Steven Jan is Reader in Music at the University of Huddersfield, UK. His research interests lie in the fields of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century music, music theory and analysis, computer-aided musicology, and the application to music of theoretical and analytical perspectives drawn from evolutionary theory. His latest book, Music in Evolution and Evolution in Music, builds off of his previous work and explores the biological- and cultural-evolutionary roots of music. In this Recently Published Book Spotlight, Jan discusses his work’s connection to Richard Dawkins and the ‘meme’ paradigm, as well as the implications of an evolutionary view of our aesthetic senses.
What is your work about?
The book attempts to apply the notion of Universal Darwinism, developed by Donald T. Campbell, Henry Plotkin, William Calvin, and Daniel Dennett, among others, to music in seeking, as the quasi-palindromic title indicates, to understand how music fits into the evolutionary history of our species (music in evolution), and to understand how the same processes drive evolution within the medium of music itself (evolution in music).
Who has influenced this work the most?
My initial influence was Richard Dawkins, and his chapter ‘Memes: The New Replicators’ in his book The Selfish Gene. I had independently and informally alighted upon several of the ideas in that chapter, so it was thrilling to see them articulated there, and presented far more powerfully and elegantly that I am capable of. Later, Daniel Dennett’s fearless espousal of memetics as an explanatory tool for the complexity of human culture and the evolution of language proved deeply inspiring, as did Susan Blackmore’s efforts to develop memetics as a scientific model. My friend Nicholas Bannan has long had an interest in the evolution of human musicality, especially vocality, and has applied his profound knowledge of this and many other subjects to his skillful work in music education.
Why did you feel the need to write this work?
I say in the book’s preface that “This book is not a sequel to my The Memetics of Music; if anything, it is a prequel.” Whereas the earlier book covers very specifically the application of memetics to questions of music theory and analysis, and thus of music’s style and structure, I felt the need to contextualize it (and to return to some of its themes) in a more expansive coverage of how music arose in the first place and how its evolution continues in human, non-human animal, and what might be understood as machine cultures.
What topics do you discuss in the work, and why do you discuss them?
Chapter 1 offers a general exposition of certain ideas in evolutionary theory that are of particular relevance to the evolution of musicality (the capacity to produce and respond to organized sound) and of music (the processes and products of that capacity). Chapter 2 then explores the evolution of the human capacity for musicality, and indeed ‘linguisticality,’ seeing each domain not as driven by a single unitary competence, but rather as a set of separately arising sub-competences that became bundled together (by biological and later cultural evolution) for survival-related reasons and that – given their common basis in sound production and re/perception – overlap across the two domains.
Chapter 3 returns to memetics, exploring some issues in greater detail than they were treated in The Memetics of Music, including music’s recursive-hierarchical structure and the concept of memetic homologies and homoplasies. Evolution as an idea has influenced much scholarly discourse on music (as it has influenced several other humanistic disciplines). I cover this in Chapter 4 and consider the cultural evolution of such discourses.
Some of the ideas discussed in Chapter 2 do not apply exclusively to our own species, and so in Chapter 5, I examine the extent to which certain animals might be said to possess (to human minds) musicality, and thus be capable of producing what (to human ears) has the potential to be heard in similar ways as we hear music. So many aspects of our lives are being transformed by the digital revolution and the rise of AI, and music is no exception. I consider in Chapter 6 how computer technologies are giving rise to machine-generated musics, and how humans might evaluate such musics and develop theoretical and analytical models to comprehend them. Perhaps unwisely, I conclude by venturing into a discussion of consciousness in Chapter 7, trying to correlate the ‘fast-evolution’ nature of consciousness (in certain models) with the ‘slow-consciousness’ nature of evolution in music, and seeing the internet as a sounding consciousness of memes.
How is your work relevant to the contemporary world?
The Darwinism that informs my work is in many ways cold and dispiriting. It argues that entities that have the capacity to survive tend to survive (to rephrase Dawkins’ statement of this tautology). We marvel at the beauty of nature, but that phenomenology is merely a function of our culturally evolved capacity to see beauty in the naturally evolved capacity to build efficient organic machines from fundamental organic molecules. Perhaps the ‘merely’ in the previous sentence is the precarious ledge on which humanity’s uniqueness, and its self-regard, rests, itself an outcrop of an equally precarious shelf of biological and environmental instability. What is real in this worldview? In the same way that dogs have evolved to show (but not necessarily to feel) what humans perceive as affection to their owners, so we have evolved to find beauty and meaning in the fragrance of a rose and the euphony of a sonata—the products of aromatic and sonic molecules, respectively.
In Chapter 7 I quote Dennett’s assertion that “[i]n the beginning, colors were made to be seen by those who were made to see them.” I followed this up by suggesting, analogously, that “in the beginning, music-ness [the property of organized sound being heard as music] was made to be heard by those who were made—who had evolved the [physical and] mental competences, hard- and soft-wired—to hear it”. This co-evolutionary reciprocity between biological and cultural replicators (gene-gene, gene-meme, meme-meme) is arguably at the heart of our aesthetic sense, and indeed of perception more broadly. Yet evolutionary theory suggests that the production-reception alignments upon which aesthetics is grounded are contingent and insubstantial – local responses to particular selection pressures. In the vastness of the ever-colder universe, what does this amount to? Renaissance Humanism inculcated in us a way of thinking about ourselves as all-powerful, and then we came to realize our insignificance. This insignificance inheres in (i) our smallness and irrelevance, in universal terms; and (ii) the fact that our perception, cognition, and culture is shaped by biological and cultural evolution in ways that are advantageous to genes and memes, respectively, and not to whatever ‘we’/‘us’ boils down to. I like, and fear, Blackmore’s notion of the Selfplex, a complex of memes running on the biological hardware of the brain evolved to advance the interests of other memes—partly by means of the siren voices of co-evolutionarily driven aesthetic preferences—that is not automatically beneficial to our genes and that survives by wrapping disparate mental processes together in an illusory unity. Evolution is certainly a big idea, but it curtails our overweening arrogance by reminding us that we are, as Macbeth realized, “[organized] sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
What writing tips do you have?
Every writer finds their own workflow, but for me a linear model of reading/thinking/note-taking followed by writing does not suit. I generally start with a chapter outline, followed by a section outline, followed by a sub-section outline. I then try to write something/anything as a placeholder under these headings, reading and researching in order to develop the content, and restructuring as necessary. Without for a minute attempting a comparison, I take heart that this was the approach used by Beethoven, whose ‘continuity drafts’ for the first movement of the Eroica Symphony (which I discuss in Chapter 4) provided the slowly-evolving sequential structure into which he inserted often very banal scraps of placeholder material, before returning to give them the characteristic luster and personal imprint of the finished work. I used LaTeX to write the book which, while not nearly as common in the humanities as the sciences, positively encourages such highly structured and hierarchical organization. Writing something every day, or most days, even a few sentences or a paragraph, gives me a sense of achievement and a tangible measure of progress.
Did you encounter any problems getting yourself published and, if so, how did you overcome them?
I approached several ‘traditional’ publishers, somewhat unconventionally towards the end of the writing process rather than the beginning (my book proposal was essentially a summary of what I had already essentially written, albeit somewhat roughly, at that stage). While they were interested in principle, they felt the book was too long. I never planned to write an 800+ page book (and I was surprised at the thickness when my complimentary copy arrived), but the nature of the subject impelled it. A colleague pointed out that the Table of Contents is six pages long, but I sincerely believe that the book itself is merely a table of contents for this vast subject, and that I only scratch its surface. Having decided not to shorten and simplify the book, I contacted Open Book Publishers on the advice of a colleague and found that they had published a good number of high-quality music titles, and that they were receptive to my project. Their predominantly online publishing model prevented the book’s length from being an impediment to publication.
Steven Jan
Steven Jan is Reader in Music at the University of Huddersfield, UK. His research interests lie in the fields of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century music, music theory and analysis, computer-aided musicology, and the application to music of theoretical and analytical perspectives drawn from evolutionary theory, particularly the ‘meme’ paradigm first expounded in Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene. His The Memetics of Music: A Neo-Darwinian View of Musical Structure and Culture (2007) was the first book-length exposition of this subject. His latest book, Music in Evolution and Evolution in Music, further explores the biological- and cultural-evolutionary roots of music. He has published articles in Music Analysis, the International Journal of Musicology, the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Computer Music Journal, Musicae Scientiae, Music Theory Online, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, the Journal of Music Research Online, Psychology of Music, Language and Cognition and Frontiers in Psychology. He is also Co-editor of the Journal of Creative Music Systems.
Maryellen Stohlman-Vanderveen is the APA Blog's Diversity and Inclusion Editor and Research Editor. She graduated from the London School of Economics with an MSc in Philosophy and Public Policy in 2023 and currently works in strategic communications. Her philosophical interests include conceptual engineering, normative ethics, philosophy of technology, and how to live a good life.
Steven Pinker is probably more correct than most intellectuals believe when he claimed that music is auditory cheesecake- a pleasant by-product of the evolutionary process yet not essential to human survival. Its significance lies more in the social evolution of the human species rather than the physical. Music goes beyond the pleasant, however, as an ontological affirmation of feeling binding us to the irrational core f being from which we emerged. It speaks to something more subtle than the intellect and often gives rise to strange musings though not necessarily metaphysical ones. In the words of a great poet, it expresses a harmonious madness. Perhaps, this is the core of irrational man.