“Enhanced by Conscious Selection”: Eugenics, Scientific Management, and the Quest to Make a Better Musician - Alexander Cowan (Jesus College, Cambridge)

Analysis of writing by eugenicists in Britain and the USA from 1869 to 1945 reveals an unlikely preoccupation with musical ability. Following discipline founder Francis Galton, eugenicists believed musical talent to be a particularly obvious example of an inherited gift, and, therefore, proof that other qualities, such as general intelligence, could be inherited as well. This belief, however, rested on uncertain evidence. Carl E. Seashore, a key figure in early music psychology and a board-member of the American Eugenics Society, attempted to redress this deficiency with his 1919 “Measures of Musical Talent”: psychometric tests that claimed to determine innate, hereditary capacity for musical achievement by assessing subjects’ ability to correctly identify qualities of aural stimuli. Seashore pitched the “Measures” at the Second International Congress of Eugenics in 1921, suggesting nothing less than the potential to improve the musical life of the nation by selective breeding of musicians. In the same year, Seashore and his student Hazel M. Stanton began a ten-year experiment in collaboration with the Eastman School of Music, to assess the accuracy of his “Measures” and their possibilities for music education. This paper examines the “Eastman Experiment” and Seashore’s eugenic writings, to argue that Seashore’s conception of musical capacity was presented as offering eugenicists an example of a quality of the mind that appeared to be fully measurable, and obviously heritable: solid ground on which grander eugenic arguments could be built. The paper explores the origins of Seashore’s thought in both eugenics and Taylorist scientific management, concluding with an examination of how educational segregation by musical ability was used as a model for a society segregated by entangled qualities of race and laboring capacity.

Dr. Alexander W. Cowan is a musicologist specializing in the intellectual and political history of music in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He is currently a Research Fellow in the Arts at Jesus College, Cambridge, having previously held a graduate fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study while completing his doctorate at Harvard University. His book project, Unsound: A Cultural History of Music and Eugenics, explores how ideas about music and musicality were weaponized in British and US-American eugenics movements in the first half of the twentieth century, and how ideas from this period survive in modern music science and the rhetoric of the contemporary far right.