Pleasure, Haydn, and DNA

I was talking with my father about Haydn the other day, and he revealed to me that as a child he loved the same Haydn piano sonatas that I am currently obsesed with (currently meaning over the last decade or so, or since I have had possession of the music that once belonged to my brother). Objectively one could say that all Haydn Piano Sonatas are great in their own specific ways, and that there are some that are so unique, so inventive, so engaging, and so physically pleasurable to play that anyone might choose the same "favorites." One could also say that the Haydn Sonatas that have been anthologized would be the ones that people would play as children, but it seems that Haydn is too often thought of as a "gateway" to Mozart, Beethoven, or Schubert. Maybe it has something to do with the way Haydn gives even non-pianists so much physical pleasure.

My love of Haydn and string playing feels so "hard wired" that I don't feel odd imagining that those specific and particular pleasures are inherited.

It has been documented that trauma, particularly physical trauma, can be passed from one generation to the next. The field of study is called epigenetics, and involves chemical marks that can be left on a person's genes that changes the way a gene gets expressed. It's a new field, and everything I have seen on the internets seems to focus on studies involving inter-generational trauma.

What I wonder if the experince of pleasure that results from a person having a profound and sustained experience with practicing music or art (or literature, or math, or science, or sports, or dance . . . ) early in life, and having the pleasure be so great that it causes the chemical changes necessary for that particular pleasure to pass the ability to experience that pleasure onto future generations. We know that physical traits are passed from generation to generation, and, at least in my family, pitch memory (as in absolute pitch) and, it seems, intelligence and personality traits are inherited (she "takes after" her father, or he "takes after" his grandmother). Then there is the environmental factor.

But the idea of pleasure, something that is so subjective and not easy to quantify, seems to have been under-studied in this way.

I have heard many people say that they inherited their love of this or that from someone in their family, and are thrilled when they do genetic tests that identify a distant ancestor as a great athlete, an artist, or a leader in a political movement. (We do tend not to identify with direct blood relatives with qualities we do not like.)

What interests me particularly, though, is if someone happens to find something early in life that offers extreme pleasure that is not necessarily something present in their family life ("I don't know where she gets it from"), and through the support and nurturing of adults who care enough to support that child's obsession, could that child be changed in an epigenetic way that might pass that pleasure onto his or her children?