Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
CHAPTER 1 - Taking It from the Top or “The Hills Are Alive . . .”
CHAPTER 2 - Friendship or “War (What Is It Good For?)”
CHAPTER 3 - Joy or “Sometimes You Feel Like a Nut”
CHAPTER 4 - Comfort or “Before There Was Prozac, There Was You”
CHAPTER 5 - Knowledge or “I Need to Know”
CHAPTER 6 - Religion or “People Get Ready”
CHAPTER 7 - Love or “Bring ’Em All In”
Notes
Acknowledgements
Index
About the Author
ALSO BY DANIEL J. LEVITIN
This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession
DUTTON
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Levitin, Daniel J.
The world in six songs: how the musical brain created human nature / Daniel J. Levitin. p. cm.
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1. Music—Psychological aspects. 2. Music—Social aspects. 3. Music—Origin. I. Title.
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CHAPTER 1
Taking It from the Top or “The Hills Are Alive . . .”
On my desk right now I have a stack of music CDs that couldn’t be more different: an eighteenth-century opera by Marin Marais whose lyrics describe the gory details of a surgical operation; a North African griot singing a song, offered to businessmen passing by in the hopes of securing a handout; a piece written 185 years ago that requires 120 musicians to perform it properly, each of them reading a very specific and inviolable part off of a page (Beethoven’s Symphony no. 9). Also in the pile: forty minutes of groans and shrieks made by humpback whales in the Pacific; a North Indian raga accompanied by electric guitar and drum machine; a Peruvian Andes vocal chorus of how to make a water jug. Would you believe an ode to the gustatory pleasures of homegrown tomatoes?
Plant ’em in the spring eat ’em in the summer
All winter without ’em’s a culinary bummer
I forget all about all the sweatin’ and diggin’
Every time I go out and pick me a big ’un
Homegrown tomatoes, homegrown tomatoes
What’d life be without homegrown tomatoes?
Only two things that money can’t buy
That’s true love and homegrown tomatoes
(Guy Clark)
That all these are music may seem self-evident to some, or the stuff of argument to others. Many of our parents or grand-parents or children say that the music we listen to isn’t music at all, it’s just noise. Noise by definition is a set of sounds that are random, confused, or uninterpretable. Could it be that all sound is potentially musical if only we could understand its internal structure, its organization? This is what the composer Edgar Varèse was driving at when he famously defined music as “organized sound”—what sounds like noise to one person is music to another, and vice versa. In other words, one man’s Mozart is another’s Madonna, one person’s Prince is another’s Purcell, Parton, or Parker. Perhaps there is a key to understanding what is common to all these collections of sounds, and to what has driven humans since the beginning to engage with them so deeply as not just sound but music.
Music is characterized both by its ubiquity and its antiquity, as the musicologist David Huron notes. There is no known culture now or anytime in the past that lacks it, and some of the oldest human-made artifacts found at archaeological sites are musical instruments. Music is important in the daily lives of most people in the world, and has been throughout human history. Anyone who wants to understand human nature, the interaction between brain and culture, between evolution and society, has to take a close look at the role that music has held in the lives of humans, at the way that music and people co-evolved. Musicologists, archaeologists, and psychologists have danced around the topic, but until now, no one has brought all of these disciplines together to form a coherent account of the impact music has had on the course of our social history. This book is a lot like making a family tree, a tree of musical themes that have shaped our ancestors’ lives: their working days, their sleepless nights—the soundtrack of civilization.
Anthropologists, archaeologists, biologists, and psychologists all study human origins, but relatively little attention has been paid to the origins of music. I find that odd. Americans spend more money on music than they do on prescription drugs or sex, and the average American hears more than five hours of music per day. We know now that music can affect our moods and our brain’s chemistry. On a day-to-day level, a better understanding of the common history between music and humanity can help us to better understand our musical choices, our likes and dislikes, to harness the power of music to control our moods. But far more than that, understanding our mutual history will help us to see how music has been a shaping force, how music has been there to guide the development of human nature.
The World in Six Songs explains, at least in part, the evoluti
on of music and brains over tens of thousands of years and across the six inhabited continents. Music, I argue, is not simply a distraction or a pastime, but a core element of our identity as a species, an activity that paved the way for more complex behaviors such as language, large-scale cooperative undertakings, and the passing down of important information from one generation to the next. This book explains how I came to the (some might say) radical notion that there are basically six kinds of songs that do all of this. They are songs of friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion, and love.
In trying to understand the evolution of humanity and the role that music has played in it, it seems wise to begin with open minds (and ears) and not exclude any form of music too soon. However, the evolution of mind and music is easiest to follow in music that involves lyrics, because the meaning of the musical expression is less debatable. When the notes are hung on words (or is it that the words are hung on notes?), the meaning is easier to talk about usefully. Because music wasn’t recorded until about a hundred years ago, nor even accurately notated until a few hundred years before that, the historic record of music is substantially lyrics. For these two reasons, music with lyrics will be the predominant focus of The World in Six Songs.
Much of the world’s music is now available on compact disc, or on the medium that is rapidly replacing it, digitized sound files on computers (generically—and somewhat inaccurately—referred to as MP3s). We live in a time of unprecedented access to music. Virtually every song ever recorded in the history of the world is available on the Internet somewhere—for free. And although recorded music represents only a small proportion of all the music that has ever been sung, played, and heard, there is so much of it—estimates suggest 10 million songs or more—that recorded music is as good a place as any to start to talk about the music of the world. Thanks to intrepid musicologists and anthropologists, even rare, indigenous, and preindustrial music is now available to us. Cultures that have been cut off from industrialization and Western influence have had their music preserved, and by their own accounts, it may have been unchanged for many centuries, giving us a window into the music of our ancestors. The more I listen to music like this and to Western artists that are new to me, the more conscious I become of how large music is and how much there is to know.
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: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
and a song about suburban noise pollution: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.
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.)
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?
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.
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.
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