Why music?
This article describes several theories which seek to explain why music is a human universal. All of them focus on group cohesion of some sort, and the fact that music seems to foster it, whether it be in work, play, or interaction or communication with other groups.
While that may all be true, I think there’s a great deal more going on. Music is akin to mathematics, an order that underlies the universe, and I think our brains are wired to key into it because it is part of our very essence.
Author and neurologist Oliver Sacks has written a wonderful book called Musicophilia that studies the brain’s relationship to music on the physical and behavioral level. Here’s a portion of an interview with Sacks that describes the complexity of the matter:
There’s no one musical part of the brain, and in fact there are, sort of, a dozen different parts of the brain which respond to pitch, to rhythm, to timbre, to melodic contour. Even…the cerebellum, is very crucial. And, in fact, you find that visual parts of the brain and motor parts of the brain, and also the parts of the brain concerned with anticipation and expectation, because one doesn’t listen to music passively, one sort of decodes it as one listens, one sees where it’s going, one has expectations.
ALAN YENTOB: Processing music requires the orchestration of many regions in the brain, a neurological feat that science is just beginning to understand. Pitch, volume, timing and so on are each analyzed separately, and then combined together to create a musical experience.
Despite the fact that all cultures value and make music, people have varying degrees of interest in it—from those who dedicate their lives to its study to those who can take it or leave it.
And then there are those who don’t get it at all, according to Sacks:
You can be deaf to music and to different aspects of music. You can be deaf to pitch, you can be deaf to rhythm, or, even if you hear pitch and rhythm normally, you may be deaf to melody””just not catch melody””or deaf to harmony. And all of these things are called amusia.
So each capability is separate, although in most people they are united and appear as part of the whole.
I’ve always had a strong love of music, although I’ve never been good at playing any musical instrument. But even as a child I was powerfully affected by the records I’d play on a scratchy old record player in our basement. I’d dance around the room, improvising the movement, and I learned the words to every song in our collection.
To this day, music is one of the things that can regularly bring me to tears—even music without words, although words help. When I find a new song or other piece of music that I like, I’ll often listen to it over and over, perhaps twenty times in a row, until it becomes an earworm. Then it plays in my head off and on, perhaps for days, while I listen to it some more and it solidifies and becomes part of my memory. Then I can relax for a while.
Here’s one of my favorite pieces of music. I chose a live performance with a video of the musicians because I think that seeing the physicality of the music-making enhances the experience:
When I was quite young in the early 1960’s, my parents purchased a set of classical music records from Time-Life. I listened to them for hours on end. This Tchaikovsky piece must have been on one of the records as this piece is ingrained in my memory.
Back the the late 1980’s (before I owned a CD player), I attended a concert of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in an enormous cathedral in Germany. When the music started, I felt a chill run up my spine. That has never happened to me before or since.
I can only imagine how the recording above sounded in person.
One of my most memorable and inspiring musical experiences was a live performance, in Paris, of music that is three centuries old played in a chapel that is five centuries older: Vivalid’s “Four Seasons” (composed in 1723) performed in La Sainte-Chapelle Chapel (built in 1239-1248).
I like the classics too.
Led Zeppelin.
What?
I like Beethoven and Mozart. They’re strident and strong. I like instrumentals. Trumpet. Flute. (How about that Galway) And Chet Atkins. And Andrea Bocelli and the Celtic Women and any good voice singing a Christian hymnal or a Jewish shabbat song.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YONAP39jVE&feature=related
I’d dance around the room, improvising the movement, and I learned the words to every song in our collection. Me too. But mostly, I would just sit and listen, like you say, over and over until I knew all the words. I still do that.
AMDG,
Janet
I’m thinking there were lullabys before there was language. Ancient mothers humming to their babies to comminicate that they loved them. And even today, music alone can sometimes communicate things that our complex verbal language just can’t get around to saying.
Here are three interpretations of “Der Hé¶lle Rache” from Mozart’s “Magic Flute”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h4f77T-LoM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWh_2Iit3Ek
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvuKxL4LOqc
It is somewhat interesting that the second singer is better than the first, and nobody can match the third. Do birds get music too?
There’s a continuium in music reaching from the head to the heart to the crotch. I’m a blues musician of many years standing (many being a number larger than 35) and I can appreciate music for the head, but if that’s all it has then I don’t bother. My preference runs rather lower, and if you call me nyculturnii I don’t mind
We can and will.
Did you ever notice that for the heavy metal and hair bands, their songs that go platinum are the droopy love ballads. Must drive them crazy.
Most of us like the head and heart stuff, but if we’re honest, we like the occasional, uh, well, er, uh . . . as you put it . . . crotch music.
Mighten you youtube us with your favorite selection?
Surprisingly, physicist Richard Feynman had a specific type of amusia: he couldn’t stand melody. Actively disliked it.
But he could be driven wild by rhythm, and was not only a good bongo player, but drummed his fingers compulsively on any hard surface.
Surprising, because mathematicians are usually dangerously susceptible to music.
All right. If you won’t do it, I will.
Fergie and Slash.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FauHsI7A0nc&feature=related
But the poet was Axel; he made the poem, and like all great poems, it was an accident:
She’s got a smile it seems to me
Reminds me of childhood memories
Where everything
Was as fresh as the bright blue sky
Now and then when I see her face
She takes me away to that special place
And if I’d stare too long
I’d probably break down and cry
Oh, oh, oh
Sweet child o’ mine
Oh, oh, oh, oh
Sweet love of mine
We usually forget that old life was rife with long periods of repetition for marginal living… most repetitious things have rythem to them and they can be accomplished more efficiently by those who have a sense of rythm and can synch their work to each other so that it all works on lock step.
music does this…
from working music, to marching music
today, we use it mostly for masturbation so we forget it had more solid benefits.
oh.. and some cultures sing like birds to choose mates…
I’m not sure how I’d classify myself. I tend only to listen to music purposely, meaning I do not tend to have music just playing. It irritates me.
Unlike any other time in history, we have constant and immediate access to music. I’ve often wondered what effect that has on us. Sometimes on the train I look around and ponder how life would be different due to a lack of the music we are so accustomed to if we ever suffered an EMP or other world/life-altering event.
Last 3 songs from “5 Mystical Songs” by Vaughan Williams (live performance at BBC Proms concert)
“To this day, music is one of the things that can regularly bring me to tears–even music without words, although words help. When I find a new song or other piece of music that I like, I’ll often listen to it over and over, perhaps twenty times in a row, until it becomes an earworm. Then it plays in my head off and on, perhaps for days, while I listen to it some more and it solidifies and becomes part of my memory. Then I can relax for a while. ”
The last song I was into like that was “Chocolate Town” by Ween. It’s ok to laugh.