Steven Jan, "The selfish meme: Particularity, replication and evolution in musical style.
International Journal of Musicology, Vol. 8, pp.9-76.

Introduction

• This article uses the perspective of evolutionary biology to formulate how particularity, replication, and evolution occur in musical style. The examples of music are primarily from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but Jan intends his theory to be applicable to all musics of all cultures.

Context: Style as Hierarchy

• Jan starts with Meyer's definition of style where style is "a replication of patterning" (p. 10); one pattern alone does not constitute a style.
• According to Meyer, pattern replication exists on the following hierarchical levels: laws, which are transcultural constraints (e.g., the limits of human musical perception and cognition); rules -- the widest limits of stylistic constraints within a culture, and strategies -- which are compositional choices made within these constraints; dialect -- where a number of composers choose to follow the same discrete rules, forming genres; idiom -- a composer's specific style; and intraopus style -- a composer's style within a particular musical work.
• Article is concerned mainly with dialect, idiom, and intraopus style.

Particle Replication in the Construction of Style

• A particle is a pattern of discrete pitch sequences taking the form either as a melody or as a melody and bass patterns
• From the examples given, one observes that the underlying pitch configuration remains intact in particles despite differences in rhythm, chromatic inflections and texture

The Selfish Meme

• According to Dawkins, a meme is a "unit of cultural transmission." Memes may be tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches (p. 17). By definition, memes must be able to replicate themselves.

The Nature of Memes in Music: Hierarchy, Segmentation and Parametric Interaction

• Memes can be represented by schemata which often take the form of Schenkerian middleground graphs to which each of the pieces in question can be reduced (these are, not surprisingly, known as memes at deeper level of structure.)
• Jan claims that a hierarchy of memes that corresponds to the hierarchy of levels (foreground, middleground, and background) in Schenkerian theory exists.
• Segmentation: "the boundaries of a meme are, quite simply, demarcated by the beginning and end of that which is replicated, at whatever level this occurs." (p. 25)
• Segmentation (the horizontal dimension) and hierarchy (the vertical dimension) cannot be considered independently
• Memes may not only be sequences of pitch, but may also be sequences of rhythms or any other musical element that forms a repeating pattern (dynamics, texture, timbre, etc.). These may all have their own hierarchy of "Schenkerian" levels.
• These memes from different musical elements need not be related to memes of other elements even if they occur simultaneously.

The Conglomeration of Memes

• Dawkins acknowledges that "memes seem to have nothing equivalent to chromosomes, and nothing equivalent to alleles" (p. 32). Jan maintains that music has developed paradigms similar to chromosomes or alleles. For example, the vast majority of pieces of tonal music conform to 3-, 5- or 8-line Urlinien, rather than 2-, 4-, 6-, or 7-line Urlinien.
• In addition, the fundamental rules of the tonal system tend to cause memes to "conglomerate" in certain ways, giving rise to predictable forms such as antecedent-consequent phrases, the sonata form, or Ursätzen themselves.
• The tonal system is a result of its smallest units, which, after aggregating and thus defining the system, are themselves generated by it.
• With the purpose of showing how musical memes are much more strikingly similar to genes than nonmusical memes, Jan compares the "universals of music/laws" section of the musical meme hierarchy to the biological "environment," where the limits of human memory and cognition prevent these memes from rapid evolution.
• Jan then shows how Schenkerian theories give rise to memetic competition (allelic memes).
• More explicitly, in Schenkerian theory, tonal music is based on fundamental structures at the deepest (most background) level, and then on various forms of prolongations, linear progressions, and movements within pitch space that convey idealized voice-leading on the middleground levels, leading to the foreground, which is the "surface" level of the music (the actual score). Each of these foreground (or middleground) memes is therefore in competition for a relationship with the structures of the background Ursatz.
• Jan acknowledges that Schenker founded his theories on the idea that music grows organically from the seed of the Ursatz (Auskomponierung), rather than from the competition of memes for background "space."
• Jan then gives examples of 18th-century Inkomponierung-composition using memes, so to speak: then, it was commonly known as ars combinatoria, where composers took discrete units of music and placed them in various spots in a piece through chance operations (e.g. Mozart's Musikalisches Würfelspiele, Bach's use of parody in his masses, Theme and Variations form).

The Propagation of Memes

• Propagation occurs by the following process: In Host 1: "meme as mental representation" ==> "meme as intermediate symbolic system" ==> Host 2: "meme as mental representation" ==> "meme as intermediate symbolic system" (p. 41)
• "Intermediate Symbolic System" refers to written, spoken, or aural patterning (such as music)
• Dawkins states: survival of memes is determined by: "longevity, fecundity, and copying-fidelity" (p. 42).
• Longevity of any one copy of a meme is not terribly important.
• Fecundity (power of the meme to spread itself) -- very important; if it can make many copies of itself, the better its chances of survival are
• Copying-fidelity: must remain small and efficient; if too long, it will become segmented or misremembered. On the other hand, this leads to evolution.
• Memes with the smallest number of components attain the greatest stability. But how small is too small?

Memes and the Evolution of Musical Style I

• The process of change that occurs in memes drives stylistic evolution in human culture
• A mutation in a meme may result in increased (or decreased) imitation (neo-Darwinian natural selection).

Memes and the Evolution of Musical Style II

• Since the Renaissance, a premium has been placed on novelty in artistic creation. There is therefore a novelty meme: "that which is new is to be valued" (52).
• In direct opposition to the novelty meme, there exists a conservation meme.
• Novelty is valued and will increase fecundity.
• Musical style evolves because human perceptual and cognitive flexibility favors novel memes.
• Memetic mutation arises out of copying-infidelity.
• It also arises out of a composers' misremembering (however deliberate) or digesting of earlier composers' works.
• As new memes, formed by mutations, are preserved due to their fecundity, they shift the former evolutionarily stable set (i.e., the collection of preserved/accepted memes) to a new evolutionarily stable set (ESS).
• This process of moving from ESS to ESS is fluid through music history, not stepwise. Therefore, the idea of "historically sequential systems of rules" cannot be sustained.

Memeplexes

• Like genes, memes can adapt to each other and occur in harmony with each other, forming memeplexes.
• The ability of a meme to coadapt is crucial to its survival; it must strike a balance between remaining compatible with the meme pool while retaining its novelty.

Replicated Symbolism: Memes as Signs

• The memeplex may consist of not only pure "memes" from one culture or art form, but also "mixed" memes from other cultures or artforms, e.g., the relationship between the memeplexes of music and memeplexes of language in an opera.

Conclusion: Toward a New Organicism

• The selfish meme can move beyond the confines of metaphor because it is not simply a likening to a gene, but it is an entity that intrinsically has all the properties fundamental to a replicant (as does the gene.)
• In the past, music had often been characterized as being organic in its derivation, but the meme extends and develops this idea far more rigorously.
• Examples of this more rigorous reasoning are the notions of the existence of memes on various hierarchic levels and their participation in allelic competition.
• Jan hopes that this article may lay the groundwork for a new field, the evolutionary memetics of music. Goals include: "tracing the developmental history of individual musical memes; understanding the nature of the interaction between memes within and across musical parameters and levels of stylistic relevance over time; and examining the relationships between memes in the realm of music and those in the wider culture" (74).
  
  

• Music 838C Main Page