A Natural History of the Senses

by Diane Ackerman

  bog low, its foghorn a thick liqueur.

  Crepe black as a funeral procession,

  the pod glides, mummer-deft,

  through galloping brine,

  each whale singing the same

  runaway, roundelay tune:

  Dry fingers rub, drag, drub

  a taut balloon. Glottal stops. Pops.

  Dry fingers resume, then, ringing

  skeletal chimes, they ping

  and rhyme—villanelles, canticles,

  even a Gregorian done on ton tongues

  as, trapped below the consciousness

  of air, hungry, or wooing,

  or lamenting slaughter,

  jazzy or appalled,

  they beat against the wailing wall

  of water, voices all

  in the marzipany murk they swim,

  invisible but for their songs.

  And often they raise high

  as angels’ eyes a refrain

  swoony as the sea, question-mad,

  sad, all interrogatives, as if

  trying to fathom the fathomless

  reach from ladle-shaped ocean,

  scurrilous surf, to breach-birth

  upon beach and blue algae’s cradle.

  Sleek black troubadours

  playing their own pipes, each body

  a mouth organ, each shape a daguerreotype

  of an oblate friar caroling,

  they migrate, glad to chain rattle

  and banshee moan, roaming the seas

  like uneasy spirits, a song on their bones.

  THE VIOLIN REMEMBERS

  Music, the perfume of hearing, probably began as a religious act, to arouse groups of people. Drums set the heart sprinting in no time, and a trumpet can transport one on chariots of sound. As far back as we can see, people made music. The first instruments used in western music were probably just sticks or rocks thwacked together to make a beat. There would have been many occasions for them: religious dances and other rituals; to accompany work songs; as a musical way to teach lessons to the young. Mesopotamian instruments have been found dating back some 5,500 years (pipes, triangles, stringed instruments, and drums), and the Mesopotamians even devised a method of musical notation. People probably made music even earlier than that, by blowing on blades of grass held between their thumbs or banging sticks and stones together—instruments we wouldn’t now be able to recognize. The Mayans played an array of intricately carved clay whistles, flutes, recorders, and ocarinas. Whistles shaped like men produced lower notes than those shaped like women. Some of them had secret chambers and could play as many as seventeen notes, others were meant to hold water while you played them, which affected the sound, and some multi-headed flutes played several notes simultaneously. According to Chinese texts, Oriental music began around 2700 B.C., when Huang Ti, the emperor, ordered bamboo pipes of the right length to be cut so that he could imitate the song of the phoenix. If one contrasts 2,400-year-old Chinese bells with a present-day Chinese flute, one finds that the tones are very similar, and nearly match on an oscilloscope. From the outset, our brains and nervous systems have led us to prefer certain intervals between sounds. Our instruments have evolved from a deep inner delight in music, but one that has boundaries. Much of what we hear strikes us as dissonance or as noise, and what falls within a certain range we find sweet, intellectually satisfying, and mellifluous.

  I first learned to play the violin in junior high, and though I practiced haphazardly for eight years, I never got past the mechanical bowing, palsied vibrato, and lusterless finger work of an amateur. I loved the gritty yet oily shine of the resin, which allowed the bow to tug gently, as if dragged over a raspy cat’s tongue. The strings I bought were referred to as “catgut,” but of course they weren’t really from a cat; the slang term dated back to an early period in violin playing, when audiences thought the strings screeched like a disemboweled tabby. “Better go buy some more catgut!” they used to jeer, and the expression caught on. Even when I was a “tweenager” (as thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds were then called), endlessly rehearsing “The Entrance March of the Peers,” “The Young Prince and the Young Princess,” and “Say It with Music” for school assembly, I’d heard rumors of a dark, nearly mythical violin that could virtually play itself, a violin that smoldered with caged emotion even when lying in its case. The name of it floated in my mouth like magical smoke: Strad-i-var-i-us. How often I lusted after a Stradivarius that would transmute my sandpapery sounds to pure gold. In time, I rose through the ranks to the orchestra’s honored position of “first violin,” which meant that I got to play the melody, which is why I chose to learn violin in the first place. I pitied the tuba players oompahing their way into oblivion. Some of them, though boys, weren’t athletically built, and when they stood up they half disappeared into the shiny, heavy, hallucinating brass, as if swallowed whole by a mirrored nautilus. The percussionists made such a nerve-jangling racket, I thought they should be given a polite burial in their own kettledrums Nothing about the finicky, birdlike oboe appealed to me. The girls who played flute always had runny noses and looked as if they were trying to blow out a small flame when they played. The clarinets sounded too mouselike. And the idea of playing cello, viola, bass, or any of the other to-my-mind subservient instruments left me cold. I wanted to make music, and music to me was melody, a soulfully singing violin. Although I had never heard a Stradivarius up close, I heard them on records and on television, and I wondered along with everyone else what magical resin or lacquer had gone into their manufacture to produce their uniquely sultry richness. The most precious instruments in the world are still the violins made by Stradivarius. At last scientists are beginning to understand why.

  Over the years, researchers have attributed the unique sound to animal fluids, special resins, a water fungus, and many other arcane potions. A more likely explanation was proposed recently by Peter Edwards and a team of researchers at Cambridge University. Using EDAX (energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy), they showered a fragment of a cello with high-energy electrons, which allowed them to analyze the wood’s ingredients. To their surprise, they found a thin layer of pozzolana—a volcanic ash from Cremona, Italy, where Stradivarius lived. The ash lay between the varnish and the wood, and Stradivarius probably applied it as a simple strengthening agent for his instruments; since it was a commonly used cement, it probably never occurred to him it could affect their tone. Of course, pozzolana alone won’t produce a Stradivarius, whose age, architecture, and craftsmanship contribute to its sound. Many violinists and violinmakers insist that violins grow into their beautiful throaty sounds, and that a violin played exquisitely for a long time eventually contains the exquisite sounds within itself. Somehow the wood keeps track of the robust lyrical flights. In down-to-earth terms: Certain vibrations made over and over for years, along with all the normal processes of aging, could make microscopic changes in the wood; we perceive those cellular changes as enriched tone. In poetic terms: The wood remembers. Thus, part of a master violinist’s duties is to educate a violin for future generations.

  MUSIC AND EMOTION

  One of the most soothing things in the world is to put your tongue to the roof of your mouth right behind the teeth and sing la, la, la, la, la, la, la. When we sing, not only do our vocal cords vibrate, but so do some of our bones. Hum with your mouth closed, and the sound travels to your inner ear directly through the skull, not bothering with the eardrum. Chant “om,” or any other mantra, in a solid, prolonged tone, and you will feel the bones in your head, as well as the cartilage in your sternum, vibrate. It’s like a massage from the inside, very soothing. Another reason it may be so conducive to meditation is that it creates an inner white noise, which cancels out extraneous noises, making your body a soundproof booth. Hebrew davening, in which the faithful bend and chant, bend and chant, has a similar effect. The drumbeat in a macumba ceremony seizes one in a crescendo of fury that climbs higher and higher, as if scaling the Himalaya of
one’s belief. All these sounds repeat hypnotically. Every religion has its own liturgy, which is important not just in its teachings but also because it forces the initiate to utter the same sounds over and over until they are ingrained in memory, until they become a kind of aural landscape. We are a species capable of adding things, ideas, and creative artifacts to the world, even sounds, and when we do, they become as real a fact as a forest.

  The odd thing about music is that we understand and respond to it without actually having to learn it. Each word in a verbal phrase tells something all by itself; it has a history and nuances. But musical tones mean something only in relation to one another, when they’re teamed up. You needn’t understand the tones to be moved. Say the words “It’s a gift to be simple. It’s a gift to be free. It’s a gift to come down where we ought to be,” and nothing much happens. You might even disagree with its minimalist doctrine. Yet if you add the tuneful Shaker music that goes with it (which Aaron Copland adapted so beautifully in Appalachian Spring*), its haunting melody, full of enough ebullience, joy, and conviction to inspire a whole village to put up a neighbor’s barn in one afternoon, will truly captivate you. When I was in Florida, at an artist’s colony on a tidal estuary, one of my writing students, also a professional whistler, regaled us one evening with a whistle concert, including this Shaker tune, “Simple Gifts,” and for the next week you could hear people humming, whistling, or singing its gaily hammering rhythm. Catchy is the right word for such a melody; it hooks onto your subconscious and won’t let go. Many hymns would thrill us even if they didn’t have words, but, with words, they’re a double score: emotional music tied to emotional messages. It works particularly well if the hymn has a dying fall in it, a musical swoon. In Blake’s “Jerusalem,” that swoon comes in the third stanza, in the second syllable of the word “desire,” which you have to sing as a sigh to a lower note:

  Bring me my bow of burning gold!

  Bring me my arrows of de-sire!

  Few desires sound as smoldery and secular as that one, especially if you’re reminded of Cupid’s arrow and the double meaning of a word like “quiver.” In the Christmas hymn “O Holy Night,” the swoon comes right after the word “fall,” in the line “Fall on your knees,” and just singing it enacts the supplication. Most often hymns soar steadily in slow sweeping steps, from lower to higher notes, as the singer climbs a mystical staircase onto progressively higher planes of feeling. “Amazing Grace” is a good example of that lighter-than-air sort of hymn, full of musical striving and stretching, as if one’s spirit itself were being elongated. Think lofty thoughts and sing that elevating tune, and soon enough you will feel uplifted (even despite having to sing such unmelodious words as “wretch”). Hypnotists use a similar technique when they put people into a deeply suggestive meditative trance: They often count from one to ten a few times over, telling patients to imagine themselves climbing deeper and deeper down with each number.

  Like pure emotions, music surges and sighs, rampages or grows quiet, and, in that sense, it behaves so much like our emotions that it seems often to symbolize them, to mirror them, to communicate them to others, and thus frees us from the elaborate nuisance and inaccuracy of words. A musical passage can make us cry, or send our blood pressure soaring. Asked to define the feeling, we say something vague: It made me sad. Or: It thrilled me. In Great Pianists Speak for Themselves, Vol. II, Paul Badura-Skoda says of Mozart’s Fantasy in C minor:

  What about the emotional content? What does the work say to you and me? Surprisingly, when I ask such questions in my master classes, I get rather tepid answers such as, “It is a serious work,” or none at all. Then I am forced to exclaim, “Don’t you realize, my dear fellows, that music is a language which communicates experience? And what experience! Life and death are involved in this Fantasy. May I tell you my personal interpretation of this work? The opening phrase is a death symbol: The hour has struck—there is no escape! The rest of the Fantasy is shock and anxiety, pages one and two, giving way then to a series of recollections: happy, serene ones, like the Adagio in D and the Andantino in B-flat major, or violent ones, full of anguish, like the two fast, modulating sections, until finally the original call returns. The inexorable fate seems to be now accepted, were it not for the heroic gesture of defiance at the very end.

  Not all composers care for listeners to find such a clear program in their work, but people get so frustrated by the abstractions of music they try to elicit from it landscapes of emotions and events.

  We find a profound sense of wholeness in the large, open structure of a classical composition, but it is a unity filled with tumult, with small comings and goings, with obstructed quests, with bouts of yearning and uncertainty, with insurpassable mountains, with interrupted passion, with knots that must be teased apart, with great washes of sentimentality, with idle ruminations, with strident blows to recover from, with love one hopes to consummate, with abruptness, disorder, but, ultimately, with reconciliation. One can re-create the emotional turmoil of an affair, a disappointment, a religious ecstasy, in as small a space as a concerto. Show, don’t tell! writing teachers counsel their students. Say what one will, words rarely capture the immediate emotional assault of a piece of poignant music, which allows the composer to say not “It felt something like this,” but rather “Here is the unnamable emotion I felt, and even my obsession with structure, proportion, and time, inside of you.” Or, as T. S. Eliot puts it in “The Dry Salvages,” here is:

  music heard so deeply

  That it is not heard at all, but you are the music

  While the music lasts.

  There are still many questions to be answered about music and emotion. In his fascinating book on music theory, The Language of Music, Deryck Cooke, for example, offers a musical vocabulary, spelling out the emotional effects a composer knows he can create with certain sounds. But why is this so? Do we tend to respond to a minor seventh with “mournfulness” and to a major seventh with “violent longing” and to a minor second with “spiritless anguish” because we’ve formed the habit of responding to those sounds in that way, or is it something more intrinsic in our makeup? Listen to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, and you’ll hear pent-up, soaring, frustrated emotion of an intensity that may drive you to distraction. Yearning overflows the music like the meniscus on a too-full glass of wine, and this is how Wagner himself described the work:

  … a tale of endless yearning, longing, the bliss and wretchedness of love; world, power, fame, honour, chivalry, loyalty, and friendship all blown away like an insubstantial dream; one thing alone left living—longing, longing, unquenchable, a yearning, a hunger, a anguishing forever renewing itself; one sole redemption—death, surcease, a sleep without awakening.

  Another question we might ask, along with Cooke, is: If we transform music into emotion, “how closely does this emotion … resemble the original emotion of Beethoven?… There can only be one answer to this … about as closely as the emotions of one human being can ever resemble those of another.” And, because we’re not Beethoven, we hear his joyous “Gloria” in the Missa Solemnis and feel joy, but probably not as passionately as he did when he wrote it. I suppose part of what’s fascinating about creativity in any field is the author’s necessity to share it with—or impose it on—the world. When he wrote the “Gloria,” Beethoven underwent a volcanic, shriek-to-the-heavens joy, but instead of dancing around in delight, he “felt the need to convert it into a permanent, stored-up, transportable, and reproducible form of energy,” as Cooke describes it, “a musical shout for joy, as it were, that all the world might hear, and still hear over and over again after he was dead and gone.” The notes he jotted down “only ever were and only ever will be a command from Beethoven to blow his eternal shout for joy, together with a set of instructions … exactly how to do so.” When we proclaim that artists live on in their work, we’re usually referring to the emotional steppingstones that lead through their lives, their disembodied moods and obsessions,
but most of all their senses. Beethoven may be dead, but his sense of life at that moment lives in his score at this moment, at any moment.

  IS MUSIC A LANGUAGE?

  Music speaks to us so powerfully that many musicians and theorists think it may be an actual language, one that developed about the same time as speech. One Harvard psychologist believes strongly that music is a kind of intelligence, an aptitude like that for words or numbers, with which we’re simply born. By experimenting with brain-damaged musicians, he’s been able to locate musical ability in the right frontal region of the brain. In a related experiment, researchers at the UCLA School of Medicine gave volunteers a Sherlock Holmes story to read, then music to listen to, and recorded brain activity with a PET scan. Reading excited the left hemisphere of the brain, music the right. But knowing where our passion for music lies doesn’t explain how it got there. No matter how far back in history we look, we find human beings making and listening to music, but how and why did our passion for it begin? Why do we feel driven to make music? Why does music differ so much between cultures? Why do many people feel the need to live in cocoons of organized sound, to keep music close at hand? Why do we respond to music’s array of abstract sounds with intense, sometimes violently felt emotions? If music evolved along with spoken language, why did it evolve? What was its survival value? Music is meaningful, as anyone listening to a soulful symphony or an opera by Wagner would readily admit, but what is its meaning? How do we assign a particular meaning to a piece of music? Why does music make sense even to people who don’t play instruments themselves, and even claim to be tone-deaf, people who aren’t particularly “musical”? Most of all: How do we understand the language of music without learning it? For the moment, the reasonable answer to that last question is that, like the ability to smile or analyze, it’s deeply hereditary. At some point in our past it was important enough that all human beings born, no matter whether Bengalese, Inuit, or Quechua, no matter whether blind, left-handed, or freckled, were not merely capable of making music; they required music to add meaning to their lives. The newest infant responds to music, and by the time a child can toddle it can already sing songs, and even make them up. To a certain extent, music is also learned. Children in China learn to like music with small intervals and subtly changing pitches; children in Jamaica learn to like syncopated ballads; and children in Africa learn to like music with fast, intricate rhythms. One’s musical preferences can be willful. Generations tend to define themselves by a music that differs from that of their parents, who usually describe the new music as noise, obscene, a waste of time, and lacking in any art. When the waltz first came in, it was thought avant-garde and scandalous.* After all, it caused men and women to hold on to each other and move rapidly, clinging wildly while their hair flew, their petticoats fluttered, and their hips rocked in unison. The same was true of swing music, which the older generations of the time found barbaric, repetitious, or just silly. What were they to make of lyrics like: “It must be jelly, ’cause jam don’t shake like that”? And the tango had its own sneaky, insinuating rhythm and a sexy dance step in which a woman wraps her leg around a man’s leg as if he were a tree and she a vanilla orchid’s climbing vine. The words that accompanied all this carnal mayhem were usually sensuous, violent, and extravagantly heartrending. Here are the lyrics to a typical Argentinean tango, taken from Philip Hamburger’s Curious World: