A Natural History of the Senses (32 page)

Does music, then, have a grammar, like language, or its own set of mathematical laws? If it’s principally mathematical, how come mathematically illiterate people still revel in it? In an essay in
New Literary History
in 1971, composer George Rochberg argued that “music is a secondary ‘language’ system whose logic is closely related to the primary alpha logic of the central nervous system itself, i.e., of the human body. If I am right, then it follows that the perception of music is simply the process reversed, i.e., we listen with our bodies, with our nervous systems and their primary parallel/serial memory functions.”
We listen with our bodies
. Indeed, it’s hard to keep our bodies still when we hear music—our feet begin tapping, our hands begin swaying, we pick up an invisible baton, or gyrate in some sketchy dance movements. In Peter Schaffer’s play about Mozart,
Amadeus
, Salieri, the established and rival composer, says:

A musical note is just pulsating air stimulating the organs in our ears. It may have various qualities, like volume, pitch, or duration, but it is still just pulsating air. That’s why the deaf often enjoy music, which they perceive as attractive vibration. Helen Keller “heard” Caruso sing by pressing her fingers to his lips and throat, and she
writes beautifully about holding a radio and listening to a symphony concert, responding to the different instruments as they joined in. An oscilloscope can make the tones visible. Since it displays vibration, it can reveal the acoustical properties of the tone, but there is no way it can judge the musical experience. When Duke Ellington plays piano, I hear many of the pastel, water-ice phrases of Ravel, but how could I begin to describe an Ellington piece? If you haven’t heard a tone before, there’s no word that will reproduce it or faithfully conjure it up. Teddy Wilson, who played piano with the Duke’s band for a while, remembers how Ellington used to play the dance rhythm with his left hand while with his right he created a splash of excitement, which he describes picturesquely as “like throwing colored sand up into the air.”

Countries speak their own unique languages, but whole civilizations enjoy certain forms of music, which we, perhaps too chauvinistically, refer to as western music, Oriental music, African music, Islamic music, and so on. What we mean is that each civilization seems to prefer hearing tones arranged in certain patterns according to slightly different laws. For the past 2,500 years or so, Western music has been obsessed with one polyphonic arrangement of tones, but there are many other arrangements, each as profoundly meaningful as the next and yet incomprehensible to outsiders. “The barriers between music and music are far more impassable than language barriers,” Victor Zuckerkandl writes in
The Sense of Music
. “We can translate from any language into any other language; yet the mere idea of translating, say, Chinese music into the Western tonal idiom is obvious nonsense.” Why is that so? According to the composer Felix Mendelssohn, it’s not because music is too vague, as one might think, but rather too precise to translate into other tonal idioms, let alone into words. Words are arbitrary. There’s no direct link between them and the emotions they represent. Instead, they lasso an idea or emotion and drag it into view for a moment. We need words to corral how we feel and think; they allow us to reveal our inner lives to one another, as well as to exchange goods and services. But music is a controlled outcry from the quarry of emotions all humans share. Though most foreign words must be
translated to be understood, we instinctively understand whimpering, crying, shrieking, joy, cooing, sighing, and the rest of our caravan of cries and calls. I believe that, in time, they led to two forms of organized sound—words (rational sounds for objects, emotions, and ideas) and music (nonrational sounds for feelings). As Cooke observes, “both awaken in the hearer an emotional response; the difference is that a word awakens both an emotional response and a comprehension of its meaning, whereas a note, having no meaning, awakens only an emotional response.” What sort of response can a few notes of music awaken? Awe, rage, wonder, restlessness, defeat, stoicism, love, patriotism.… “What passion cannot Music raise and quell?” John Dryden asks in his “A Song for St. Cecelia’s Day,” and then goes on to say:

In a letter to his father, written in Vienna on September 26, 1781, Mozart said of his
Abduction from the Seraglio:

For Mozart, music was not only a passionately intense intellectual medium, it was one through which he felt, indeed conducted, precise emotions. The theme of the first movement of Mahler’s Ninth
Symphony mimics his cardiac arrhythmia, and therefore laments his mortality. He died soon after, in the middle of writing his Tenth Symphony.

Of course, there is an odd sense in which music can’t really be heard at all. Much of musical composition is tonal problem solving on a very complex scale, an effort undertaken entirely in the mind of the composer. Not only is the orchestra not necessary for that creative feat of legerdemain, it most likely will produce an inferior version of the music the composer imagines. How could Beethoven write the Ninth Symphony so brilliantly when he was deaf, people wonder. The answer is that it wasn’t necessary for Beethoven to “hear” the music. Not as sound, anyway. He heard it flawlessly and much more intimately in his mind. Everyone touched by a piece of music hears it differently. The composer hears it perfectly in the resonant chambers of his imagination. The general audience hears it emotionally, without understanding its craft. Other composers hear it with an insider’s knowledge of form, structure, history, and incunabula. The members of an orchestra—arranged according to instrument—hear it boomingly, from “inside,” but not as a balanced work.

Some animals and people speak in music alone. For example, on the island of Gomera in the Canaries, descendants of an aboriginal people called the Guanches, about whom little is known except that they lived in caves and mummified their dead, use an ancient whistling language to communicate across the sprawling valleys. They trill and warble a little like quails and other birds, but more elaborately, and, from as far away as nine miles, they hear one another and converse as their ancestors did.
Silbo Gomero
the idiom is called, and some islanders mix it with Spanish vocabulary to make a creole of whistle and word. They find this hybrid language precise enough.

In Australia, the aboriginals have divided up their land according to a maze of invisible roads, or Songlines, across which they travel to conduct the normal affairs of their lives. Closest perhaps to the way in which bird song maps out a territory, the Songlines are ancient and magical, but they are also precise map references. The
continent is crisscrossed by a labyrinth of Songlines, and the aboriginals can sing their way along them. As Bruce Chatwin describes the process in
The Songlines:

When words and music meet in poetry or in song, each enhances the effect of the other. As our emotions flare, our speech naturally becomes more lyrical. “All passionate language does of itself become musical,” Thomas Carlyle observes, “the speech of a man even in zealous anger becomes a chant, a song.” This is never more evident than in the sermons of fundamentalist preachers, or the rhetoric of strident political activists, or the stanzas of Russian poets, who sing their verse. Virtually all movies these days have soundtracks and background music. The assumption must be that we’re not competent to hear the world, and that we need music to supply us with quick, relevant emotions. Is this because we don’t think the world is worth listening to? Is it because filmmakers wish to combine words and music for the most intense emotional effect? Or is it just that they think we’re too lazy, or too shallow, or too numb to have an emotional response to what we’re viewing?

Some facets of our biology are ideally shaped for music, which pours through them as beautifully as light through a stained-glass window. William Congreve was right: “Music hath charms to soothe a savage
breast.” Over the years, many people have slurred that aphorism to read
beast
, not
breast
, but Congreve didn’t mean that lions are tamed by music, or cobras hypnotized by the snake charmer’s flute (anyway, it’s the movement of the flute and the charmer himself, not its sound, which fascinates the snake; snakes are deaf). He meant that music can calm the hearts of the most bloodthirsty of us, even against our will. Most often, our emotions are private things. We bottle them up like so many jars of peach preserves that we store on a top shelf in a hidden pantry; then, in a crisis, we reach for them, often taking off the lids on our emotions through song. People who sing and wail at wakes know how therapeutic this can be. We often vent great passion by breaking into song. Strangers who seem to share nothing, not even the same culture, can sing with a mournfulness or jubilation all understand. Manfried Klein, an Australian physiological psychologist, conducted studies in which he played passages of Bach and then measured the hand-muscle responses of a group of volunteers. Regardless of their cultural background (Japanese and American businessmen, Australian aboriginals, and others), all responded to the same passages of Bach in the same way. Next he measured hand-muscle responses when they felt joy, anger, and other strong emotions. The graphs plotted for the emotional states corresponded to those for the passages of Bach. Music seems to produce specific emotional states that all people share, and as a result, it allows us to communicate our most intimate emotions without having to talk about or define them in a loose net of words.

Our pupils dilate and our endorphin level rises when we sing; music engages the whole body, as well as the brain, and there is a healing quality to it. In World War II, it was discovered that even comatose patients could respond to music. Doctors and nurses use music to help them reach handicapped children, especially children with multiple handicaps. Autistic or learning-disabled children, who find speaking an insurmountable hurdle, frequently have less trouble communicating first in song, then transferring their facility to speech. Because music can be so uplifting and recharging, it encourages sedentary people to exercise longer and more often. The usual choice is jazz, swing, pop, or rock, whose rhythms jar our natural
heart rhythm and make our blood pressure rise; we feel revved up. Music can also calm. Some therapists specialize in a course called “Guided Imagery in Music,” working with blindfolded patients who are led into a relaxed state where fruitful images may form. In some cardiac intensive-care wards, angina patients listen to classical music as part of their recovery process. It both relaxes them and draws a musical blind down over the frightening scenes around them. Some doctors prescribe music for cancer patients, the elderly, the emotionally disturbed or mentally ill. And there’s a large international organization of music therapists, whose most recent annual conference included sessions on “The Use of Music in Teaching Reading to Hearing-Impaired Children,” “The Aging Nervous System: Problems for Music Therapists in Geropsychiatry,” “Promoting Psychosocial Adjustment in Pediatric Burns through Music Therapy,” “Music Therapy in the Rehabilitation of Traumatically Brain-Injured Persons,” and many other intriguing-sounding topics.

To understand why music pleases us, we must ask why we feel pleasure at all. What we perceive as “pleasure” may be just the thrill of shooting the rapids on our body’s “river of reward,” as chemist James Olds nicknamed it. It was Olds who, when he was conducting experiments with rats, first located the brain’s pleasure center. Like the rest of the body, the river of reward is a strange alloy of electricity and chemicals, and there are various ways to trigger or quiet it artificially, using electrodes or drugs. From the outset, we’ve evolved through a thick tapestry of rewards, so it shouldn’t surprise us that quiz shows, contests, medals, and award-donating programs of every conceivable kind dominate our culture, or that addictions are so hard to break. Reward, one of the central players in the brain, wears many masks. Like a melody, it can appear in a higher or lower key, at a faster or slower pace, on a wide array of instruments; it can be simple or elaborate, and still be recognizable.