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The Evolution of a ‘Memeplex’ in Late Mozart: Replicated Structures in Pamina's ‘Ach ich fühl's’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Steven Jan
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Abstract

‘Memetics’, a concept most elegantly expounded by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, asserts that human culture consists of a multitude of units transmitted between individuals by imitation and subject to evolutionary pressures. Such particles, ‘memes’, are broadly analogous to the genes of biological transmission. Four late pieces of Mozart's, including Pamina's aria ‘Ach ich fühl's’ from Die Zauberflöte, are examined in terms of the meme concept and a conglomeration, or ‘memeplex’, consisting of seven memes is identified within them. The nature of the musical memeplex, in this specific case and also more generally, is considered, particularly from the perspective of its location at different levels of the structural hierarchy. The evolutionary history of some of Mozart's memes is examined with reference to selected passages from works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Finally, relationships between the musical memes under investigation and memes in the verbal-conceptual realm are explored.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 128 , Issue 1 , 2003 , pp. 30 - 70
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Musical Association, 2003

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References

The author is grateful to Julian Rushton for stimulating the development of some of the ideas in this article, to Douglas Jarman and two anonymous reviewers for perceptive comments on earlier drafts, and to Graham Cummings for the translation of Metastasio's ‘Ecco quell fiero istante’ in Section 6.Google Scholar

1 Julia Kristeva, in Kevin Korsyn, ‘Beyond Privileged Contexts: Intertextuality, Influence, and Dialogue’, Rethinking Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (Oxford, 1999), 55–72 (p. 56).Google Scholar

2 Ibid.Google Scholar

3 Kevin Korsyn, ‘Towards a New Poetics of Musical Influence’, Music Analysis, 10 (1991), 3–72 (p. 15).Google Scholar

4 Korsyn, ‘Beyond Privileged Contexts’, 56.Google Scholar

5 Korsyn, ‘Towards a New Poetics’, 6–7.Google Scholar

6 Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford, 1992).Google Scholar

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9 Jean Chantavoine, Mozart dans Mozart (Paris, 1948).Google Scholar

10 Meyer, Leonard B., Style and Music: Theory, History, and Ideology (Philadelphia, 1989), 24.Google Scholar

11 Eckelmeyer, Judith A., ‘Two Complexes of Recurrent Melodies Related to Die Zauberflöte‘, Music Review, 41 (1980), 11–25.Google Scholar

12 Ibid., 13–15. The second complex, illustrated in her Examples 3(a) and (b), shows ‘Melodies related to the final chorus, Heil sei euch Geweihten!’ (no. 21, bars 828ff.), and ‘Melodies related to the Adagio before the chorale’ (no. 21, bars 190ff.), respectively (ibid., 20–1). The melodies constituting this complex might best be regarded as based upon a () ‘changing-note’ archetype/schema in the Meyer/Gjerdingen sense; see Robert O. Gjerdingen, A Classic Turn of Phrase: Music and the Psychology of Convention (Philadelphia, 1988), 55–9.Google Scholar

13 Eckelmeyer, ‘Two Complexes’, 16.Google Scholar

14 The example is a particella showing the principal melodic line, the bass line and an occasional inner part of the arietta, Adagio, lied (here transposed from F minor to G minor) and aria. (To facilitate comparison with the other three pieces, all analytical discussion of the lied in this article will refer to this transposed version, speaking of it as if it were in G minor. The relevance of the difference between the key of the lied and that of the other three pieces will be considered in Section 6.) Figured bass numerals are added at times to clarify the harmonic content. The music is disposed so as to align vertically major structural correspondences – the seven memes A–G – between groups of bars. The symbols used in the particella are as follows. (1) The seven memes are shown enclosed by solid vertical continuity of the barlines. Where the differences of metre permit, these continuous lines also occur within the groups. (2) Continuous dotted (bar)lines indicate functional parallelisms, e.g. bar 19 of the arietta and bar 8 of the aria, where the passages linked by the dotted line are analogous contrasting themes in the relative major. (3) Without continuity of barlines, even when barlines are aligned vertically, passages are not in direct correspondence; such coincidences are necessary to allow alignment of the structural correspondences. (4) Brackets and lines (apart from such lines as indicate the voice exchanges within meme C) draw attention to specific pitch correspondences (as in meme G). Some secondary correspondences, because of the overriding influence of more important similarities, are not vertically aligned (e.g. the bass of bars 12–13 of the arietta and the bass of bars 3–4 of the aria).Google Scholar

15 In some works of Mozart's – such as bars 21–5 of the second movement of K.516 – the rising upper-voice structure is associated with the descending chromatic tetrachord in the lower voice. It is this association which prompts my reading of the structure in the Adagio and aria as ‘quasi-tetrachordal’, for these passages are perhaps best understood as selections from a total resource. For a fuller discussion of these figures, see Jan, Steven, Aspects of Mozart's Music in G Minor: Toward the Identification of Common Structural and Compositional Characteristics (London and New York, 1995), Chapter 7. See also Peter Williams, The Chromatic Fourth during Four Centuries of Music (Oxford, 1998), Chapter 6; the tetrachordal figures in the Adagio and aria are, however, not examined by Williams.Google Scholar

16 Eckelmeyer, ‘Two Complexes’, 15.Google Scholar

17 Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (2nd edn, Oxford, 1989), 192.Google Scholar

18 For book-length treatments offering an overview of memetics, see Blackmore, Susan, The Meme Machine (Oxford, 1999); Richard Brodie, Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme (Seattle, 1996); and Aaron Lynch, Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads through Society – The New Science of Memes (New York, 1996). For more critical voices, some of the essays in Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science, ed. Robert Aunger (Oxford, 2000), come from disciplinary perspectives (such as anthropology and sociology) which are somewhat sceptical of the meme concept. A more technical, mathematically orientated account of memetic transmission and evolution is given in Aaron Lynch, ‘Units, Events and Dynamics in Memetic Evolution’, Journal of Memetics – Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission, 2/1 (1998) (<http://jom-emit.cfpm.org/1998/vol2/lynch_a.html>). For more on the application of memetics to music, see Jan, Steven, ‘Replicating Sonorities: Towards a Memetics of Music’, Journal of Memetics – Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission, 4/1 (2000) (<http://jom-emit.cfpm.org/2000/vol4/jan_s.html>); ‘The Memetics of Music and its Implications for Psychology’, Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition, ed. Christopher Woods, Geoffrey B. Luck, Renaud Brochard, Susan A. O'Neill and John A. Sloboda (CD-ROM, Keele, 2000); ‘The Selfish Meme: Particularity, Replication, and Evolution in Musical Style’, International Journal of Musicology, 8 (2002), 9–76; and ‘The Illusory Mozart: Selfish Memes in the Priests’ Marches from Idomeneo and Die Zauberflöte’, International Journal of Musicology, 10 (forthcoming, 2004). A few passages in the present article are adapted from Jan, ‘Replicating Sonorities’, ‘The Memetics of Music’ and ‘The Selfish Meme’. The recently established online Journal of Memetics – Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission (<http://jom-emit.cfpm.org>) offers a forum for articles on various aspects of the subject.).+For+more+on+the+application+of+memetics+to+music,+see+Jan,+Steven,+‘Replicating+Sonorities:+Towards+a+Memetics+of+Music’,+Journal+of+Memetics+–+Evolutionary+Models+of+Information+Transmission,+4/1+(2000)+();+‘The+Memetics+of+Music+and+its+Implications+for+Psychology’,+Proceedings+of+the+Sixth+International+Conference+on+Music+Perception+and+Cognition,+ed.+Christopher+Woods,+Geoffrey+B.+Luck,+Renaud+Brochard,+Susan+A.+O'Neill+and+John+A.+Sloboda+(CD-ROM,+Keele,+2000);+‘The+Selfish+Meme:+Particularity,+Replication,+and+Evolution+in+Musical+Style’,+International+Journal+of+Musicology,+8+(2002),+9–76;+and+‘The+Illusory+Mozart:+Selfish+Memes+in+the+Priests’+Marches+from+Idomeneo+and+Die+Zauberflöte’,+International+Journal+of+Musicology,+10+(forthcoming,+2004).+A+few+passages+in+the+present+article+are+adapted+from+Jan,+‘Replicating+Sonorities’,+‘The+Memetics+of+Music’+and+‘The+Selfish+Meme’.+The+recently+established+online+Journal+of+Memetics+–+Evolutionary+Models+of+Information+Transmission+()+offers+a+forum+for+articles+on+various+aspects+of+the+subject.>Google Scholar

19 Brodie, Virus of the Mind, 13.Google Scholar

20 That is, forms of analogous configuration whose similarity is such that a relationship of copying – as opposed to random convergence – may, on the basis of statistical probability, be inferred to exist between them. When testing candidate strings of data (in a variety of media, including music) for memetic content, the presence of such corresponding segments in two contexts allows the initial and terminal elements and medial content of the meme to be defined by reference to that portion of the information stream which is replicated (i.e. the coequal). In this way, a ‘quasi-digital’ order arises from what is otherwise – from a memetic perspective – undifferentiated, ‘analogue’, data.Google Scholar

21 Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene (London, 1982; repr. Oxford, 1983), 293.Google Scholar

22 Plotkin, Henry C., Darwin Machines and the Nature of Knowledge: Concerning Adaptations, Instinct and the Evolution of Intelligence (London, 1995), xvii.Google Scholar

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28 Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype, 81.Google Scholar

29 See Jan, ‘Replicating Sonorities’, Section 5, for more detailed discussion of the segmentation of the musical continuum into memes by means of the criteria of particulateness and co-equality.Google Scholar

30 Blackmore, The Meme Machine, 63.Google Scholar

31 See Juan D. Delius, ‘Of Mind Memes and Brain Bugs: A Natural History of Culture’, The Nature of Culture: Proceedings of the International and Interdisciplinary Symposium, October 7–11, 1986 in Bochum, ed. Walter A. Koch (Bochum, 1989), 26–79. Examples of such harmful memes, by which is meant those which in some way impede the replication of the host's genes, include, at their most extreme, suicide cults (Blackmore, The Meme Machine, 47, 51) and, more subtly, memes for contraception (Lynch, Thought Contagion, 91–2). The complex subject of gene-culture (meme) ‘coevolution’ is examined in William H. Durham, Coevolution: Genes, Culture, and Human Diversity (Stanford, 1991).Google Scholar

32 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (2nd edn, London, 1860), ed. Gillian Beer (Oxford, 1996), 342.Google Scholar

33 Luigi L. Cavalli-Sforza and Marcus W. Feldman, Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach, Monographs in Population Biology, 16 (Princeton, 1981), 19–29.Google Scholar

34 Meyer, Style and Music, 13, 17, 23–4.Google Scholar

35 Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music, trans. Carolyn Abbate (Princeton, 1990), 136, Figure 6.2.Google Scholar

36 Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman, Cultural Transmission and Evolution, 15.Google Scholar

37 Dennett, Daniel C., Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (London, 1995), 343.Google Scholar

38 See Jan, ‘The Memetics of Music’ for an account, couched in terms of Narmour's implication-realization model, of how mutational changes to a meme may increase its perceptual and cognitive salience and therefore its propensity to imitation.Google Scholar

39 Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype, 284.Google Scholar

40 Ibid., 283.Google Scholar

41 Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 192.Google Scholar

42 Dennett, Daniel C., Consciousness Explained (London, 1993), 210.Google Scholar

43 For a memeplex to occur, it seems reasonable to suggest the following two necessary conditions. First, each of the particles constituting the memeplex must be replicated individually in at least one other context, in order for each particle to attain independent memetic status. Secondly, the collection of memes, the memeplex, must be replicated collectively in at least one other context, in order for this higher-level grouping itself to attain memetic status.Google Scholar

44 In Blackmore, The Meme Machine, xiv.Google Scholar

45 It will be understood that the two types of hierarchy represented here are structural, as opposed to Meyer's cultural hierarchies (the concepts of laws, rules, etc.) discussed in Section 3. The arrangement of this figure into ‘Context 1’ and ‘Context N’ represents the notion of replication over time.Google Scholar

46 That memes also exist in the rhythmic dimension, sometimes independent of pitch, can be seen by comparing bar 6 of Example 1(a) with bar 10 of Example 1(b), where the pattern is replicated. Indeed, a memetic reading of Maury Yeston, The Stratification of Musical Rhythm (New Haven, 1976), suggests the existence of rhythmic memes at hierarchic levels above the immediate foreground of local attack points. For present purposes, however, I will focus largely on memes in the parameter of pitch.Google Scholar

47 Narmour might regard the level-3 memes as ‘style forms’. These, he notes, are ‘those parametric entities which achieve enough closure so we can understand their functional coherence without reference to the specific intraopus context from which they come – all those seemingly time-independent patterns, large and small, from parameter to parameter, which recur with statistically significant frequency’ (Eugene Narmour, Beyond Schenkerism: The Need for Alternatives in Music Analysis, Chicago, 1977, 173). Narmour might consider the level-2 memes to be ‘style structures’. He notes that ‘the [statistically common] contexts which result from [the syntactic] arrangement [of style forms] can be called style structures in the sense that they are directly tied to and contribute to the structure of real pieces, not just to constructed classes of things, as are style forms. Unlike the description of style forms, the identification of style structures involves ascribing time-dependent function to patterns … in intraopus relationships’ (ibid., 174).Google Scholar

48 Gjerdingen, A Classic Turn of Phrase, 45–6.Google Scholar

49 Constraints of space prevent a detailed examination of the four pieces in Schenkerian terms.Google Scholar

50 Psychological studies have shown that the perceptual and cognitive reality of such virtual structures, at least to most listeners untrained in formal/structural analysis, is often fragile. Long concerned with this dichotomy, Cook speaks of ‘discrepancies between the way in which theoreticians and analysts think of compositions … and the way in which listeners respond to them’ (Nicholas Cook, Music, Imagination, and Culture, Oxford, 1990, 57). As a further complication, it will be evident that the conceptual and graphical constructs used to comprehend musical patterning and structure are themselves memeplexes, being propagated within music-theoretical communities and subject to variation and selection, especially according to the criterion of perceived fit with that which they purport to explain. As such, they may not necessarily be suited clearly to resolve (or even detect) elements of the music the composer situates below the immediately perceptible surface.Google Scholar

51 See Jan, ‘Replicating Sonorities’, Section 6, for more detailed discussion of the structural-hierarchic organization of memes and memeplexes.Google Scholar

52 Strictly speaking, each level-3 meme, once it has been mutated, ceases to be a meme until a copy is made of the new form. When Mozart mutated the memes of the arietta in the Adagio in May 1787 the resultant level-3 particles may not have been memetic, for they may, for a time, have been unique, not yet imitated by other composers. Lynch speaks of a ‘mnemon’ – ‘an item of brain-stored memory. When copied from one brain to another, it becomes a meme’ – in such cases (Aaron Lynch, Mnemon 1998a: Y2K Memes (Issue 1), <http://www.mcs.net/~aaron/Mnemon1998a.html>). See Jan, ‘Replicating Sonorities’, Sections 7 and 8, for more detailed discussion of the mechanism of memetic mutation and stylistic evolution.).+See+Jan,+‘Replicating+Sonorities’,+Sections+7+and+8,+for+more+detailed+discussion+of+the+mechanism+of+memetic+mutation+and+stylistic+evolution.>Google Scholar

53 Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 86.Google Scholar

54 The difficulty of verifying this point – requiring the examination of all Mozart's output – will, however, be readily apparent.Google Scholar

55 Nattiez, Music and Discourse, 10–16.Google Scholar

56 Stephen J. Gould and Elisabeth S. Vrba, ‘Exaptation – A Missing Term in the Science of Form’, Paleobiology, 8/1 (1982), 4–15 (p. 6).Google Scholar

57 These arias are ‘Betracht dies Herz’ (Der Engel), no. 2 of the Grabmusik (Passionskantate), K.42/35a (1767); ‘Nel sen mi palpita’ (Aspasia), no. 4 of Mitridate, re di Ponto, K.87/74a (1770); ‘Ma qual virtù’ (Cabri), no. 2 of La Betulia liberata, K.118/74c (1771); ‘Vorrei punirti indegno’ (Arminda), no. 13 of La finta giardiniera, K.196 (1775); and ‘Tiger! wetze nur die Klauen’ (Zaïde), no. 13 of Zaïde, K.344/336b (1779).Google Scholar

58 Jan, Aspects of Mozart's Music in G Minor, 56–7.Google Scholar

59 Alfred Einstein, Mozart: His Character, his Work, trans. Arthur Mendel and Nathan Broder (6th edn, London, 1966), 264.Google Scholar

60 Ludwig Ritter von Köchel, Chronologisch-thematisches Verzeichnis sämtlicher Tonwerke Wolfgang Amadé Mozarts, ed. Franz Giegling, Alexander Weinmann and Gerd Sievers (8th edn, Wiesbaden, 1983), 583.Google Scholar

61 Blackmore, The Meme Machine, Chapter 4.Google Scholar

62 Ibid., 231.Google Scholar

63 Susan Blackmore, ‘Meme, Myself, I’, New Scientist, 161/2177 (1999), 40–2 (p. 42).Google Scholar

64 Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, 325.Google Scholar

65 Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype, 112.Google Scholar

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