The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature (2 page)
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Authors: Daniel J. Levitin
BOOK: The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature
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The diversity of our musical legacy includes songs that tell stories about people, such as “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” or “Cruella de Vil”; there’s a catchy song about a murderous psychopath who kills the judge at his own trial; songs exhorting us to buy this meat product and not that (Armour hot dogs versus Oscar Mayer wieners); a song promising to keep a promise; a song mourning the loss of a parent; music made on instruments believed to be one thousand years old and on instruments invented just this week; music played on power tools; an album of Christmas carols sung by frogs; songs sung to enact social and political change; the fictional Borat singing the equally fictional national anthem of Kazakhstan, boasting about his country’s mining industry:
and a song about suburban noise pollution:
Kazakhstan greatest country in the world
All other countries are run by little girls
Kazakhstan number one exporter of potassium
All other countries have inferior potassium
Here comes the dirt bike
Beware of the dirt bike . . .
Brainwashing dirt bike
Ground-shaking dirt bike
Mind-bending dirt bike
In control
Soul-crushing dirt bike
In spite of all this diversity, I have come to believe that there are basically six kinds of songs, six ways that we use music in our lives, six broad categories of music. No less.
I have been making and studying music for most of my life—I had a career producing pop and rock records for a number of years and now I direct a research laboratory studying music, evolution, and the brain. Yet I was concerned when I started this project that I might be blinkered. I didn’t want to discover I was being ego- or ethnocentric. I didn’t want to be culturally biased, or fall prey to any of a number of other insidious biases of gender, genre, or generation, or even pitch bias or rhythm bias. So I asked a number of musician and scientist friends what they thought all music has in common.
I visited Stanford University to meet with my old friend Jim Ferguson, who is the chairman of the Anthropology Department there; we went to high school together and have been close friends for thirty-five years. Anthropologists study culture, how it shapes our thoughts, ideas, and our worldview, and I thought for sure Jim would help me to avoid all the pitfalls and prejudices that I feared could be so seductive. Jim and I discussed how songs have many roles in the daily lives of people throughout the world and that over the millennia music has been used in so many ways we can’t hope to enumerate them all.
Ubiquitous are work songs, blood songs, lust and love songs. . . . There are songs about how great God is, songs about how our god is better than yours; songs about where to find water or how to make a canoe; songs to put people to sleep and to help them stay awake. Songs with lyrics, songs of grunting and chanting, songs played on pieces of wood with holes in them, on tree trunks, with sea and turtle shells, songs made by slapping your cheeks and chest Bobby McFerrin style. I asked Jim what all these types of music had in common. His answer was that this was the
wrong question.
wrong question.
Quoting the great anthropologist Clifford Geertz, Jim persuaded me that the
right
question to ask, in trying to understand music’s universality, is not what all musics have in common, but how they differ. The notion that humanity can be best appreciated by extracting those features common to all cultures is a bias that I held without even knowing it. Ferguson—and Geertz—feel that the best way, perhaps the
only
way, to understand what makes us most human is to thrust ourselves face-to-face with the enormous diversity of things that humans do. It is in the particulars, the nuances, the overwhelming
variety
of ways we express ourselves that one can come to understand best what it means to be a musical human. We are a complicated, imaginative, adaptive species. How adaptable are we? Ten thousand years ago humans plus their pets and livestock accounted for about 0.1 percent of the terrestrial vertebrate biomass inhabiting the Earth; now we account for 98 percent. Humans have expanded to live in just about every climate on the surface of the Earth that is even remotely habitable. We’re also a highly
variable
species. We speak thousands of different languages, have wildly different notions of religion, social order, eating habits, and marriage rites. (Kinship definitions alone account for mind-boggling variability among us, as any introductory college anthropology text will attest.)
right
question to ask, in trying to understand music’s universality, is not what all musics have in common, but how they differ. The notion that humanity can be best appreciated by extracting those features common to all cultures is a bias that I held without even knowing it. Ferguson—and Geertz—feel that the best way, perhaps the
only
way, to understand what makes us most human is to thrust ourselves face-to-face with the enormous diversity of things that humans do. It is in the particulars, the nuances, the overwhelming
variety
of ways we express ourselves that one can come to understand best what it means to be a musical human. We are a complicated, imaginative, adaptive species. How adaptable are we? Ten thousand years ago humans plus their pets and livestock accounted for about 0.1 percent of the terrestrial vertebrate biomass inhabiting the Earth; now we account for 98 percent. Humans have expanded to live in just about every climate on the surface of the Earth that is even remotely habitable. We’re also a highly
variable
species. We speak thousands of different languages, have wildly different notions of religion, social order, eating habits, and marriage rites. (Kinship definitions alone account for mind-boggling variability among us, as any introductory college anthropology text will attest.)
The right question then, after due consideration of music’s diversity, is whether there is a set of functions music performs in human relations. And how might these different functions of music have influenced the evolution of human emotion, reason, and spirit across distinct intellectual and cultural histories? What role did the musical brain have in shaping human nature and human culture over the past fifty thousand years or so? In short,
how did all these musics make us who we are?
how did all these musics make us who we are?
The six types of songs that shaped human nature—friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion, and love songs—I’ve come to think are obvious, but I accept you may take some persuading. The people of a given time or place may not have used all six. The use of some has ebbed while others flowed. In modern times with computers, PDAs, even since the beginning of written language, we haven’t needed to rely so much on knowledge songs to encapsulate collective memory for us, although most English-speaking schoolchildren still learn the alphabet through song and the number line through counting songs, such as the politically incorrect “One Little Two Little Three Little Indians.” For many of the world’s still preliterate cultures, memory and counting songs remain essential to everyday life. As the early Greeks knew, music was a powerful way of preserving information, more effective and more efficient than simple memorizing, and we are now learning the neurobiological basis for this.
By definition, a “song” is a musical composition intended or adapted for singing. One thing the definition leaves unclear is who does the adapting. Does the adaptation have to be constructed by a professional composer or orchestrator, as when Jon Hendricks took Charlie Parker solos and added scat lyrics (nonsense syllables) to them, or when John Denver took Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony and added lyrics to the melody? I don’t think so. If I sing the intro guitar riff to “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones (as my friends and I used to do frequently when we were eleven years old),
I
am the one who has done the adapting, and even if separated from the vocal parts of that song, this melodic line then stands alone and
becomes
a “song” by virtue of my friends and I singing it. More to the point, you can sing “As Time Goes By” with the syllable “la” and never sing the words—you may have never seen
Casablanca
and you may not even
know
that the composition has words—and it becomes a song by virtue of you singing it. For that matter, suppose that only one person in the world knew the words to “As Time Goes By,” and that all of us went on blissfully humming, whistling, and la-la-la-ing the melody. My intuition here is that just because we didn’t sing words wouldn’t mean that it wasn’t a song.
I
am the one who has done the adapting, and even if separated from the vocal parts of that song, this melodic line then stands alone and
becomes
a “song” by virtue of my friends and I singing it. More to the point, you can sing “As Time Goes By” with the syllable “la” and never sing the words—you may have never seen
Casablanca
and you may not even
know
that the composition has words—and it becomes a song by virtue of you singing it. For that matter, suppose that only one person in the world knew the words to “As Time Goes By,” and that all of us went on blissfully humming, whistling, and la-la-la-ing the melody. My intuition here is that just because we didn’t sing words wouldn’t mean that it wasn’t a song.
Most of us share an intuition that “song” is a broad category that includes anything we might sing or any collection of sounds that resembles such a thing. Again,
The World in Six Songs
is not, I hope, culturally narrow-minded. African drum music has an important role in the daily lives of millions of people and might not strike some as being songs, but to ignore such purely
rhythmic
(and difficult to sing, unless you’re Mel Tormé or Ray Stevens) forms of expression would betray a bias toward melody. The rock, pop, jazz, and hip-hop that are the most popular forms of music today would not exist without the African drumming that they evolved from. As I will show, drumming, among its many qualities, can produce powerful songs of friendship.
The World in Six Songs
is not, I hope, culturally narrow-minded. African drum music has an important role in the daily lives of millions of people and might not strike some as being songs, but to ignore such purely
rhythmic
(and difficult to sing, unless you’re Mel Tormé or Ray Stevens) forms of expression would betray a bias toward melody. The rock, pop, jazz, and hip-hop that are the most popular forms of music today would not exist without the African drumming that they evolved from. As I will show, drumming, among its many qualities, can produce powerful songs of friendship.
I have used the word
song
as a convenient shorthand and, in its most inclusive sense, as a stand-in for music in all its forms, to refer to any music that people make, with or without melody, with or without lyrics. I’m particularly interested in that portion of musical compositions that people remember, carry around in their heads long after the sound has died out, sounds that people try to repeat later in time, to play for others; the sounds that comfort them, invigorate them, and draw them closer together. I confess that I unwittingly came to this project with the bias that the best songs become popular and are sung by many. Maybe my background in the music industry put that bias in place. After all, “Happy Birthday” has been translated into nearly every language on earth (even into Klingon, as fans of
Star Trek: The Next Generation
can attest; the song is called “
qoSlIj DatIvjaj
”).
song
as a convenient shorthand and, in its most inclusive sense, as a stand-in for music in all its forms, to refer to any music that people make, with or without melody, with or without lyrics. I’m particularly interested in that portion of musical compositions that people remember, carry around in their heads long after the sound has died out, sounds that people try to repeat later in time, to play for others; the sounds that comfort them, invigorate them, and draw them closer together. I confess that I unwittingly came to this project with the bias that the best songs become popular and are sung by many. Maybe my background in the music industry put that bias in place. After all, “Happy Birthday” has been translated into nearly every language on earth (even into Klingon, as fans of
Star Trek: The Next Generation
can attest; the song is called “
qoSlIj DatIvjaj
”).
Pete Seeger set me straight on this, telling me about how in some cultures, the best songs are meant to be sung and played for only one other person! Seeger is the great folk singer-songwriter who penned such songs as “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”, “If I Had a Hammer,” and “Turn, Turn, Turn” (the latter with lyrics taken from Ecclesiastes).
“Among American Indians,” Seeger explained, “a young man got his eye on a girl and he would make a reed flute and compose a melody. And when she came down to get a pail of water at the brook, he would hide in the weeds and play her his tune. If she liked it, she followed and saw where things led. But it was her special tune. A tune wasn’t thought of as being free for everybody. It belonged to one person. You might sing somebody’s song after they’re dead to recall them, but each person had a private song. And of course today, many small groups feel their song belongs to them and they’re not happy when it becomes something that belongs to everybody.”
The fact is we are all biased to some degree by our specific life history and culture. I carry the biases of an American male growing up in California in the 1950s and 1960s. But I was lucky to have been exposed to a wide variety of music. My parents took me to see ballet and musicals before I was five, and through them (
The Nutcracker
and
Flower Drum Song)
I gained an early appreciation for Eastern scales and intervals—neuroscientists now believe that such early exposure to other tonal systems is important for later appreciation of music outside one’s own culture. Just as all of us can acquire any of the world’s languages as young children if we are exposed to them, so too can our brains learn to extract the rules and the structures of any of the world’s musics if we’re exposed to them early enough. This doesn’t mean that we can’t learn to speak other languages later in life, or learn to appreciate other musics, but if we encounter them as young children, we develop a natural way of processing them because our brains literally wire themselves up to the sounds of these early experiences. Through my father I developed a love of big bands and swing, through my mother a love of piano music and Broadway standards. My mother’s father loved Cuban and Latin music, as well as Eastern European folk songs. Hearing Johnny Cash on the radio when I was six conditioned me for country, blues, bluegrass, and folk music.
The Nutcracker
and
Flower Drum Song)
I gained an early appreciation for Eastern scales and intervals—neuroscientists now believe that such early exposure to other tonal systems is important for later appreciation of music outside one’s own culture. Just as all of us can acquire any of the world’s languages as young children if we are exposed to them, so too can our brains learn to extract the rules and the structures of any of the world’s musics if we’re exposed to them early enough. This doesn’t mean that we can’t learn to speak other languages later in life, or learn to appreciate other musics, but if we encounter them as young children, we develop a natural way of processing them because our brains literally wire themselves up to the sounds of these early experiences. Through my father I developed a love of big bands and swing, through my mother a love of piano music and Broadway standards. My mother’s father loved Cuban and Latin music, as well as Eastern European folk songs. Hearing Johnny Cash on the radio when I was six conditioned me for country, blues, bluegrass, and folk music.
A sentiment that I’ve heard many times is that classical music cannot be compared to anything else. “How can you honestly say that that repetitive, loud
garbage
called rock and roll is even
close
to the sublime
music
of the great masters?” To take this position is to ignore the inconvenient fact that a major source of joy and inspiration for the great masters themselves was the “common” popular music of their day. Mozart, Brahms, and even great-grandaddy Bach took many of their melodic ideas from ballads, bards, European folk music, and children’s songs. Good melody (let alone rhythm) knows no boundaries of class, education, or upbringing.
garbage
called rock and roll is even
close
to the sublime
music
of the great masters?” To take this position is to ignore the inconvenient fact that a major source of joy and inspiration for the great masters themselves was the “common” popular music of their day. Mozart, Brahms, and even great-grandaddy Bach took many of their melodic ideas from ballads, bards, European folk music, and children’s songs. Good melody (let alone rhythm) knows no boundaries of class, education, or upbringing.
Most of us could effortlessly construct a list of our favorite songs, of songs that just make us feel joyful, or comforted, or spiritual, that remind us of who we are, who we loved, of groups we belong to. When I ask people to do this in my laboratory, it is always surprising to see how diverse these lists are. Music is
large
. It is made by as many different types of people, with as many different backgrounds, as there are listeners. New forms of music are being invented and evolving from earlier forms every day. And each new song is a link in a millennia-long chain of evolutionary enhancements to previous song building—slight alterations in the “genetic structure” of one song lead us to a new one.
large
. It is made by as many different types of people, with as many different backgrounds, as there are listeners. New forms of music are being invented and evolving from earlier forms every day. And each new song is a link in a millennia-long chain of evolutionary enhancements to previous song building—slight alterations in the “genetic structure” of one song lead us to a new one.
Some songs celebrate a particular individual, but then become enhanced (or diluted) by overapplication and overgeneralization. Anyone named Maria or Michelle in the 1960s (think Bernstein and Beatles) or Alison or Sally in the 1970s (think Elvis Costello and Eric Clapton) knows what it is like to be accosted by the song bearing your name, mentioned by a friend or new acquaintance intoxicated by his own wit at having made this childishly simple connection. Anyone who has the lack of common sense to actually
sing
you the song with your name in it suffers from the doubly foolish notion that she was the first one to think of doing so. My own past has been bothered, annoyed, and taunted by endless choruses of “Danny Boy” or “Daniel” (Elton John), by people expecting me to howl at their cleverness. Steely Dan have made it a habit, a fashion even, to elevate main characters with uncommon names like Rikki, Josie, and Dupree. But the rarer the name, of course, the more exuberant is the tormentor. I have actually known people named Maggie Mae, Roxanne, Chuck E., and John-Jacob (think Rod Stewart, the Police, Rickie Lee Jones, and an old children’s song), and they are astonished when people sing these songs to them as though no one has ever thought to do this before.
sing
you the song with your name in it suffers from the doubly foolish notion that she was the first one to think of doing so. My own past has been bothered, annoyed, and taunted by endless choruses of “Danny Boy” or “Daniel” (Elton John), by people expecting me to howl at their cleverness. Steely Dan have made it a habit, a fashion even, to elevate main characters with uncommon names like Rikki, Josie, and Dupree. But the rarer the name, of course, the more exuberant is the tormentor. I have actually known people named Maggie Mae, Roxanne, Chuck E., and John-Jacob (think Rod Stewart, the Police, Rickie Lee Jones, and an old children’s song), and they are astonished when people sing these songs to them as though no one has ever thought to do this before.
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