The musical brain doesn’t have to remember every note or every chord sequence; rather, it learns the rules by which notes and chord sequences are (typically, in a given culture) created. Violations of those rules are encoded as surprising events and so remembered as schema-breaking exceptions. We don’t have to relearn every time a friend gives us his phone number that there are going to be seven digits plus an area code—this information is schematized. We don’t need to learn that the candle-lighting song for a particular ceremony uses only certain notes in a certain pattern, because the choice of notes is constrained by the form (the scales) of our culture’s music; we learn the exceptions and the rules, not every single note.
Music is therefore a highly efficient memory and information transmission system. We don’t like it because it is beautiful, we find it beautiful because those early humans who made good use of it were those who were most likely to be successful at living and reproduction. We are all descended from ancestors who loved music and dance, storytelling, and spirituality. We are descended from ancestors who sealed mating rituals and wedding ceremonies with song, as we do now (or at least boomers like me) with “The Wedding Song (There Is Love),” the Carpenters’ “Close to You,” Nat King Cole’s “Unforgettable,” and Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are.” Songs like these remind us during life cycle events that we are part of a chain of continuing ceremony and ritual, participating as our ancestors did, binding our collective past to our personal future.
The Psalms of the Old Testament—reportedly written by King David—were all written as songs to commemorate, uphold, and celebrate the world’s first monotheistic religion. The Catholic Mass, Handel’s Messiah, the liturgical chants drawn from the Qur’an, and thousands upon thousands of other songs are intended to do the same. (Dan Dennett has suggested that atheists would do well to have some rousing pro-science gospel-like songs.) Some of the most beautiful music ever written has been songs of religion, songs of praise to God. Religious thoughts takes us outside ourselves, lift us up higher, elevate us from the mundane and day-to-day to consider our role in the world, the future of the world, the very nature of existence. The power of music to challenge the prediction centers in our prefrontal cortex, to simultaneously stimulate emotional centers in the limbic system and activate motor systems in our basal ganglia and cerebellum serves to tie an aesthetic knot around these different neurochemical states of our being, to unite our reptilian brain with our primate and human brain, to bind our thoughts to movement, memory, hopes, and desires.
Two final and important ways in which religious music has functioned in the formation of human nature are its ability to motivate repetitive action, and to bring what psychologists call closure . Obtaining closure ameliorates the very human tendency to obsess, to “stress out” over the unknown, to dwell on things that are beyond our immediate control. We pray for a sick child and then move on. We pass through a rite of passage and become in the eyes of society an adult. Rituals, religion, and music unite memory, motion, emotion, control over our environment, and ultimately feelings of personal security and safety, and agency. Some form of ritual is an integral part of the daily lives of children and adults in every culture. The sheer diversity of it is surprising, from people gathering sticks and bundling them in a certain way, to brushing one’s hair one hundred times before going to sleep, to singing songs of praise upon arising in the morning, or whispering “I love you” to your partner before closing your eyes.
My mother’s mother—the piano-playing grandma—followed a daily ritual of her own making after we bought her that electronic keyboard for her eightieth birthday. Every morning she woke up with a sense of purpose, a goal, and that was to sing her song, “God Bless America.” Who said you can’t teach an old grandmother new tricks? Learning the sequence of finger movements kept her mind active and challenged, especially as she began to add chords when she was eighty-nine. It gave her a sense of mastery, of accomplishment. And the particular song she chose to sing gave her pride in being alive and living in a free society. She played that on-awakening song every morning until she was ninety-six, adding in a personal prayer of thanks for her health, her family, her home, and her dog. Then one day she passed away.
I flew to Los Angeles for the funeral. She had a plot next to my grandfather Max’s, way outside of town to the north. It was cold that morning and we could see our breath in puffs of steam rising toward the sky as the rabbi spoke the ancient prayers, the familiar cadences we had all known since childhood, the guttural sounds of Hebrew and Aramaic that reminded me of her own throaty German accent. I helped to carry her casket to the grave site, along with my father, uncles, and cousin Steven. The casket seemed too light to hold my grandmother, a woman of such determination, such strength and power that she had saved her entire family from the hands of the Nazis through the sheer force of her will. After the casket was lowered into the ground, we each picked up a fistful of dirt and, in the Jewish tradition, threw the damp earth into her grave. We sang from the Bible, Psalm 131, according to the ancient Aramaic tune that Jews have been singing some version of for two thousand years. The tune’s Middle Eastern, minorish sound, with odd, exotic intervals, evokes stone buildings and walled cities:Lord, my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty;
neither do I exercise myself in things too great,
or in things too wonderful for me.
Surely I have stilled and quieted my soul;
like a weaned child with its mother,
my soul is with me like a weaned child.
O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time forth and forever.
It was not the memorial speeches that brought us to tears, not the lowering of her casket into the ground, but the haunting strains of that hymn that broke through our stoic veneer and tapped those trapped feelings, pushed down deep beneath the surface of our daily lives; by the end of the song there wasn’t a dry cheek among our group. It was this event that helped all of us accept the death of my grandmother, to mourn appropriately, and, ultimately, to replace rumination with resolution. Without music as a catalyst, as the Trojan horse that allowed access to our most private thoughts—and perhaps fears of our own mortality—the mourning would have been incomplete, the feelings would have stayed locked inside us, where they might have fermented and built up tension, finally exploding out of us at some distant time in the future and for no apparent reason. Grandma was gone; we had shared the realization and etched it in our minds, sealed with a song.
Many of the greatest music of all time has been religious—from the Song of Solomon to Handel’s Messiah, to “Amazing Grace.” Scientists and other religious skeptics often deride the religious by posing the following question: If God is so great that he created the entire universe, why would he care whether we praise him or not—why would such a powerful being be so psychologically needy that he wants us to sing to him?” But modern religious thinkers who believe in the existence of God indisputably suggest that the primary reason for this is to benefit the singer, not God. “God doesn’t need our praise,” Rabbi Hayyim Kassorla says. “He is not vain, he doesn’t need us to tell Him He is great. But because He designed us, He knows what we need. He dictated that we should sing songs of religion and belief because He knows they help us to remember, they motivate us, and they bring us closer to Him; He knows that they are what we need.”
CHAPTER 7
Love or “Bring ’Em All In”
Romantic love songs are a sham that perpetuate a lie on unsuspecting young kids,” said Frank Zappa. “I think one of the causes of bad mental health in the United States is that people have been raised on ‘love lyrics.’ ”
Joni Mitchell says, “There’s no such thing as romantic love. It was a myth invented in ancient Sumeria, repopularized in the Middle Ages, and one that is clearly not true. Romantic love is all about ‘I’ this and ‘I’ that. But true love is about ‘other.’ ”
For two such different people to agree on the ultimate deception of roma
ntic love—an avant-garde composer best known for perverse, cynical lyrics of the “Kenny picked his nose and left it on the window” type and one of the great romantic poets of our time—there must be something to the idea. Virginia Woolf described romantic love as “only an illusion. A story one makes up in one’s mind about another person.”
But what about all those shamelessly romantic love songs I loved so much when I was thirteen? The bubblegum songs?
Imagine me and you, I do
I think about you day and night, it’s only right
To think about the girl you love and hold her tight
So happy together
There’s Elvis’s “Love Me Tender” and “(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear,” Tommy Roe’s “Dizzy” (and oh, what a great string part!), the Archies’ “Sugar, Sugar” (sung by Ron Dante, who was back a few months later with “Tracy” by the Cuff Links), the Jackson Five’s “I Want You Back,” Gary Puckett and the Union Gap’s “Over You,” the Ohio Express’s “Yummy Yummy Yummy.” Not to mention great love songs from my parents’ generation, such as “Our Love Is Here to Stay” as sung (in my favorite versions) by Ella Fitzgerald or by Nat King Cole:It’s very clear, our love is here to stay
Not for a year, but forever and a day
I can’t see me lovin’ nobody but you
For all my life
When you’re with me, baby the skies’ll be blue
For all my life
After these poetic statements about the writer’s love in general, the lyric playfully turns to specifics to involve a metaphor for the longlastingness of their love:In time the Rockies may tumble, Gibraltar may crumble
They’re only made of clay, but our love is here to stay
Like many preteens, I “learned” about love from songs like this, from fairy tales and Disney movies. The message in these is that when you find the right person (and there is only one “right person” for each of us), you will know it’s love because you will want to be with that person all the time, she will make you feel good, happy, and fulfilled, and you will never have a disagreement. In 1988, when I was working for Columbia Records, a friend of mine in the company played me an album that had just been finished by a new singer-songwriter with the audacious name of Parthenon Huxley. The first two lines of the second song on the album caught my attention: “I fell in love when I was twenty-one/I knew it was love, it was more fun than being alone.” That is what love felt like to me—the discovery that there was no one in the world I would rather be with. The night before I got married, Julia Fordham dedicated a song to us at one of her concerts, saying it was “for a love that is filled with shiny, limitless newness.” I sensed in her voice a world-weary knowledge of some transformation she thought would inevitably occur, but I didn’t stop to figure out what she might have meant.
I knew about the curmudgeonly anti-love diatribes of some writers, and figured they were just trying to be funny. Kurt Vonnegut wrote:I have had some experiences with love, or think I have, anyway, although the ones I have liked best could easily be described as “common decency.” I treated somebody well for a little while, or maybe even for a tremendously long time, and that person treated me well in turn. Love need not have had anything to do with it. Also: I cannot distinguish between the love I have for people and the love I have for dogs. When a child, and not watching comedians on film or listening to comedians on the radio, I used to spend a lot of time rolling around on rugs with uncritically affectionate dogs we had. And I still do a lot of that. The dogs become tired and confused and embarrassed long before I do. I could go on forever.
W. Somerset Maugham weighs in with “Love is what happens to a man and woman who don’t know each other.” According to the cold, clinical view of science, Zappa, Mitchell, and Vonnegut may be a lot closer to the truth than the Turtles, Ella Fitzgerald, or Parthenon Huxley, and Maugham may be the closest of all. Was love really here to stay or was what we were feeling just kid stuff? “And they called it puppy love.” It may have been wonderful, powerful, and full of youthful energy, but not very mature.
Researchers have identified neurochemical changes that occur during the first few months of a relationship; huge releases of oxytocin (the “trust” hormone) and feel-good hormones like dopamine and norepinephrine, and at such high levels that they could be regarded as inducing clinically verifiable altered states of consciousness. The Stylistics crooned “I’m stone(d) in love with you,” B. J. Thomas sang that he was “hooked on a feeling/high on believing /that you’re in love with me.” Bryan Ferry sang “Love is a drug and I need to score,” and Robert Palmer sang “Doctor, doctor, give me the news/I got a bad case of lovin’ you/No pills are gonna cure my ills.” The Beatles harmonized “And when I touch you I feel happy inside/It’s such a feeling that my love/I get high, I get high” (in Dylan’s famous misunderstanding of the lyric, which was actually “I can’t hide, I can’t hide”). This neurochemical high causes our heart rate to speed up when we think about our loved one, impels us to make resolutions such as losing weight or exercising more, and fills us with a kind of giddy optimism that with this person, everything will work out right.
The drug aspect of love is reflected as more sinister in other songs, such as “Cupid’s Got a Brand New Gun” by one of my favorite songwriters, Michael Penn (Sean’s brother, and husband of Aimee Mann):This quick opiate
might wear the wings of angels
that’s when you realize
you’ve been shot down
wounded unto death by something called love
Penn suggests that love is a kind of death: a death of our single self, a death to some extent of our ego and of boundaries we place around our most private thoughts and feelings. The implicit message in his lyric is something we’ve all experienced, that love can make you do things you might not otherwise do, as Percy Sledge sang about in “When a Man Loves a Woman” (the lyric in Chapter 1). Having had romantic love and lost it can be one of the most painful things we experience—so much so that, like the person who drank too much alcohol the night before, we resolve never to do it again: “No, I don’t want to fall in love (this love is only gonna break your heart)” (Chris Isaak); “I don’t want to fall in love” (Tonya Mitchell); “I don’t want to fall in love with the idea of love” (Sam Phillips).
“In songs like that,” Sting says, “you really have an aspect of knowledge songs and love songs combined—they’re trying to teach you about love, to be wary: ‘Don’t put your faith in love, my boy, my father said to me/I fear you’ll find that love is like the lovely lemon tree/Lemon tree very pretty and the lemon flower is sweet/But the fruit of the poor lemon is impossible to eat.’ ”
The fact that romantic love can be reduced to or described by distinct changes in neurochemistry does not make it any less real. Stubbing your toe and winning the lottery also cause neurochemical changes, but that doesn’t mean that when the brain chemistry is back to normal your toe isn’t still bruised, or that your bank account isn’t still flush.
At the historical core of this propensity for romantic love is the ability to form a strong partnership with another person, and that has clear evolutionary advantages—with the long maturation period of human children, those men and women who feel bonded and committed to one another are more likely to share in the raising of the children, and those children are more likely to thrive both physically and psychologically. Nowhere in your lineage, no matter how many thousands of years you go back, will you find an ancestor of yours who failed to have children. And although care may have differed considerably from one child to another and from one family unit to another, none of us has an ancestor who didn’t receive at least the care necessary to grow up and successfully reproduce. Life in any era is unpredictable and child rearing is potentially fraught with difficulty. Feeling committed to your partner through romantic love confers obvious advantages to the offspring.
Unfortunately, the neurochemical high doesn’t last forever. Sometimes it is gone after a few
days or weeks or months; sometimes it can last five or seven years (leading to the so-called “seven year itch” in marriages). Perhaps the second most common song in pop music, after the romantic love song, is the breakup song, or the song of love lost. In “Let It Die,” Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters writes: Hearts gone cold and hands are tied
Why’d you have to go and let it die?
In “Downbound Train,” Bruce Springsteen sings:She just said, “Joe, I gotta go
We had it once, we ain’t got it anymore”
Or as Rosanne Cash sings, with the heartbreak dripping from her voice in her song “Paralyzed”:I picked up the phone, you were both on the line
Your words to each other froze me in time
A lifetime between us just burnt on the wires
Dissolved in a dial tone, consumed in your fires
What is this thing called love that it is so slippery, so ephemeral, so capricious? Could some of the greatest literature and music of all time have been written about an illusion? For those legions of modern thinkers and scientists who are atheists, there is certainly precedent in all the great writing and painting that was directed at a nonexistent God.
Because romantic love is what gets written about, talked about, filmed and sung about so much, we can temporarily forget that love comes in many different forms—the love between parents and children, between friends, love of God, love of one’s way of life, and love of country. What all these forms of love have in common is intense caring (the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference), caring more about someone or something else than you care about yourself. Describing a man who played his last game of chess before committing suicide, Gabriel García Márquez writes in Love in the Time of Cholera: “Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, already lost in the mists of death, had moved his pieces without love.” “Without love” is rendered as the equivalent of “without care.” Parthenon Huxley writes in “Buddha Buddha”:Everything I do, Buddha did with love and that’s what I aspire to,
The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature Page 22