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Music and the Mind
Anthony Storr


Why does music have such a powerful effect on our minds and bodies? It is the most mysterious and most intangible of all forms of art.Yet, Anthony Storr believes, music today is a deeply significant experience for a greater number of people than ever before. In this challenging book, he explores why this should be so. Drawing on a wide variety of opinions, Storr argues that the patterns of music make sense of our inner experience, giving both structure and coherence to our feelings and emotions. It is because music possesses this capacity to restore our sense of personal wholeness in a culture which requires us to separate rational thought from feelings, that many people find it so life-enhancing.







ANTHONY STORR









MUSIC AND THE MIND

�Music’s the Medicine of the Mind’

John Logan (1744–88)
























Copyright (#ulink_47c8a67d-e484-5d07-8b36-0db98764fd57)


HarperCollins PublishersLtd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by Collins 1992

Copyright В© Anthony Storr 1992

The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge permission to reproduce extracts from:

Hitler: The Fuhrer and the People, J.P. Stern (Fontana Press, 1975); Schoenberg, Charles Rosen (Fontana, 1976); The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes, В© 1976 Julian Jaynes, reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Co. and Penguin Books Limited.

Anthony Storr asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780006861867

Ebook Edition В© JANUARY 2017 ISBN: 9780007383993

Version: 2017-02-08


FOR

SOPHIA, POLLY, AND EMMA

WHO SHARE MY LOVE

OF MUSIC




Contents


Cover (#ud358d6f2-9073-5cdd-9bc1-248a6a385473)

Title Page (#u092c2e11-e095-59fa-82bc-66b862661a1b)

Copyright (#ulink_e30c14db-b9e9-5c3c-9711-0c6c9e14cfa8)

INTRODUCTION (#ulink_710e97be-542a-5c04-aa6d-d2b68be1e88a)

CHAPTER I ORIGINS AND COLLECTIVE FUNCTIONS (#ulink_5d98f600-2d58-52ae-b414-023df4b446ce)

CHAPTER II MUSIC, BRAIN AND BODY (#ulink_7770dbb1-f675-5396-a933-ec9ffe3eb810)

CHAPTER III BASIC PATTERNS (#ulink_689b828f-cf90-59cf-a75a-22ec0ae66259)

CHAPTER IV SONGS WITHOUT WORDS (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER V ESCAPE FROM REALITY? (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER VI THE SOLITARY LISTENER (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER VII THE INNERMOST NATURE OF THE WORLD (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER VIII A JUSTIFICATION OF EXISTENCE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER IX THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MUSIC (#litres_trial_promo)

Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)

References (#litres_trial_promo)

Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)

Index (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




Introduction (#ulink_5d51c012-06fe-5982-856d-e67fb1681bb2)


Since music is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man.

CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS




Today, more people listen to music than ever before in the history of the world. The audience has increased enormously since the Second World War. Recordings, radio, and even television, have made music available to a wider range of the population than anyone could have predicted fifty years ago. In spite of dire warnings that recordings might empty opera houses and concert halls, the audience for live performances has also multiplied.

This book reflects my personal preference in that it is primarily concerned with classical or Western �art’ music, rather than with �popular’ music. That these two varieties of music should have become so divergent is regrettable. The demand for accessible musical entertainment grew during the latter half of the nineteenth century in response to the increased wealth of the middle class. It was met by Offenbach, both Johann Strausses, Chabrier, Sullivan, and other gifted composers of light music which still enchants us today. The tradition was carried on into the twentieth century by composers of the stature of Gershwin, Jerome Kern, and Irving Berlin. It is only since the 1950s that the gap between classical and popular music has widened into a canyon which is nearly unbridgeable.

In spite of its widespread diffusion, music remains an enigma. Music for those who love it is so important that to be deprived of it would constitute a cruel and unusual punishment. Moreover, the perception of music as a central part of life is not confined to professionals or even to gifted amateurs. It is true that those who have studied the techniques of musical composition can more thoroughly appreciate the structure of a musical work than those who have not. It is also true that people who can play an instrument, or who can sing, can actively participate in music in ways which enrich their understanding of it. Playing in a string quartet, or even singing as one anonymous voice in a large choir, are both life-enhancing activities which those who take part in them find irreplaceable. But even listeners who cannot read musical notation and who have never attempted to learn an instrument may be so deeply affected that, for them, any day which passes without being seriously involved with music in one way or another is a day wasted.

In the context of contemporary Western culture, this is puzzling. Many people assume that the arts are luxuries rather than necessities, and that words or pictures are the only means by which influence can be exerted on the human mind. Those who do not appreciate music think that it has no significance other than providing ephemeral pleasure. They consider it a gloss upon the surface of life; a harmless indulgence rather than a necessity. This, no doubt, is why our present politicians seldom accord music a prominent place in their plans for education. Today, when education is becoming increasingly utilitarian, directed toward obtaining gainful employment rather than toward enriching personal experience, music is likely to be treated as an �extra’ in the school curriculum which only affluent parents can afford, and which need not be provided for pupils who are not obviously �musical’ by nature. The idea that music is so powerful that it can actually affect both individuals and the state for good or ill has disappeared. In a culture dominated by the visual and the verbal, the significance of music is perplexing, and is therefore underestimated. Both musicians and lovers of music who are not professionally trained know that great music brings us more than sensuous pleasure, although sensuous pleasure is certainly part of musical experience. Yet what it brings is hard to define. This book is an exploratory search; an attempt to discover what it is about music that so profoundly affects us, and why it is such an important part of our culture.




CHAPTER I ORIGINS AND COLLECTIVE FUNCTIONS (#ulink_3eeb221d-88fc-5286-8cae-acfed4b6c721)


Music is so naturally united with us that we cannot be free from it even if we so desired.

BOETHIUS




No culture so far discovered lacks music. Making music appears to be one of the fundamental activities of mankind; as characteristically human as drawing and painting. The survival of Palaeolithic cave-paintings bears witness to the antiquity of this form of art; and some of these paintings depict people dancing. Flutes made of bone found in these caves suggest that they danced to some form of music. But, because music itself only survives when the invention of a system of notation has made a written record possible, or else when a living member of a culture recreates the sounds and rhythms which have been handed down to him by his forebears, we have no information about prehistoric music. We are therefore accustomed to regarding drawing and painting as integral parts of the life of early man, but less inclined to think of music in the same way. However, music, or musical sounds of some variety, are so interwoven with human life that they probably played a greater part in prehistory than can ever be determined.

When biologists consider complex human activities such as the arts, they tend to assume that their compelling qualities are derivations of basic drives. If any given activity can be seen to aid survival or facilitate adaptation to the environment, or to be derived from behaviour which does so, it �makes sense’ in biological terms. For example, the art of painting may originate from the human need to comprehend the external world through vision; an achievement which makes it possible to act upon the environment or influence it in ways which promote survival. The Palaeolithic artists who drew and painted animals on the walls of their caves were using their artistic skills for practical reasons. Drawing is a form of abstraction which may be compared with the formation of verbal concepts. It enables the draughtsman to study an object in its absence; to experiment with various images of it, and thus, at least in phantasy, to exert power over it. These artists were magicians, who painted and drew animals in order to exercise magical charms upon them. By capturing the image of the animal, early humans probably felt that they could partially control it. Since the act of drawing sharpens the perceptions of the artist by making him pay detailed attention to the forms he is trying to depict, the Palaeolithic painter did in reality learn to know his prey more accurately, and therefore increased his chances of being successful in the hunt. The art historian Herbert Read wrote:

Far from being an expenditure of surplus energy, as earlier theories have supposed, art, at the dawn of human culture, was a key to survival, a sharpening of the faculties essential to the struggle for existence. Art, in my opinion, has remained a key to survival.




The art of literature probably derived from that of the primitive story-teller. He was not merely providing entertainment, but passing down to his listeners a tradition of who they were, where they had come from, and what their lives signified. By making sense and order out of his listeners’ existence, he was enhancing their feeling of personal worth in the scheme of things and therefore increasing their capacity to deal effectively with the social tasks and relationships which made up their lives. The myths of a society usually embody its traditional values and moral norms. Repetition of these myths therefore reinforces the coherence and unity of the society, as well as giving each individual a sense of meaning and purpose. Both painting and literature can be understood as having developed from activities which, originally, were adaptively useful.

But what use is music? Music can certainly be regarded as a form of communication between people; but what it communicates is not obvious. Music is not usually representational: it does not sharpen our perception of the external world, nor, allowing for some notable exceptions,


does it generally imitate it. Nor is music propositional: it does not put forward theories about the world or convey information in the same way as does language.

There are two conventional ways in which one can approach the problem of the significance of music in human life. One is to examine its origins. Music today is highly developed, complex, various and sophisticated. If we could understand how it began, perhaps we could better understand its fundamental meaning. The second way is to examine how music has actually been used. What functions has music served in different societies throughout history?

There is no general agreement about the origins of music. Music has only tenuous links with the world of nature. Nature is full of sound, and some of nature’s sounds, such as running water, may give us considerable pleasure. A survey of sound preferences amongst people in New Zealand, Canada, Jamaica and Switzerland revealed that none disliked the sounds of brooks, rivers and waterfalls, and that a high proportion enjoyed them.


But nature’s sounds, with the exception of bird-song and some other calls between animals, are irregular noises rather than the sustained notes of definable pitch which go to form music. This is why the sounds of which Western music is composed are referred to as �tones’: they are separable units with constant auditory waveforms which can be repeated and reproduced.

Although science can define the differences between tones in terms of pitch, loudness, timbre, and waveform, it cannot portray the relation between tones which constitutes music. Whilst there is still considerable dispute concerning the origins, purpose, and significance of music, there is general agreement that it is only remotely related to the sounds and rhythms of the natural world. Absence of external association makes music unique amongst the arts; but since music is closely linked with human emotions, it cannot be regarded as no more than a disembodied system of relationships between sounds. Music has often been compared with mathematics; but, as G. H. Hardy pointed out, �Music can be used to stimulate mass emotion, while mathematics cannot.’




If music were merely a series of artificial constructs comparable with decorative visual patterns, it would induce a mild aesthetic pleasure, but nothing more. Yet music can penetrate the core of our physical being. It can make us weep, or give us intense pleasure. Music, like being in love, can temporarily transform our whole existence. But the links between the art of music and the reality of human emotions are difficult to define; so difficult that, as we shall see, many distinguished musicians have abandoned any attempt to do so, and have tried to persuade us that musical works consist of disembodied patterns of sound which have no connection with other forms of human experience.

Can music be related to the sounds made by other species? The most obviously �musical’ of such sounds are those found in bird-song. Birds employ both noises and tones in their singing; but the proportion of definable tones is often high enough for some people to rate some bird-songs as �music’. Bird-song has a number of different functions. By locating the singer, it both advertises a territory as desirable, and also acts as a warning to rivals. Birds in search of a mate sing more vigorously than those who are already mated, thus supporting Darwin’s notion that song was originally a sexual invitation. Bird-song is predominantly a male activity, dependent upon the production of the male sex hormone, testosterone, although duets between male and female occur in some species. Given sufficient testosterone, female birds who do not usually sing will master the same repertoire of songs as the male.




Charles Hartshorne, the American ornithologist and philosopher, claims that bird-song shows variation of both pitch and tempo: accelerando, crescendo, diminuendo, change of key, and variations on a theme. Some birds, like the Wood thrush Hylochicla mustelina, have a repertoire of as many as nine songs which can follow each other in a variety of different combinations. Hartshorne argues:

Bird songs resemble human music both in the sound patterns and in the behavior setting. Songs illustrate the aesthetic mean between chaotic irregularity and monotonous regularity … The essential difference from human music is in the brief temporal span of the bird’s repeatable patterns, commonly three seconds or less, with an upper limit of about fifteen seconds. This limitation conforms to the concept of primitive musicality. Every simple musical device, even transposition and simultaneous harmony, occurs in bird music.




He goes on to state that birds sing far more than is biologically necessary for the various forms of communication. He suggests that bird-song has partially escaped from practical usage to become an activity which is engaged in for its own sake: an expression of avian joie de vivre.

Singing repels rival males, but only when nearby; and it attracts mates. It is persisted in without any obvious immediate result, and hence must be largely self-rewarding. It expresses no one limited emotional attitude and conveys more information than mere chirps or squeaks. In all these ways song functions like music.




Other observers disagree, claiming that bird-song is so biologically demanding that it is unlikely to be produced unless it is serving some useful function.

Is it possible that human music originated from the imitation of bird-song? Géza Révész, who was a professor of Psychology at the University of Amsterdam and a friend of Béla Bartók, dismisses this possibility on two counts. First, if human music really began in this way, we should be able to point to examples of music resembling bird-song in isolated pre-literate communities. Instead, we find complex rhythmic patterns bearing no resemblance to avian music. Second, bird-song is not easily imitated. Slowing down modern recordings of bird-songs has demonstrated that they are even more complicated than previously supposed; but one only has to listen to a thrush singing in the garden to realize that imitation of his song is technically difficult. Liszt’s �Légende’ for solo piano, �St François d’Assise: La Prédication aux oiseaux’, manages to suggest the twittering of birds in ways which are both ingenious and musically convincing. I have heard a tape of American bird-song which persuasively suggests that Dvořák incorporated themes derived from it following his sojourn in the Czech community in Spillville, Iowa. Olivier Messiaen made more use of bird-song in his music than any other composer. But these are sophisticated, late developments in the history of music. It is probable that early man took very little notice of bird-song, since it bore scant relevance to his immediate concerns.




LГ©vi-Strauss affirms that music is in a special category compared with the other arts, and also agrees that bird-song cannot be the origin of human music.

If, through lack of verisimilitude, we dismiss the whistling of the wind through the reeds of the Nile, which is referred to by Diodorus, we are left with little but bird song – Lucretius’ liquidas avium voces – that can serve as a natural model for music. Although ornithologists and acousticians agree about the musicality of the sounds uttered by birds, the gratuitous and unverifiable hypothesis of the existence of a genetic relation between bird song and music is hardly worth discussing.




Stravinsky points out that natural sounds, like the murmur of the breeze in the trees, the rippling of a brook or the song of a bird, suggest music to us but are not themselves music: �I conclude that tonal elements become music only by virtue of their being organized, and that such organization presupposes a conscious human act.’




It is not surprising that Stravinsky emphasizes organization as the leading feature of music, since he himself was one of the most meticulous, orderly, and obsessionally neat composers in the history of music. But his emphatic statement is surely right. Bird-song has some elements of music in it, but, although variations upon inherited patterns occur, it is too obviously dependent upon in-built templates to be compared with human music.

In general, music bears so little resemblance to the sounds made by other species that some scholars regard it as an entirely separate phenomenon. This is the view of the ethnomusicologist John Blacking, who was, until his untimely death, Professor of Social Anthropology at the Queen’s University of Belfast, as well as being an accomplished musician.

There is so much music in the world that it is reasonable to suppose that music, like language and possibly religion, is a species-specific trait of man. Essential physiological and cognitive processes that generate musical composition and performance may even be genetically inherited, and therefore present in almost every human being.




If music is indeed species-specific, there might seem to be little point in comparing it with the sounds made by other species. But those who have studied the sounds made by subhuman primates, and who have discovered what functions these sounds serve, find interesting parallels with human music. Gelada monkeys produce a wide variety of sounds of different pitches which accompany all their social interactions. They also use many different rhythms, accents, and types of vocalization. The particular type of sound which an individual produces indicates his emotional state at the time and, in the longer term, aids the development of stable bonds between different individuals. When tensions between individuals exist, these can sometimes be resolved by synchronizing and coordinating vocal expressions.

Human beings, like geladas, also use rhythm and melody to resolve emotional conflicts. This is perhaps the main social function served by group singing in people … Music is the �language’ of emotional and physiological arousal. A culturally agreed-upon pattern of rhythm and melody, i.e., a song, that is sung together, provides a shared form of emotion that, at least during the course of the song, carries along the participants so that they experience their bodies responding emotionally in very similar ways. This is the source of the feeling of solidarity and good will that comes with choral singing: people’s physiological arousals are in synchrony and in harmony, at least for a brief period. It seems possible that during the course of human evolution the use of rhythm and melody for the purposes of speaking sentences grew directly out of its use in choral singing. It also seems likely that geladas singing their sound sequences together synchronously and harmoniously also perhaps experience such a temporary physiological synchrony.




We shall return to the subject of group arousal in the next chapter. Meanwhile, let us consider some other speculations about the origin of music.

One theory is that music developed from the lalling of infants. All infants babble, even if they are born deaf or blind. During the first year of life, babbling includes tones as well as approximations to words: the precursors of music and language cannot be separated. According to the Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner, who has conducted research into the musical development of small children:

The first melodic fragments produced by children around the age of a year or fifteen months have no strong musical identity. Their undulating patterns, going up and down over a very brief interval or ambitus, are more reminiscent of waves than of particular pitch attacks. Indeed, a quantum leap, in an almost literal sense, occurs at about the age of a year and a half, when for the first time children can intentionally produce discrete pitches. It is as if diffuse babbling had been supplanted by stressed words.




During the next year, children make habitual use of discrete pitches, chiefly using seconds, minor thirds, and major thirds. By the age of two or two and a half, children are beginning to notice and learn songs sung by others. RГ©vГ©sz is quite sure that the lalling melodies produced by children in their second year are already conditioned by songs which they have picked up from the environment or by other music to which they have been exposed.


If lalling melodies are in fact dependent upon musical input from the environment, it is obviously inadmissible to suggest that music itself developed from infant lalling.

Ellen Dissanayake, who teaches at the New School for Social Research in New York and who has lived in Sri Lanka, Nigeria, and Papua New Guinea, persuasively argues that music originated in the ritualized verbal exchanges which go on between mothers and babies during the first year of life. In this type of interchange, the most important components of language are those which are concerned with emotional expressiveness rather than with conveying factual information. Metre, rhythm, pitch, volume, lengthening of vowel sounds, tone of voice, and other variables are all characteristic of a type of utterance which has much in common with poetry. She writes:

No matter how important lexico-grammatical meaning eventually becomes, the human brain is first organized or programmed to respond to emotional/intonational aspects of the human voice.




Since infants in the womb react both to unstructured noise and to music with movements which their mothers can feel, it seems likely that auditory perception prompts the baby’s first realization that there is something beyond itself to which it is nevertheless related. After birth, vocal interchange between mother and infant continues to reinforce mutual attachment, although vision soon becomes equally important. The crooning, cooing tones and rhythms which most mothers use when addressing babies are initially more significant in cementing the relationship between them than the words which accompany these vocalizations. This type of communication continues throughout childhood. If, for example, I play with a child of eighteen months who can only utter a few words, we can communicate in all kinds of ways which require no words at all. It is probable that both of us will make noises: we will chuckle, grunt, and make the kinds of sounds which accompany chasing and hiding games. We may establish, at least for the time being, a relationship which is quite intimate, but nothing which passes between us needs to be expressed in words. Moreover, although relationships between adults usually involve verbal interchange, they do not always do so. We can establish relationships with people who do not speak the same language, and our closest physical relationships need not make use of words, although they usually do so. Many people regard physical intimacy with another person as impossible to verbalize, as deeper than anything which words can convey.

Linguistic analysts distinguish prosodic features of speech from syntactic: stress, pitch, volume, emphasis, and any other features conveying emotional significance, as opposed to grammatical structure or literal meaning. There are many similarities between prosodic communication and music. Infants respond to the rhythm, pitch, intensity, and timbre of the mother’s voice; all of which are part of music.

Such elements are manifestly important in poetry, but they can also be in prose. As a modern example, we can consider James Joyce’s experiments with the sound of words which are particularly evident in his later works.

But even in his earliest stories the meaning of a word did not necessarily depend on the object it denoted but on the sonority and intonation of the speaker’s voice; for even then Joyce addressed the listener rather than the reader.




It will be recalled that Joyce had an excellent voice and considered becoming a professional singer. He described using the technical resources of music in writing the Sirens chapter of Ulysses. Joyce portrays Molly Bloom as comprehending the hurdy-gurdy boy without understanding a word of his language.

One popular Victorian notion was that music gradually developed from adult speech through a separation of the prosodic elements from the syntactic. William Pole wrote in The Philosophy of Music:

The earliest forms of music probably arose out of the natural inflections of the voice in speaking. It would be very easy to sustain the sound of the voice on one particular note, and to follow this by another sustained note at a higher or lower pitch. This, however rude, would constitute music.

We may further easily conceive that several persons might be led to join in a rude chant of this kind. If one acted as leader, others, guided by the natural instinct of their ears, would imitate him, and thus we might get a combined unison song.




Dr Pole’s original lectures, on which his book is based, were given in 1877, and bear the impress of their time, with frequent references to savages, barbarians, and the like. Although The Philosophy of Music is still useful, Pole shows little appreciation of the fact that music amongst pre-literate peoples might be as complex as our own. Twenty years earlier, in 1857, Herbert Spencer had advanced a similar theory of the origins of music, which was published in Fraser’s Magazine.








Spencer noted that when speech became emotional the sounds produced spanned a greater tonal range and thus came closer to music. He therefore proposed that the sounds of excited speech became gradually uncoupled from the words which accompanied them, and so came to exist as separate sound entities, forming a �language’ of their own.

Darwin came to an opposite conclusion. He supposed that music preceded speech and arose as an elaboration of mating calls. He observed that male animals which possess a vocal apparatus generally use their voices most when under the influence of sexual feelings. A sound which was originally used to attract the attention of a potential mate might gradually be modified, elaborated, and intensified.

The suspicion does not appear improbable that the progenitors of man, either the males or the females, or both sexes, before they had acquired the power of expressing their mutual love in articulate language, endeavoured to charm each other with musical notes and rhythm. The impassioned orator, bard, or musician, when with his various tones and cadences he excites the strongest emotions in his hearers, little suspects that he uses the same means by which, at an extremely remote period, his half-human ancestors aroused each other’s ardent passions during their mutual courtship and rivalry.




GГ©za RГ©vГ©sz reproduced another theory of the origin of music, which was first advanced by Carl Stumpf, although RГ©vГ©sz makes no direct acknowledgement to this earlier author. It is based on the perception that the singing voice has greater carrying power than the speaking voice. Early man, RГ©vГ©sz supposes, when wishing to communicate with his fellows at a distance, discovered that he could do so more effectively by using a singing voice rather than a speaking voice. RГ©vГ©sz affirms that giving vent to loud, resounding signals produces pleasure, and remembers his own delight in making his voice ring out into wide open spaces. He assumes that such calls can pass over into song quite easily. In other words, he tries to derive all music from the yodel.

It is true that musical sounds are used by pre-literate people for communication at a distance, and that wind instruments of considerable carrying power have been invented for this purpose. Allegedly, the Mura Indians of the Amazon communicate with each other across the great rivers in a special musical language which they play on a three-holed flageolet.


Signalling by means of drums and horns is a widespread practice in Africa and elsewhere. Even so, communication using musical sounds is not itself music, and there is no direct evidence that such signals became transmuted into music.

Révész’s theory also fails to account for the rhythmic element in music, which ethnomusicologists find to be fundamentally important. Neither Révész nor Darwin nor Spencer are able to tell us why music became attractive to early men or their descendants.




Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was not only a revolutionary social theorist but also an accomplished composer, argued that musical sounds accompanied or preceded speech as we know it. In his biography of Rousseau, Maurice Cranston recounts from the Essai sur l’origine des langues Rousseau’s theory that

men first spoke to each other in order to express their passions, and that at the early stages of human society there was no distinct speech apart from song. Earliest languages, he suggests, were chanted; they were melodic and poetic rather than prosaic and practical. He also claims that it was men’s passions rather than their needs which prompted their first utterances, for passions would drive men towards others, whereas the necessities of life would impel each to seek his satisfaction alone. �It is not hunger or thirst, but love, hatred, pity and anger which drew from men their first vocal utterances.’ Primitive men sing to one another in order to express their feelings before they come to speak to one another in order to express their thoughts.




John Blacking claims that singing and dancing preceded the development of verbal interchange.

There is evidence that early human species were able to dance and sing several hundred thousand years before homo sapiens sapiens emerged with the capacity for speech as we now know it.




It may even have been the case, as the eighteenth-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico suggested, that human beings danced before they walked. He also thought that poetry came before prose, and that men naturally embodied their feelings. attitudes, and thoughts in symbols. The metaphorical use of language, according to Vico, preceded the literal or scientific; and he is not the only philosopher to think this. Heidegger wrote:

Poetry proper is never merely a higher mode (melos) of everyday language. It is rather the reverse: everyday language is a forgotten and therefore used-up poem, from which there hardly resounds a call any longer.




The objective language generally used by scientists and philosophers, which is concerned with conceptual thought and with demonstration and proof rather than with evocation, and which usually avoids metaphor as far as possible, is quite different from the �musical’ language used by poets, by the pre-literate, or even by those who are not highly educated in the Western tradition. �The magnet loves iron’ is not a scientific explanation of magnetism, but is a naturally anthropomorphic way of speaking found the world over.

A world in which men naturally talk of the lips of a vase, the teeth of a plough, the mouth of a river, a neck of land, handfuls of one thing, the heart of another, veins of minerals, bowels of the earth, murmuring waves, whistling winds and smiling skies, groaning tables and weeping willows


– such a world must be deeply and systematically different from any in which such phrases are felt, even remotely, to be metaphorical, as contrasted with so-called literal speech. This is one of Vico’s most revolutionary discoveries.




As Isaiah Berlin points out, all the metaphors listed above are taken from the human body. When human beings looked upon the external world and tried to describe it, it was natural that they did so in terms of their own subjective, physical experience. The language of science had not yet become dissociated from the language of poetry and music, and the notion that the phenomena of the external world could only be understood if anthropomorphism was excluded had not yet developed. The behaviourist idea that human beings can only properly be comprehended when their actions are observed with scientific objectivity rather than assessed by means of empathic understanding was far in the future. Vico would have agreed with John Blacking in supposing that a people’s music is one important key to understanding their culture and their relationships.

In ancient Greece, which is usually considered to be the birthplace of Western civilization, music was both ubiquitous and supremely important. Although we know little about how Greek music actually sounded, classical scholars refer to it as �an art which was woven into the very texture of their lives’.




As in our culture, elaborate instrumental skills were the preserve of professional musicians; but the Greeks considered that instruction in singing and in playing the lyre should be a regular part of education for every freeborn citizen. Music was an important feature of domestic celebrations, feasts, and religious rituals, and musical competitions were held alongside athletic contests. Poetry and music went hand in hand: the poetry of Homer, for example, was originally recited to the accompaniment of the lyre.

For the Greeks, music and poetry were inseparable. The poet and the composer were frequently the same person, so that often words and music were created together. The Greek word melos indicated both lyric poetry and the music to which a poem is set: it is the origin of our word �melody’. It is worth noting that, in spite of its mathematical connections, music accompanied the subjective language of poetry rather than the objective language of intellectual argument. We can imagine The Odyssey being chanted to musical accompaniment; we cannot imagine The Republic being similarly treated.

First of all, early poetry was song. The difference between song and speech is a matter of discontinuities of pitch. In ordinary speech, we are constantly changing pitch, even in the pronunciation of a single syllable. But in song, the change of pitch is discrete and discontinuous. Speech reels around all over a certain portion of an octave (in relaxed speech about a fifth). Song steps from note to note on strict and delimited feet over a more extended range.

Modern poetry is a hybrid. It has the metrical feet of song with the pitch glissandos of speech. But ancient poetry is much closer to song. Accents were not by intensity stressed as in our ordinary speech, but by pitch. In ancient Greece, this pitch is thought to have been precisely the interval of a fifth above the ground note of the poem, so that on the notes of our scale, dactyls would go GCC, GCC, with no extra emphasis on the G. Moreover, the three extra accents, acute, circumflex, and grave, were, as their notations , , , imply, a rising pitch within the syllable, a rising and falling on the same syllable, and a falling pitch respectively. The result was a poetry sung like plainsong with various auditory ornamentation that gave it beautiful variety.




The Greek word for this is . It cannot easily be translated; for it signifies musically determined verse, or music and poetry in one. Whereas modern Western verse is primarily linguistic, words which may or may not be set to music,

The ancient Greek verse line behaved differently. Here the musical rhythm was contained within the language itself. The musical-rhythmic structure was completely determined by the language. There was no room for an independent musical-rhythmic setting; nothing could be added or changed.




Gradually, the musical component shrank, to be replaced by a system of accents; that is, by dynamic stresses which bore little relation to the original rhythm and which were not intoned at different pitches. Thrasybulos Georgiades, from whose book Music and Language I have just quoted, thinks that the original was replaced by prose and music as separate forms. Linguistically determined poetry followed, with verse rhythms governed by stress rather than pitch. It then became possible to set both prose and poetry to music in the ways familiar to us. So language and music could be recombined where this was thought appropriate, as, for example, in the Christian liturgy; but only after their initial unity had been disrupted and their independence from each other had been established.

Rousseau may well have been right in thinking that there was no distinct speech apart from song at the beginning of history. The psychoanalyst Anton Ehrenzweig, himself an accomplished musician, wrote:

It is not unreasonable to speculate that speech and music have descended from a common origin in a primitive language which was neither speaking nor singing, but something of both. Later this primeval language would have split into different branches; music would have retained the articulation mainly by pitch (scale) and duration (rhythm), while language chose the articulation mainly by tone colour (vowels and consonants). Language moreover happened to become the vehicle of rational thought and so underwent further influences. Music has become a symbolic language of the unconscious mind whose symbolism we shall never be able to fathom.




If song and speech were initially more closely linked, and then became separated, it is understandable that the differences in their functions became accentuated. One can imagine that, as prose became less metaphorical, less anthropomorphic, more objective, and more precise, people would use this kind of speech for conveying information and expounding ideas, whilst reserving poetic and musical communication for religious and other rituals. However, even the speech used by scientists and mathematicians to explain and convey their ideas is never entirely devoid of varieties of tone, emphasis, and pitch. If this were the case it would be so monotonous that no one would listen to it.

Today, we are accustomed to listening to instrumental music which has no necessary connection with the human voice or with public ceremonies. We have also developed language to the point at which it can be used for scientific description or for conceptual thought without prosody, metaphor, or the expression of subjective feeling. Seen from the perspective of history, these changes are recent. I think that they are also connected. If we consider together the ideas of Vico, Rousseau, and Blacking, we can perceive that language and music were originally more closely joined, and that it makes sense to think of music as deriving from a subjective, emotional need for communication with other human beings which is prior to the need for conveying objective information or exchanging ideas.

Ethnomusicologists generally emphasize the collective importance of music in the cultures they study. There are a number of cultures which, like that of ancient Greece, do not distinguish music as a separate activity from those which it invariably accompanies. Singing, dancing, the recitation of poetry, and religious chant are so inseparably linked with music that there is no word for music as such. Indeed, it may be difficult for the observer to determine whether a particular activity includes music or does not. Ceremonial speech may, as in the case of Greek poetry, include rhythmic and melodic patterns which are so much part of it that words and music cannot really be differentiated.

The origins of music may be lost in obscurity but, from its earliest beginnings, it seems to have played an essential part in social interaction. Music habitually accompanies religious and other ceremonies. Some anthropologists have speculated that vocal music may have begun as a special way of communicating with the supernatural; a way which shared many of the features of ordinary speech, but which was also distinctive.




Stravinsky would have agreed with this suggestion. In his Charles Eliot Norton lectures delivered at Harvard in 1939–40 he unequivocally affirms that �the profound meaning of music and its essential aim … is to promote a communion, a union of man with his fellow man and with the Supreme Being.’




In pre-literate societies the arts are usually intimately connected with rituals and ceremonies which are dissociated from the routines of ordinary day-to-day living. As Ellen Dissanayake has cogently observed, the arts are concerned with �making special’; that is, with underlining and rendering ritualized forms of behaviour.


In ritual, words are used metaphorically and symbolically and often reunited with music, which still further charges them with meaning. Raymond Firth, the anthropologist who wrote with such insight about Tikopia and other Pacific communities, states

Even songs, as a rule, are not composed simply to be listened to for pleasure. They have work to do, to serve as funeral dirges, as accompaniments to dancing, or to serenade a lover.




Pre-literate societies have very little idea of the individual as a separate entity. They regard the individual as indissolubly part of the family, and the family as part of the larger society. Ritual and aesthetic activities are integral parts of social existence, not superstructures or luxuries which only the rich can afford. Amongst the Venda of the Northern Transvaal, music plays an important part in initiation ceremonies, work, dancing, religious worship, political protest – in fact in every collective activity. Especially important is tshikona, the national dance. This music can only be produced when

twenty or more men blow differently tuned pipes with a precision that depends on holding one’s own part as well as blending with others, and at least four women play different drums in polyrhythmic harmony.




This description disposes of the notion that the music of rural African societies is less developed or less complex than our own: it is simply different. Tshikona is highly valued. It raises the spirits of everyone who participates. Blacking thinks this is because its performance generates the highest degree of individuality in the largest possible community; a combination of opposites rarely achieved. Playing in a modern Western orchestra or singing in a large choir may be enjoyable and uplifting, but neither activity provides much scope for individuality.

Music contributes both to the continuity and the stability of a culture whether pre-literate or not. That ardent collector of folksongs, BГ©la BartГіk, deploring the changes brought about by the First World War and realizing that the type of music produced by a particular culture is inseparable from the nature of that culture, wrote:

I had the great privilege to be a close observer of an as yet homogeneous, but unfortunately rapidly disappearing social structure, expressing itself in music.




The triumph of the West and the case of modern communication have caused the disappearance of different musics, as they have also diminished the number of spoken languages.

John A. Sloboda, a psychologist at the University of Keele, argues that pre-literate cultures may have even more need of music than our own.

Society requires organization for its survival. In our own society we have many complex artefacts which help us to externalize and objectify the organizations we need and value. Primitive cultures have few artefacts, and the organization of the society must be expressed to a greater extent through transient actions and the way people interact with each other. Music, perhaps, provides a unique mnemonic framework within which humans can express, by the temporal organization of sound and gesture, the structure of their knowledge and of social relations. Songs and rhythmically organized poems and sayings form the major repository of knowledge in non-literate cultures. This seems to be because such organized sequences are much easier to remember than the type of prose which literate societies use in books.




Johann Gottfried Herder, supposedly the father of European nationalism, had made a similar observation in the eighteenth century.

All unpolished peoples sing and act; they sing about what they do and thus sing histories. Their songs are the archives of their people, the treasury of their science and religion.




The music of the Australian aboriginals remained free from outside influences, and unknown to the West, until the arrival of the British two centuries ago.

Since all their knowledge, beliefs, and customs, upon whose strict preservation through exact ritual observance the constant renewal of nature (and hence their own survival) was held to depend, were enshrined in and transmitted by their sacred song-cycles, it is reasonable to think that theirs is the oldest extant, still practised music in the world. Since they had no form of writing or notation, oral tradition was the only means of retaining and inculcating their lore, and music therefore provided the essential mnemonic medium. As such it was invested with the utmost power, secrecy, and value.




Bruce Chatwin, in his fascinating book The Songlines, demonstrates how songs served to divide up the land, and constituted title-deeds to territory. Each totemic ancestor was believed to have sung as he walked and to have defined the features of the landscape in so doing. Song was the means by which the different aspects of the world were brought into consciousness, and therefore remembered. As Chatwin observed, aboriginals used songs in the same way as birds to affirm territorial boundaries. Each individual inherited some verses of the Ancestor’s song, which also determined the limits of a particular area. The contour of the melody of the song described the contour of the land with which it was associated. As Chatwin’s informant told him: �Music is a memory bank for finding one’s way about the world.’




When the tribe met to sing their own song-cycle on ritual occasions, song-owners had to sing their particular verses in the right order. Songs also transcended language barriers and constituted a means of communication between individuals who could not communicate in other ways.

When a culture is under threat, music may become even more significant. Bruno Nettl, Professor of Musicology and Anthropology at the University of Illinois, discussing the music of the Flathead Indians, suggests that

the uses of music in Flathead culture are mainly to accompany other activities, perhaps in order to validate them as done in a properly Flathead fashion … Music supports tribal integrity when many peoples, whites and other Indian tribes, because of the onset of modernization and Westernization, come into a position of influencing the Flathead.




E. O. Wilson, the Harvard socio-biologist, writes that, in primitive cultures,

Singing and dancing serve to draw groups together, direct the emotions of the people, and prepare them for joint action.




One joint action for which sounds produced by musical instruments may help to prepare people is that of warfare. Attacks upon enemies are often initiated by blowing horns and trumpets which both arouses the aggressiveness of the attackers and is supposed to terrify the enemy.

The Muras and other tribes of the Orinoco region performed wild overtures on horns before commencing their attack; the Samoans blew conch-shells, and the savages of Guiana began their advance with a screech of horns and trumpets.




Such sounds are also used to frighten away evil spirits.

Music can sometimes symbolize rebellion. It may be permissible to express anti-government attitudes in songs, the words of which would invite arrest if they appeared in a newspaper article. Under some regimes, night-club satirists are given a licence denied to the ordinary citizen. The song �Lilliburlero’ became an epitome of anti-Catholic sentiments, and is said to have contributed to the revolution of 1688 and to the subsequent defeat of James II at the Battle of the Boyne.

Continuity and stability are served by tunes which everybody knows; but music can also create new patterns of joint experience. Blacking gives examples of African drum patterns which when combined and performed by several players can create new cultural products.

Through musical interaction, two people create forms that are greater than the sum of their parts, and make for themselves experiences of empathy that would be unlikely to occur in ordinary social intercourse.




The mnemonic power of music is still evident in modern culture. Many of us remember the words of songs and poems more accurately than we can remember prose. That music facilitates memory has been objectively confirmed by the study of mentally retarded children who can recall more material after it is given to them in a song than after it is read to them as a story.




Some people who are primarily interested in classical music are disturbed to find that they recall the words and lyrics of popular songs more easily than they remember the music which means most to them. I think this is because popular songs are simple, endlessly repeated and difficult to avoid. This also accounts for their nostalgic quality. Anniversary �evenings out’ are seldom accompanied by the �Eroica’. Repetition can make any type of music memorable. Professional musicians, especially conductors and instrumental soloists, are required to remember huge quantities of classical music, and can usually do so without too much difficulty because they have studied it and played it repeatedly.

In Western societies the importance of music as a means of defining and identifying a culture has declined, but it has not disappeared. Particular pieces of music continue to be associated with particular societies, and come to represent them in the same way as a national flag. �They are playing our tune’ is a phrase which can have a much wider significance than our habitual reference of it to the courtship memories of a mated couple. In Britain we never refer to �God Save the Queen’ as �our tune’; nevertheless it symbolizes the structure of our society and the allegiance which is still expected of us. It is ironic but not inexplicable that in the USA the same tune is used for �My Country, �tis of Thee’. To play the hymn �Abide With Me’ at football matches is in dubious taste; but those who join in singing it feel an enhanced sense of joint participation, even if they do not believe the words which they are singing, or subscribe to the Christian beliefs which the hymn expresses.

It is not surprising that Church leaders have doubted whether the feelings which music arouses are genuinely religious. Music’s power to fan the flame of piety may be more apparent than real; more concerned with enhancing group feeling within the congregation than with promoting the individual’s relation with God. St Augustine reveals that he was so entranced by the pleasures of sound that he feared that his intellect was sometimes paralysed by the gratification of his senses. On the other hand, the beauty of music could also aid the recovery of faith.

So I waver between the danger that lies in gratifying the sense and the benefits which, as I know, can accrue from singing. Without committing myself to an irrevocable opinion, I am inclined to approve of the custom of singing in church, in order that by indulging the ears weaker spirits may be inspired with feelings of devotion. Yet when I find the singing itself more moving than the truth which it conveys. I confess that this is a grievous sin, and at those times I would prefer not to hear the singer.




It will never be possible to establish the origins of human music with any certainty; however, it seems probable that music developed from the prosodic exchanges between mother and infant which foster the bond between them. From this, it became a form of communication between adult human beings. As the capacity for speech and conceptual thought developed, music became less important as a way of conveying information, but retained its significance as a way of communicating feelings and cementing bonds between individuals, especially in group situations. Today, we are so accustomed to considering the response of the individual to music that we are liable to forget that, for most of its history, music has been predominantly a group activity. Music began by serving communal purposes, of which religious ritual and warfare are two examples. It has continued to be used as an accompaniment to collective activities; as an adjunct to social ceremonies and public occasions. We share these functions of music with pre-literate cultures. In our society, one cannot imagine a Coronation or a State funeral taking place in the absence of music. We know less than we would like about what musical activities went on in the past in private houses; but it is important to recall that the modern concert, in which instrumental music is performed in a public concert hall as a separate entity unaccompanied by voices and in the absence of any ceremony, was not a prominent feature of musical life in England until the late seventeenth century. Since then, music as a distinct form in its own right has continued to grow in importance. During the same period, the performer has become more sharply differentiated from the listener. The individual listener’s response to music is a principal theme of this book.

*For example, Haydn’s The Creation, Beethoven’s �Pastoral’ Symphony, Delius’s On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring, Strauss’s Sinfonia Domestica.

*Pole makes passing reference to this in one footnote, but makes no acknowledgement to Spencer.

*All these examples are taken directly from Vico’s Sanza Nova.




CHAPTER II MUSIC, BRAIN AND BODY (#ulink_52c4a727-8027-5334-a642-b46996479863)


Human attitudes and specifically human ways of thinking about the world are the results of dance and song.

JOHN BLACKING




Music brings about similar physical responses in different people at the same time. This is why it is able to draw groups together and create a sense of unity. It does not matter that a dirge or funeral march may be appreciated in a different way by a musician and by an unsophisticated listener. They will certainly be sharing some aspects of the same physical experience at the same moment, as well as sharing the emotions aroused by the funeral itself. Music has the effect of intensifying or underlining the emotion which a particular event calls forth, by simultaneously co-ordinating the emotions of a group of people.

It must be emphasized that making music is an activity which is rooted in the body. Blacking believes that �feeling with the body’ is as close as anyone can get to resonating with another person.

Many, if not all, of music’s essential processes can be found in the constitution of the human body and in patterns of interaction of bodies in society … When I lived with the Venda, I began to understand how music can become an intricate part of the development of mind, body, and harmonious social relationships.




It is generally agreed that music causes increased arousal in those who are interested in it and who therefore listen to it with some degree of concentration. By arousal, I mean a condition of heightened alertness, awareness, interest, and excitement: a generally enhanced state of being. This is at its minimum in sleep and at its maximum when human beings are experiencing powerful emotions like intense grief, rage, or sexual excitement. Extreme states of arousal are usually felt as painful or unpleasant; but milder degrees of arousal are eagerly sought as life-enhancing. We all crave some degree of excitement in our lives; and if stimuli from the environment are lacking, we seek them out if we are free to do so. Not all music is designed to cause arousal. Satie wrote music designed only to provide a comforting background. This has been succeeded by the kind of �wallpaper’ music played in elevators, which soothes some people and provokes fury in others. However, this is an exception and not the kind of listening being discussed at this point. Lullabies may send children to sleep; but we listen to Chopin’s Berceuse or the Wiegenlieder of Brahms and Schubert with rapt attention.

Arousal manifests itself in various physiological changes, many of which can be measured. The electro-encephalogram shows changes in the amplitude and frequency of the brain waves which it records. During arousal, the electrical resistance of the skin is diminished; the pupil of the eye dilates; the respiratory rate may become either faster or slower, or else become irregular. Blood-pressure tends to rise, as does the heart rate. There is an increase in muscular tone, which may be accompanied by physical restlessness. In general, the changes are those which one would expect in an animal preparing for action; whether it be flight, fight, or mating. They are the same changes recorded by the polygraph or �lie detector’ which demonstrates arousal in the form of anxiety, but which, contrary to popular belief, cannot prove guilt or innocence.

Recordings of muscle �action potentials’ on another instrument, the electro-myograph, show marked increases in electrical activity in the leg muscles whilst listening to music, even when the subject has been told not to move. In the concert hall, the physical restlessness induced by arousal is often insufficiently controlled. Some people feel impelled to beat time with their feet or drum with their fingers, thereby disturbing other listeners. There are tracings recording the increase in Herbert von Karajan’s pulse-rate while conducting Beethoven’s Overture, Leonora No. 3. Interestingly, his pulse-rate showed the greatest increase during those passages which most moved him emotionally, and not during those in which he was making the greatest physical effort. It is also worth noting that recordings of his pulse-rate whilst piloting and landing a jet aircraft showed much smaller fluctuations than when he was conducting.


Music is said to soothe the savage breast, but it may also powerfully excite it.

What seems certain is that there is a closer relation between hearing and emotional arousal than there is between seeing and emotional arousal. Why else would the makers of moving pictures insist on using music? We are so used to hearing music throughout a film that a short period of silence has a shock effect; and movie-makers sometimes use silence as a precursor to some particularly horrific incident. But a love scene in a film is almost inconceivable without music. Even in the days of silent films a pianist had to be hired to intensify and bring out the emotional significance of the different episodes. A friend of mine, visiting the Grand Canyon for the first time, found himself disappointed at his lack of response to this awesome sight. After a while, he realized that he had seen the Grand Canyon many times on the cinema screen and never without music. Because his sight of the real thing lacked such musical accompaniment, his arousal level was less intense than it had been in the cinema.

Seeing a wounded animal or suffering person who is silent may produce little emotional response in the observer. But once they start to scream, the onlooker is usually powerfully moved. At an emotional level, there is something �deeper’ about hearing than seeing; and something about hearing other people which fosters human relationships even more than seeing them. Hence, people who become profoundly deaf often seem to be even more cut off from others than those who are blind. Certainly, they are more likely to become suspicious of their nearest and dearest. Deafness, more than blindness, is apt to provoke paranoid delusions of being disparaged, deceived, and cheated.

Why is hearing so deeply associated with emotion and with our relationship with our fellow human beings? Is there any connection with the fact that, at the beginning of life, we can hear before we can see? Our first experience of hearing takes place in the womb, long before we leap into the dangerous world and begin to look at it. David Burrows, who teaches music at New York University, writes:

An unborn child may startle in the womb at the sound of a door slamming shut. The rich warm cacophony of the womb has been recorded: the mother’s heartbeat and breathing are among the earliest indications babies have of the existence of a world beyond their own skin.




A dark world is frightening. Nightmares and infantile fears coalesce with rational anxieties when we come home at night through unlit streets. But a silent world is even more terrifying. Is no one there, nothing going on at all? We seldom experience total silence, except in the artificial conditions of those special rooms in psychological laboratories in which darkness is combined with sound-proofing to exclude input to our senses as completely as possible. As Burrows points out, we are dependent on background sound of which we are hardly conscious for our sense of life continuing. A silent world is a dead world. If �earliest’ and �deepest’ are in fact related, as psychoanalysts have tended to assume, the priority of hearing in the emotional hierarchy is not entirely surprising; but I think it unlikely that this is the whole explanation.

The details of the physiological responses outlined above need not detain us. We have all experienced them, and we are all aware that the condition of arousal can be exciting or distressing according to its intensity. The important point to recognize in this context is that, with a few exceptions, the physical state of arousal accompanying different emotional states is remarkably similar. Sexual arousal and aggressive arousal have in common fourteen physiological changes. The Kinsey team found that there were only four respects in which the physiology of anger differed from the physiology of sex. Although there are rather more physiological differences between the state of fear and the states of anger and sexual arousal, fear still shares nine of the same items of physiological change with the other two, including increase in pulse-rate, increase in blood-pressure, and increase in muscular tension.




It is easy to appreciate that we enjoy becoming sexually aroused; less easy to acknowledge that we like being frightened, and still less easy to accept that we may welcome the excitement of being angry. But many people enjoy the fear induced by ghost stories or horror films; and some will admit that �justified’ wrath against an enemy is exhilarating. The fact is that human beings are so constituted that they crave arousal just as much as they crave its opposite, sleep. Whilst we may deliberately and reasonably affirm that we want our morning newspaper to contain no accounts of disasters, there is no doubt that tragedy is stimulating, as the proprietors of the tabloids know only too well.

One of Freud’s cardinal errors was to suppose that what human beings most wanted was a state of tranquillity following the discharge of all tensions. He treated powerful emotions as an intrusion, whether they were instigated by stimuli from without or caused by instinctual impulses from within. For Freud, the main function of the central nervous system was to see that the tensions caused by such emotions were discharged, either directly or indirectly, as soon as possible. He called this dominating feature of mental life the Nirvana principle. In Freud’s scheme, there is no place for �stimulus hunger’; that is, for the need which human beings have to seek out emotional and intellectual stimuli when they are placed in a monotonous environment or when they have been in a state of tranquillity for so long that they have become bored.




Freud died in 1939. If he had been alive in the 1950s and 1960s, he would have become aware of research into the effects of shielding human beings from as many incoming stimuli as possible. Although Nirvana-like bliss and relief from tension can sometimes be achieved by exposing people to short periods of voluntary isolation in the sound-proof, light-proof rooms already referred to, longer periods of solitary confinement usually lead to desperate efforts to find something stimulating which will relieve monotony. Human beings suffer from stimulus hunger as well as from stimulus overload; and those who have experienced months or years alone in prison cells find that doing mental arithmetic, recalling or writing poetry, or other mental activities, are absolutely necessary if they are not to sink into apathy or despair.




It seems obvious that one reason why people seek to listen to or to participate in music is because music causes arousal, which may be intense at times, but which is seldom unbearably so. When, in A la Recherche du temps perdu, Mme Verdurin protests at her husband’s suggestion that the pianist shall play a particular sonata in F sharp on the grounds that it will make her ill, we do not believe her, and Proust did not intend us to do so.

�No, no, no, not my sonata!’ she screamed, �I don’t want to be made to cry until I get a cold in the head, and neuralgia all down my face, like last time. Thanks very much, I don’t intend to repeat that performance. You’re all so very kind and considerate, it’s easy to see that none of you will have to stay in bed for a week.’




Every concert-goer is familiar with the histrionic member of the audience who demonstrates his or her intense sensibilities by sighing, groaning, or clapping ecstatically; and who then looks around with rolling eyes to make sure that these antics have been noticed.

This is not to deny that music can provoke intense, genuine emotional arousal, from ecstatic happiness to floods of tears. This does not happen with everyone. The unmusical person, as one would expect, is less physiologically aroused than the musical person. Even in people to whom music means a great deal, responses vary with their mood. One would not expect a depressed person to respond to music as vigorously as an elated person; although music has been known to break through the carapace of melancholy and enable the depressed person to regain access to the feelings from which he had been alienated.

There is another aspect of arousal which is relevant to music. There is some measure of agreement about the nature of certain well-known musical works, whether they are jolly, uplifting, humorous, martial, impressive, and so on. No one calls Rossini’s overture to The Barber of Seville tragic; no one thinks of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony as merely pretty. Roger Brown, one of the world’s experts on the development of language in children, has also studied reactions to music. His research has demonstrated that there is widespread consensus between listeners about the emotional content of different pieces of music even when these pieces are unknown to, or not identified by, the different listeners. That is, whether a piece of music is considered poignant, wistful, elegiac, boisterous, rustic and so on, does not depend upon previous knowledge of the piece in question, or upon identifying the context in which it was composed.




But it is simplistic and inaccurate to suppose that the emotions expressed in the music – sadness, joy, or whatever other emotion seems displayed – are necessarily those aroused in the listener. Peter Kivy, author of an influential, award-winning book on music, The Corded Shell, repeatedly affirms:

We must separate entirely the claim that music can arouse emotion in us from the claim that music is sometimes sad or angry or fearful … a piece of music might move us (in part) because it is expressive of sadness, but it does not move us by making us sad.




Othello’s suicide is profoundly moving; but it does not make us feel suicidal. What moves us is the way in which Shakespeare (and Verdi) made sense out of tragedy by making it part of an artistic whole. As Nietzsche realized, even tragedy is an affirmation of life.

In spite of Roger Brown’s demonstration that the general emotional tone of a piece of music will probably be similarly perceived by different listeners, there will always be disputes about specific details when criticism is carried further. This does not imply that one listener is more or less perceptive than the other. Both may have experienced arousal; and both will therefore agree that the music has had a powerful effect upon them. It is natural enough, given the varying backgrounds from which listeners come, and the very different life-experiences to which they have been exposed, that what they read or project into any given piece of music may also be rather different. What is interesting is that there is as much consensus as there appears to be.

The idea that music causes a general state of arousal rather than specific emotions partly explains why it has been used to accompany such a wide variety of human activities, including marching, serenading, worship, marriages, funerals, and manual work. Music structures time. By imposing order, music ensures that the emotions aroused by a particular event peak at the same moment. It does not matter that the kind of emotions excited in different individuals may vary. What matters is the general state of arousal and its simultaneity. Because of its capacity to intensify crowd feeling, music has a power akin to that of the orator.

Ellen Dissanayake, in the paper from which I quoted in the last chapter, believes that the importance of physical movement as a constituent of musical behaviour has been underestimated. She points out that children up to the age of four or five find it difficult to sing without moving their hands and feet. The close relationship between music and bodily movement is not confined to pre-literate societies. The composers Roger Sessions and Stravinsky have both stressed the connection with the body; and Stravinsky not only composed superb music for ballet, but also insisted that instrumentalists be visually perceived whilst playing. This may be one reason why so many musicians dislike recorded performance. They want to see the players’ movements as well as hear the sounds they make.

Stravinsky, in old age, asked:

What is the �human measure’ in music? … My �human measure’ is not only possible, but also exact. It is, first of all, absolutely physical, and it is immediate. I am made bodily ill, for example, by sounds electronically spayed for overtone removal. To me they are a castration threat.




There can be no doubt that seeing the movements which musicians make during live performance is, for many people, an important reason for going to concerts as opposed to listening to music at home on radio or disc. Some of the greatest conductors, like Richard Strauss and Pierre Monteux, kept their physical movements to a minimum; others are more flamboyant. But some listeners confess that their appreciation of a particular work is increased by observing the gestures of a conductor.

There is pleasure to be gained from seeing the co-ordinated bowing of the various string sections, just as there is from seeing other examples of group co-ordination, like gymnastic displays. Virtuoso instrumentalists not only play music which is technically inaccessible to the amateur, but also give people the same sort of pleasure which they gain from seeing a great athlete or juggler in action. This may not be directly connected with the appreciation of music itself; but it does underline the physicality of musical performance.

Debussy wrote:

The attraction of the virtuoso for the public is very like that of the circus for the crowd. There is always a hope that something dangerous may happen.




This view was shared by the violinist Jascha Heifetz who claimed that every critic was eagerly awaiting an occasion on which his impeccable technique would let him down.

Because music affects people physically and also structures time, it is sometimes used when a group of people are performing repetitive physical actions. Some songs are working songs which alleviate boredom and co-ordinate the actions of threshing, pounding, reaping, and the like. It has been suggested that music originated because rhythmically organized work was discovered to be more efficient; but this sounds like a notion derived from a Protestant, capitalist ethic transposed backward in time. Even if Vico was wrong in supposing that dancing preceded walking, dancing probably antedated organized work; and the rhythmic movements of the dance are usually linked with music.

Our modern equivalent to the use of music in co-ordinating agricultural labour is the provision of music in factories. Opinion is divided as to its effects. Judging from its use in agriculture, one might expect that music would improve performance of the routine operations which are common in factory work. Repetitive movements are less tedious when synchronized with musical rhythms. The provision of music is certainly popular amongst factory workers. However, the heightening of morale is not necessarily accompanied by increase in output. Whilst music probably enhances the performance of routine tasks, especially those in which repetitive physical actions prevail, it tends to interfere with the performance of non-repetitive actions which need thinking about. For example, there is evidence suggesting that music increases the number of errors in typing.




The order which music brings to our experience is rhythmic, melodic and also harmonic. As the great violinist Yehudi Menuhin puts it:

Music creates order out of chaos; for rhythm imposes unanimity upon the divergent; melody imposes continuity upon the disjointed, and harmony imposes compatibility upon the incongruous.




The effect which music has upon repetitive physical actions is predominantly rhythmic. Rhythm is rooted in the body in a way which does not apply so strikingly to melody and harmony. Breathing, walking, the heartbeat, and sexual intercourse are all rhythmical aspects of our physical being. In some pre-literate cultures rhythm is so highly developed that Western musicians cannot reproduce its complexities. Grosvenor Cooper and Leonard Meyer, who were both professors of Music at the University of Chicago, begin their book The Rhythmic Structure of Music by writing:

To study rhythm is to study all of music. Rhythm both organizes, and is itself organized by, all the elements which create and shape musical processes.




We take for granted the fact that rhythm imposed from outside has an effect upon our own capacity for organizing our own movements. For instance, a military band playing a march orders our strides and also reduces fatigue.

David, a six-year-old autistic boy, suffered from chronic anxiety and poor visual-motor co-ordination. For nine months, efforts had been made to teach him to tie his shoe-laces without avail. However, it was discovered that his audio-motor co-ordination was excellent. He could beat quite complex rhythms on a drum, and was clearly musically gifted. When a student therapist put the process of tying his shoe-laces into a song, David succeeded at the second attempt.

A song is a form in time. David had a special relationship to this element and could comprehend the shoe-tying process when it was organized in time through a song.




The effects of music upon patients with neurological diseases causing movement disorders are sometimes astonishing. Some patients can make voluntary movements to the sound of music which they cannot accomplish without it. The disease known as paralysis agitans, or Parkinsonism, causes an inability to co-ordinate and control voluntary movement. In his famous book on sufferers from post-encephalitic Parkinsonism, Awakenings, the neurologist Oliver Sacks describes a patient who suffered from recurrent �crises’ characterized by intense excitement, uncontrollable movements, forced repetition of words and phrases, and other symptoms. Dr Sacks writes:

By far the best treatment of her crises was music, the effects of which were almost uncanny. One minute would see Miss D. compressed, clenched and blocked, or jerking, ticcing and jabbering – like a sort of human bomb; the next, with the sound of music from a wireless or a gramophone, the complete disappearance of all these obstructive-explosive phenomena and their replacement by a blissful ease and flow of movement as Miss D., suddenly freed of her automatisms, smilingly �conducted’ the music, or rose and danced to it.




Dr Sacks later writes of these terrible cases: �The therapeutic power of music is very remarkable, and may allow an ease of movement otherwise impossible.’


One of Dr Sacks’s patients who had taught music described herself as �unmusicked’. When frozen into immobility by the disease, she would remain helplessly unable to move until she was able to recall tunes she had known in her youth. These would suddenly release her ability to move again.

Fortunately, the epidemic disease of encephalitis lethargica which caused this type of Parkinsonism has disappeared; and only sporadic cases are now recorded. But Parkinsonism is common in the elderly, and is said to occur in 1 in 200 people over the age of fifty. It is due to loss of cells in the substantia nigra; the part of the brain which produces dopamine. This is a chemical neurotransmitter which is involved in the passage of impulses from the brain to the voluntary muscles.

Happily, most of us who listen to music do not do so because we need it as treatment for neurological disease; but the physical effects of music are undoubted, and, as we have seen, can be measured in people who are perfectly normal.

Occasionally, music’s effect upon the brain can be the opposite of therapeutic. In rare cases, music can provoke an epileptic fit. The neurologist Macdonald Critchley described one patient whose epileptic attacks were exclusively brought on by music. Playing a record of Tchaikovsky’s Valse des Fleurs caused emotional distress followed by a typical grand mal; that is, a major epileptic seizure with convulsive movements, frothing at the lips, and cyanosis.


Such attacks are without doubt �organic’; that is, the result of music as a physical stimulus acting directly on the brain, not secondary to the emotional effects of music. This can be shown by provoking a fit whilst the electro-encephalogram records the electrical activity of the patient’s brain.

In most cases of musicogenic epilepsy, the seizures are induced by music played by an orchestra. Less commonly, a single instrument, piano, organ, or the ringing of bells may cause an attack. In very rare instances, even the recall of music can be sufficient provocation. Musicogenic epilepsy raises many unsolved neurological problems which it would be inappropriate to discuss in this context. But this rare phenomenon convincingly demonstrates that music has a direct effect upon the brain.

Music and speech are separately represented in the two hemispheres of the brain. Although there is considerable overlap, as happens with many cerebral functions, language is predominantly processed in the left hemisphere, whilst music is chiefly scanned and appreciated in the right hemisphere. The division of function is not so much between words and music as between logic and emotion. When words are directly linked with emotions, as they are in poetry and song, the right hemisphere is operative. But it is the left hemisphere which deals with the language of conceptual thought. This difference between the hemispheres can be demonstrated in a variety of ways.

It is possible to sedate one hemisphere of the brain whilst leaving the other in a normal state of alertness. If a barbiturate is injected into the left carotid artery, so that the left hemisphere of the brain is sedated, the subject is unable to speak, but can still sing. If the injection is made into the right carotid artery, the person cannot sing, but can speak normally. Stammerers can sometimes sing sentences which they cannot speak; presumably because the stammering pattern is encoded in the left hemisphere, whilst singing is predominantly a right hemispheric activity.

The electrical activity of different parts of the brain can be recorded by means of the electro-encephalogram. It can be demonstrated that, if recordings of speech are played to six-month-old babies, the left hemisphere of the brain will show more electrical activity than the right. But if recordings of music are played, the right hemisphere shows the greater electrical response.

If different melodies are played simultaneously through right and left earphones (so-called �dichotic listening’), the melody heard through the left earphone will be better recalled than that heard through the right. This is because the left ear has greater representation in the right hemisphere of the brain. The right hemisphere processes the perception of melody more efficiently than the left. If words are similarly presented, the reverse is true since the left hemisphere specializes in processing language.

Patients who have suffered brain damage or disease may lose the ability to understand or make use of language without losing musical competence. The great Soviet neuro-psychologist A. R. Luria studied a composer named Vissarion Shebalin who, following a stroke, suffered from severe sensory aphasia; that is, he was unable to understand the meaning of words. Yet he continued to teach music and composed his fifth symphony which Shostakovich said was brilliant.


Luria’s famous patient, Zasetsky, whom he studied for many years, received a terrible bullet wound during the Second World War which extensively damaged the left side of his brain. His capacity to use and understand language was at first badly impaired. Amongst many other losses of cerebral function, his spatial perception was grossly distorted and his memory fragmented. Yet he liked music just as much as he had done before he was wounded, and could easily remember the melodies of songs, though not their words.




Howard Gardner reports the case of an American composer who suffered from a form of aphasia which left him with a persistent reading difficulty. But, although he could not understand the meaning of printed words, he had little difficulty with musical notation, and was able to compose music just as well as he could before his aphasia.




The musician portrayed in Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat suffered from a brain lesion which, although he could see, made it impossible for him to recognize the essential nature of objects, as the title of the book indicates. Yet his musical abilities were unimpaired: indeed, he could only dress himself, eat a meal, or have a bath, if he did so whilst singing. Music became the only way by which he could structure the external world or find meaning in it.


This case might be illuminatingly compared with that of the autistic boy, David, described earlier.

There are very few instances of brain lateralization in other animals, although, interestingly enough, bird-song is one exception. In birds, a functioning left hypoglossal nerve is essential for the production of song.

The development of hemispheric specialization is certainly connected with the development of language as an uniquely human phenomenon. Moreover, language is not only a superior means of communication between human beings, but also an essential tool for understanding and thinking about the world. We do not necessarily think in words. The scanning and sorting of information goes on unconsciously as part of the creative process, and can certainly take place during sleep. There is no reason to confine the use of the term �thinking’ to conscious deliberation. But, if we are to formulate our thoughts, express them, and convey them to our fellows, we must put them into words. Although language appears to be understood by both hemispheres to some extent, formulating thoughts in words, and creating new sentences, are functions of the left hemisphere.

It is worth noting that children with lesions in the right hemisphere may be competent at reading, but poor at communicating their feelings. Their speech is often monotonous and inexpressive, lacking just those emotional/intonational aspects of speech recognized earlier as being important in communication between mothers and infants.

It is probably the case that as a listener to music becomes more sophisticated and therefore more critical, musical perception becomes partly transferred to the left hemisphere. However, when words and music are closely associated, as in the words of songs, it seems that both are lodged together in the right hemisphere as part of a single Gestalt. Since the word order of a song is fixed, the innovative verbal skills which belong in the left hemisphere are not required.

Musical gifts are multiple and not always found together in the same person. There is often a wide discrepancy between musical interest and musical talent. Many of those to whom music is immensely important struggle for years to express themselves as composers or executants without avail. Others who are auditorily gifted, as shown by musical aptitude tests, are not necessarily very interested in music. Teachers of music agree that enthusiasm for music becomes increasingly important for success as a child grows older. Musically gifted children may fail to realize their full potential because their interest in music declines.




It is my impression, and no more than an impression, that this discrepancy between interest and talent is more often encountered in music than in other subjects. For example, those who are not mathematically gifted seldom long to be mathematicians; but musical enthusiasts often confess that their lack of musical talent is their greatest disappointment.

The discrepancy between interest in, and talent for, music may be explicable in terms of hemispheric specialization. We have already observed that critical appreciation of music is partly a function of the left hemisphere. People who score highly on a test of musical aptitude tend to show left hemisphere advantage, regardless of training.


Perhaps emotional response to music is chiefly centred in the right hemisphere, whilst executive skills and critical analysis are functions of the left hemisphere. Sloboda quotes the case of a violinist with damage to the left hemisphere who retained some musical abilities whilst suffering impairment of others. A great deal of further research is required to establish the neurological correlates of the varied skills which music requires, but what seems certain is that there is no one centre in the brain which houses them all.

As we pointed out earlier, the language used both by philosophers and scientists is neutral and objective. It eschews the personal, the particular, the emotional, the subjective. No wonder it is principally housed in a separate part of the brain from that concerned with the expressive aspects of music. Whilst it is perfectly possible to study music from a purely objective, intellectual point of view, this approach alone is insufficient.

Any attempt to understand the nature of music must take into account its expressive aspects and the fact that the parts of the brain concerned with the emotional effects of music are distinct from those which have to do with appreciation of its structure. Recordings of blood-pressure, respiration, pulse-rate and other functions controlled by the involuntary, autonomic nervous system taken from the same subject demonstrated that, when he was completely involved with the music there were marked changes in the tracings recording evidence of physiological arousal; when, however, he adopted an analytical, critical attitude, these changes were not apparent.




This is objective confirmation of the art historian Wilhelm Worringer’s well-known dichotomy, empathy and abstraction; categories which are just as applicable to music as to the visual arts with which he was primarily concerned.


Worringer claimed that modern aesthetics was based upon the behaviour of the contemplating subject. If the subject is to enjoy a work of art, he must absorb himself into it, make himself one with it. But this empathic identification with the work is only one way of approaching it. The other is by way of abstraction. Aesthetic appreciation is also a matter of discovering form and order, which requires detachment from the work. These two attitudes are linked with extraversion and introversion. In individuals, one or other attitude is usually predominant and, when exaggerated, leads to mutual misunderstanding. Empathic identification with a musical work may so emotionally involve the listener that critical judgement becomes impossible. In contrast, an exclusively intellectual, detached approach may make it difficult to appreciate the music’s emotional significance. Many disputes both in psychology and in aesthetics arise because each participant claims that whichever attitude he personally adopts is the only valid one.

Although appreciation of a musical work necessarily involves perception of both form and expressive content, it is interesting that the two can be artificially separated. Many years ago, I acted as a �guinea-pig’ for one of my colleagues who was investigating the effects of the drug mescaline. Whilst still under its influence, I listened to music on the radio. The effect was to enhance my emotional responses whilst concurrently abolishing my perception of form. Mescaline made a Mozart string quartet sound as romantic as Tchaikovsky. I was conscious of the throbbing, vibrant quality of the sounds which reached me; of the bite of bow upon string; of a direct appeal to my emotions. In contrast, appreciation of form was greatly impaired. Each time a theme was repeated, it came as a surprise. The themes might be individually entrancing, but their relation with one another had disappeared. All that was left was a series of tunes with no connecting links: a pleasurable experience, but one which also proved disappointing.

My reaction to mescaline convinced me that, in my own case, the part of the brain concerned with emotional responses is different from the part which perceives structure. The evidence suggests that this is true of everyone. The appreciation of music requires both parts, although either may predominate on a particular occasion.

In connection with the perception of form and structure it is worth recalling that the auditory apparatus is itself primarily concerned with symmetry and closely linked with balance. The labyrinth or inner ear contains the complex vestibular organ which orients us to gravity, and provides essential information about the position of our own bodies, by registering acceleration, deceleration, angles of turn et cetera. Such internal feedback is needed if we are to be able to control our own movements and relate them to changes in the environment.

It also makes possible our upright posture. Equilibrium or balance can only be maintained if we are constantly informed about tilts of the body, backward, forward, right or left. A tilt in one direction immediately elicits a compensatory muscular reaction in order to prevent our falling and restore our balance.

From an evolutionary perspective, the vestibular apparatus antedates the auditory system which developed from it. Although the two systems remain functionally separate, the vestibular nerve and the cochlear nerve, which respectively convey information from the vestibular apparatus and the auditory apparatus, run in close parallel.

The auditory system is designed to record the nature and location of vibrations in the air, which we perceive as sounds. Experience tells us which sounds are dangerous or threatening, and which are likely to be harmless. By turning our heads so that the sound in each ear is of equal volume we accurately locate the direction of its origin. Hearing and orientation are closely allied.

We are so accustomed to thinking of sight as the primary sense by which we learn how to find our way around that we are apt to forget that hearing can also be used in this way, as it certainly is by the blind. Repeated visual encounters with a particular area become internalized as a picture which can be recalled at any time and in any place. The tapping sticks of the blind provide an auditory map of the immediate environment based on variations in sound alone which also becomes internalized as a schema.

Anyone who has experienced sea-sickness or who has been drunk knows that impairment of one’s sense of balance and equilibrium is extremely unpleasant. In contrast, anything which increases our feeling of being securely balanced and in control of our movements enhances our sense of well-being. Marching soldiers swing their arms symmetrically as they march; and also march better to music. Music can order our muscular system. I believe that it is also able to order our mental contents. A perceptual system originally designed to inform us of spatial relationships by means of imposing symmetry can be incorporated and transformed into a means of structuring our inner world. For example, writers who �hear’ their sentences as if read aloud tend to write better prose than those who merely see them. A writer considering how best to express a particular point may finally exclaim �I see how to put it.’ It is often equally appropriate to say �I hear how to put it.’

The Greeks of Plato’s day considered that the right type of music was a powerful instrument of education which could alter the characters of those who studied it, inclining them toward inner order and harmony. Equally, the wrong type of music could have seriously bad effects. Both Plato and Aristotle shared this view of music, although they did not always agree as to which type of music was beneficial and which harmful. Plato, in The Republic, reports Socrates as saying:

And therefore, I said, Glaucon, musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful, or of him who is ill-educated ungraceful; and also because he who has received this true education of the inner being will most shrewdly perceive omissions or faults in art and nature, and with a true taste, while he praises and rejoices over and receives into his soul the good, and becomes noble and good, he will justly blame and hate the bad, now in the days of his youth, even before he is able to know the reason why; and when reason comes he will recognise and salute the friend with whom his education has made him long familiar.




Plato, who was not averse to strict censorship, wanted to banish from the ideal State styles of music which were sorrowful, plaintive or associated with indolence and drinking. There were only two styles which should be tolerated: one for use in battle or in times of misfortune, when a man’s resolve might need boosting; the other to be used in times of peace, when he is either seeking to persuade God or man in moderate fashion, or else himself is yielding to persuasion in an equally balanced way. Such music might be used to represent his prudence and moderation.

These two harmonies I ask you to leave; the strain of necessity and the strain of freedom, the strain of the unfortunate and the strain of the fortunate, the strain of courage, and the strain of temperance; these, I say, leave.




As Glaucon points out, this leaves only the Phrygian and Dorian modes from amongst those in common use. The term �mode’ as employed by the Greeks is difficult to define exactly in modern terms, for it referred both to the scale and also to the type of melody; but the general sense is clear enough.

Aristotle believed that,

men are inclined to be mournful and solemn when they listen to that which is called Mixo-Lydian; but they are in a more relaxed frame of mind when they listen to others, for example the looser modes. A particularly equable feeling, midway between these, is produced, I think, only by the Dorian mode, while the Phrygian puts men into a frenzy of excitement.




Indeed, Aristotle thought Socrates wrong to permit the Phrygian mode to be added to the Dorian, because he believed it to be too orgiastic and emotional. For educational purposes, he recommended the Lydian mode because of its power to combine orderliness with educative influence.

The Phrygian mode, according to the great classical scholar E. R. Dodds, was used both in the Dionysiac rituals of the Archaic Age and later in the Corybantic rituals of the fifth century BC. Both seemed to have been based upon the notion of �catharsis’: that is, upon the idea that individuals could be purged of irrational impulses or cured of madness if they temporarily lost all inhibitions and �let go’ in an ecstatic fashion.




Plato was conservative as well as severe. Socrates says that it was necessary that

music and gymnastic be preserved in their original form, and no innovation made… for any musical innovation is full of danger to the whole State, and ought to be prohibited. So Damon tells me, and I can quite believe him – he says that when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them.




We may not share the Greek view that particular modes have different effects upon listeners. But we recognize that some composers habitually select certain keys when they want to express particular emotions. It is generally agreed that Mozart used G minor to express tragedy or melancholy; for example, the Piano Quartet K. 478, the String Quintet K. 516, the Symphonies K. 183 and K. 550. Perhaps the Greek idea of linking certain modes with particular emotions is not so far from our own perceptions as at first appears.

Plato anticipated, or perhaps invented, the notion of mens sana in corpore sano which became the supposed aim of English public school education. What was needed was a proper balance between the physical and mental. He believed that those who simply pursued athletics became violent and uncivilized, whilst those who only exposed themselves to music became soft and feeble. Plato suggested that there are two principles of human nature, the spirited and the philosophical, which are served by gymnastics and music respectively.

And he who mingles music with gymnastic in the fairest proportions, and best attempers them to the soul, may be rightly called the true musician and harmonist in a far higher sense than the tuner of the strings.




Centuries later, the historian Edward Gibbon makes use of a similar dichotomy. Indeed, he may have learned it from Plato.

There are two very natural propensities which we may distinguish in the most virtuous and liberal dispositions, the love of pleasure and the love of action… To the love of pleasure we may therefore ascribe most of the agreeable, to the love of action we may attribute most of the useful and respectable qualifications. The character in which both the one and the other should be united and harmonized would seem to constitute the most perfect idea of human nature.




Plato wrote in the Timaeus:

All audible musical sound is given us for the sake of harmony, which has motions akin to the orbits in our soul, and which, as anyone who makes intelligent use of the arts knows, is not to be used, as is commonly thought, to give irrational pleasure, but as a heaven-sent ally in reducing to order and harmony any disharmony in the revolutions within us. Rhythm, again, was given us from the same heavenly source to help us in the same way; for most of us lack measure and grace.




Theon of Smyrna, a Platonist who flourished between AD 115 and 140, left a treatise concerning arithmetic, astronomy, and the theory of musical harmony which he called �Mathematics useful for reading Plato’.

The Pythagoreans, whom Plato follows in many respects, call music the harmonization of opposites, the unification of disparate things, and the reconciliation of warring elements… Music, as they say, is the basis of agreement among things in nature and of the best government in the universe. As a rule it assumes the guise of harmony in the universe, of lawful government in a state, and of a sensible way of life in the home. It brings together and unites.




It goes without saying that Plato and Aristotle were two of the most intelligent men who have ever lived. Their view of the physical universe has been superseded by modern scientific discoveries, as has that of Newton. But music and art are in a different category. Unlike science, art is not superseded, and nor are views about its meaning and significance. The great music of the past is great today. Bach’s Mass in B minor has not been displaced by Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis. Bartók’s quartets have not supplanted those of Beethoven. Modern masterpieces of music enlarge our sensibilities; but they do not surpass or replace those masterpieces which have preceded them. The views of Plato and Aristotle on music and the other arts are not outdated. They are not like theories about the physical world which can be proved or disproved. They are as worthy of critical appraisal today as they were when they were first formulated. Although scientific discovery has displaced the Greek view of the universe, the Greek perception of music may have been nearer the truth than our own.

Music is so freely available today that we take it for granted and may underestimate its power for good or ill. The idea that some modes should be forbidden and others encouraged may make us smile. In Britain, we cannot imagine our rulers banning a scale or key, partly because we would think this an unwarranted interference with personal liberty, but also because, as I suggested in the introduction, music is seldom taken seriously by politicians and educationalists who are not themselves musicians. This is not always the case elsewhere. Allan Bloom’s well-known attack on American education, The Closing of the American Mind, contains a chapter on music in which the author expresses considerable anxiety about the effect which rock music has upon students. Bloom recognizes that great music is powerfully educative, and fears that rock has banished any interest in, or feeling of need for, any other kind of music.

In Stalin’s Russia, contemporary European music, including jazz, was virtually banned, and Russian composers were subjected to many restrictions and a flood of instructions. Shostakovich’s opera The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was banned in 1936, and the composer wisely withheld a number of other works which he feared would not conform to the dictates of �socialist realism’. Although such censorship is deplorable, it does imply some recognition of the power and importance of music in the lives of ordinary people.

The power of music, especially when combined with other emotive events, can be terrifyingly impressive. At the Nuremberg rally of 1936, the thunderous cheers of the vast crowd eventually drowned the music of the massed bands which played Hitler in. But the bands were there long before Hitler appeared, preceding his rhetoric with their rhetoric, preparing the huge gathering for Hitler’s appearance, binding them together, arousing their expectations, aiding and abetting Hitler’s self-dramatization, making it credible that a petit bourgeois failure had turned himself into a Messiah. The Greeks were right in supposing that music can be used for evil ends as well as for good. There can be no doubt that, by heightening crowd emotions and by ensuring that those emotions peak together rather than separately, music can powerfully contribute to the loss of critical judgement, the blind surrender to the feelings of the moment, which is so dangerously characteristic of crowd behaviour.

Rousseau would not have been surprised by Hitler’s oratorical style, which accords with his ideas about the development of speech. It is interesting that at the Nuremberg rally, as on many other occasions, Hitler’s speech was not intended to convey information but took on the quality of an incantation or chant. Hitler’s voice was harsh and unmusical, but he used language in the way it is used in religious ritual. As the historian and German scholar J. P. Stern points out in his perceptive account of this Nuremberg rally, Hitler used a declamatory style superimposed upon near quotations from biblical texts.

How deeply we feel once more in this hour the miracle that has brought us together! Once you heard the voice of a man, and it spoke to your hearts, it awakened you, and you followed that voice. Year in year out you followed it, without even having seen the speaker; you only heard a voice and followed it.

Now that we meet here, we are all filled with the wonder of this gathering. Not every one of you can see me and I do not see each one of you. But I feel you, and you feel me! It is faith in our nation that has made us little people great, that has made us poor people rich, that has made us wavering, fearful, timid people brave and confident; that has made us erring wanderers clear-sighted and has brought us together!

So you have come this day from your little villages, your market towns, your cities, from mines and factories, or leaving the plough, to this city. You come out of the little world of your daily struggle for life, and of your struggle for Germany and for our nation to experience this feeling for once: Now we are together, we are with him and he is with us, and now we are Germany!




Considered intellectually, this speech is rubbish. Considered emotionally, its effect was overwhelming. Hitler was using words to reinforce the effect which the music, the banners, the searchlights, and the processions had already induced. He was both arousing his audience and making them experience the same, or closely similar emotions, simultaneously. Over and over again, Hitler stressed the feeling of unity: unity with him, unity with each other. The language which Hitler used is not the conceptual language which is used for abstract thought or exchange of information. It is rhetoric of a hypnotic persuasiveness, exploiting the basic human need to belong; to feel part of a social group; to be united with one’s fellow countrymen. In spite of his harsh voice and his vulgar turns of speech, Hitler’s incantatory style affected crowds in rather the same way as can some music. It looks as if Rousseau was right when, in the passage already quoted from Maurice Cranston’s biography, he affirmed that �Earliest languages… were chanted; they were melodic and poetic rather than prosaic and practical.’




Hitler’s adoration of Wagner’s music began early in his life and persisted until his own Götterdämmerung-like finale. If he became depressed his friend and financial backer Hanfstaengl, who was also a pianist, would play some Wagner for him and he would respond �as to an energizing drug’.


It is interesting that Hitler’s favourite composer is the one most generally recognized to be able to overwhelm people emotionally, for this is what Hitler did with his speeches. There must be people still living who heard Hitler speak who look back upon their emotional response to his oratory with horror. I guess that only an exceptionally detached, independent-minded intellectual could have attended events like the Nuremberg rallies without being temporarily swept off his feet.

Today, we are beginning to understand some of the physiological mechanisms by means of which music affects us. But the human brain is immensely complex and our knowledge of how music impinges upon it is incomplete and elementary. We know that how the brain develops is partly determined by the external stimuli to which it is exposed. It would not surprise me to learn that exposure to music with a reasonably complicated structure facilitates the establishment of neural networks which improve cerebral function. This has not yet been demonstrated; but we can affirm with confidence that Plato and Aristotle were right. Music is a powerful instrument of education which can be used for good or ill, and we should ensure that everyone in our society is given the opportunity of participating in a wide range of different kinds of music.




CHAPTER III BASIC PATTERNS (#ulink_72e18942-34d1-52ef-a833-0a8a139ba7ca)


The Musical Scale is not one, not �natural’, nor even founded necessarily on the laws of the constitution of musical sound so beautifully worked out by Helmholtz, but very diverse, very artificial, and very capricious.

ALEXANDER J. ELLIS




In the first chapter, it was suggested that music is an art deeply rooted in human nature but not closely connected with the external world. As a consequence, different cultures create different musics, just as they create different languages. Although an ethnomusicologist may painstakingly learn to understand and appreciate the music of another culture, it is probably more difficult to do this than thoroughly to master a foreign language. Even within Europe, we cannot be sure that we appreciate music of a few centuries ago in the way that a contemporary listener apprehended it or that the composer intended it.

As our concert programmes demonstrate, the majority of Western listeners appreciate only a narrow range of music, perhaps from the middle of the seventeenth century to the middle of the twentieth century. To promote a concert consisting only of contemporary art music is usually to court financial disaster. Music composed before the seventeenth century has gained considerable popularity in the last fifty years, but remains a specialist taste. Although these limitations may be deplorable, one can hardly blame the ordinary listener for being so unadventurous. So much good music was composed during those three hundred years that there is a virtually inexhaustible treasure trove for the conventionally-minded listener to explore.

J. S. Bach is said to have composed five annual cycles of cantatas for every Sunday and feast day; that is, about 300 in all. Some two-fifths of them have disappeared, but 199 survive. In addition, there are a considerable number of secular cantatas. Although Bach’s popularity has continued to grow since Mendelssohn’s famous performance of the St Matthew Passion in 1829 began his rehabilitation, there can be very few enthusiasts who know all the sacred cantatas intimately. These cantatas alone might be thought a life’s work for any composer; but, as every listener knows, this is only one aspect of Bach’s achievement. There are the works for solo keyboard, keyboard concertos, orchestral suites and concertos, organ music, the Mass in B minor




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