I wrote a Prelude and Fugue without thinking it would be part of a collection. Then gradually the idea [for composing a set of Etudes] came to me, because I was inspired by the Twelve Etudes in the Minor Keys by [the French composer] Alkan. I was playing a lot of [his pieces] at the time. But [while these Etudes were composed incrementally, over 25 years beginning in 1986] the ‘cycle’ didn’t really take shape until just a little while ago... When I had about nine of them finished, that’s when I got a letter out of the blue from C.F. Peters asking whether they could publish my Etudes. So that was really an incentive to finish the series.” — Marc-André Hamelin, interview with Topher Levin.
M arc- André Hamelin’s Harriman-Jewell Series recital on Saturday evening explored the relation of the individual to ‘place’—impressions and memories of place and identity.
Berg - Piano Sonata, Op. 1
Liszt - Piano Sonata in B minor
Debussy - Préludes, Book 2 (excerpts): La puerta del vino, Les fées sont d’exquises danseuses, Les tierces alternées, Feux d’artifice
Hamelin - Twelve Études In All The Minor Keys (excerpts): Études 2, 7, 8, 11, and 12
H aving never heard them before, the 13-minute Berg Sonata and the 24-minutes of excerpts from Hamelin’s ‘12 Études in All the Minor Keys’ were, for me, the highlights of the performance.
T he 12 Études are like a time-lapse self-portrait of Hamelin as a person and as a musician. Each person’s identity is actively created: of that there is no doubt. Impressions of new experiences and memories of experiences past engage us on a lifelong, daily basis as each of us constructs our [multiple] identities, multiple personae. The dimensions explored in these Études include the body [including the left-hand Étude, No. 7], the neighborhood and community and nation, Time (the epoch in which you live or the person remembered lived), and our mobility between settings (émigréness)—some settings that we ‘own’ or belong to; other ones that are not ours, or that we are displaced from against our wishes, or that we out-live—how these all shape, and are shaped by, people’s identities.
U nlike some composers, I don’t regard writing for one hand as an opportunity to display pianistic proficiency. Instead, I consider it a fascinating compositional constraint. There is not much point in composing for one hand unless one tries to make the textures as rich as possible, and it is a special delight to make one hand sound like two.” — Marc-André Hamelin, program notes.
T hese Études argue that sense-of-place and belonging are the result of our imagination as individuals and as families, communities, societies... that our identities are actively constructed over time, not passively received. Our narratives of place-situated belonging and identity are time-sensitive, context-sensitive. They mutate and evolve. They are a product of the things that we hold dear, fear, obsess over, remember; they are a product of where and with whom we spend most of our time. Hamelin is very modest about the happenstantial way in which the Études came to be the way they are—asserting that they merely or mostly accumulated over time; that they were never envisioned as a collection of 12 and were never meant to be autobiographical. And yet a great part of their beauty, I think, is that they are this 25-year pianistic portrait of his own personal Canadian narrative.
T hat they are all in minor keys is, I hope, not a consequence of his living in Boston!
H amelin’s encore, an obscure Prelude by Leonid Sabaneyev (1881–1968), was a captivating little character piece, mysterious, inviting, poignant, jewel-like... a by-now-nostalgic example of Soviet modernism embodying the will of the individual rather than the Party. Self-actualization of each comrade, is what it sounds like. Contemplate, if you will, the utopian dream of the national unity of free-spirit comrades creating, producing, acting in concert, is what it seems to suggest. This Prelude made me think, among other things, of how ungodly far humanity has come (regressed?) in 100 years! The things that, to many, once seemed reachable, in one’s own country! It feels like we are all émigrés now...
T he ineffable qualities of instrumental music meant that the authorities continued to regard music as a less-than-critical ideological arena.” — Amy Nelson, Music for the Revolution, p. 243.
S oft power is derived from both state and society. Savvy states are able to harness the creativity and vibrancy of their societies for soft power purposes while understanding that it is civil society’s independence from the state that contains the real persuasive power. When authoritarian states deny the global public the ability to directly access their domestic civil society, they are potentially depriving themselves of a key soft power asset in the information age.” — Shanthi Kalathil, ISD Working Papers in New Diplomacy, MAY-2011.
I ’ve just returned from several weeks in China—a wonderful, profoundly stimulating experience. I attended chamber music performances in Beijing, including a delightful concert at the National Centre for the Performing Arts (“The Egg”) by pianist Igor Levit and three of his colleagues (Evgenia Rubinova, Michail Lifits, Herbert Schuch).
U nfortunately, due to Chinese government policy Google Blogger, Twitter, and Facebook are all blocked in the PRC, which is why I have posted no blogs or tweets in recent weeks. (Did not try to use a proxy-server. Hotel ISPs were dodgy enough as it was...)
T here were interesting ‘audience compliance enforcement’ practices in China that we would never see in the West. For example, the concert hall staff aim red ‘marksman’/gun-sight-type lasers on the heads and backs of audience members who make noise or who move or try to take a forbidden photo during a performance. Everyone in the audience sees the bright red dot ‘painted’ on the body part of the offender. We don’t see that kind of enforcement of etiquette in the U.S. or Europe, that’s for sure. But the effectiveness of the social censure by the other audience members who are seated near the ‘offender’ is total and nearly instantaneous. From a performer’s perspective, this is kind of cool—especially when the behavior is disruptive and selfish on the part of the person doing the picture-taking or recording or moving-around.
I gor Levit gave a fantastic left-hand-only rendering of BWV 971 (among other things). I asked him and he says the transcription was Brahms’s, published by Breitkopf & Hartel, but I look in Breitkopf catalog and do not see it... I will have to buy a copy of their EB-6018 to look... maybe it is in there and only the Breitkopf pdf file online is in error. There are lots of LH transcriptions of BWV 1004 Chaconne, BWV 1006, BWV 1002, BWV 1031, and so on. I so far do not find the LH tr. of 971...
T he unlikely LH as proponent of subject, object, everything: this reveals new dimensions in, and sheds new light on, a piece I thought I understood. The RH stands by like a watchful parent, saying nothing.
L eon Fleisher and others have had dystonia or other reasons to pursue such literature, but here in China I hear Igor Levit and learn new things. Some might consider one such piece in an otherwise normal program to be a ‘novelty’ or ‘gimmick’, but it was not. Absolutely masterful.
I visited hospitals—crowded but fastidiously clean and well-run—so many things different from the West, but so many things the same. Visited the Central Conservatory where Chen Yi and Zhou Long and others trained. Oh, the food! The friendly, gracious Chinese people!
S o China blazes this prodigious, distinctive, iconoclastic path—many paths, actually, reflecting mixtures of Han Chinese plus 55 minority groups: regional, metropolitan and rural—always diverging from the West, because why? Because what is distinctly Chinese embodies the belovèd “national circumstances” and reinforces the honorable “Chinese characteristics”, or guoqing (国情). That is why... that is why this Chinese ‘autopoietic’ tendency is self-sustaining. It is a little like Richard Dawkins’s ‘Selfish Gene’ on a large social scale. Based on my 3-week exposure, I think it’s not a deliberated process and not a politically-coerced one. Instead, it feels organic, inevitable. So many people, who mostly seem so happy, so long as the ‘boom’ lasts! I can hardly wait for the chance to return...
S tandpoint theory’ … asks: could you do science [, or computing, or music or other of the arts] differently if you did not ‘erase’ [disenfranchise] those people outside the [conventionally-enforced] institutional representation? ... Women in science can more sharply expose [science’s] assumptions because they are not party to the prior agreements [of the prevailing Establishment authorities]. And precisely because they are not part of the prior agreements, they may freely prioritize other agreements, including agreements about strategies for dealing with the actual world that are different from those used by institutional science [or institutional music, etc.]; strategies with a different understanding about power relations between the observer and the observed and generating different kinds of knowledge.” — Lynette Hunter, Situated Textualities, p. 163.
E verybody thinks that classical music is the music of the European canon. But when you go to children [in public schools in the U.S.] now, they don’t know what ‘classical music’ is, period.” — Toyin Spellman-Diaz, Imani Winds oboist, quoted in Vivien Schweitzer NYT 14-NOV-2008.
A nd so those kids are growing up not imagining that these musical ‘homelands’ exist. They are growing up not knowing that they ‘belong’ and have the possibility of a home within the many communities of classical music including chamber music. Community outreach programs to address that problem are tremendously important, to the kids and to each society as a whole. The Imanis are wonderful ambassadors—Secretaries of State from what, to those kids, are unknown (and what, once they discover them, are revealed to be exciting and congenial—) ‘lands’. Thank you, Imani Winds, for all of your efforts to de-mystify chamber music through your community outreach programs!” — DSM.
The ‘Thanksgiving’ U.S. holiday seems to me a perfect occasion to point out the recent, festive performances and recordings of the wind quintet, Imani.
Valerie Coleman, flute
Mariam Adam, clarinet
Toyin Spellman-Diaz, oboe
Jeff Scott, French horn
Monica Ellis, bassoon
M embers of the Imani Winds ensemble all have graduate degrees from conservatories like the Juilliard School and the Manhattan School of Music. But, prior to their illustrious achievements in those settings and subsequently, each of them attended public schools in the U.S., and experienced the limitations that that generally entails. With that as prologue, the ensemble and its members do now perform pro bono and ‘community outreach’ work as a focus of many of their programs. Their own personal experiences in this way inform and propel their natural, generous response to the still-unmet, ever-more-unmet needs, especially for music education opportunities for underserved inner-city kids. This aspect was covered in Vivien Schweitzer’s article on the Imanis in the NYT a couple of weeks ago. It is inspiring and truly wonderful to see the Imanis ‘giving back’ in this way. Please be sure to thank them and acknowledge their efforts. (And, of course, one way of tangibly doing that is to attend their performances and buy their CDs.)
Have a listen to a couple of MP3 clips from two of their recent recordings:
[50-sec clip, Imani Quintet, Ástor Piazzolla, ‘Fuga e Misterio’, 1.2MB MP3]
[50-sec clip, Imani Quintet, ‘The Holly and The Ivy’ traditional carol, 1.2MB MP3]
The Piazzolla is especially characteristic, I think, of the Imanis’ chamber music ‘fusion’ interpretive approach. In his chamber compositions Piazzolla notoriously ‘borrowed’ elements of jazz (esp, its harmonies and dissonances)—plus elements of tango, baroque counterpoint, and a variety of other idioms. Essentially, he created a ethnomusicological ‘country’ or ‘territory’ in which to ground his own individualism. The Imanis make a ‘home’ out of it. In fact, they make every sonic-space they enter their ‘home’.
Piazzolla’s—and the Imanis’—style transcends all of the borrowed influences: they don’t merely ‘appropriate’ the influences or ‘reference’ them. For example, the passacaglia form with its circulating continuo line entraining/entrained-in a recursive harmonic sequence was idiomatic for 17th and 18th Century baroque music, but it’s also fundamental to jazz progressions. Another example from baroque composition idioms is the complex and often virtuosic counterpoint that epitomizes formal, collectivistic fugal gestures but which in Piazzolla/Imani Winds incarnations becomes a vehicle for individualistic discourse by each chamber artist in turn.
M ore obviously ‘democratic’ and autonomy-related are the improvisational elements. Improvisation might nominally be borrowed from jazz, but in practice it entails different tonal and rhythmic palettes that, despite how extensible and varied they are, do stay within the boundaries of the ‘homesteaded’ sonic territory.
Property rights;
Autonomy and equality;
Enfranchisement;
Social justice;
Decolonizing the colonized;
Becoming anti-colonial musical activists.
Yeah, all of that. Thankful are we, for these beautiful and interesting real worlds and virtual worlds.
Our notions of ‘belonging’ and nation-ness may have mutated in these recent years of globalization, but the issue of belonging is no less important than it ever was—and the Imani Winds sound reminds us of that fact. Thanksgiving is a holiday (in the U.S., Canada, and other places) that is associated, perhaps more than any other holiday, with concepts of nation and family and unity and equality. But it’s also an occasion for remembering and celebrating difference—for affirming the stories that we hold in common with each other, and for remembering and meditating upon the narratives that make us diverse or that, for better and worse, still separate us or colonize us. The Imanis cross genre boundaries as though they weren’t there—one big borderless E.U. as far as the performing arts are concerned.
Shall I put one of the Imani CDs on to play when my own family assembles to celebrate this Thursday? In think yes. The group or family forms a focus for our sense of belonging—and how we move our sense of attachments and identity from place to place. Members of my own family live far apart and travel abroad frequently; we don’t have opportunities to see each other very often. Our processes of ‘identification’ aren’t constant, and they surely aren’t frozen in-time as they once seemed when we were not all so far-flung. The processes are renewed and altered at times of holiday celebrations; they are contingent and fleeting, expressed in relation to our group and its customary holiday foods, and music, and other cultural genres and artifacts. We ‘transcend’ whatever our identities may have been in the past, as we create new experiences together. In a way, Imani Winds is ‘trans-national’ and ‘contingent’ as much as it is transcendent in its repertoire and interpretations. And it is so in much the same way, I think, as what I believe families do, including my own.
All of us are, in the process, avoiding artistic ‘essentialism’ and artistic ‘determinism’ or passivity—and instead actively migrating into or creating new areas. Or at least that is what listening to the Imanis makes me feel.
Their warmth and exciting virtuosity are captivating. To hear Imani Winds perform is to want to be(come) a member of their family...
Upcoming Imani Winds performances include the following:
01-DEC-2008 19:00 at Borders Bookstore, 461 Park Av, New York NY
02-DEC-2008 20:00 at Carnegie Hall Stern Auditorium, New York
09-DEC-2008 19:00 at Borders Bookstore, 3700 Torrance Blvd, L.A.
10-DEC-2008 20:00 at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles CA
12-DEC-2008 20:00 at the Performing Arts Center in South Orange NJ
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.
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:
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 5ths movement in this series of chords. The ‘Circle of 5ths’ describes chord movement downward by 5ths (or upward by 4ths). 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 7th (leading-tone), and this union begat the melodic minor scale. The raised 6th and 7th on the way up sounded ‘right’ in a melodic context and didn’t impair the harmonization.
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.
