One of the most impressive features of brains – especially human brains — is the flexibility to learn almost any kind of task that comes its way. Give an apprentice the desire to impress his master and a chicken-sexing task, and his brain devotes its massive resources to distinguishing males from females. Give an unemployed aviation enthusiast a chance to be a national hero, and his brain learns to distinguish enemy aircraft from local flyboys. This flexibility of learning accounts for a large part of what we consider human intelligence. While many animals are properly called intelligent, humans distinguish themselves in that they are so flexibly intelligent, fashioning their neural circuits to match the task at hand. It is for this reason that we can colonize every region on the planet, learn the local language we’re born into, and master skills as diverse as playing the violin, high-jumping and operating space shuttle cockpits.
The memetic evolution of baroque music in Europe is a development towards learnability? There are probably no more than 100 people alive that can make their way through Bach’s 2nd Partita for violin.
Bach’s sonatas and partitas for solo violin) are a cornerstone of the violin repertory. We may therefore assume that every professor of violin at a major university or conservatory has performed at least one of them at least once, just like we may assume that every professor of mathematics has studied the Lebesgue dominated convergence theorem. How many professors of violin are there? Let’s just consider one country, the United States. Each state in the U.S. has at least two major public universities (typically “University of X” and “X State University”, where X is the state); some have many more, and this doesn’t even count private universities. Personal experience suggests that the average big state university has about one professor of violin. There are 50 states in the U.S., so that’s 100 people already right there. And we have yet to count:
every other country in the world (including European countries like Germany where the enthusiasm for art music in general and J.S. Bach in particular is likely to be much higher);
private universities and conservatories in the U.S.;
members of the violin sections of professional symphony orchestras throughout the world (again, on average one in each U.S. state);
professional concert soloists (there may be more of these than you realize)
the students of the aforementioned professors (between 5 and 20 in a given semester, at least one of whom will typically be playing one of the sonatas or partitas that semester).
Thus, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if there were at least 10,000 people alive who have performed one of the sonatas and partitas (to say nothing of those who would be capable of performing them). There are six of these works in total, so we can divide this already-conservative estimate by six to (under)estimate the number who have performed the Second Partita in particular. (This is likely an underestimate because many of them will have performed more than one—indeed, all six, in a fair number of cases.)
The estimate “no more than 100 alive who can make it through” would be much more appropriate for a difficult contemporary work (like, say, Melismata by Milton Babbitt) than a 300-year-old standard.
Ever notice how you never hear humans playing music that humans aren’t capable of learning to play? I think there may be some selection effects at play here...
Well, I never notice the satisfaction of that contradiction, quite, but I do notice that the history of baroque music includes the steady achievement of theretofore unreached technical difficulty.
It might be more accurate to say that pretty much everything, including what we call biology and physics—humans are the ones codifying it -- is memetically selected to be learnable by humans. Not that it all develops towards being easier to learn.
Wouldn’t we see more regularity in the structure of languages then? English and classical Latin are almost opposites by every measure I can think to apply to a language (complexity of grammar, diversity of vocabulary and idiom, etc.). This doesn’t seem like a good assumption.
English and Latin aren’t even anywhere near as different as two natural languages can be. Take a look at this for a quick example, and take a look at the Language Construction Kit (it’s about constructed languages, but AFAICT most of the things exemplified aren’t completely unheard-of among natural languages) for a lot more.
(There are quite a few linguistic universals, but I’m not entirely convinced that all of them exist because a language flouting one of them would be unlearnable by humans, rather than (say) because they were inherited from a common ancestor.)
David Eagleman, Incognito, p. 71
Minor nitpick:
The reason we can learn the local language is that languages are memetically selected for learnability by humans.
So is everything else except biology and physics.
The memetic evolution of baroque music in Europe is a development towards learnability? There are probably no more than 100 people alive that can make their way through Bach’s 2nd Partita for violin.
I’m pretty sure you’re underestimating that by...a lot. Fermi estimate time:
Bach’s sonatas and partitas for solo violin) are a cornerstone of the violin repertory. We may therefore assume that every professor of violin at a major university or conservatory has performed at least one of them at least once, just like we may assume that every professor of mathematics has studied the Lebesgue dominated convergence theorem. How many professors of violin are there? Let’s just consider one country, the United States. Each state in the U.S. has at least two major public universities (typically “University of X” and “X State University”, where X is the state); some have many more, and this doesn’t even count private universities. Personal experience suggests that the average big state university has about one professor of violin. There are 50 states in the U.S., so that’s 100 people already right there. And we have yet to count:
every other country in the world (including European countries like Germany where the enthusiasm for art music in general and J.S. Bach in particular is likely to be much higher);
private universities and conservatories in the U.S.;
members of the violin sections of professional symphony orchestras throughout the world (again, on average one in each U.S. state);
professional concert soloists (there may be more of these than you realize)
the students of the aforementioned professors (between 5 and 20 in a given semester, at least one of whom will typically be playing one of the sonatas or partitas that semester).
Thus, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if there were at least 10,000 people alive who have performed one of the sonatas and partitas (to say nothing of those who would be capable of performing them). There are six of these works in total, so we can divide this already-conservative estimate by six to (under)estimate the number who have performed the Second Partita in particular. (This is likely an underestimate because many of them will have performed more than one—indeed, all six, in a fair number of cases.)
A glance at the recordings available on Amazon, sorted by release date may help put things into perspective.
The estimate “no more than 100 alive who can make it through” would be much more appropriate for a difficult contemporary work (like, say, Melismata by Milton Babbitt) than a 300-year-old standard.
Ever notice how you never hear humans playing music that humans aren’t capable of learning to play? I think there may be some selection effects at play here...
Well, I never notice the satisfaction of that contradiction, quite, but I do notice that the history of baroque music includes the steady achievement of theretofore unreached technical difficulty.
It might be more accurate to say that pretty much everything, including what we call biology and physics—humans are the ones codifying it -- is memetically selected to be learnable by humans. Not that it all develops towards being easier to learn.
Wouldn’t we see more regularity in the structure of languages then? English and classical Latin are almost opposites by every measure I can think to apply to a language (complexity of grammar, diversity of vocabulary and idiom, etc.). This doesn’t seem like a good assumption.
English and Latin aren’t even anywhere near as different as two natural languages can be. Take a look at this for a quick example, and take a look at the Language Construction Kit (it’s about constructed languages, but AFAICT most of the things exemplified aren’t completely unheard-of among natural languages) for a lot more.
(There are quite a few linguistic universals, but I’m not entirely convinced that all of them exist because a language flouting one of them would be unlearnable by humans, rather than (say) because they were inherited from a common ancestor.)
There doesn’t have to be one solution to “memetically selected for learnabillity”