ABSTRACT
Although creationism and evolutionism would, as theories, seem to operate generally in opposition to one another, the divisions attendant to this conflict are not entirely absolute in their application in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century British music historiography in Britain. Neither are they mutually exclusive, for British writers of music history of this time – or indeed foreigners writing in English for the British marketplace2 – utilized types of creationism and evolutionism as metaphors around which they might establish methodologically cohesive principles. And within respective methodological templates, be they religious or scientific, creationist or evolutionist, there exists in certain writers a gamut which could be said to encompass both creationism and evolutionism in their broadest possible meanings. In some writers the synthesis is clearly intentional, as in the case of Edwards or Newton discussed below. In others it is more dissembled, but even in the most ostensibly insular approaches one can occasionally find shared methodological influences. This is true,
1This chapter is drawn from work presented in Bennett Zon, Music and Metaphor in
Nineteenth-Century British Musicology (Aldershot, 2000). 2It is not my intention in this essay to distinguish between native British writers and
foreign writers publishing in English (not translation) for a British readership. What is
significant here is not individual authors’ citizenship, but the fact that their works were
written in English and published in Britain; hence they are representative of music
historiography then in circulation. And to this extent they can be considered influential
within the geographical and conceptual domain of Britain at the time, despite the fact
that their exact provenance remains as yet uncertain.
