Structuralism, Music, And DNA

Seed Magazine has a fascinating article about characteristics that are inherited biologically, but not through DNA.

The reason I’m posting about it here is because of the brilliant analogy the author makes between biological inheritance, and the way that performance and recordings of music change the nature of the music itself:

An organism’s genotype (DNA) is like a musical score; phenotypes are particular interpretations and performances of that score…nowadays music is not transmitted solely through the score: Interpretations can be passed to future generations using the very different technology of recording and broadcasting (analogous to epigenetic inheritance mechanisms). Even with identical musical scores, performances differ, since they depend on the culture, conductor, musicians, and instruments. In the same way, DNA ‘s performance depends on conditions within the cell. Because of recordings, the musical interpretations of one generation may influence the subsequent performances of later generations. Similarly, because of epigenetic inheritance, the characteristics acquired in one generation can affect what happens in the next. Interesting interactions can occur between the two routes of music transmission — changes in the score will obviously affect the performance, but some performances may actually modify the score that later musicians use. There are comparable interactions between genetic and epigenetic inheritance.

Read the whole thing here. Thanks to Ben Kunz for tweeting about this.