4 Evolutionary Metaphors in Discourse on Music

Chapter 4: discusses the impact evolutionary thought has had on discourses in music historiography and in music theory/analysis. This requires a double-layered approach that not only considers the (metaphorical) application of evolutionary ideas to questions of individual composers’ stylistic development, to diachronic and idiostructural formal-structural development, and to diachronic musical style and genre change (these particularly prevalent in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries), but that also considers verbalisation on music (as ‘verbal-conceptual memeplexes’) as itself subject to memetic-evolutionary pressures, some of these pressures arising from the need for alignment with the music that the verbal-conceptual memeplexes purport to describe and explain. The relationship between such music-discourse evolution, and the evolution of culture more broadly, is also examined, as part of an evaluation of Susan McClary’s critique of ‘absolute’ music and its relationship to socioeconomic change.