jwilzewske: We Are Genetically Wired for Music, But Not Just Six Songs

T he strength of any piece of music is how well it can simultaneously invoke memory schemas but still surprise us with clever twists and turns that foil our expectations.”
— Daniel Levitin, Chatauqua Institution interview, 16-AUG-2007.

I think that is a mistake. There are more ways in which we reflectively meta-surprise ourselves than the number of ways that music directly surprises us. In fact, many of the pieces that are most-loved are ones that intrigue us by causing us to (re-)experience and rehearse emotions that we treasure. Have a look at David Huron’s new book (link below) for detailed empirical data and discussion of surprise and meta-surprise in music. The key is the prosodic stimuli that we experience with the music, and how the particular prosody of a piece satisfies a listener’s hunger or unmet need. Our need—and consequently our interpretation of the music—differs from time to time, from place to place, from culture to culture. What the pieces in Well-Tempered Clavier mean to me evolves with each passing decade of my life, and with each performance. The same is true of how I perceive the song ‘I Love the Mountains’.”
— DSM.

One World or None? The astonishment at Daniel Levitin’s simplistic, reductionistic “Six Songs” meme! So it was that I began reading Levitin’s new book with this chip on my shoulder: ‘How like an ex-rock-producer-turned-academic to reduce everything to neat marketing and packaging!’

S cience should make everything [out to be] as simple as possible but not simpler [than is possible or factual].”
— Albert Einstein.

But the book stayed; it stayed in my hands until I had finished the last page. So I now put up this CMT blog post to enthusiastically recommend that you read it, too.

Daniel Levitin argues in ‘The World in Six Songs’ that all music can be classified into one of six thematic categories:

friendship,
joy,
comfort,
knowledge,
ritual, and
love.

The motives for composing and performing may be more diverse than these categories, but, according to Levitin, all music is socially ‘normative’ (prescriptive, or reinforcing of social norms) and the reception of each piece by individual listeners and by society as a whole is associated with one of these categories.

T he right question, after due consideration of music’s diversity, is whether there is a set of functions music performs in human relations. And how might these different functions have influenced the evolution of human emotion, reason, and spirit across distinct intellectual and cultural histories? What role did the musical brain have in shaping human nature?”
— Daniel Levitin, The World in Six Songs, p. 7.

Q uoting the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, [Stanford professor James Ferguson] persuaded me that the right question to ask, in trying to understand music’s universality, is not what all musics have in common, but how they differ... It is in the particulars—the nuances, the overwhelming variety of ways we express ourselves—that one can come to understand best what it means to be a musical human.”
— Daniel Levitin, The World in Six Songs, p. 7.

Twenty years ago Alexander Ringer (Professor Emeritus, Univ Illinois Urbana-Champaign) examined the question of whether there is one music ‘world’ or many. And Francois Fetis and Alexander Ellis had ‘classified the human races according to their musical systems’ 100 years before that. Levitin’s new book knowingly caters to current social ‘political correctness’ fixations, but, in my view, scholarship is not advanced by uncritical illustration.

I don’t like the idea of this at all. How can you tell the story of the world in six songs? Who does this guy think he is telling me what these six songs should be? [A few hours later: ] Hmmm... this is interesting. I think I could come up with six songs to tell the story of the world.”
— Willie Nelson.

Levitin’s new book is not scholarly ethnomusicology—it is a humanistic tract written for a popular audience. What I mean to say is that, insofar as comparative musicology tends to reveal in musical terms relatively synoptic and superficial features of human evolution, Levitin’s reduction of music to “six songs” should be considered a kind of ‘historiography’ at best and as a kind of "Voyager spacecraft Golden Record" at worst. The record placed on-board Voyager, which was launched in 1977 and departed the solar system into deep space in 2004, contained material selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University.

Golden Record on Voyager spacecraft, 1977

W hy is music so important to us as human beings? What is it about us that seeks music? For many people, music is a way of expressing, sharing, or experiencing emotions that we use as an alternative to language. Music does things that language can’t. As an art form, it allows us to express emotions and ideas over time, as opposed to painting, which does this over space. Why do songs evoke many emotions, that can make us laugh and cry? Because that is the job of music! It is made to do that. Music captures the dynamics of human emotion, their changing nature, the complexity of feeling happy and sad at the same time. When it’s composed well, it can do this better than language, and that’s probably the reason why we, as a species, still have both.”
— Daniel Levitin, interview on Voice of America, 20-AUG-2008.

Prof. Sagan and colleagues assembled 115 images and a variety of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind, and thunder, and animal sounds, including the songs of birds and whales. To this were added several dozen musical selections from different cultures and timeperiods, plus spoken greetings in fifty-five languages. The first movement of Bach’s Brandenburg concerto No. 2, the Prelude and Fugue in C No. 1 from WTC Book 2, and the gavotte from Partita No. 3 in E for violin were on the disc. Louis Armstrong’s ‘Melancholy Blues’ and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and String Quartet No. 13 Op. 130 were on it. Chuck Berry’s ‘Johnny B. Goode’ and the Bulgarian ‘Izlel je Delyo Hajdutin’ were on it. In all, an eclectic 90-min housemix of the past 500 years of music.

The diversity of human feeling and musical expression was not about to be adequately captured on one Golden Record, any more than the tremendous diversity of round musical “pegs” will fit into Levitin’s six square “holes”.

A sign is something which stands for something to somebody. It addresses one or more somebodies. It carries an association with a particular meaning and generally with one or more other signs. It can even create other signs. The sign stands for something: its object. In Peirce’s notion of semiotics, the sign creates in the perceiver’s mind a more developed sign (called an ‘interpretant’). Each of these in turn generates its own chain of interpretants. ‘I Love the Mountains’ (ILTM) generates a litany of its own interpretants. So does Bach’s BWV 862.

In music, pitch, timbre, intensity, or chord progressions may act as signs. Popular music especially trades on these. But all music since time immemorial has also done so. In fact, after reading Levitin’s book (and its mention on p. 108 of how prevalent ‘I-vi-ii-V⁷’ progressions are) I went looking for examples in Baroque music. They’re not difficult to find. Open up Bach’s ‘Well-Tempered Clavier’, for example. Have a look in Book 1 at BWV 862. The chord progression ‘I-vi-ii-V⁷’ is nominally the second most common chord progression in music, ever.

Here we have the little-known duet by J.S. and son C.P.E. Bach, in 1722:

J.S. & C.P.E. Bach, ‘Ich liebe die ganze Welt’, WTC Buch 1, No. 17, BWV 862, Fugue in A-flat

Pieces with I-vi-ii-V⁷ progression:

I Love the Mountains
Blue Moon
Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man
Savin’ All My Love
Try To Remember
Chopin’s Nocturne in E-flat
Bach’s Fugue in A-flat
Millions more…

A hit song is actually somewhat formulaic—the repetitiveness, the rousing section that leads us to that ever-so-hooky thing that we call a chorus—those things seem to happen over and over in hit songs, whether we like to admit it or not. It’s not necessarily a good song from a musical standpoint, one that uses ‘The Chord That Stops The Planet From Rotating On Its Axis’. I think one of the most difficult things to give students a grasp of is an idea of the dire simplicity of most of the music in a song.”
— Jon Aldrich, Berklee College of Music.

[Video was first aired on 15-APR-2008 during the Discovery Channel’s season premiere of “Deadliest Catch” program; went ‘viral’ after that. Arrangment by composer Brian Chapman (Beacon Street Studios, Los Angeles); Creative Director: Glenn Cole; CD/Designer: Bryan Rowles; CD/Copywriter: Jason Norcross; Agency: 72andSunny; Agency Executive Producer: Sam Baerwald; Agency Producer: Angelo Ferrugia; Production Company: Outsider; Director: James Rouse; Director of Photography: Max Goldman; Producer: Jeremy Barrett; Editorial Company: Mad River Post; Editor: Lucas Eskin; Producer (Editorial): Ann Kirk; VFX Artist: Alex Kolansinski; VFX Producer: Helena Lee; Producer (Music): Adrea Lavezzoli]

It never gets old, huh?
Nope.
Kinda makes you wanna... break into song?
Yup.

I love the moun-tains, I love the clear blue skies;
I love big bridg-es, I love when great whites fly--
I love the whole world, and all its sights and sounds.
Boom-Dee-Ah-Dah, Boom-Dee-Ah-Dah, Boom-Dee-Ah-Dah, Boom-Dee-Ah-Dah.

I love the o-cean, I love real dir-ty things;
I love to go fast, I love e-gyp-tian kings--
I love the whole world, and all its cra-zi-ness.
Boom-Dee-Ah-Dah, Boom-Dee-Ah-Dah, Boom-Dee-Ah-Dah, Boom-Dee-Ah-Dah.

I love tor-na-does, I love a-rach-a-nids;
I love hot mag-ma, I love the gi-ant squids--
I love the whole world, it’s such a brill-iant place.
Boom-Dee-Ah-Dah, Boom-Dee-Ah-Dah, Boom-Dee-Aht-Tah, Boom-Dee-Ah-Dah.

[50-sec clip, Brian Chapman et al., DiscoveryChannel ad, ILTWW, 0.8MB MP3]

Notice the circle of 5^ths movement in this series of chords. The ‘Circle of 5ths’ describes chord movement downward by 5^ths (or upward by 4^ths). The strong resolution of the dominant V⁷ chord to the tonic I chord is known, oddly enough, as ‘dominant resolution’.

In chamber musc and other classical music genres, ‘dominant resolution’ is called an ‘authentic cadence’. Every time we change chords:

The root moves down a fifth, or one string.
The seventh always slides down one fret, to become the third of the next chord.
The third of the previous chord stays where it is, but becomes the seventh of the next chord.

[50-sec clip, CrewsNelson, ILTM, 0.9MB MP3]

In the right hand of a guitar, each note moves to the pitchwise-closest note in the next chord. That’s basic ‘voice-leading’, and the ‘I-vi-ii-V⁷’ progression voice-leads well—it is physiologically convenient to sing and play, reliably and with minimal risk of mistakes, and, consequently, is likely to sound good—which is why this pattern has been so prevalent in western music over the centuries. MIDI sequencers can execute horribly complex patterns that might sound good, and MIDI sequencers can execute them with no performance risk. But our ears and minds have evolved over the millennia to prefer singability/playability. We love dire simplicity, as Jon Aldrich calls it.

Somehow ‘major scale’ = ‘happy expressivity’ / ‘minor scale’ = ‘melancholic expressivity’ became a social norm—at least in western music. That led to a bias toward the ‘harmonic minor’ harmonizations. Listen to just about any piece of music in a minor key and you will hear progressions like I-iv-V⁷-I / I-vi-ii-V⁷ / I-vi-IV-V⁷. Success breeds success. But the sound of the harmonic minor scale played in a melodic context was unpopular. So the Dorian and Aeloian came together with the addition of a raised 7^th (leading-tone), and this union begat the melodic minor scale. The raised 6^th and 7^th on the way up sounded ‘right’ in a melodic context and didn’t impair the harmonization.

[50-sec clip, DSM, midi euphonium (Garitan), ILTM, 0.7MB MP3]

[50-sec clip, Orange Sherbet, ILTM, 2.2MB MP3]

[50-sec clip, Cedarmont Kids, ILTM, 2.1MB MP3]

As Frank Zappa put it in ‘The Real Frank Zappa Book’, this progression is the ultimate in formulaic ‘bad caucasian music’. While it may have originally been interesting 500 years ago or more, it has by now been so overused by every composer and songwriter that it’s become a musical cliché. ‘I-vi-ii-V’ progressions—the only way these can be used effectively to create new music is to subvert the cliché. Which you can see that Bach did in BWV 862 if you carefully analyze it, measure by measure.

In the end, Levitin’s new book is highly enjoyable, well worth the read. If you’re looking for penetrating comparative musicological scholarship, this is not your book; but, if you’ve read other of Levitin’s writings, you would never have thought that it would be anything other than what it is: an expansive, highly-readable, inspirational book-length essay. Successful record-producer and marketer that he is, Levitin concludes abruptly with a surprising ‘Love is the fulfillment of the Law’ passage that is patterned along the lines of Romans 13:8-10 or Galatians 5:14. What the!?

I t is the love of our existence that is the highest love of all—the love of humanity with all our flaws; all our destructiveness; all our petty fears, gossip, and rivalries. A love of the goodness that we sometimes show under the most difficult stresses—of the heroism of doing the right thing even when no one can see us doing it; of being honest when there is nothing to gain by it; of loving those whom others might find unlovable. It is all this, and our capacity to write about it—to celebrate it in music—that makes us [sentient creatures with moral standing].”
— Daniel Levitin, The World in Six Songs, p. 289.

I won’t hazard to guess how comparative anthropologists will receive this book. But Levitin’s writing succeeds as brilliant, popularistic music commentary in much the same way as, say, Rob Kapilow or Bruce Adolphe succeeds. It’s fine. It’s fun. And it propels ordinary readers to think about why music works—about why they respond to it as they do.

Just the same, what about ILTM? Isn’t this song simultaneously a member of all six of Levitin’s categories? And why exactly is it that I like Brian Chapman’s Discovery Channel ad so, so much? The reason has nothing do with any of Levitin’s six categories. Boom-de-yada.

jwilzewske

Monday, September 8, 2008

We Are Genetically Wired for Music, But Not Just Six Songs

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