Not the other way around, as is commonly thought. Stephen
Pinker, who by and large is a really smart guy, makes
a reasonable-seeming guess that music functions as a kind
of auditory cheesecake. Pinker thinks music is a fortuitious
bonus arising from our language abilities, fun and relaxing
but not of much survival value. I don't agree with this view,
and Stephen
Mithen doesn't either. While I muttered at Pinker in my
head, Professor Mithen wrote a book called The
Singing Neanderthals. In it, SM suggests, quite convincingly
as far as I'm concerned, that music long predates language
in our evolutionary history, the bridge to the gestural and
sonic communications of our primate ancestors. SM further
ventures that music was a crucial adaptation for our hominid
ancestors, catalyzing social bonding, transmitting and receiving
emotion, and coordinating our fine motor skills and sense
of timing. Then as now, music's value extends far beyond its
ability to make people feel good, not
that making people feel good is chopped liver.
Music and the active making of it are a much more pervasive
aspect of your daily life than you probably realize. A very
large part of your waking life is occupied by totally nonconscious
bodily engagement in music-making of one form or another.
Consider whistling or humming quietly to yourself while waiting
for an elevator. Consider tapping a pen against a tabletop
while you're reading. People do a great deal of absent-minded
musicianship when they're bored or their minds are only partially
occupied. There's a movie you should run out and see called
Touch
The Sound, a documentary about the percussionist Evelyn Glennie.
She's the deaf Scottish woman who playing tuned exhaust pipes
on the Björk's Telegram, a sublimely weird tune on a
sublimely weird record:
My Spine
The documentary shows people in Grand Central Station drumming
with pens on the arms of their seats, tapping their feet,
and so on, all perfectly unaware as they read or stare into
space. The brain's capacity for nonconscious musicality is
an inviting space for memes
to occupy, which is why I so often walk
around unable to get Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber's goddamn songs
out of my goddamn head.
I consider the act of listening attentively with emotions
and imagination engaged to be a form of musicianship, in fact
one of the most important forms. For all singers and instrumentalists,
amateur and pro, the practice of engaged listening is central
to learning how to play, and a necessary precondition to giving
good performances. Active listening doesn't depend on having
music playing outside your head; it works equally well with
music played on the brain's internal jukebox, or on any patterned
environmental sounds, or on the interactions of both. It works
well with birds, amphibians and insects, but technological
sounds can reward attentive listening. Try focusing on the
sounds of a bank's ATM area sometime, notice that all of the
machines are beeping different tones from the same key. You
have in fact probably already noticed this and filed it way,
without ever having been conscious of doing so.
I would also include in my definition of musicianship any
form of dance, which is basically just an extroverted form
of participatory listening. Like drumming and humming, dance
is a lot more pervasive that we usually think. All walking
has a strong dance component, most apparent in stylized walks
like a military march or homeboy's pimp roll, but visible
everywhere. Consider a busy commuter's harried stride vs that
person's weekend afternoon amble. Consider George W Bush's
swagger vs John Kerry's stiff-legged lurch. Watch this
animation, and
this one, and notice that pendulum-like swinging of the
hips makes for a sexier and more confident walk. Straighter
walks are more like military marching or dejected trudging.
The same could be said for eighth notes. I have at various
periods had trouble walking for the same reason I have trouble
dancing - anxiety and self-consciousness overwhelm my motor
areas with conflicting instructions. Professor Mithen conjectures
that dance was the mental scaffold our Lucy-era
ancestors used to learn the difficult balancing act that is
walking upright.
Speech also has a musical skeleton. Pitch literally conveys
grammatical and vocabulary information in languages like Mandarin
Chinese, and it supplies an enormous amount of contextual
nuance in every language. Consider all of the different inflections
of the word Dude or Okay or Hey and how each conveys a different
stance towards whomever you're addressing. Rhythm and tempo
are crucial to the power of great orators from Martin Luther
King to Bill Clinton, and lack of rhythm is what makes Al
Gore's speech grate so on the ears.
The brain has evolved in layers, with the earliest structures
in the middle and newer features surrounding them. We know
that language is an evolutionary novelty because the brain's
language-processing centers are right up against the skull
on lower frontal cortex. We know that respiration is very
old, because the brain's breathing center is in the middle
of the brainstem. How about music? Pinker's logic suggests
that it might happen in the more high-tech new areas, but
the evidence is beginning to suggest that the neural networks
for music processing extend beyond the cerebral cortex and
into parts of the brain with a much longer history.
Prof Mithen names the communication system most likely used
by Homo Sapiens in Stone Age Africa 'Hmmmmm' - an acronym
standing for Holistic, Manipulative, Multi-Modal, Musical,
Mimetic. He thinks that while the Neanderthals also used a
similar system, they never developed an abstract, semantic
language the way we did.
Imagine a gradual progression from the grunts, barks, touches
and gestures of monkey and ape communication to Hmmmmm. Mithen
imagines our hominid forebears using vocalizations to imitate
nature, especially the calls of animals and birds. Mothers
hmmmmmed to infants in much the same ways that they still
do (and the way we unconsciously do to pets as well.) Singing
presumably had a strong courtship function in the Stone Age,
again as it still does. And hominid hunter-gatherer bands
would have done a lot of group singing and chanting, to build
morale and teamwork or just to pass the time. As language
has taken over the basic data transmission tasks, music has
specialized and diversified, but the best stuff is still fulfilling
its most ancient purposes. Consider Bob Marley's song Them
Belly Full:
Forget your problems and dance
Forget your sickness and dance
Forget your weakness and dance
hear it on Natty Dread
hear it on Live At The Roxy
I agree with Mithen's statement that "all infants are
born musicians," the same way that all neurologically
ordinary infants are born with the capacity to learn language,
walking, eating with a fork, etc. But kids need the opportunity
to develop their capacities if they're to find their fullest
expression. Western academic musical practice has become a
systematic method for grinding musicality out of ninety-five
percent of people, and for getting the other five percent
to compete with each other over it in a manically crazy way.
Specialization of musicianship has its benefits - it produces
virtuosos from Chopin to Coltrane - but it has terrible costs
to the non-specialists' emotional development. The specialists
don't benefit evenly either - Chopin and Coltrane led troubled
and tumultuous lives sadly typical of the best professional
musicians.
What about geniuses? Wasn't Coltrane born with something
the rest of us don't have? Ditto John Lennon, Bach, Billie
Holiday et al? I'm increasingly confident that geniuses are
more made than born. People vary genetically, but I think
differences in musical "talent" have a lot more
to do with access, time and attention. If you grow up doing
a lot of singing and playing, you're going to be better at
it than if you don't. Cuba produces a lot of great musicians
because the culture values musicality, and a lot of Cubans
spend a lot of their time playing and listening. Saudi Arabia
doesn't produce too many great musicians because their culture
frowns on musicality and they don't get much chance to play
or listen. America is somewhere in the middle. Coltrane grew
up poor (by American standards) but he had the opportunity
to do a lot of music-making, both formally and informally,
in church, in school bands and even in the Navy. Our brains
have a wonderful plasticity; if you spend all day every day
studying something, you're probably going to be very good
at it, as the neurons that
fire together wire together.
Music is a way of systematizing and communicating emotional
states. When I was younger and mostly awkward and angry, so
was my music. When I was too scared to even express or acknowledge
my feelings, I wasn't making any music (except inside my head,
all the time.) Now that I'm happier and more confident, I
make music steadily, and while my tastes still run into the
dark and turbulent, I
can also explore the more joyously booty-shaking sounds as
well. I see similar dynamics in every musician I've ever
met.
© ethan hein 2007 | back
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