2023-04-21 | Musical style transmission

Interesting piece in JPE with fascinating data exploitation on the transmission of style in music composition between professors and students : https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10.1086/718370

The paper codes similarity between melodies of 750 composers. After transposing all melodies into C, they look at n-gram (sequence of 2 to 4 notes) similarity between composers.
Students' melodies are more similar to those of their professors than to those of other composers.

The similarity even passes on to the second generation.
The paper also looks at the link between transmission and various measures of composers' success (which it calls "quality"...  economists can't help being dogmatic about quality :) ). Successful composers transmit more and their transmission is tied to students' success.

Although plausible, I wonder if the selection might not affect the link. More successful composers might have more melodies listed in the source used for the paper, further increasing chances of similarity.
 Sadly the paper doesn't look at rythmic similarity.

In a context of conquering genetical approaches (where everything is about the genes), it is worth noting that (the chance of) influence does matter.
While it could seem as a plea for raising the pay of (successful) professors, it's also interesting to relate this result with research on social capital.

It could be connected to R Collins' monumental sociology of philosophy showing  (although with less technical sophistication) that over three millenaries being central in the network of philosophical discussions (student, opponents, peer, etc) is tied with philosophical legacy.

One could relate to the debate between Tia DeNora and Pierre-Michel Menger on the role of social capital for Beethoven's success. 
DeNora claims that the success of Beethoven over his peers like Dussek or Czerny was due to his social capital. Menger claims that the apparent relation between success and social capital is due to a selection phenomenon. Contemporaries were able to detect Beethoven's early talent and selected him for this reason in socially rich networks.

Borowiecki's paper adds that at least composition professor could still make a difference beyond the selection mechanism.