In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Memetics of Music: A Neo-Darwinian View of Musical Structure and Culture
  • Daniel Leech-Wilkinson
The Memetics of Music: A Neo-Darwinian View of Musical Structure and Culture. By Steven Jan. pp. xvi + 278. (Ashgate, Aldershot and Burlington, Vt., 2007, £55. ISBN 0-7546-5594-7.)

Memes, as formulated by Richard Dawkins, are units of cultural transmission comparable in function and behaviour to genes, units of biological transmission. Both are replictors, means by which information is passed from one individual to another. While genetics has transformed our understanding of heredity, memetics has had less impact so far on the general understanding of cultural development. This seems curious, given that so much of humanities scholarship has always been concerned with the relationship between influence and originality. One might think that a theory easily able to explain how an artist uses ideas drawn from a host of predecessors with some modifications of their own would be a runaway success. Perhaps it is simply too obvious, or perhaps humanities scholarship is too unwilling to believe in mechanisms driving human choice (especially the choice of Genius).

In the meantime, Dawkins and his followers have extended the notion of evolution by natural selection to cover all systems in which complexity results from many small (often unnoticeably small) changes made over long periods of time: so-called universal Darwinism, of which the evolution of culture, like the evolution of life, is seen as a subset. A theory this far-reaching deserves our attention.

Steven Jan’s book aims to work out a theory of musical memetics, showing how musical ideas can be conceptualized as memes (or the products of memes) that are transferred between individuals by (deliberate or unconscious) imitation. Copying is not always accurate and so over time styles change. The advantage of this approach [End Page 150] is not just that it improves on traditional music history by providing a mechanism capable of explaining how it is that compositions are closely related yet general style changes. It also allows the application to music of many aspects of genetic evolution that have been far more thoroughly and powerfully theorized than most aspects of musical development.

Jan’s application of memetic theory to musical compositions, drawing examples mainly from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is thorough, thoughtful, and consistently fascinating. His interest is not only in melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic material at the surface level but also in underlying formal schemes and processes, with especially detailed reconsiderations of implication–realization models and Schenkerian schemata. Could Jan’s book be useful to music analysts, then? Much of it is analytical in orientation, and it makes excellent use of psychologically informed analytical work, especially by Narmour and Gjerdingen. But although it is fascinating to see the application, especially at deeper levels of structure, many may feel that memetics doesn’t bring a great deal that is new to the analysis of musical scores. Little in Jan’s analyses would not have been obvious using conventional motivic and tonal analytic thinking. Reformulating analysis in terms of memetics, though entirely reasonable, and rather helpful in that it gives compositional thinking a theoretical base in biology, has probably come too late to have much impact in musicology. Theorists have been there and done that, and won’t be inclined to go back and do it again even though equipped with a different and improved set of underlying attitudes.

Nonetheless this is a book that every theoretically and analytically inclined musicologist should read. Music is not, and cannot be, immune from evolutionary processes. And now that we have a well-developed theory of evolution there is simply no excuse for not considering such a fundamental human activity as music in its light. It is hugely to Jan’s credit that he has been the first to attempt this in some depth. His book does have a major limitation, namely restricting its purview to things notated in scores, but without that the subject would have been so complex that the book might have been inconceivable. Having said that, since he is so open about the limitations he sees in his work, devoting a lengthy final chapter to them and to...

pdf

Share