Music theorists since Aristoxenes and Aristotle, through Leonard Meyer, Leonard Bernstein, Eugene Narmour, and Robert Gjerdingen, have talked about tension as being one of the core properties of music. Virtually all theories of music assume that musical tension changes during the course of the piece, involving increases and decreases in a cyclic dance of tension and release. In a paper published a few years ago in the journal Music Perception, my students Bradley Vines (now a research scientist at UC Davis) and Regina Nuzzo (now a professor at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC) and I described this property of music in terms of physics—Newtonian mechanics specifically. We compared music to a coiled spring like the one you might have attached to your garage door. Pull or push the spring and it tries to come back to its resting position.
Musicians and composers are speaking metaphorically of course when they talk about tension and release in music. But across many studies, the metaphor seems to have consistency of meaning, even among non-musicians and across very different cultures. We seem hardwired to “get” the relationship, however metaphorical, between musical tension and the tension that we feel in physical objects (like springs), in the body (as in muscles), and in social situations (as at high school dances). These common life experiences among humans cause a convergence of meaning for “tension” and “release” across individuals when referring to music. The cognitive psychologist Roger Shepard reminds us that the human mind co-evolved with the physical world in such a way that it has incorporated certain physical laws. No human infant is surprised when objects fall downward—gravity has become incorporated into the hardwiring of the human brain from birth. Indeed, infants as young as a few weeks show surprise when objects are experimentally manipulated to “fall” up, or when one billiard ball hits another and the second does not move appropriately.
In general, tension tends to built up during music to a peak, after which the tension is released and subsides, often rapidly. This is what gives us that “aahhhhh” feeling at the end of a piece of music. Symphonies (from the standard-practice period of classical music), perhaps more so than other musical forms we enjoy today, are particularly formulated to create this sense of dynamism, of tension and ultimate, rewarding release in the last few moments. In performances of Indian classical music, the performer teases the listener by circling just above and below a stable tone, delaying the resolution as long as possible. When the resolution comes, members of the audience shake their heads and say, “Vah-vah!” Like life, music speeds up and slows down, it breathes, it has peaks and valleys of emotion, it engages our attention more or less strongly, it holds us then lets us go, and then picks us up again.
You can think of that stretched garage-door spring as containing potential energy—it wants to move; physicists also call this stored energy. When it starts to return to its original position, it is showing kinetic energy, the energy of movement. Similarly in music, composers and musicians create both potential and kinetic musical energy through a variety of means, principally involving pitch, duration, and timbre changes. But the “springiness” of music tension comes from our brains not from a physical object. No musical note is intrinsically or inherently “tense,” rather, tension comes from expectations that our brains create based on stylistic norms for music, statistical properties of music, and the notes that we have just previously heard in the musical piece we’re listening to. When we hear a note we didn’t expect, or one that violates standard musical probabilities even in a small way, this is like pulling on the musical tension spring; our brains want the music to return to a more stable position. When we hear the first two notes of the chorus in “Over the Rainbow”—that big octave leap—it feels like someone has pulled a spring in our musical brains. The third note simply has to come down in pitch, and of course it does. In fact, the entire chorus of the song can be seen as an intricate and fabulous journey of trying to come to a relaxing resting point from that initial two-note tension. Joni Mitchell stretches the melodic spring several times in her song “Help Me,” and spends the rest of the song allowing that spring to come nearly home, and—as in “Over the Rainbow”—not fully resolving the tension until the end of the song.
The tension in music motivates us to imagine musical scenarios that will come next—to form predictions. When our predictions come true, we feel rewarded and pat ourselves on the back. But we can learn even more when our predictions are not true, if events unfold in a way that is logical but is simply not one we would have thought of before ourselves. When a caveman friend showed another an easier way to find food, the second caveman recognized the value of learning, of expanding his repertoire of “right answers” as adaptive solutions to the problem of acquiring nourishment. Learning new things should feel good in our brains because it is usually adaptive.
Huron argues that music appropriates all of these four TRIP processes (plus another called “appraisal” that I’ve left out). He dissects the Beatles’ song “She Loves You” to illustrate this. One of the most clichéd chord sequences in fifties pop music and doo-wop is what musicians call a I-vi-IV-V progression (in the key of G: G Major, E minor, C Major, D Major; sometimes a ii chord is substituted for the IV, that is, A minor, which has two-thirds of the notes in common with C Major). In the first section of the chorus, Huron notes, Lennon and McCartney throw in a C minor where we are expecting to hear a C Major. There is only one note different between a C minor and a C Major chord (E flat instead of E natural), but even non-musicians detect this instantly. The C minor doesn’t last very long and then we are brought to the expected D Major—listeners reappraise the entire sequence, subconsciously of course, and realize that there exists a plausible alternative to the overlearned sequence they expected to hear. The listener, with the composers’ help, has learned something new about the world.
If we think of musical sequences metaphorically as road maps, the point is clear. Caveman Og only knows one way to get to the watering hole and he follows that route every day. One day the route is blocked by a boulder that has fallen right in the middle. Fortunately, Og remembers what his friend Gluzunk showed him—a side trail that also goes to the watering hole. There is not only one way to get from point A to point B. Those of our ancestors who delighted in compiling information such as this—whether in the real world or metaphorically, artistically, musically—were those who were more prepared in the case of contingencies that interfered with attaining their goals.
The process of music listening thus involves tension, our reactions to that tension, our imagining and prediction of where the music is going to go next. All this can be seen as a preparatory activity for the sort of abstract thinking about the world that finding food, shelter, and mates—and escaping dangers—requires. For this to work, our ancestors had to enjoy playing this game of TRIP; they had to enjoy making predictions and then seeing if they were met or not. Remember that emotions (linked to motivation) are the way that our brains reward and punish us for actions that affect our fitness. By random mutation, some of our ancestors may have gotten a squirt of that feel-good hormone dopamine whenever they made successful predictions in the theater of their minds. This would cause them to want to do it again—to spend more time in thought, more time imagining scenarios, turning them over in their minds, playing the game of prediction and resolution over and over again. To the extent that such mental exercises conferred an advantage in the real world, in a relatively short amount of time this adaptation would permeate the population. To paraphrase Dennett, we don’t sing and dance and get songs stuck in our heads because they are intrinsically attractive, memorable, or aesthetically beautiful. Rather, we have the relationship with music we do because those of our ancestors who found it enjoyable to be musical were those who were successful at passing on their genes.
Fundamentally, we have joy songs because moving around, dancing, exercising our bodies and minds is something that was adaptive in evolutionary history. Stretching, jumping, and using sound to communicate felt good because our
brains—through natural selection—developed rewards for those behaviors. Joy songs today give us a jolt of good brain chemistry as a biological echo of the importance they held over thousands of years of evolution. “I define joy,” Oprah Winfrey says, “as a sustained sense of well-being and internal peace—a connection to what matters.” By being able to celebrate our good feelings, sense of well-being, and positive emotions, we were better equipped to share our emotional states with others, a key ingredient in being able to form societies and cooperative groups.
CHAPTER 4
Comfort or “Before There Was Prozac, There Was You”
Eddie—the dishwasher at the pancake restaurant where I worked—lunged at my boss Victor with a kitchen knife. Victor fled, through the restaurant, just two steps ahead of him, knocking over a stack of high chairs and a few skinny teenage waitresses as he tried to get away. “I’m going to kill you!” Eddie shouted as Victor ran into the back, the Sunday morning patrons left agape. They had made two more complete circles through the restaurant and back room when Victor knocked over a tray of glasses. Eddie ran on over the broken glass without hesitation, passing by the griddle where I was cooking, and I grabbed his arm, pinning it momentarily to the counter. The knife fell out of his hand and straight down, lodging in his foot. The rest of the crew helped him pull the knife out while Victor made it to the parking lot and drove off. I went back to cooking pancakes and Eddie limped out the side door, and we never saw him again. All this over a song. And not just any song, but Tony Orlando and Dawn’s “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree.” I understood Eddie’s frustration (though perhaps not his chosen cutlery-based response), because having music in the back room was what helped all of us get through the dreary workday. But it had to be the right music, and this was something that the ragtag bunch of us who’d ended up at the Newport, Oregon, Sambo’s restaurant could never agree on. We all found comfort in music, and in fact it was this quality of music that had landed me there in Newport in the first place.
I dropped out of college to join a rock band, not because I found myself more interested in rock and roll than in calculus and physics (I didn’t), but for my mental health. My school subjects were intellectually stimulating, but I hadn’t made any friends my first year away from home and I was lonely. Music had always been a comfort to me during my largely solitary childhood. I found myself listening to music more and more during that first year away from home, and that made me want to play music more and more. The six songs that inspired me in 1975—that made me want to become a musician at least in those days—were:1. “Autobahn” by Kraftwerk. These guys ushered in what is now regarded as an entirely new genre—techno (sometimes called electronica)—and like all great musicians, they made it seem easy. Combining long-form, classical themes with a kind of geeky interest in electronics and creating their own synthesizer sounds, they seemed to be just the kind of sciency, music-y nerds that I could aspire to being. The song from the album of the same name was a twenty-five-minute tour de force of drawn-out arpeggios and McCartney-ish shifts from major to minor tonality.
2. Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, performed by Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic. The development of the main themes and variations on them, the counterpoint running through, are all laid out so transparently, so clearly for the listeners that it sounds as though this piece wrote itself. When listening to any one instrument, I felt that what the other instruments are doing at the same time is inevitable, obvious, that if only I could write a single melody, the other parts would present themselves to me automatically. Of course I knew that wasn’t true, but the ease with which Beethoven navigated harmonic space inspires me still.
3. Revolver by the Beatles. (I can’t single out one song from this album, but I listened to the album uninterrupted, hundreds of times, as though it were a song.) When this record first came out, I was only nine and not ready for it—I didn’t discover it until college. The sense of play, fun, and camaraderie among the musicians is very noticeable, and the music still sounds fresh to me. Their songs took on a more sophisticated lyrical, melodic, and harmonic quality with this album than on previous albums by the group. They sounded like they were having such a good time!
4. “Through My Sails” by Neil Young with Crosby, Stills & Nash. The delicate vocal harmonies here still give me chills. Think of the Everly Brothers to the second power. The blend of their voices is gorgeous, comforting, and warm. It is usually Stills who performs songs with a solo lead vocal, joined at certain points by the lush background voices (“Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” “See the Changes,” “Woodstock”), but here for the only time I’ve ever heard, Young pulls a Stills and delivers a few call-out lines, his voice enmeshed in the harmony the rest of the time. I’d always figured that Neil was too much of a loner, and too impatient to rehearse and practice, to work out the harmonic synchrony necessary to pull this off. Years later at a party, Graham Nash told me that this was in fact true: That for this song, he, Crosby, and Stills had taken the tapes and painstakingly worked out their parts after Neil had recorded his. Neil told me not long afterward that he really doesn’t like working over things, preferring the spontaneity of the moment. Neil even boasted to my friend Howie Klein—who at the time was president of Neil’s record label, Reprise—that he had written and recorded an entire album in just two days.
5. “The Great Gig in the Sky” by Pink Floyd. This came from their concept album Dark Side of the Moon, the band’s second effort (after Meddle) at playing with large-scale thematic connections among the tracks, more like a symphony than anything else that had ever been done in rock. The use of classical devices and narrative arc on the album got me thinking big, about merging classical and rock music. The singer, a guest vocalist named Clare Torry, delivers a chilling vocal performance—so much passion and sadness conveyed by the human voice that, even though there are no lyrics, the message seems so clear.
6. “Night and Day” by Stan Getz. As a sax player myself, I love listening to Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Wayne Shorter, and Charlie Parker, but Stan Getz has always held a special place for me because of his tone and his economical playing style. He was the first saxophonist whose parts I could get under my fingers; they just lay so easily on the instrument, and because of the hard rubber mouthpiece I used (and I suppose the shape of my mouth), I was able to emulate his tone more easily than the others’. I knew I could never play as fast as Bird, but I found comfort in knowing that a relatively slow player like Getz (Was he the B.B. King of the saxophone?) could still have a career.
My parents were naturally disappointed that I planned to drop out, unsure of what kind of future I could make for myself without a college degree. I told them about my plans to become a professional musician, but said I wasn’t really sure how to go about it. They confessed that they didn’t know either. I joined a series of rock bands that didn’t get very far. We would collapse under the weight of our own incompetence, or we would simply find it impossible to get booked at clubs. After more than two years or so of such floundering, I came home to visit for my father’s birthday in October. My father is a businessman who has always had a preternatural gift for problem-solving. His entrepreneurial spirit led him in his younger days to start his own accounting business, but he soon moved to a position at a large corporation. In his mind, there was an apt analogy here: Starting a band from scratch might be more difficult than joining a going concern, he told me. I realized that I had been playing with musicians who weren’t much better than I, and in fact, I was often the best in these little groups that were forming. And I wasn’t particularly good. That was no way to learn. If I was to become a professional, I had to be the worst member of the band. And so I set out to become the worst musician I could in a really good band! Or rather, I set out to become good enough that I could join a band of musicians who were just out of my league, who could help raise me up a notch in ability, who saw in me some potential that could be sculpted and molded.
My fath
er gave me a book written by George Plimpton called The X Factor that described how people become experts in their respective fields. Plimpton points out that successful people have had far more failures than unsuccessful people. Of course this seems paradoxical. But the resolution is this: People who eventually become successful have had many, many failures along the way, and what distinguishes them from the rest of the population is that they don’t give up. These leaders—corporate heads, expert chess players, actors, writers, athletes—look at failure differently than everyone else. First, when they fail, they don’t assume that there is anything wrong with them (“I’m not good enough,” “I suck”), nor do they figure that this is a permanent state (“I’m never going to get better,” “I will always suck ”). Rather, they look upon each failure as a necessary step toward reaching their ultimate goal. People who become successful see the progress toward a goal as involving a number of steps that will inevitably produce some minor setbacks. “This is something that I need to know in order to reach my goal,” they say to themselves. “And until now, I didn’t even know that I needed to know this. This setback is an opportunity to now go about acquiring the knowledge that is necessary to succeed.”
In order to be the worst musician in a better band than the ones I’d been playing in, I knew I needed to practice more. But with the sort of menial jobs I could get without a college degree, all my income went toward the high rents in California, even with five people crammed into a three-bedroom flat (one person sleeping in the living room and one the dining room). I moved to Oregon, where I knew rents were cheap, so that I could spend most of my time practicing the guitar. I took a job as chef at Sambo’s, a chain of pancake restaurants, and I could make my expenses in just two days a week of work—leaving plenty of time to practice the guitar. After six months of playing eight hours a day, I felt myself getting pretty good and I answered an ad at the local grocery store for a band that was looking for a lead guitarist, the Alsea River Band. This was a well-known band on the Oregon Coast, and they had actual gigs lined up several months in advance. They were led by a singer and songwriter named Étienne who was originally from Quebec. He may have been no older than forty-five, but that was ancient to me at the time, and his heavily creased face looked world-weary, battered, and he sang about love lost like he had lived every word. The band was a four-piece when I joined, Étienne playing rhythm guitar, a husband-and-wife duo on bass and keyboard, and a drummer. Étienne couldn’t play lead, but he knew what he wanted to hear. He gave me cassette tapes of his songs as done by the band before they lost their lead player, and of some of his favorite music, by Hank Snow, George Jones, and Tammy Wynette. I had never played country music and I had no particular interest in becoming a country musician, but this was the only game in town, and they were good, and I mean really good.
The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature Page 11