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The Gestalt! Editorial -
"Thoughts on Music:
Why We Have It, Why We Do It, and Why We Like it."
http://www.g-g.org/gej/index.html
John Wymore
I can't be sure of
this, but it may be that my first experience of music, the first time I was
fascinated by it, was sometime between the age of birth and 3, when my Dad
was playing the accordian and singing. My actual memory starts about the age
of three. I remember Ciribiribin (which he sang), Estudiantil, and Roll Out
the Barrel. Then later at night, in the basement I might hear Grandpa, my
mother's father, playing a concertina and singing Czech folk songs.
Somewhere along that time, I learned my first song from the radio. It was
Tumblin' Tumble Weed. That's right the original Sons of the Pioneers. Man, I
still love that song. "I'll keep rollin' along, pledgin' my love to the
ground, here on the range I belong, drifitn' along like a tumblin'tumble
weed." The words evoke melancholy and a fatalistic contentment. The melody
is surprisingly harmonized in a major key yet supports the sort of dark and
lonely feel of the song.
The first really emotional experience
that had to do with music (other than hating to practice) was as a
performer. This was a time when kids in the midwest were usually in
accordion bands. Not me; I played marimba. And by the age of eight I had a
modest reputation and actually had become a fairly seasoned performer. So
here I was playing a gig (a word not in my vocabulary at the time. It would
have been scandalous) for a PTA meeting at Edgewood Number 3 a small school
in rural Iowa. I was doing my best encore number, Hungarian Dance No.5,
which features emotionally contrasting sections going from the exuberant to
the lugubrious. I was in the lugubrious part when a twelve year old girl in
the front row turned to her friend and said "He's cute". Everyone in the
auditorium heard it. I blushed; looked up from the keys and totally lost my
place as well as my composure. I stopped playing. My accompanist, the only
one in the auditorium who didn't know what had happened, looked up at me to
see what was going on; but in her attempt to keep playing she lost it. It
was disaster. We started over about where we had left off. My face was still
burning, and I didn't dare lift my eyes from those rosewood keys and my
bamboo mallets. The piece ends with a vivace section and I had been taught
to finish with a flourish. The parents and teachers loved it - gave us a
standing-O. I bowed and did not look at those two girls.
Here are some other experiences:
- I'm In the Mood For
Love. It was high school and for Bonnie and me , that was OUR song. (Give
me a break. It was 1950.)
- In a weekend group
somewhere, sometime, blindfolded, lying on the floor, listening to
Pendorecki. Someone went into hysterics.
- Salvatore Roquet and
Stanasloff Graff discovered that you could use music, breathing and
disgusting visuals to send people on bummers. You didn't need LSD.
- Driving down La
Cienega Boulevard a Brandenburg brings me to tears.
- I can actually
conduct Corialon and Egmont. What fun
- The thrill of my
voice in harmony with others singing Palestrina, Bach, or Cole Porter
- Wagner makes me
forget his racism
- Bernedette Peters
singing Sondheim. I, my wife, and a packed Covent Garden are in love with
her.
- Salsa sabrosa,
rumberos (oye mi gua-gua co) , ritmo caliente
What actually is happening in these
examples? Certain modules of the brain are responding to inputs from the
environment. What kind of inputs? Lyrlcs, certain notes (i.e.. pitches),
intervals (pitch difference between successive notes), certain qualities of
the note (timbre), rhythm, and complex aspects of performance.
Lyrics obviously suggest activity in
language mechanisms. But what about the contours and sequences of various
pitches, setting lyrics aside. Psycholinguists like Noam Chomsky and Steven
Pinker have established convincingly that there is a Universal Grammar.
Leonard Bernstein was the first to propose that there is a Universal Musical
Grammar and it has since been supported by other theorists. It is logical to
assume that all auditory systems in the animal kingdom evolved in accordance
with the physics of harmony, specifically the overtone series. This would
explain why there seems to be a degree of accessibility in all the worlds
music cultures. The chromatic scale and 7-tone scales of European music is
based on the overtone series and so is the pentatonic scale which is the
base for so much of the rest of the world's music. However, Pinker points
out, "The metrical structure of strong and weak beats, the intonation
contour of rising and falling pitch, and the hierarchical grouping of
phrases within phrases all work in similar ways in language and in music."
Music from various traditions has a conversational quality to it - making
statements, revising them, making asides, listening to a response, and
coming to a conclusion. Attempts to abandon this idea, that music carries a
complex message, may be a way of understanding avant garde or "free" jazz.
The escape is from any constraints imposed by melodic or rhythm patterns,
thus making music as UNLIKE language as possible.
Here's an interesting thing: Part of
the neural circuit that controls birdsong in the canary are two descending
motor pathways to the voice box (syrinx). They mediate song production., as
opposed to, say, song learning. The left descending pathway plays a more
important role in singing than does the right, duplicating the
left-hemisphere dominance in humans.
A single pitch sounded alone is seldom
evocative. Although it is said that people with perfect pitch are not
necessarily blessed. They go around in a constant state of annoyance because
musical notes are seldom really "true". The notes in the scales known in
Indian music as ragas (the Random House Webster's refers to them as formulas
which may be a better word than scale) have specific pitches but the
improvisational technique both instrumentally and vocally can vary within a
certain range in accordance with the esthetic judgment of the performer.
Most cultures seem to like precise intonation but also like to experiment
with it.
Intervals between notes is what gives
music its shape - in fact, its essential criteria.
I used to have a friend who, when
drunk, stoned, tripping (or all three), would loudly proclaim to whomever he
imagined was listening, "The basis of all Western Music is the resolution of
the tri-tone !"
Try this: play F and B (or B and F, it
doesn't matter). Notice that the two notes are exactly 3 full steps apart.
For me it's a slightly weird sound. I think it's Night On Bald Mountain
(maybe it's The Sorcerer's Apprentice) that opens up with the orchestra
playing a two tri-tone figure each a tri-tone apart. It's what you hear if
you play B-F followed by F-B below. Anyhow something needs to happen with
that sound, it needs resolution, it demands that the other shoe drop. Play F
and B or B and F together then play a G underneath it. Sound all three notes
together. What you have there is a G7 chord. It is known as the dominant in
the key of C. Let your fingers go to C on the bottom then E and G. You can
add another C on top. Ahhh, home. Now. Play the tri-tone again but this time
but D-flat (or C-sharp) in the base. This is called a substitute dominate.
Bring it home, C-E-G-C. Same sensation. Isn't that cool? The reason is that
the tri-tone remains the same in G7 as in D-flat7. Blues and jazz pianists
will sometimes play tri-tones in the left hand , that is omitting a tonic
(home) note in the base. This makes for a slightly, edgy, urbane sounding
blues.
Here's a pretty well known interval.
Select any two notes a half step apart in a low register. Play them
alternately. If you've seen the movie, you'll know what that evokes.
One of the best courses I've ever had
was Ethnomusicology 101 at UCLA which had just established a full academic
department in Ethnomusicology. The professor was the late Richard Waterman
an anthropologist from Wayne State. He had just come back from field work in
North Arnhemland Australia and by then could qualify as one of the few
experts in the world on music of the aborigines. The people, he said, only
recognized two pitches in the didjerido, but they had words for 12 different
timbres. Any rendition was recognized and appreciated by that criteria.
The human voice, however, has the
ability to produce an incredible range of timbre as well as pitch. Male and
female humans are obviously dimorphic in voice quality as well as other
aspects of the body. I don't know how this gets played out in the animal
kingdom.
Is music ever without rhythm? It seems
to me that it is not. But I may need some help here. Certain pieces of music
both instrumental and vocal may carry the direction, ad lib or rubato, but
all that means is that the performer is free to choose whatever patterns he
or she wishes. I can't imagine myself being a-rhythmic. Music necessarily
has a pulse like speech and the placement of accents tends to fall into
repeated patterns. Free jazz and atonal, or serial music (without a feeling
of home) have seldom awakened a sense of appreciation in me.
Not only is rhythm often the most
compelling part of music, but quite often that's all there is. It would seem
that rhythmic music taps directly into the system of motor control.
Interestingly, tasks that are repetitive or that require coordinated
movement have tended to inspire a song to accompany the rhythmic movement,
for example , railroad workers (gandy dancers) and deck hands on sailing
ships. It's not just athletes and musicians who know the pleasure of being
"in a groove" or "in the flow".
I believe that performance is an
important part of any search for meaning in music. Music is something that
is produced to be heard and responded to. A virtuoso performance can be
seductive, intimidating, or applauded by a significant and influential
portion of the community, thus giving the wood thrush mating opportunities,
the redwing territorial control, or the pop star social status - which comes
back around to mating opportunities, particularly opportunities with the
potential of good genetic outcomes.
So have we come to an ultimate - that
is, evolutionary - explanation for music? Darwin felt that human music grew
out of our ancestor's mating calls. That would suggest that music actually
was an adaptation and therefor evolved qua music. Steven Pinker doesn't
think so. "As far as biological cause and effect are concerned, music is
useless," he asserts. He sees no Darwinian goals such as long life,
grandchildren, or increased ability to predict or understand the world.
What does my personal phenomenology
reveal? Like children everywhere and forever I learned the meaning of my
mother's volume changes and pitch modulations very early. I could interpret
them, evoke them, and respond to them. Besides human speech other variable
sequences of sounds that were common in my life were farm animals, wild
birds, weather sounds (wind and rain). I learned to tell if the cow was
mooing to be fed, milked, or bred. It was a matter, of pitch, timbre, and
rhythm. The cluck of a hen with chicks, the hysterical cackle if the fox was
on the town. The soft rise and fall of a turtle doves call. The constant
chirping of the sparrows in the barn. Still in the barn: The buzzing of
flies caught in spider webs. The summer storms with great crashes, howling
winds, and the rain on the roof like a very tight snare drum. The sparrows
grow silent just before the storm. Later in my life the tremolo of the loon,
the triplets of the white throated sparrow, and the descending arpeggios of
the wood thrush and the canyon wren. The incredible vocalizations of ravens,
the chorusing of robins, the cry of the red-tail, there are owls that
actually ask "who? who?" and others that bark like a dog. Wolves howl in
concert. Whales may intentionally be composing what we call songs.
Elephants, we have recently learned send deeply pitched rumblings long
distances across the Savannah. Humans can't even hear them.
In the Stone Age these phenomena were
not mere curiosities or wonderments. Sight and sound gave us cues and clues
to help determine which of the four f's a strange human or a possible
predator might be intending: fighting, fleeing, feeding, or sex. In short
the brain evolved to make complex distinctions in the quality and direction
of sounds in the environment and eventually to manufacture it's own set of
sounds to send back.
The evidence presently suggests that
by 60,000 years ago Neanderthals had language. An important piece of
evidence is the hyoid bone which in Neanderthals is identical in shape and
location to modern man. . The hyoid bone serves as the anchor for throat
muscles that, in humans, are important in speaking. But It also increases
the risk of choking. Along with the descended hyoid appears an increase in
brain size which also carries considerable cost, e.g., energy consumption
and heat generation. What benefits might have compensated for these costs?
Language, tool use, and social maneuvering.
(Foot note: The 60,000 year figure
only marks an observation made of Neanderthal bones. (which is generally
placed within homo sapiens). Language may have actually emerged in homo
habilis 2 million years ago.
Was there music yet? No one knows.
Which is fortunate, because we can speculate freely. It seems to me that the
only really melodious signals among animals are produced by birds. (A bold
statement; there are probably spectacular exceptions). This is inevitably
associated with mating rituals and rich coloration especially but not
exclusively in males. Such mimicry rituals are commonly witnessed today in
ethnic dances.
No one as far as I know has observed
any animal making a tool for the purpose of producing sounds, in other words
a musical instrument. One would look among primates, since it is now well
known that they make tools. However mimicry is common among animals, and the
purposes of deception vary. It may be for the purpose of protection, as the
monarch butterfly, for the purpose of luring food, as in the angler fish,
and for the purpose of mating as in sneaky fuckers (actually a technical
term for male sticklebacks masquerading as females as well as similar
behavior in other animals). I am discussing the sounds that animals make in
terms of mimicry because my speculations lead me to a scenario where humans
or humanoids developed a practical and eventually an esthetic appreciation
of bird song. Can any animal other than humans whistle like the birds?
Language or the ability to make different sounds with different pitches
enabled humans to mimic mating calls, distress calls, and territorial
signals all with the purpose to draw prey. They must have tried it out on
themselves for Darwinian fun and profit.
So here it is - music - so powerful,
so evocative, so universal, so woven through with the thread of sexuality
and courtship. How could this not be adaptive. How could this not in some
way support darwinian fitness? Still Steven Pinker sees no Darwinian goals
such as long life, grandchildren, or increased ability to predict or
understand the world
I'm not so sure. Long life? Well, I
would venture to say that individuals who sing and dance are more healthy,
and part of performance may be to signal good health (i.e., good genes).
Female canaries know that; so male canaries devise and rehearse new songs
during the off season to better impress the ladies in the coming spring.
Virtuosity itself may be an adaptation. Mocking birds don't seem to attract
robins, cardinals, and catbirds, just other mocking birds. Have they evolved
an appreciation for repertory?
Music can restructure the ground,
shape the field, provide the context. Music makes the line drawn between
organism-environment vibrate according to the laws of physics. Music is a
manipulation at the contact boundary. If you're sending music or if you're
receiving music total energy must be committed. Here is where the term
"creative adjustment at the contact boundary" is preferred to "resistance"
or "interruptions".
You must not be distracted from the
production of your tone or the intensity of your listening. So your
selective deflection is relentless.
Introjections about making an ass of
your self or wasting time are overcome.
Projections are used in service of the
excitement not to curtail it.
Retroflection with awareness is used
to heighten tension then release
Confluence with exquisite awareness
and attention is the purpose.
All this is true even if you're just
singing in the shower. |
