Memetics is a profoundly important new school of thought surrounding the development and evolution of information. Memetic Theory - in short - states that cultural information is suseptible to the laws of evolution: that cultural information adapts, competes and cooperates for survival. As teachers, we are the contact point between student and musical information. We, therefore, play a vital role in not only how students take in that information, but also in how the evolution of musical information is to take place. Below is an adapted version of an e-mail that sparked a friendship between composer Libby Larsen and Jon Michael Iverson.

Memetics is a new field dealing with the evolutin of information.  In short, non-genetic information is subject to the same laws of natural selection that apply to genetic information (DNA) during biological evolution; that is, that information adapts, mutates, radiates, drifts, competes and cooperates with other information. Over time, bits of information called "memes" [rhymes with "beams"] coalesce and bind together, resulting in huge information structures; we see this in languages, judicial systems, political systems, religions – anything that has to do with cultural information that can be passed from one person to another, one generation to the next. Music is one of those enormous information structures.

While biological evolution is a natural process that occurs unconsciously, cultural evolution is purely a conscious phenomenon executed by the human brain, where the brain acts as a computer processor – the hardware – and culture installs the software. The brain’s recombinant ability to restructure bits of information (i.e., words to create sentences, pitches to create melodies, ideas to create innovative thinking, etc.) is the mechanism behind memetic evolution and, needless to say, explains cultural transmission, preservation, and adaptation

In the domain of music, this effects everything: genre and style then become pockets of speciated musical information that has adapted to specific regions and environments; memetics shows a historical evolutionary thread through of the use of key, meter, instrumentation, form and structure; performance practices and a period’s zeitgeist are the result of vast cultural evolutionary periods; mimetics reframe composers as informational re-engineers and architects: Bach as recycling old Lutheran hymns, the use of fugue in late Beethoven, Schnittke’s ‘polystylism,’ and Libby Larsen’s compositional style all might be thought of in this light as well; memetics explains instrument building as an artisanship and helps explain why modern instruments have survived and why others have gone extinct; this puts “musical traditions” in perspective; a basic understanding of memetics is crucial to private and classroom teachers as teachers are information replicators - they are the contact point between students and music; and on and on and on ...

There are many avenues of research to be explored in what should become an exploding field of research called memetics. The iceberg might be bigger than any one of us could have ever have anticipated.

Jon Michael Iverson