The Memetics of Music

ACCORDING to Steven Jan, a University of Huddersfield musicologist, ‘[g]iven that memetics has assimilated a broad and deep theoretical base from its sister discipline evolutionary biology, it is inclined—on the grounds of the axiomatically rigorous and empirically endorsed authority of the latter—to make strong a priori claims about the nature of culture’ (p. 20). In this dense, thoughtful, and challenging book that often takes considerable risks, Jan advocates a neo-Darwinian, neo-organicist perspective on music. Having adopted the (anthropomorphically ‘selfish’) gene as the basic unit of natural selection (as opposed to species, group, and even the individual organism)–and thus the ‘gene's eye view’ of nature–Dawkins (1976, 1989) then coined meme, as a fragment of culture, ‘a unit of cultural transmission, or.... imitation’. Dawkins's examples included tunes, concepts, and fashions. The meme (or ‘memeplex’) of memetics was subsequently ‘replicated’ in the mostly partisan works by Dennett, Lynch, and Blackmore. Whether or not one agrees with Gould's assessment of memes as a ‘meaningless metaphor’ depends in part on whether one accepts the notion of broad applicability of the ‘maximally abstract’ logical structure of ‘universal Darwinism’ (Dawkins, Dennett, Plotkin), in which ‘cultural evolution is not (weakly) analogical to biological evolution... but is (strongly) parallel to it as an equal... member of a set of replicator systems operating on earth... (such as DNA molecules, alphabetical characters, musical sounds...), themselves subsumed by the cosmic ambit of universal Darwinism’ (p. 14

Art · Cognitive science · Darwinism · Epistemology · Evolutionary psychology · Linguistics · Literature · Memetics · Metaphor · Musical · Sociobiology · Sociology · Language and cultural evolution · Philosophy · Psychology

• The Backbone of Night

  K Hesketh•Contemporary Music Review•2010

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• Exploring the structural principles underlying the capacity of groups of notes to function concurrently in music

  Open Access•Adam Ockelford•Musicae Scientiae•2010

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• The Heavens are Telling’

  Steven Jan•Interdisciplinary Science Reviews•2012

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• The Butterfly Schema in the Classical Instrumental Style

  Trevor Rawbone, Steven Jan•Music Analysis•2020

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• Cultural evolution of music

  Open Access•Patrick E Savage•Palgrave Communications•2019

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