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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.
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.
Price: $130.00
Pages: 320
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Inc.
Imprint: Boydell Press
Publication Date:
20 October 2026
Trim Size: 9.21 X 6.14 in
ISBN: 9781837650033
Format: Hardcover
BISACs:
MUSIC / Ethnomusicology, Theory of music and musicology, MUSIC / Instruction & Study / Theory, SCIENCE / Life Sciences / Biology, NATURE / Ecology
Preface: It's the song, not the singer
Acknowledgements
Preparing a bio-musical workplace
1 Corona virus is playing our song. Are we listening?
2 What is music in vivo?
Part 1: Finding music in biology
3 Finches on adaptive radiation
4 Starlings on co-creation
5 Sticklebacks on the epigenetics of performance
6 Lichens on the normalcy of chimeras
7 The music of lichens, fish and birds
Part 2: Finding biology in music
8 Making sense of musical variability
9 From the I-word to mouvance
10 Finding biology in melody
11 Psalm-singing, an ecological perspective
Part 3: The self-organization of everyday life
12 Ways of the hand
13 The path is made in walking
14 Autopoiesis is never optional
Part 4: The macroevolution of species and musical practices
15 The single road of history
16 Biology and music listening to each other
17 Root, stem and branch
Part 5: Emergent order in two musical ecosystems
18 A repertoire is an ecosystem
19 Two premieres
20 Making song in Istanbul and Vienna: Following where variants lead
21 Where does song come from?
Epilogue: A Copernican moment for music?
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
Preparing a bio-musical workplace
1 Corona virus is playing our song. Are we listening?
2 What is music in vivo?
Part 1: Finding music in biology
3 Finches on adaptive radiation
4 Starlings on co-creation
5 Sticklebacks on the epigenetics of performance
6 Lichens on the normalcy of chimeras
7 The music of lichens, fish and birds
Part 2: Finding biology in music
8 Making sense of musical variability
9 From the I-word to mouvance
10 Finding biology in melody
11 Psalm-singing, an ecological perspective
Part 3: The self-organization of everyday life
12 Ways of the hand
13 The path is made in walking
14 Autopoiesis is never optional
Part 4: The macroevolution of species and musical practices
15 The single road of history
16 Biology and music listening to each other
17 Root, stem and branch
Part 5: Emergent order in two musical ecosystems
18 A repertoire is an ecosystem
19 Two premieres
20 Making song in Istanbul and Vienna: Following where variants lead
21 Where does song come from?
Epilogue: A Copernican moment for music?
Bibliography
Index