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, musicolog...