Music and Eugenics with Alexander Cowan

From its beginnings, the eugenics movement has looked to music: for foundational figures like Francis Galton and contemporaries like Charles Murray, the child-prodigy composer or violinist could serve to demonstrate that talent was innate and inherited, and thus could be bred. The horrendously racist implications of such a vision have long been understood, but the relationship between music and eugenicist thought has received scant attention. In this dark but important conversation, musicologist Alexander Cowan reveals the central role of music to eugenicist philosophy, and how myths of musical talent have undergirded myths of racial supremacy. Show notes and more over at soundexpertise.org ! Questions? Thoughts? Email soundexpertise00@gmail.com or tag Will on Instagram/Twitter @seatedovation

You can listen to Music and Eugenics with Alexander Cowan online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Music and Eugenics with Alexander Cowan is an episode from Sound Expertise by Will Robin.

This episode is 48:59 long.

This episode was published on Nov 26, 2024.

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