The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature

by Levitin, Daniel J.

  The criticality of time and place is a hallmark of ritual songs, and it is so important that if it is violated, jobs can be lost and even—in the extreme—so can lives. Consider songs that accompany a country’s ruler, such as “Hail to the Chief ” or “God Save the Queen,” played respectively when the President of the United States or the British queen enters a room. If a scheming, conniving underling were to instruct the military band to play the song every time he walked in a room, it would be seen as a direct and aggressive challenge to the reigning ruler’s authority. In a dictatorship, playing the leadership song for the wrong person could easily result in a death sentence. Such is the importance of time and place in ritual and religion songs.

  Ritual and religion songs are therefore, to my way of thinking, bound to particular times and events, and for the explicit purpose of accompanying, guiding, or sanctifying a specific spiritual act. Under this definition “Jingle Bells” or “Deck the Halls” are not religion songs, although they spring from the celebration of a religious holiday. Rather, I see them as friendship songs, binding us to friends and family who hold similar beliefs. Christmas carols can be sung during a broad range of occasions surrounding the season of the holiday; as I conceive ritual and religion songs, they are far more restricted. Similarly, national anthems and football fight songs, although ritualistic (being played at the beginning of a competition, for example), are really serving a social bonding function more than a religious or spiritual one. “The Wedding March,” “The Funeral March,” the Mass, the Song of Atonement, on the other hand, are religion songs in that they must be performed at a certain time and place and they cannot be performed whenever one pleases. To do so would seem improper. I could sing “Jingle Bells” or “Over the River and Through the Woods” in the middle of July. It might seem odd, but it would not seem improper, sacrilegious, or disrespectful.

  Some form of music accompanies every behavior that even remotely resembles a religious practice worldwide, from the Pentecost Islanders’ male puberty ritual, to ancient Egyptian funeral services, to a contemporary Catholic Mass. In a great many ceremonies, there is a clear goal to perform the act as a community. Part of music’s role then involves the social bonding function of bringing together members of a community in this moment of making the request (for food, rain, health, etc.), the feeling of “strength in numbers” at appearing before the gods (invoking a feature of friendship songs), and part of music’s involvement is because it is effective at encoding the particular formula of a request that has worked in the past (invoking a feature of knowledge songs). But songs used in a religious context, while they have these elements of the friendship and knowledge songs described earlier, are a radically different type of song because of their connection to a belief system, and their being tethered to a particular time and place. Also crucial is music’s power to encode the details of the ritual—remember that by definition, rituals involve repetitive movements, and music exerts its power here to encode the proper conduct of the movements, synchronously with the music.

  Consider the ancient Devr ritual of the Kotas, a group of two thousand people who live in the Nilgiri Hills, a region bordering the South Indian states of Tamilnadu, Kerala, and Karnataka. Although unique in its details, it highlights common themes among belief, ritual, movement, and music that exist across all cultures and times.

  Devr begins on the first Monday after the waxing of the first crescent moon of winter. Villagers gather wood, prepare special ceremonial clothing, eat only a vegetarian diet, reduce their alcohol consumption, and walk barefoot. They clean and purify their homes using special plants (including branches from the tak tree, which contains a purple ellipsoidal berry that grows on a thorny stem). Designated individuals create and transfer a series of special fires that are conduits for divinity. The village deities (who are said to be present in these fires) inhabit stick bundles in a back room of a mundkanon’s (leader in all village god rituals) house called a kakuy. When the bundles are put in the fire, the deities can express themselves to the community.

  The beginning of the ceremony, omayn, is signaled by the unison blasts of the kob (a brass instrument) along with flutes and drums. The word omayn means “sounding as one” and is similar, of course, to the Jewish and Christian amen and the Sanskrit aum meaning “it is true” or “we all agree.” The gods hear these forceful blasts as an attention-getting invitation to enter the village. Much ceremonial music throughout the world has this attention-getting quality, from the rising perfect fourth of “Pomp and Circumstance” to the sudden appearance of the fifth in Kyrie of the Catholic Mass (on the word Christe).

  For the next ten to twelve days, Kotas perform instrumental music, dance, and sing to express their joy, unity, and respect for the gods, and to entertain them. Particular songs are used during ritual bathing and food offering, as individuals synchronize their movements to the music. A highlight of the Devr celebration occurs when villagers join together to re-thatch the temple roof. As the music plays, they throw sanctified materials onto the roof. To perform the ritual properly, the throwing must be synchronized with the horn blasts from the kob players so that the upward motion of the throwing arm is simultaneous with the playing of a piercing tremolo on the highest note on the instrument. Other notes give emphasis to changes in orientation and motion, both horizontal and vertical.

  In this and other rituals, music performs a critical, synthetic, and catalytic function. Music synthesizes disparate parts of the motor activities under a single melodic/temporal scheme. It catalyzes the actions by its alternation of tension and release: When rituals are synchronized with music specially designed for the undertaking of the ritual, the music reaches an emotional peak when the activity does, and reaches a resolution and release of harmonic tension as the activity draws to a close. Music guides participants to the proper, rigid, accurate performance of the ritual because motor action sequences can be learned in synchrony to the music: During this part of the song we raise our arms; during that part of the song we fold them.

  Children’s songs in which participants move parts of their body selectively, and in particular ways, are found in every culture. These constitute practice for coordinating music and movement. In my own childhood, a favorite was “The Hokey Pokey”:You put your right foot in

  You put your right foot out

  You put your right foot in

  And you shake it all about

  You do the Hokey Pokey and you turn yourself around

  That’s what it’s all about!

  Subsequent verses find us putting in our left foot, our arms, our head, our “whole self,” and so on. (In a recent dream, I’m climbing a steep mountain to reach a seer at the top. He emerges from his cave, his long white beard and long hair waving in the breeze. I ask him “What is the meaning of life? What is it all about?” He responds by quoting me the verse above, with a pregnant pause just before the last line, and then beams, “That’s what it’s all about!”)

  A song many Americans of all faiths learn in Sunday school about Noah and the flood has similar motor synchronization:The Lord said to Noah, “There’s gonna be a floody floody,”

  Lord said to Noah, “There’s gonna be a floody floody,”

  Get those children out of the muddy muddy

  Children of the Lord

  Chorus: So rise and shine and give God your glory glory

  So rise and shine and give God your glory glory

  Rise and shine and give God your glory glory

  Children of the Lord

  During the chorus, children stand at the word “rise,” hold their open palms next to their face during “shine,” and shake their palms to emulate a glittering action on the words “glory” (“ jazz hands”). I have Muslim and Baptist friends who learned the same patterns. “Itsy-Bitsy Spider” and myriad other hand-eye-sound coordination songs train children to move with music, train us for rituals.

  Recent research has confirmed that music is a powerful way of encoding
motor action sequences—specific movements that must be done in a particular way. Down syndrome children who are otherwise unable to tie their shoes can learn to do so if the movements are set to song. Military units learn to assemble and disassemble guns, engines, and other tasks using song. Rigidity in the performance of the ritual is enhanced by the music: Notes and words unfold in a precise sequence and at a precise time, and motor actions are learned to synchronize with them. The music also helps to set the emotional tone, to serve as a memory aid for practice, and to synchronize multiple participants.

  Most ritual music has a quality of unison rhythm for this reason, but exceptions exist, the most notable and fascinating being pygmy music, which (to my ear) is a conceptual predecessor of the ebullient, enthusiastic singing in many religious ceremonies, which is perhaps best known in black churches in America. I attended synagogue as a child and even sang in the choir, but as I mentioned above, this was a stern, reserved affair: We always sang in rhythmic unison, and only occasionally strayed into three-part harmony. This was in stark contrast to the Cornerstone Baptist Church Choir (singing “Down By the Riverside”) and St. Paul’s Disciple Choir (“Jesus Paid It All”) that I saw on Sunday morning television. Within such choirs, an ever-changing core group of people sing the nominal melody as others sing, improvise, shout, chant, and rejoin whenever they feel moved to do so. The result is a thrilling and exhilarating musical force that could sow doubt in the most ardently confirmed atheist. In gospel music, as sung in thousands of churches, both the community and the individual are celebrated. The unison and harmony lines of the core melody strengthen the sense of solidarity and community, of shared goals (as stated in the song) and shared history (as evidenced by the singing of a song that everyone knows). The ecstatic interjections, some planned and some spontaneous, affirm the individual as an artistic and meaningful entity, created in God’s image—leading to feelings of self-acceptance and self-confidence. As India.Arie sings in “Video,” her own merging of hip-hop, funk, gospel, and pop: I’m not the average girl from your video

  and I ain’t built like a supermodel

  But, I learned to love myself unconditionally

  Because I am a queen

  When I look in the mirror and the only one there is me

  Every freckle on my face is where it’s supposed to be

  And I know my creator didn’t make no mistakes on me

  My feet, my thighs, my lips, my eyes; I’m lovin’ what I see

  In the African pygmy music I’m listening to right now, enthusiastic shouting, wailing, and counterpoint run through the song. Rhythms are kept on shaker sticks and drums, often speeding up and slowing down. For the Mbuti people, the forest is benevolent and powerful, and their music is the language with which they communicate with the spirit of the forest, in order to request food, peace, and health. The aim is to communicate intense joy to the forest, which will return it to them. Good music is seen as the embodiment of social cooperation, as is good hunting and feasting. Bad music embraces laziness, aggressiveness, and disputatiousness and is associated with ill humor, shouting, crying, anger, bad hunting, and death. An ultimate goal of pygmy singing is to oppose the destructive force of death.

  Although traces of its asynchronous polyphony are found in modern gospel music, in its pure form it is without peer. Pygmy music is so utterly distinctive as to have earned its own entry in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians: Its most striking features, apparently common to all groups, are an almost unique wordless yodeling, resulting in disjunct melodies, usually with descending contours; and a varied and densely textured multipart singing. . . . This choral music is built up from continuously varied repetitions of a short basic pattern, which takes shape as different voices enter, often with apparent informality. . . . The frequently clear division of the total cyclic pattern between leader and chorus . . . is absent . . . or obscured by . . . the passing round of what might be regarded as soloistic parts from one to another. Some scholars see in this a reflection of the essentially democratic, non-hierarchical structure of pygmy social units.

  In describing the music, rituals, and practices of other cultures as I’ve done here, my intention is to show the great diversity of religious and ritual customs, and the enormous variety of forms of musical expression. I do not mean to draw attention to practices in a way that is disrespectful to them or to their adherents. Obviously, it is important to remind ourselves that preliterate and preindustrial peoples are not childlike or necessarily less intelligent than we—they live a different lifestyle, hold different beliefs, and have a different education. The pygmies famously resisted efforts by a few unwittingly condescending anthropologists to render them as “primitives.” (One pygmy man was tragically captured and put in a circus.) A true story attests to their sophistication and attempts to defend their dignity. When asked by the anthropologist Colin Turnbull to play the oldest song they knew for his tape recorder, a group of rain-forest pygmies sang an impromptu version of “Oh My Darling, Clementine,” complete with polyrhythmic drumming, stick-beating, and vocal harmony.

  Forms of nonsynchronous singing and chanting exist in much of the world’s religious music, from Sephardic Jewish liturgy, to Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu chanting. Children typically have difficulty with nonsynchronous music, and rounds are all but impossible for young children, who become distracted by the other parts, until they reach a developmental stage in which they have more volitional control over their own attentional mechanisms (and a more highly developed cingulate gyrus in the frontal cortex), sometime around age six to eight. Complex, nonsynchronous music can thus serve as a marker of intellectual maturity.

  In more structured forms of music—especially religious music—a leader sings a line and the choir or congregation echoes it, or answers with a prescribed musical reply. We see this in songs like “Oh Happy Day.” In such “call-and-response” music, the response may either be a literal musical and textual repeat (as it is here on the first and second replies) or a melodic variation (as on the third reply):LEADER: Oh happy day!

  CHOIR: Oh happy day!

  LEADER: Oh happy day!

  CHOIR: Oh happy day!

  LEADER: When Jesus washed . . .

  CHOIR: When Jesus washed . . .

  The folk music and work songs that grew out of the enslavement of African-Americans in the rural south incorporated elements of African music and gospel, and many of them featured a call-and-response form. It was these songs that subsequently formed the bedrock of twentieth-century folk and eventually popular music, where the call-and-response became a staple of sixties and seventies rock, as in “Twist and Shout” by the Isley Brothers: LEADER: Well shake it up baby

  BACKGROUND: (Shake it up baby)

  LEADER: Twist and shout

  BACKGROUND: (Twist and shout)

  LEADER: Well come on baby now

  BACKGROUND: (Come on baby)

  LEADER: Come on and work it on out

  BACKGROUND: (Work it on out)

  The call-and-response technique became so famous in pop music that it could even be implied, instrumentally, and evoke the same emotional drama and impact as the literal response. The roots of this are in the jump ’n’ jive music of the 1940s, for example in Big Joe Turner’s “Flip Flop and Fly,” where each vocal line is answered by a saxophone line. In Leon Russell’s “Superstar,” as performed by the Carpenters (with Richard Carpenter’s brilliant arrangement), Karen sings “Long ago” and the orchestral instruments echo her vocal melody, and keep up a vocal call and instrumental response throughout the song. McCartney does the same thing with his piano lines responding to the vocal lines in “Let It Be.”

  Call-and-response, as a specialized form of nonsynchronous singing, is partly predictable, in that we know when the next musical event is going to occur, although we may not know exactly what it will be. This balance of predictability and unpredictability gives the performance (as distinct from the underlying composition) a palpable exciteme
nt. In less structured forms, such as pygmy music or the religious and spiritual music of many indigenous and preliterate peoples, the unpredictability is increased and along with it the excitement. In musics like this, the rhythmic elements—played on drums, rain sticks, shakers, shells, stones, sticks, and hand claps—typically take on a more regular, hypnotic quality that can induce trance states. Just how music induces trance is not known, but it seems to be related to the relentless rhythmic momentum, coupled with a solid, predictable beat (or tactus). When the beat is predictable, neural circuits in the basal ganglia (the habit and motor ritual circuits), as well as regions of the cerebellum that connect to the basal ganglia, can become entrained by the music, with neurons firing synchronously with the beat. This in turn can cause shifts in brain-wave patterns, easing us into an altered state of consciousness that may resemble the onset of sleep, or the netherworld between sleep and wakefulness, or even a druglike state of heightened concentration coupled with increased relaxation of the muscles and a loss of awareness of time and place. When we’re engaged in the music making ourselves, and creating elaborate motor movements, we reach the flow state mentioned in Chapter 2, similar to an athlete being “in the zone.” When we’re not explicitly moving (or merely swaying with the beat), the state is different, more like a state of hypnosis, and differences in brain waves are also observed between the two states.