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BY ANDREW STILLER ------------ This article appeared originally in Opus (August, 1987), now combined with editions of Musical America, and is used here with the permission of the copyright owners. I consider it a profoundly important article since it brings together information vitally important to those of us whose love of music is, after all, the basic motive underlying our search for accurate reproduction of it. But this article is more th. that. It is full of clues about the basic interrelationship be tween the rational, judging, evaluative capacities of our left brains and the fundamental, biologically and emotionally based methods of proc cuing music in our right brains, which are radically different. The experiments at New York University the author refers to make it clear that there is undoubtedly a fundamental difficulty for most of us when we try to evaluate the qualities of music, and at the same time, to process it with our right brains. I believe this is the basis for the highly emotional, acrimonious and still un resolved debate about our abilities to successfully and fruitfully participate in double blind equipment tests. To my mind, double blind tests will not be scientifically accurate measures of the relative performance parameters of music reproduction equipment until the test instrument is more fully understood. Using the human senses and the brain as a measuring instrument to evaluate equipment without knowing whether un-quantified variables affect the measuring device is not scientific. A scientific experiment allows only one variable. It is as though we have decided to use an Off the-shelf test instrument whose evaluation mechanism we do not fully understand. E.T.D. --------- ------------------------ THE PAST THIRTY YEARS have witnessed a tremendous growth in our understanding of humanity's place in the natural world, and of the biological component of human behavior and mental processes. This new knowledge carries profound implications for the realm of music. It requires extensive re-examination of our ideas on the position of music in our lives, and of its importance to both the ------------ ABOUT THE AUTHOR Andrew Stiller is a composer residing in Philadelphia, where his A Periodic Table of the Elements will be premiered by Orchestra 2001 on March 25, 1990. His original train ing was in paleontology, a field in which he retains a lively interest. He is the author of an encyclopedic Handbook of Instrumentation ( California, 1985). ------------------- individual and society. There are significant ramifications, too, for music theory and aesthetics; yet because of the much lamented culture gap between science and the humanities, critics and theorists have so far paid scant attention to these developments. The relevant data come from fields as diverse as ethology, anthropology, paleontology, and neurology, and while a vast amount remains to be learned about the biological roots of music, a clear outline has begun to emerge, where a generation ago there was only a question mark. One of the most important developments has been the virtual erasure of the boundary between instinctive and learned behavior. In the classic formulation, instinct was literally inborn, built into the very structure of the brain and apart of its ''hardware."' The expression of an instinct was automatic and unconscious, requiring only an appropriate stimulus to set it off. Learned behavior on the other hand was 'software,' differing from individual to individual and requiring experience, trial, and error for its acquisition and application. Dead Instincts Research in the past three decades has shattered this neat dichotomy to such an extent that there is now serious question whether the concept of ''instinct"' retains any validity at all. For one thing, the ability to learn is not unitary: In each species (including humans), certain things are more quickly and easily learned than others. This built-in propensity to learn specific behaviors proves so strong in some cases that virtually all members of the species ac quire them, and it is these that we call instinctive. But ''instinctive'' behaviors must be learned. Furthermore, there is a seamless continuum leading from these behaviors through those less frequently adopted to those only exceptional individuals can learn. The few truly automatic behaviors that remain (such as a newborn's tendency when stroked on the cheek to turn toward the stimulus and attempt to suck) are now considered merely reflexes. The new view of instinct can be clearly illustrated with the example of sex. Here if anywhere is an instinct, hard-wired into the body with specialized nerve endings, a specific processing region in the brain, and an elaborate system of hormonal control mediated by the gonads, pituitary, and adrenals. Yet when this system kicks in at puberty, the adolescent spends months in a state of vague restlessness before figuring out what itches and how to scratch it, and it will take several- even many-years before ''doing what comes naturally'' is fully learned. Some people never do get it right. Ape Levels On the other hand, language, once thought to be purely a product of the human intellect has been shown to have important biological underpinnings. Experiments in teaching sign language to apes have demonstrated that a human level of intelligence is not required for language acquisition-yet apes have no language of their own, while a human microcephalic idiot (whose brain may be smaller than a pygmy chimpanzee's) will learn to speak without any special prompting. In fact, a physically normal human cannot be prevented from learning to talk, and twins reared in unusually isolated conditions have been known to teach speech to each other, making up their own, full-fledged language as they go. Such 'twin speech' is similar in structure and complexity to ''real'' languages, themselves all more or less alike. Babies-even deaf ones-go through an "'instinctive'' babbling phase in which they simply enjoy trying out vocal sounds; it's an easy leap from that point to speech. And there is a specific, anatomically identifiable speech area in the brain-a feature found only in humans. On the basis of all this evidence, it is now generally believed that hominids evolved the ability to speak before advancing beyond the ape level of intelligence-indeed, that the possession of language is what enabled the evolution of human intelligence in the first place. Could music be equally ancient and inborn? Increasing evidence suggests that it may be. Some of this evidence comes, rather grudgingly, from the field of anthropology. Anthropologists are not in general very comfortable with the notion of biological determination of human behavior. The reasons for this are historical: biological arguments were used in the nineteenth century to support notions of racial and ethnic ''superiority'' that anthropologists since have seen it as their mission to combat. Nonetheless, it was anthropology that demonstrated the universality of the smile, the furrowed brow, and other facial and bodily gestures of biological origin. And anthropology has turned up numerous other ''universals'' in human culture- among them, music. Brain Tracks All societies have some kind of music. More specifically, all societies have singing, and dancing, and sacred music. Spurred by studies showing the under lying similarity of all languages, ethno musicologists in the past couple of decades have been searching for comparable similarities among the world's musical dialects; and though much work re mains to be done, a number of important musical universals have been identified: Melodies worldwide are made mostly of major seconds; all music employs dynamic accents, and notes of varying lengths; and all display extensive use of variation and repetition. That these traits seem ''natural'' and obvious is itself significant, for logically music does not have to be made this way. That they-and music itself-are cultural universals, however, does not automatically prove that they are bio logically determined: T-shirts and cassette recorders will be universals in a few years (if they are not already), though there is surely no biological mandate for them. But the universal ity of music suggests that there may be a biological basis for its existence. If so, that basis should be reflected in the structure and functioning of the brain. Here, too, the evidence proves strongly suggestive. It is by now well known that the perception of music as such takes place in the right half of the brain (language and analytical reasoning, by contrast, are left-brain functions). Recently this process has been directly observed through PET (positron-emission tomography) scans of experimental subjects, in whom increased right-brain metabolism can be seen as music is listened to. Those with musical training show activity in both halves of the brain, fluctuating constantly as the music is simultaneously experienced and analyzed. Neurological Gropes Unlike the case with language, there seems to be no distinct, limited piece of the brain devoted to ''music appreciation." Rather, this function is spread diffusely through the right cerebral hemisphere, especially the temporal lobe. Such diffuse brain functions are very hard to study, and little is known about the neural interconnections involved. Our understanding of how the brain processes music is based largely on observations of what happens when things go wrong. This is of course the classic method of study in neurology-deducing the organizational structure of the brain by observing what goes on in brains that are congenitally defective, injured, or ill. It's rather like trying to figure out the components and wiring of a piece of electronic equipment by studying what happens in specimens that arrive defective from the factory, incur dam age, or become overloaded. Most of the observations about music made under these circumstances have been incidental to more dramatic phenomena, and the amount of attention paid to them has depended largely upon the musical interest and sophistication of the investigating neurologist. Much potentially valuable work has been com promised by the failure of investigators to come to grips with the musical phenomena under study; many of the contributors to the pioneering symposium Music and the Brain (MacDonald Critchley and R. A. Henson, eds; Heinemann Medical, 1977), for example, seem to be groping in the dark, mystified by the nature of musical performance and composition, and unable to define ''music," to differentiate music and sound as concepts, or to elicit precise accounts of their patients' experiences. The neurological evidence strongly implies that mu sic was no last-minute addition to the roster of human behavior, and we may safely assume that Neanderthals were singing songs 100 millennia ago. Unscathed Bach Far more valuable for our purposes- and far more entertaining for the general reader-is the immensely humane and highly praised anthology of case studies The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, by the British/ American neurologist Oliver Sacks ( Summit, 1986). Sacks spreads his net across the whole realm of neurology, but offers astute observations about music in connection with almost every case. Indeed this book should be required reading for anyone interested in the fundamental questions of musical aesthetics and musical psychology; it repeatedly goes straight to the heart of things and illustrates the nature of music from numerous surprising and highly revealing angles. Two of Sacks' cases have particular relevance here. One involves an old woman in a nursing home who awoke one morning to find herself deafened by the sound of Irish folksongs from her remote childhood. These turned out to be entirely in her brain; she was having temporal-lobe seizures. Such cases (not always with an identifiable cause) are almost commonplace among the elderly. They always involve music, usually songs from the patient's distant past, and it seems difficult to escape the conclusion that our brains contain storage space specifically set aside for a song anthology. Charles Ives's famous remark; 'I think there must be a place in the soul all made of tunes,'' appears to be quite literally true. The other case is far more unusual: a man whom childhood meningitis had left mentally retarded as well as behaviorally and emotionally crippled, but who enjoyed a rich, full, and highly developed musical life. He was so familiar with the Bach cantatas (all the Bach cantatas, as well as a staggering amount of other music) that he served as a valuable resource for his church choir, evincing a full understanding and appreciation of these highly intellectual scores. Clearly, whatever had happened to the rest of his brain, his musical intelligence remained a separate-and unimpaired-function. Thumbs and Music This is by no means the most extreme such case. As mentioned above with regard to language, idiots with IQs in the teens (incomprehensible figure!) show unimpaired musical response. Here, plainly, is no arbitrarily conditioned response to complex patterns of sound, but something far more basic, a fundamental part of human nature, with only secondary ties to the intellect-a part, that is to say, of our biological selves. But if musical response is indeed as much a part of the basic biological equipment of human beings as stereoscopic color vision or the opposable thumb, there must be a reason for it. Complex species-wide biological features do not occur by accident any more than do option packages in automobiles. If we have a built-in attraction to music, it is because we evolved thus; and if we so evolved, it is because music serves some function in human existence that enhances our survivability as individuals or as a species. Assuming such a function exists, we should be able to observe its working in all human societies. For that we must return to anthropology, and here another book proves indispensable: Bruno Nettl's The Study of Ethnomusicology (Univ. of Illinois Press, 1983), an invaluable introduction to the role of music in society-any society. The foregoing discussion of the universality of music owes much to Nettl, and I must now rely on him again, for he devotes an entire chapter to the question of music's function. Rather than attempt to summarize his evidence (which builds on the work of some half dozen previous investigators over the past twenty-five years), I merely pre sent his conclusions-and that in abbreviated form: The function of music in human society, what music ultimately does, is to control humanity's relationship to the supernatural, mediating between people and other beings, and to support the integrity of individual social groups. It does this by expressing the relevant central values of culture in abstracted form. . . . In each culture music will function to express a particular set of values in a particular way. Music as Glue Other students of this tricky topic have expressed similar opinions. Alan Lomax, for example, writing in 1968, held that 'a culture's favorite song style reflects and reinforces the kind of behavior essential to its main subsistence effort and to its central and controlling social institutions." Yet the most vivid and compelling statement comes from none of these, but from Sacks, who, with no thought o function," simply describes the nature of music as revealed in his neurological observations: The power of music . . . is of the greatest practical and theoretical importance. What we see, fundamentally, is the power of music to organize and to do this efficaciously (as well as joyfully!), when abstract or schematic forms of organization fail. Indeed, it is especially dramatic, as one would expect, precisely when no other form of organization will work. In short, music constitutes a powerful social glue. Homo sapiens, a social animal descended from a line of ancestral social species stretching back to the beginning of the Age of Mammals, thrives best when behaving cooperatively. Music helps to ensure that co operation-indeed, must play an important role in that regard, or there would have been no need to evolve such a unique form of emotional communication. We sense, in any event, the truth behind Shakespeare's lines in The Mer chant of Venice: Nor is not mov'd with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils; The motions of his spirit are dull as night, And his affections dark as Erebus: Let no such man be trusted. When would such evolution have taken place? We will probably never know for sure, but recent paleontological finds open a vast field for speculation. Genes for Music Just a generation ago it was believed that humans diverged from the ape line within the past million years; that characteristic features of the human body and brain evolved together on a single timetable, each synergistically influencing the other; and that Paleolithic cultural development proceeded in a smooth curve while all this was going on, making it impossible to differ entiate cultural growth from biological evolution of the brain. Music, it was agreed, must have been ''invented'' a few tens of thousands of years ago. Now, however, it is known that the timetable was much more spacious, with the development of body, brain, and culture occurring at essentially different times. The position of music within that time table is completely up for grabs. The oldest known direct ancestor of Homo sapiens was Australopithecus afarensis, about four million years old. These creatures (people?) had small yet fully human bodies surmounted by, essentially, ape heads. Whether they used and made tools remains debatable. The succeeding Homo habilis is associated with a stone-tool culture called Oldowan that was the same wherever and whenever the species was found. This extremely rudimentary technology not only represented the best Homo habilis could do, but apparently remained characteristic of its behavior under all ordinary circumstances for nearly a million years. One suspects that like the dams and lodges of beavers, these stone tools were a product more of biological proclivity than of culture, as that word is commonly understood. Homo erectus, the next species in line, was characterized by its own long lived, universal tool culture, the Acheulian--but Homo erectus also used fire and built temporary dwellings, and is presumed to have displayed some form of cultural variability. And that brings us to ourselves. Homo sapiens, in the archaic neanderthalensis form, appeared about 100,000 years ago, together with the first evidence of religious practices. Fully modern Homo sapiens sapiens showed up some 50,000 years ago, and cultural evolution finally took off about 20,000 years later, beginning with the earliest preserved art and the oldest known musical instruments, bone whistles and flutes with-surprise-predominantly diatonic arrangements of finger holes. Emotional Hominids One must not be too quick to draw conclusions from any of this. Ancient artifacts are very rare because very perishable; and music itself must be older than musical technology. The neurological evidence strongly implies that music was no last-minute addition to the roster of human behavior, and we may safely assume that Neanderthals were singing songs 100 millennia ago. What about Homo erectus? We know (on the basis of internal skull configurations) that this species had speech, but did they sing? For all we know, perhaps even Australopithecus afarensis could talk-I rather like to think it did-but could music be that old? Nothing now known rules out the possibility. Still, one could argue not. While language would be an obvious asset to any social organism, however stupid, that acquired it, there would seem no need for a special social glue like music until enough intelligence was floating around to create high levels of independent mindedness and political dissent within the tribe-a situation unlikely below the erectus level. The sudden appearance of ritual burial and other religious observances with the earliest Homo sapiens, combined with the strong subsequent link between music and religion, suggests that music may be an attainment of Homo sapiens alone. But we are now entering the realm of pure speculation-and the room for speculation is vast. The almost completely human postcranial skeleton of Australopithecus afarensis shows that the hominid and pongid (ape) lines have been separate for far longer than anyone had imagined, and that for perhaps five million years hominids were neither human nor ape, but something else-a third kind of creature that no longer exists. These ''upright apes'' must have behaved differently from living pongids in many ways, and it is by no means far-fetched to suggest that they may have possessed that unique form of emotional communication we call music, relying on it, perhaps, as a substitute for one of the social cohesion factors seen in modern apes but not present in people. Research on Oldowan tools published just within the past year indicates that Homo habilis, at any rate, was as preferentially right-handed as modern humans; this in turn implies that the uniquely human lateralization of the brain, which makes music and speech possible, had at that level already occurred. Beastly Bits An issue I have been deliberately avoiding in all of this is whether nonhuman animals enjoy music. A number of obvious lines of research that would quickly clear up the matter have not been followed for the simple reason that the whole idea just doesn't seem likely. Humans make music precisely because they enjoy hearing it, and this enjoyment is not fundamentally dependent on intelligence. Thus, one would expect that if cats, dogs, and horses could appreciate music, they would make music of their own. Since they do not, one can only infer that these sounds are meaningless to them, except perhaps as indicators of their master's mood (''he always takes me for a walk after making those noises''). We seem to have a deep psychological need to anthropomorphize our fel low earthlings, and projecting musical delight upon them is one way of doing that. Humanizing nature tames it, controls it, removes its terrors. Behind every doting pet owner who is sure that Tabby or Rover loves to listen to Mozart, one can perceive the master of the dancing bear, the Indian snake charmer (cobras are in fact deaf as posts), and the widespread myth of the musician-hero who tames (i.e., humanizes) wild beasts and lulls malevolent spirits with the power of music alone. It is no accident that Congreve is so frequently mis quoted: We prefer to believe that music can charm savagery not just from the breast, but from the beast as well. Consequential The emerging picture of music as a biological attribute of human nature has, as noted at the outset, the most pro found implications for music theory, aesthetics, and the sociology of music. Here are some of the immediate consequences: Music is not a luxury. If music is a major, biologically mandated source of social cohesion, then it's damned important. The social importance of music hardly comes as a new idea (see Plato and the Pythagoreans, for example), but those who have insisted on this point have never previously been able to ex plain why so much concern should be attached to the art. Poets (whose art is itself half music) have come closer to hitting the nail on the head. Hear William Carlos Williams: It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there. These lines from Asphodel, That Greeny Flower are justly famous not only because they startle, but because at some fundamental level we know them to be true. It is time such ideas began to be taken seriously. No unitary aesthetics is possible. Concepts of ''beauty'' and ''quality'' in the realm of music are ultimately keyed to the emotional response music arouses. Since that response seems to rely upon special neural circuitry that processes only music, it follows that beauty and value in music bear only a superficial, even coincidental, relation ship to beauty and value in the other arts-to say nothing of such things as ''a beautiful sunset." The one exception is poetry, which differs from prose largely in the possession of elements that are purely musical in nature. At any rate the meaning content of a sentence such as ''all art aspires to the condition of music'' must now be seriously questioned. Musical Values have an objective basis. In the old, dichotomous view of instinct-versus-intellect, music was thought to fall squarely in the latter camp. How then explain music's emotive power? For most of our century it has been widely viewed as a conditioned response, learned by observing what music was considered powerful and then training oneself (it was sup posed) like Pavlov's dogs to respond emotionally when music of that sort was heard. In such a view musical response is essentially arbitrary. Any kind of music (in the extreme formulation, any sounds) can serve as a template for a conditioned response, and thus no piece of music is intrinsically better or worse than any other. Virtually the entire discipline of music sociology has based itself (so far) on this premise, and an immense amount of work, some of it extremely sophisticated, has attempted to ascertain the ways in which social, political, and economic factors supposedly determine which music is considered ''good'' and which ''bad'' at any given place and time. I do not mean to belittle such work, much of which is highly valuable: Socioeconomic circumstances really do exercise immense influence on musical style, and much too little is yet known about the mechanism and history of these effects. But the key word is ''influence." It is no longer possible to deny that emotional response is a primary, non-intellected effect of music, that its nature is and has always been the same worldwide, and that it depends on a number of objective musical characteristics--as yet poorly understood. Determinations of quality in music, therefore, while arguable and highly variable, rest upon a submerged rock and are not in finitely labile. Beethoven was a great composer because he was a great composer-not because he embodied the aspirations of the European intelligentsia at the beginning of the last century. Music is not a language. The idea that "music is the language of the emotions: is very old, and analogizing musical to linguistic structures has been a favorite gambit of music theorists at least since the Middle Ages. Recent years have seen a veritable rush in that direction, because major advances in the understanding of language seem to hold the promise of similar advances in music theory. Yet it becomes increasingly dubious that the ''deep structure' of music bears any valid comparison to that of speech. Music and speech are processed in completely different parts of the brain, and in completely different ways. There is doubtless an underlying similarity in the way the brain processes all forms of information, but no specific linkage between music and speech has been suggested. One should note, too, that emotive speech seems to be handled differently from rational discourse: Stroke victims who suffer the loss of speech often retain intact the ability to swear. One thinks of Thomas d'Urfey, he of the Pills to Purge Melancholy, who stuttered badly except when swear ing or singing ('The Town may da-da damn me for a Poet,' he wrote, ''but they si-si-sing my songs for all that"'). There is an underlying unity in all musical structures. Research along these lines has so far been largely the province of ethnomusicologists; but the detailing of that unity will be the great task for music theory in the next cen tury. Beyond that can be glimpsed theory's Holy Grail: the discovery of the structural determinants of musical response-the description of, in Morton Feldman's words, ''what Mozart did that I should also do in order to be a great composer.'' Music is not abstract. Music has long been contrasted to the other arts be cause it is not fundamentally ''about"' anything. Much contemporary theory is based on the assumption that musical patterns are totally abstract and essentially mathematical in their ration ale-but we know now that this is not the case. Music has no ''object'' be cause it is an object: a sonorous halo round every human head; an invisible web perfusing human societies. It is akin to such concepts as personality, family, appetite, passion, mind. Not something outside, but a property of ourselves. ++++++++++++++++ Also see: |
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