Species Concepts in Biology and Perspectives on Association in Music Analysis

Abstract

Species Concepts in Biology and Perspectives on Association inMusic Analysis 1? Dora A. Hanninen Twelve years ago while browsing in a bookstore inAnn Arbor, I happened to pick up a book tided Toward a New Philosophy of Biology: Observations of an Evolutionist (1988) by the evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr. Here was a philosophy of science thatwas entirely different in itsorientation and core issues from the philosophy of science of the 1950s and 1960s (then mostly a philosophy of the physical sciences) that found itsway intoAmerican music theory in its formative years through thewritings ofMilton Babbitt. Instead of universal laws, Mayr emphasized the particularity and contingency of evolutionary history. Instead of bridge laws and theory reduction, he offered a nuanced view of inter-level relations designed to recognize and preserve biology's autonomy as a science.1 As I readmore ofMayr's work, aswell as that by many other writers including Elliott Sober, Phillip Kitcher, 6 PerspectivesofNew Music Michael Ghiselin, Michael Ruse, David Hull, Massimo Pigliucci, and Kim Sterelny, it became clear that core issues in philosophy of biology such as altruism, function, units of selection, and species have a holistic or historical bent that make the field qualitatively different from philosophy of physics or chemistry and much closer in the texture of its thought to contemporary music theory and analysis. Although much of what I read in philosophy of biology seemed to resonate in one way or another with my own thinking about music analysis, given my work with associative sets and associative organization the vast literature on species concepts struck a special chord.2 At a high level of generality, both species and associative sets are categories one forms on the basis of some sort of pattern recognition (e.g., DNA structure or vestigial features in biology; literal or varied repetition in pitch or rhythm inmusic analysis). With categories forming the thread of an analogy between species and associative sets, I began to read the substantial body of work on species concepts not only for its intrinsic interest, but also as an invitation to explore differentways of thinking about associative sets and the roles that association among "like" segments can play inmusic analysis. In "Associative Sets, Categories, and Music Analysis" (Hanninen 2004c), I examined the workings of object formation and category formation inmusic analysis. The current paper continues the discussion at another level, drawing on work on species concepts in biology as an inspiration to contemplate and tryout differentways of interpreting and using associative sets as categories in music analysis. The paper has two parts. Part I provides background on some of the ways that biologists and philosophers of biology have conceptualized species. Here I outline key features and primary challenges of four types of species concepts: the phenetic, biological, phylogenetic, and species as-individuals concepts. My exposition of this preliminary material is a good deal more detailed than, strictly speaking, is actually necessary to support themore basic analogy between species and associative sets that underlies the four perspectives on musical association I develop in Part II. I provide this information in order to give readers a sense of the historical and scientific contexts in which different ways of thinking about species came about: for example, many of the tensions among species concepts in biology reflect exigencies of modeling different sorts of organisms (birds, flowering plants, slime molds, bacteria), or differences in the practices and conceptual cultures of various fields within the life sciences (e.g., molecular biology, ornithology, paleontology). Similarly, one of the points of this paper is to suggest thatmusic analysts, inspired by their own interests, interpretive goals, Species Concepts inBiology 7 and musical context, might try out different ways of thinking about association to seewhere they lead. Part II extracts four central ideas from the species concepts in Part I and uses these to develop four (roughly analogous) perspectives on association for use in music analysis. These focus on morphological similarity, population demographics and processes, associative lineages, and the persistence and transformation of individuals, respectively.3 After outlining each perspective, I provide one or two necessarily brief but suggestive analytic sketches designed to show, first,how an analyst might use each perspective inmusic analysis; and second...