Alexander W. Cowan

[Presented at the 150th Meeting of the Royal Musicological Association, September 2024]

Francis Galton, cousin to Darwin and founder of the dismal science of eugenics, is not often thought of as a figure in music history; nor is music thought of as contributing especially to the history of biology. Analysis of Galton’s writings from the 1860s to the 1910s, however, suggests that both of these premises must be reconsidered. 

Drawing on archival research and new readings of published scientific texts, this paper argues that Galton considered the purported heritability of musical talent to be an especially significant proof for his new science of eugenics, and that the rhetorical weight he gave to music shaped the trajectory of subsequent hereditarian research. The paper’s first half considers the role of hereditary musicality in Galton’s thought. Throughout his career, from his first paeans to “Hereditary Genius” in 1865 to  statistical surveys in the 1890s, Galton presents musical ability as something that is not only hereditary, but obviously so: child prodigies like Mozart or Mendelssohn, he argued, had to have come from somewhere. The second half of the paper examines Galton’s rhetoric of music-as-proof as inherited by his students, who formed the first cohort of professional geneticists in the English-speaking world. I analyze a debate between two factions of Galton’s students over the newly-rediscovered theory of Mendelian inheritance, and show how studies of musical ability had a significant role in securing victory for supporters of Mendelism, a victory that would shape the course of 20th-century science—and, in its shoring up of eugenic logic, the century’s politics.