Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id QAA07605 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from b.edmonds@mmu.ac.uk); Fri, 14 Apr 2000 16:37:49 +0100 Message-ID: <38F73B1E.4D35A794@mmu.ac.uk> Date: Fri, 14 Apr 2000 16:37:02 +0100 From: Bruce Edmonds <b.edmonds@mmu.ac.uk> Organization: Centre for Policy Modelling X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en] (X11; I; SunOS 5.7 sun4m) X-Accept-Language: en To: jom-emit-ann@mmu.ac.uk Subject: New Paper: "Replicating Sonorities: Towards a Memetics of Music" by Steven Jan Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: b.edmonds@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: JOM-EMIT@sepa.tudelft.nl
Replicating Sonorities:
Towards a Memetics of Music
Steven Jan
Royal Northern College of Music,
Manchester, UK.
Abstract
The memetic paradigm is herein applied to music. While
memetics has been used to elucidate a wide variety of cultural
phenomena, its concerns to date have largely been with
memes in the realm of verbally-expressible concepts. In view
of this, this paper represents an attempt to integrate the central
concerns of analytical musicology with a neo-Darwinian
meme-selectionist perspective. Such a viewpoint may be
used, it is argued, to unify, under a systematic new paradigm,
understanding of both local issues of musical structure and
organization, and global issues of musical style configuration
and its diachronic change. Against the grain of several
suggestions in the memetics literature, a minimalist view of the
musical meme is taken, seeing it as consisting, at the lower
extreme, of configurations of as few as three or four notes. The
hierarchic location of musical memes is a central concern here,
both in cultural hierarchies - i.e., the replication of patterning
at
different strata within a culture - and in structural hierarchies
- i.e., the replication of patterning at different strata within a
work, including the level of the global structural archetype.
Leonard Meyer's perspective on culture is employed to frame
consideration of the first phenomenon, whilst the analytical
method of Heinrich Schenker is employed to comprehend the
second. In order to understand how musical memes partake of
meaning in association with verbally-mediated concept
memes, the semiology of Ferdinand de Saussure and
Jean-Jacques Nattiez is employed. The article concludes with
observations on the transmission and mutation of musical
memes, and an account of how this process engenders the
evolution of musical styles.
Keywords: Meme, memetics, memeplex, music, musicology,
style, hierarchy, Meyer, Schenker, semiology.
Available at:
http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit/2000/vol4/jan_s.html
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