Music in Vivo : The Music of Biology and the Biology of Music

Interprets music as a systemic process which is inherently in motion, a living art, emphasizing music's continuity with nature.

Interprets music as a systemic process which is inherently in motion, a living art, emphasizing music''s continuity with nature.


All the teeming life of nature, as this book argues, is mirrored in the practice of music. Musical repertoires behave like ecosystems, and music and nature both tend toward variation, even when replicating a cherished masterwork or a vital cellular function. The in vivo in the book''s title is a scientific term for the study of changes in living organisms while they are alive and still connected to the environment sustaining them. Music, whether written or improvised, heard or imagined, also demands an in vivo understanding.

Music in Vivo claims that the authorless self-organization essential to life is also essential to music. The book asks what biological and musical processes share, as they continually replicate themselves and invent fresh responses to new contexts. With a biology-centred perspective, music becomes more integrated into the planet''s everyday work of self-making and self-sustaining. Artists are less like gods breathing life into clay, and more like participants in the work of nature. That work sometimes results in a hummingbird, a giant sequoia or a Ninth Symphony, for which we are all grateful. When music is understood as a function of nature, what appears to be the mutual otherness of natural and human creations diminishes.

Music in Vivo is a timely book that explores how music is less distant from the processes of our planet than we have believed. It asks whether music may still serve as a refuge isolated from the planetary derangement now visible around us.