The Memetics of Music

A Neo-Darwinian View of Musical Structure and Culture

Steven Jan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781351542647
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Richard Dawkins's formulation of the meme concept in his 1976 classic The Selfish Gene has inspired three decades of work in what many see as the burgeoning science of memetics. Its underpinning theory proposes that human culture is composed of a multitude of particulate units, memes, which are analogous to the genes of biological transmission. These cultural replicators are transmitted by imitation between members of a community and are subject to mutational-evolutionary pressures over time. Despite Dawkins and several others using music in their exemplifications of what might constitute a meme, these formulations have generally been quite rudimentary, even na. This study is the first musicologically-orientated attempt systematically to apply the theory of memetics to music. In contrast to the two points of view normally adopted in music theory and analysis - namely those of the listener and the composer - the purpose of this book is to argue for a distinct and illuminating third perspective. This point of view is metaphorical and anthropomorphic, and the metaphor is challenging and controversial, but the way of thinking adopted has its basis in well-founded scientific principles and it is capable of generating insights not available from the first two standpoints. The perspective is that of the (selfish) replicated musical pattern itself, and adopting it is central to memetics. The approach taken is both theoretical and analytical. Starting with a discussion of evolutionary thinking within musicology, Jan goes on to cover the theoretical aspects of the memetics of music, ranging from quite abstract philosophical speculation to detailed consideration of what actually constitutes a meme in music. In doing so, Jan draws upon several approaches current in music theory, including Schenkerism and Narmour's implication-realization model. To demonstrate the practical utility of the memetic perspective, Chapter 6 applies it analytically, tracing the transmission o

Chapter 1

Introduction: Biological and
Socio-Cultural Evolution

1.1. Prologue: Why a Memetics of Music?

Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.

(Dobzhansky 1973)

Much theoretical and analytical musicology of the past two hundred years has devoted itself to the detection and discussion of patterns in music, from small fragments of musical information to large-scale formal archetypes. A pattern normally only attains significance if it occurs in more than one context. Ways of conceiving and representing such recurrences have changed significantly over time, but they are now often considered under the aegis of the notion of intertextuality. From the point of view of the listener, their recurrence in different contexts facilitates perception and cognition of the music, giving a frame of reference with which to negotiate the work, to predict its unfolding processes, and to manage its novelties and unpredictabilities. From the point of view of the composer, learning the craft of composition generally involves learning how to manipulate such standard patterns and figures; and even when the composer discovers his or her distinctive ‘voice’, there is perhaps more that is borrowed (albeit transformed) than is genuinely new in his or her style.

To take a simple and clear-cut example of pattern recurrence, the passages in Example 1.1 below show a direct and unequivocal morphological relationship – the patterning is essentially ‘the same’. Because of the close conformance, because Mozart was known to admire and respect J.C. Bach as a person and as a composer and because Die Entführung was written around a decade after Bach’s concerto, we are strongly inclined to say that Mozart copied this pattern from J.C. Bach – or copied another example (or ‘instantiation’) of it from J.C. Bach or another composer. Throughout his life Mozart assimilated the styles of composers whom he respected and this often took the form of copying such style-defining patterns – a receptivity which is probably true of most composers.

Example 1.1: Replicated Patterns in Works of J.C. Bach and Mozart

From the listener’s perspective, such connections are often very striking and, provided we are familiar with both contexts, hearing one of the passages tends to interrupt our intra-work processing and jolts us to an inter-work perspective, rather like clicking on a hyperlink and moving to another, related, page on the internet. By virtue of our exposure to myriad other such connections, we assimilate a deep-level stylistic knowledge: we form ‘top-down’ cognitive schemata which structure our ‘bottom-up’ perception of a style and which provide predictions as to how an incoming sequence of musical information might unfold over time (Bharucha 1987: 2–3). Even if we get the relationship of precedence the wrong way around – if we think, on hearing the Bach concerto, that it is ‘by Mozart’ or ‘sounds like Mozart’ – we make a diachronic error which does not necessarily undermine our synchronic perspective on the style: both hearings contribute to our formation of a mental representation of the style.

We have so far invoked the two clear points of view of the listener and the composer – Nattiez’s esthesic and poietic poles respectively (1990: 10–16) – but are these the only points of view which matter in such cases? The purpose of this book is to argue for a distinct and illuminating third perspective. This point of view is metaphorical and anthropomorphic and the metaphor is challenging and controversial, but the way of thinking I aim to outline here derives from a fundamental reality which has its basis in well-established scientific principles. The point of view I am referring to is that of the recurrent, or replicated, pattern itself, which is the central standpoint of memetics. Dennett states the issue clearly when he argues that

In the beginning, there were no reasons; there were only causes. Nothing had a purpose, nothing had so much as a function; there was no teleology in the world at all. The explanation for this is simple: There was nothing that had interests. But after millennia there happened to emerge simple replicators …. While they had no inkling of their interests, and perhaps properly speaking had no interests, we, peering back from our godlike vantage point at their early days, can nonarbitrarily assign them certain interests – generated by their defining ‘interest’ in self-replication.… Put more anthropomorphically, if these simple replicators want to continue to replicate, they should hope and strive for various things; they should avoid the ‘bad’ things and seek the ‘good’ things. When an entity arrives on the scene capable of behavior that staves off, however primitively, its own dissolution and decomposition, it brings with it into the world its ‘good’. That is to say, it creates a point of view from which the world’s events can be roughly partitioned into the favorable, the unfavorable, and the neutral. And its own innate proclivities to seek the first, shun the second, and ignore the third contribute essentially to the definition of the three classes.

(1993: 173–4; his emphases)

As the keystone of all Dawkins’s work on evolution, the consequences of this argument is that a replicator will be selfish (1989). I will consider in detail later what a replicator is, how it might be said to be selfish and how music might engender and sustain replicators, but for the moment my three basic contentions are that patterns such as those shown in Example 1.1 are replicators – specifically, they are musical memes – that music is largely made up of such replicated patterns transmitted from generation to generation of composers, and that the synchronic (structural-hierarchic) and diachronic (historical-developmental) dimensions of music may be understood in terms of their transmission and evolution. In short, I aim here to advocate a (neo-) Darwinian perspective on music. If this viewpoint is legitimate, then Dobzhansky’s maxim cited at the head of this section will also apply to music and indeed to all the products of human culture.

While the detailed definition of what constitutes a musical meme will need to be developed over the course of several chapters, it is useful to have a provisional working definition in mind until we are ready to turn to detailed musical considerations towards the end of Chapter 2. (This may seem a long wait, but it is important to outline a number of foundation concepts in memetics in order to provide a clear context for the main, specifically musical, discussions.) To this end, we might regard the musical meme as a discrete ‘packet’ of musical information, demarcated from neighbouring material by various kinds of articulation and consisting of a relatively small number of uni- or multi-parametric elements – a collection of pitches in a distinctive rhythmic garb, for instance, as in Example 1.1.

What are the advantages of this way of thinking about music? Why adopt the new and contentious point of view of the selfish replicator as against the established perspectives of the composer or the listener? While these advantages will emerge, and be justified, over the course of this book, the advantages of a memetic view of music might initially be summarized as follows:

•As a metatheory, it links theoretical, analytical and historical perspectives on music with those of psychology, showing how musical patterns and structures, and the processes by which they alter over time, have their roots in perceptual and cognitive processes.

•It motivates systematic empirical testing of its hypotheses.

•It is elegantly compatible with applications of Darwinian thought to other realms and other substrates, such as evolutionary perspectives on the transmission and transformation of languages.

•It allows us to address a number of issues in musicology and music theory and analysis more satisfactorily than other perspectives. These include the questions of why certain musical patterns and procedures are more common than others at certain times, how ways of organizing musical structures change over time, and even how trends and traditions in discourses about music arise and develop.

Because adopting the viewpoint of the selfish replicator requires one to follow a Darwinian path, this first chapter is a necessary (and necessarily concise) summary of the development of views on biological evolution and their extension, since the eighteenth century, to the realm of human culture (for comprehensive accounts of the theory of evolution, see Maynard Smith 1993 and Jones 1999). Having covered these issues at the outset, the parallels drawn between nature and (musical) culture in subsequent chapters – and the sometimes esoteric terminology used in drawing them – will then hopefully be clearer.

In this chapter, after a review of the development of evolutionary thought from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, culminating in the acceptance of the Darwinian model of natural selection, I turn to Dawkins’s reinvigoration of Darwinism by means of the powerful ‘selfish gene’ model. As a prelude to a brief history and overview of memetics, I consider the extension of evolutionary thinking to culture and the central notion of universal Darwinism. I conclude with a consideration of the methodological and conceptual issues underpinning the theorization of the memetics of music.

1.2. Theories of Biological Evolution from Lamarck to Dawkins

1.2.1. Pre-Darwinian Theories and Creationism

‘When Darwin’s friend and colleague T.H. Huxley first read [On] The Origin of Species [By Means of Natural Selection] in 1859’, Miller recalls, ‘he said to himself “how stupid not to have thought of it before!”’ (1992: 3). With the benefit of hindsight, all the evidence for Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution – ‘by means of natural selection’ is the most important phrase – was in place by the early years of the nineteenth century. The reason this evidence was misinterpreted by most thinkers before Darwin was that commentators of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had clear, but incorrect, views about the patterns of evidence they saw. As Miller notes,

a strong preconception about what a pattern means, what it represents, can stop you seeing it in any other way. Presumably this happened to Darwin’s predecessors and some of his contemporaries as well. They failed to ‘see’ what Darwin ‘saw’, not because they were short of facts, but because they had reasons for ‘seeing’ the facts in a different way.

(1992: 9; his emphasis)

In the eighteenth century the very notion of evolution¹ itself – in the sense of gradual mutational change in the morphologies of living organisms over time, the transmutation of species – was fiercely disputed as a result of adherence to two of these ‘strong preconceptions’: the Biblical account of creation given in the book of Genesis and the Platonic notion of Ideal Forms (Essentialism) (Miller 1992: 9). The first of these, Creationism, argued that the earth was created relatively recently (all estimates fell far short of the now widely accepted figure of c. four billion years), fabricated over a short space of time and then filled with a plethora of flora and fauna which maintained a constant form over time by means of true breeding. The earth itself was believed to be inert, the only differences between its present form and that of the creation having been caused by the flood described in Genesis 6–8 (: 10–13).

Logical support for creationism seemed to come from the ‘Argument from Design’, expressed most clearly in William Paley’s Natural Theology of 1803. Paley believed that the rich complexity of biological forms – the perfection of design manifested by the eye, the wing and the hand – could not have arisen in any way other than through the actions of an intelligent designer. The existence of God, it seemed to Paley, could easily be proved merely by casual observation of the natural world, in all its wonder and diversity, around us (Miller 1992: 17–19).

The first evidence to undermine these views of a static, immutable creation, and therefore to admit the possibility of some kind of evolution, came in the form of fossils. When it was finally acknowledged that these were indeed remnants of organic forms, and when it was realized that fossil strata revealed many chronologically distinct levels of extinct life, it became necessary to posit not one but several acts of divine violence (Catastrophism), Noah’s flood being the last, each followed by a restocking of the planet. It became increasingly clear, however, that the higher (later) strata contained remnants of creatures of greater complexit...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Music Examples
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Biological and Socio-Cultural Evolution
• 2 Memory, Replication and Style: Memes in Music I
• 3 Replicating Sonorities, Replicating Hierarchies: Memes in Music II
• 4 Evolutionary Dynamics: The Selfish Musical Meme
• 5 Cumulative Selection and The Evolution of Large-Scale Design in Music
• 6 Memetics and Musical Analysis: Issues and Methodologies
• 7 Conclusion: Towards the Memetics of Music
• References
• Index