A Natural History of the Senses (31 page)

The odd thing about music is that we understand and respond to it without actually having to learn it. Each word in a verbal phrase tells something all by itself; it has a history and nuances. But musical tones mean something only in relation to one another, when they’re teamed up. You needn’t understand the tones to be moved. Say the words “It’s a gift to be simple. It’s a gift to be free. It’s a gift to come down where we ought to be,” and nothing much happens. You might even disagree with its minimalist doctrine. Yet if you add the tuneful Shaker music that goes with it (which Aaron Copland adapted so beautifully in
Appalachian Spring
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), its haunting melody,
full of enough ebullience, joy, and conviction to inspire a whole village to put up a neighbor’s barn in one afternoon, will truly captivate you. When I was in Florida, at an artist’s colony on a tidal estuary, one of my writing students, also a professional whistler, regaled us one evening with a whistle concert, including this Shaker tune, “Simple Gifts,” and for the next week you could hear people humming, whistling, or singing its gaily hammering rhythm.
Catchy
is the right word for such a melody; it hooks onto your subconscious and won’t let go. Many hymns would thrill us even if they didn’t have words, but, with words, they’re a double score: emotional music tied to emotional messages. It works particularly well if the hymn has a dying fall in it, a musical swoon. In Blake’s “Jerusalem,” that swoon comes in the third stanza, in the second syllable of the word “desire,” which you have to sing as a sigh to a lower note:

Few desires sound as smoldery and secular as that one, especially if you’re reminded of Cupid’s arrow and the double meaning of a word like “quiver.” In the Christmas hymn “O Holy Night,” the swoon comes right after the word “fall,” in the line “Fall on your knees,” and just singing it enacts the supplication. Most often hymns soar steadily in slow sweeping steps, from lower to higher notes, as the singer climbs a mystical staircase onto progressively higher planes of feeling. “Amazing Grace” is a good example of that lighter-than-air sort of hymn, full of musical striving and stretching, as if one’s spirit itself were being elongated. Think lofty thoughts and sing that elevating tune, and soon enough you will feel uplifted (even despite having to sing such unmelodious words as “wretch”). Hypnotists use a similar technique when they put people into a deeply suggestive meditative trance: They often count from one to ten a few times over, telling patients to imagine themselves climbing deeper and deeper down with each number.

Like pure emotions, music surges and sighs, rampages or grows quiet, and, in that sense, it behaves so much like our emotions that
it seems often to symbolize them, to mirror them, to communicate them to others, and thus frees us from the elaborate nuisance and inaccuracy of words. A musical passage can make us cry, or send our blood pressure soaring. Asked to define the feeling, we say something vague:
It made me sad
. Or:
It thrilled me
. In
Great Pianists Speak for Themselves, Vol. II
, Paul Badura-Skoda says of Mozart’s Fantasy in C minor:

Not all composers care for listeners to find such a clear program in their work, but people get so frustrated by the abstractions of music they try to elicit from it landscapes of emotions and events.

We find a profound sense of wholeness in the large, open structure of a classical composition, but it is a unity filled with tumult, with small comings and goings, with obstructed quests, with bouts of yearning and uncertainty, with insurpassable mountains, with interrupted passion, with knots that must be teased apart, with great washes of sentimentality, with idle ruminations, with strident blows to recover from, with love one hopes to consummate, with abruptness, disorder, but, ultimately, with reconciliation. One can re-create the emotional turmoil of an affair, a disappointment, a religious ecstasy, in as small a space as a concerto.
Show, don’t tell!
writing teachers counsel their students. Say what one will, words rarely
capture the immediate emotional assault of a piece of poignant music, which allows the composer to say not “It felt something like this,” but rather “Here is the unnamable emotion I felt, and even my obsession with structure, proportion, and time,
inside of you
.” Or, as T. S. Eliot puts it in “The Dry Salvages,” here is:

There are still many questions to be answered about music and emotion. In his fascinating book on music theory,
The Language of Music
, Deryck Cooke, for example, offers a musical vocabulary, spelling out the emotional effects a composer knows he can create with certain sounds. But why is this so? Do we tend to respond to a minor seventh with “mournfulness” and to a major seventh with “violent longing” and to a minor second with “spiritless anguish” because we’ve formed the habit of responding to those sounds in that way, or is it something more intrinsic in our makeup? Listen to Wagner’s
Tristan und Isolde
, and you’ll hear pent-up, soaring, frustrated emotion of an intensity that may drive you to distraction.
Yearning
overflows the music like the meniscus on a too-full glass of wine, and this is how Wagner himself described the work:

Another question we might ask, along with Cooke, is: If we transform music into emotion, “how closely does this emotion … resemble the original emotion of Beethoven?… There can only be one answer to this … about as closely as the emotions of one human being can ever resemble those of another.” And, because we’re not Beethoven, we hear his joyous “Gloria” in the
Missa
Solemnis
and feel joy, but probably not as passionately as he did when he wrote it. I suppose part of what’s fascinating about creativity in any field is the author’s necessity to share it with—or impose it on—the world. When he wrote the “Gloria,” Beethoven underwent a volcanic, shriek-to-the-heavens joy, but instead of dancing around in delight, he “felt the need to convert it into a permanent, stored-up, transportable, and reproducible form of energy,” as Cooke describes it, “a musical shout for joy, as it were, that all the world might hear, and still hear over and over again after he was dead and gone.” The notes he jotted down “only ever were and only ever will be a command from Beethoven to blow his eternal shout for joy, together with a set of instructions … exactly how to do so.” When we proclaim that artists live on in their work, we’re usually referring to the emotional steppingstones that lead through their lives, their disembodied moods and obsessions, but most of all their senses. Beethoven may be dead, but his sense of life at that moment lives in his score at this moment, at any moment.

Music speaks to us so powerfully that many musicians and theorists think it may be an actual language, one that developed about the same time as speech. One Harvard psychologist believes strongly that music is a kind of intelligence, an aptitude like that for words or numbers, with which we’re simply born. By experimenting with brain-damaged musicians, he’s been able to locate musical ability in the right frontal region of the brain. In a related experiment, researchers at the UCLA School of Medicine gave volunteers a Sherlock Holmes story to read, then music to listen to, and recorded brain activity with a PET scan. Reading excited the left hemisphere of the brain, music the right. But knowing where our passion for music lies doesn’t explain how it got there. No matter how far back in history we look, we find human beings making and listening to music, but how and why did our passion for it begin? Why do we feel driven to make music? Why does music differ so much between cultures? Why do many people feel the need to live in cocoons of
organized sound, to keep music close at hand? Why do we respond to music’s array of abstract sounds with intense, sometimes violently felt emotions? If music evolved along with spoken language,
why
did it evolve? What was its survival value? Music is meaningful, as anyone listening to a soulful symphony or an opera by Wagner would readily admit, but what is its meaning? How do we assign a particular meaning to a piece of music? Why does music make sense even to people who don’t play instruments themselves, and even claim to be tone-deaf, people who aren’t particularly “musical”? Most of all: How do we understand the language of music without
learning
it? For the moment, the reasonable answer to that last question is that, like the ability to smile or analyze, it’s deeply hereditary. At some point in our past it was important enough that all human beings born, no matter whether Bengalese, Inuit, or Quechua, no matter whether blind, left-handed, or freckled, were not merely
capable
of making music; they
required
music to add meaning to their lives. The newest infant responds to music, and by the time a child can toddle it can already sing songs, and even make them up. To a certain extent, music is also learned. Children in China learn to like music with small intervals and subtly changing pitches; children in Jamaica learn to like syncopated ballads; and children in Africa learn to like music with fast, intricate rhythms. One’s musical preferences can be willful. Generations tend to define themselves by a music that differs from that of their parents, who usually describe the new music as noise, obscene, a waste of time, and lacking in any art. When the waltz first came in, it was thought avant-garde and scandalous.
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After all, it caused men and women to hold on to each other and move rapidly, clinging wildly while their hair flew, their petticoats fluttered, and their hips rocked in unison. The same was true of swing music, which the older generations of the time found barbaric, repetitious, or just silly. What were they to make of lyrics like: “It must be jelly, ’cause jam don’t shake like that”? And the tango had its own sneaky, insinuating rhythm and a sexy dance step in which a woman wraps her leg around a man’s leg as if he were
a tree and she a vanilla orchid’s climbing vine. The words that accompanied all this carnal mayhem were usually sensuous, violent, and extravagantly heartrending. Here are the lyrics to a typical Argentinean tango, taken from Philip Hamburger’s
Curious World:

In recent times, science fiction has proposed music as the Esperanto of the universe, a language which even far-flung creatures might share.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
is perhaps the best example of a sci-fi story based on that premise. A single chord is a calling card and, at that, a mighty simple chord, based on universally shared mathematics. This is an old idea, going back to the Greeks and the music of the spheres. There has always been a connection between music and mathematics, which is why scientists have often been inordinately fond of music, especially of composers such as Bach. The composer Borodin was first and mainly a scientist, who discovered a method for combining fluorine and carbon atoms to produce new compounds. We’re indebted to his inspiration for Teflon, Freon, and a variety of aerosols. His hobby was composing music. At the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, there is a concert hall among the offices and labs. Some West German physicists are studying the relationship between musical composition and the mathematics of fractals. Why is music mathematical? Because, as Pythagoras of Samos discovered in the fifth century
B.C.
, notes can be precisely measured along a vibrating string, and the intervals between notes expressed as ratios. Of course, people sang what pleased them; they didn’t decide to sing in ratios. This revelation, that mathematics was secretly determining the beauty of music, must have seemed just one more indisputable proof to the mathematically minded Greeks that the universe was an orderly, logical, knowable structure. The Greeks used to play or sing
their scales downward, from high to low. We prefer to sing or play ours upward, from low to high. This change really began with Christianity and the Gregorian chant, and I think it came about as a result of religious uplift and a desire for transcendence. Science fiction argues that if music is mathematical then it must be universal. For interstellar space, don’t bother with verbal messages; send a fugue. To be safe, send both. When Voyager I was launched in 1977, it carried assorted messages for other planetarians to find, including a record that contains miscellaneous sounds of Earth as well as Earth’s music, and instructions as to how to play the record.