising the score entirely from the musical notation, while others use the piano to create the actual sound of the melodic and harmonic content of the piece.

Composers undertake this second process in reverse, trying to put on paper instructions for recreating the sounds that they have imagined. Some composers, too, use the piano in this process, generating ideas and fixing the main outlines of harmonic and rhythmic content in their minds. For the great majority, whose main active interest is in listening to orchestral music rather than creating or recreating it, the reasons for learning to read a score are less ambitious but more varied.

The composer and the orchestra today

‘Though the standard orchestra is not yet an anachronism, perhaps, it can no longer be used standardly except by anachronistic composers.’ Stravinsky's statement, made in the late 1950s, undoubtedly carries weight: first, from a historical angle and secondly, on account of the aesthetic/technical issues raised by such a succinct, yet perceptive, remark.

The purely musical is unavoidably bound up with practical, cultural and social issues whenever a composer writes an orchestral piece. If the creative spark has been kindled by a commission, the terms of the contract are usually clear, those who manage both chamber and symphony orchestras being primarily concerned with financial survival and, intertwined with such a concern, audience numbers. In short, money and ratings matter. As a result, outside the quasi-Utopian realm of public service broadcasting, an orchestra is a business whose very existence depends on pleasing the public, with all that this implies. Composers today cannot rely on the seriousness of mind displayed by Frederick the Great towards Bach (what contemporary monarch or arts administrator could set a composer a fugue subject?), nor can they expect the average listener to be versed in a particularly wide-ranging repertory at any level other than the most superficial. An orchestral concert is, historically, as well as by nature and intention, a public event, albeit the nature and scope of the ‘public’ having changed over the course of three centuries. There is no doubt that Haydn's late symphonies parade their virtues in a way in which his mature quartets do not; the brushstrokes are broader.

‘Will the Oracle in the Cave of Harmony please speak?’ According to legend, the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham would utter these words on completing a recording take. ‘The Cave of Harmony’ was the recording booth. ‘The Oracle’ was the recording engineer.

If Beecham's sarcastic wit endeared him to his champions, it probably upset some of his collaborators. Working (literally) at the cutting edge, his engineers, like today's, would have been doing their best to capture his performances in their full glory, but for most of Beecham's lifetime they were constrained by an inadequate medium. Not only was the sound quality deficient, but the performances themselves were also compromised. The maximum time that could be recorded on one side of a 78 rpm shellac disc was about five minutes. Domestic listeners to extended classical works were obliged to change record sides at frequent intervals, which impaired concentration, and broadcasters had to resort to multiple copies and deft changeover procedures in order to present a recorded work in uninterrupted form. Moreover, conductors were obliged to choose tempi that matched side changes to natural musical junctions, so when, for example, we hear Gustav Holst conducting ‘Mars’ from his own Planets suite in a very fast five minutes, it is unwise to deduce that this reveals the definitive tempo.

Introduction

Instrumentation and orchestration have been defined as ‘the art of combining the sounds of a complex of instruments (an orchestra or other ensemble) to form a satisfactory blend and balance’. If the two terms are separable, ‘instrumentation’ concerns selection of the ensemble, including the study of the technical aspects which determine the choice of instruments for a particular purpose, while ‘orchestration’ is used for the application of skills in an artistic fashion. Thus an orchestral realisation of a musical conception may be an original work, without any existence prior to its orchestral realisation; or it may be a transcription for orchestra of music by the person orchestrating it, or by someone else.

Orchestration is thus more than the effective disposition of pitches (not to mention rhythms) among the instruments of the orchestra; but this skill remains indispensable, and advice on the craft of instrumentation forms a substantial literature. The first celebrated example, though not the first publication of its kind, was by the French composer Hector Berlioz, and was for many years incomparably the most influential and most widely used in teaching. Orchestration treatises concentrate mainly on technical details, including some description of instrument mechanisms and a comprehensive listing of the possibilities and impossibilities of the various instruments, with examples of recent usage. The creative, aesthetic dimension of orchestration is less open to explanation in a textbook, but more vital to the composer and listener. Orchestral sonorities form an integral part of musical thinking in the European traditions of concert music, and a vital element of its expressive language and rhetoric.

Introduction

The life of an orchestral musician can be highly rewarding, challenging and exciting, but is just as likely to be frustrating, exhausting and unfulfilling. Between these two extremes there are many different realities. In order to understand and determine at which end of the spectruma player's life might fall, one must understand not only the individual's particular circumstances and attitude towards his or her position, but also the artistic, financial and political background in which he or she operates. It is also important to appreciate that most people take up music professionally because they have artistic aspirations, whereas their orchestral role is largely that of an artisan. Artistic creativity lies primarily with conductors and soloists, although there is significant creative input from principal players. Many orchestral musicians understand and accept this role and are able to find great fulfilment and enjoyment, as well as camaraderie, in their work. Those who fail to develop creative outlets often find that the inherent tension of an artist working primarily as an artisan leads to frustration and a lack of personal growth and creativity.

The orchestra as a community

An orchestra is a microcosm of society and a cross-section of people from all kinds of social backgrounds, working together in close proximity. As with any social system, there are many ways of organising its internal political structures, a topic that forms part of the discussion in chapter 15 of this book. As noted by Simon Channing in the previous chapter, orchestras have become ever more consultative throughout the second half of the twentieth century, so that the musical director is no longer a dictator, as was often the case in the past.

Introduction

As late as the 1970s historical recordings of orchestral music were virtually ignored. A few enthusiasts stored collections of 78 rpm records in their attics, and spoke reverently of the pre-war Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, as a motoring enthusiast would talk of the red RR on an early Rolls-Royce. But almost no old orchestral recordings were available in transfers to LP, apart from a few concerto recordings valued almost exclusively for their soloists. The sixteen-year-old Yehudi Menuhin's 1932 recording of Elgar's Violin Concerto, conducted by the composer, was rightly regarded as extraordinary. But its value was taken to lie exclusively in the beautiful playing of the miraculous teenager. The fact that it was conducted by Elgar was of little more than sentimental interest. And as for the orchestral playing, the predominant view was that it was something of a mess, and demonstrated how much orchestral standards in Britain had improved since the 1930s.

By the early twenty-first century, reactions to orchestral playing of that period have become more complex and less dismissive. We have become accustomed to the sounds of early twentieth-century orchestras through the thousands of reissues now available on CD. Only thirty years ago the rare speaker who wanted to play a pre-war orchestral recording on BBC Radio 3 would have to find the original 78 rpm records in the BBC library or in a private collection. Now hardly a day goes by without a historical orchestral recording being played on Radio 3, and it is almost always taken from a CD reissue. Music shops are full of them, and they have become so widely accepted that in many shops they are not restricted to a separate ‘historical’ section, but mixed up with the latest digital recordings, often at the same price. The past is ever-present.