The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature (27 page)

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Authors: Daniel J. Levitin

BOOK: The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature
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Children’s songs in which participants move parts of their body selectively, and in particular ways, are found in every culture. These constitute practice for coordinating music and movement. In my own childhood, a favorite was “The Hokey Pokey”:
You put your right foot in
You put your right foot out
You put your right foot in
And you shake it all about
You do the Hokey Pokey and you turn yourself around
That’s what it’s all about!
 
Subsequent verses find us putting in our left foot, our arms, our head, our “whole self,” and so on. (In a recent dream, I’m climbing a steep mountain to reach a seer at the top. He emerges from his cave, his long white beard and long hair waving in the breeze. I ask him “What is the meaning of life? What is it all about?” He responds by quoting me the verse above, with a pregnant pause just before the last line, and then beams, “
That’s
what it’s all about!”)
A song many Americans of all faiths learn in Sunday school about Noah and the flood has similar motor synchronization:
The Lord said to Noah, “There’s gonna be a floody floody,”
Lord said to Noah, “There’s gonna be a floody floody,”
Get those children out of the muddy muddy
Children of the Lord
 
Chorus:
So rise and shine and give God your glory glory
So rise and shine and give God your glory glory
Rise and shine and give God your glory glory
Children of the Lord
 
During the chorus, children stand at the word “rise,” hold their open palms next to their face during “shine,” and shake their palms to emulate a glittering action on the words “glory” (“ jazz hands”). I have Muslim and Baptist friends who learned the same patterns. “Itsy-Bitsy Spider” and myriad other hand-eye-sound coordination songs train children to move with music, train us for rituals.
Recent research has confirmed that music is a powerful way of encoding motor action sequences—specific movements that must be done in a particular way. Down syndrome children who are otherwise unable to tie their shoes can learn to do so if the movements are set to song. Military units learn to assemble and disassemble guns, engines, and other tasks using song. Rigidity in the performance of the ritual is enhanced by the music: Notes and words unfold in a precise sequence and at a precise time, and motor actions are learned to synchronize with them. The music also helps to set the emotional tone, to serve as a memory aid for practice, and to synchronize multiple participants.
Most ritual music has a quality of unison rhythm for this reason, but exceptions exist, the most notable and fascinating being pygmy music, which (to my ear) is a conceptual predecessor of the ebullient, enthusiastic singing in many religious ceremonies, which is perhaps best known in black churches in America. I attended synagogue as a child and even sang in the choir, but as I mentioned above, this was a stern, reserved affair: We always sang in rhythmic unison, and only occasionally strayed into three-part harmony. This was in stark contrast to the Cornerstone Baptist Church Choir (singing “Down By the Riverside”) and St. Paul’s Disciple Choir (“Jesus Paid It All”) that I saw on Sunday morning television. Within such choirs, an ever-changing core group of people sing the nominal melody as others sing, improvise, shout, chant, and rejoin whenever they feel moved to do so. The result is a thrilling and exhilarating musical force that could sow doubt in the most ardently confirmed atheist. In gospel music, as sung in thousands of churches, both the community and the individual are celebrated. The unison and harmony lines of the core melody strengthen the sense of solidarity and community, of shared goals (as stated in the song) and shared history (as evidenced by the singing of a song that everyone knows). The ecstatic interjections, some planned and some spontaneous, affirm the individual as an artistic and meaningful entity, created in God’s image—leading to feelings of self-acceptance and self-confidence. As India.Arie sings in “Video,” her own merging of hip-hop, funk, gospel, and pop:
I’m not the average girl from your video
and I ain’t built like a supermodel
But, I learned to love myself unconditionally
Because I am a queen
 
 
When I look in the mirror and the only one there is me
Every freckle on my face is where it’s supposed to be
And I know my creator didn’t make no mistakes on me
My feet, my thighs, my lips, my eyes; I’m lovin’ what I see
In the African pygmy music I’m listening to right now, enthusiastic shouting, wailing, and counterpoint run through the song. Rhythms are kept on shaker sticks and drums, often speeding up and slowing down. For the Mbuti people, the forest is benevolent and powerful, and their music is the language with which they communicate with the spirit of the forest, in order to request food, peace, and health. The aim is to communicate intense joy to the forest, which will return it to them. Good music is seen as the embodiment of social cooperation, as is good hunting and feasting. Bad music embraces laziness, aggressiveness, and disputatiousness and is associated with ill humor, shouting, crying, anger, bad hunting, and death. An ultimate goal of pygmy singing is to oppose the destructive force of death.
Although traces of its asynchronous polyphony are found in modern gospel music, in its pure form it is without peer. Pygmy music is so utterly distinctive as to have earned its own entry in
The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians:
Its most striking features, apparently common to all groups, are an almost unique wordless yodeling, resulting in disjunct melodies, usually with descending contours; and a varied and densely textured multipart singing. . . . This choral music is built up from continuously varied repetitions of a short basic pattern, which takes shape as different voices enter, often with apparent informality. . . . The frequently clear division of the total cyclic pattern between leader and chorus . . . is absent . . . or obscured by . . . the passing round of what might be regarded as soloistic parts from one to another. Some scholars see in this a reflection of the essentially democratic, non-hierarchical structure of pygmy social units.
 
In describing the music, rituals, and practices of other cultures as I’ve done here, my intention is to show the great diversity of religious and ritual customs, and the enormous variety of forms of musical expression. I do not mean to draw attention to practices in a way that is disrespectful to them or to their adherents. Obviously, it is important to remind ourselves that preliterate and preindustrial peoples are not childlike or necessarily less intelligent than we—they live a different lifestyle, hold different beliefs, and have a different education. The pygmies famously resisted efforts by a few unwittingly condescending anthropologists to render them as “primitives.” (One pygmy man was tragically captured and put in a circus.) A true story attests to their sophistication and attempts to defend their dignity. When asked by the anthropologist Colin Turnbull to play the oldest song they knew for his tape recorder, a group of rain-forest pygmies sang an impromptu version of “Oh My Darling, Clementine,” complete with polyrhythmic drumming, stick-beating, and vocal harmony.
Forms of nonsynchronous singing and chanting exist in much of the world’s religious music, from Sephardic Jewish liturgy, to Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu chanting. Children typically have difficulty with nonsynchronous music, and rounds are all but impossible for young children, who become distracted by the other parts, until they reach a developmental stage in which they have more volitional control over their own attentional mechanisms (and a more highly developed cingulate gyrus in the frontal cortex), sometime around age six to eight. Complex, nonsynchronous music can thus serve as a marker of intellectual maturity.
In more structured forms of music—especially religious music—a leader sings a line and the choir or congregation echoes it, or answers with a prescribed musical reply. We see this in songs like “Oh Happy Day.” In such “call-and-response” music, the response may either be a literal musical and textual repeat (as it is here on the first and second replies) or a melodic variation (as on the third reply):
LEADER
: Oh happy day!
CHOIR
: Oh happy day!
LEADER
: Oh happy day!
CHOIR
: Oh happy day!
LEADER
: When Jesus washed . . .
CHOIR
: When Jesus washed . . .
 
The folk music and work songs that grew out of the enslavement of African-Americans in the rural south incorporated elements of African music and gospel, and many of them featured a call-and-response form. It was these songs that subsequently formed the bedrock of twentieth-century folk and eventually popular music, where the call-and-response became a staple of sixties and seventies rock, as in “Twist and Shout” by the Isley Brothers:
LEADER
: Well shake it up baby
BACKGROUND
: (Shake it up baby)
LEADER
: Twist and shout
BACKGROUND
: (Twist and shout)
LEADER
: Well come on baby now
BACKGROUND
: (Come on baby)
LEADER
: Come on and work it on out
BACKGROUND
: (Work it on out)
 
The call-and-response technique became so famous in pop music that it could even be implied, instrumentally, and evoke the same emotional drama and impact as the literal response. The roots of this are in the jump ’n’ jive music of the 1940s, for example in Big Joe Turner’s “Flip Flop and Fly,” where each vocal line is answered by a saxophone line. In Leon Russell’s “Superstar,” as performed by the Carpenters (with Richard Carpenter’s brilliant arrangement), Karen sings “Long ago” and the orchestral instruments echo her vocal melody, and keep up a vocal call and instrumental response throughout the song. McCartney does the same thing with his piano lines responding to the vocal lines in “Let It Be.”
Call-and-response, as a specialized form of nonsynchronous singing, is partly predictable, in that we know
when
the next musical event is going to occur, although we may not know exactly
what
it will be. This balance of predictability and unpredictability gives the performance (as distinct from the underlying composition) a palpable excitement. In less structured forms, such as pygmy music or the religious and spiritual music of many indigenous and preliterate peoples, the unpredictability is increased and along with it the excitement. In musics like this, the rhythmic elements—played on drums, rain sticks, shakers, shells, stones, sticks, and hand claps—typically take on a more regular, hypnotic quality that can induce trance states. Just how music induces trance is not known, but it seems to be related to the relentless rhythmic momentum, coupled with a solid, predictable beat (or
tactus
). When the beat is predictable, neural circuits in the basal ganglia (the
habit
and
motor ritual
circuits), as well as regions of the cerebellum that connect to the basal ganglia, can become entrained by the music, with neurons firing synchronously with the beat. This in turn can cause shifts in brain-wave patterns, easing us into an altered state of consciousness that may resemble the onset of sleep, or the netherworld between sleep and wakefulness, or even a druglike state of heightened concentration coupled with increased relaxation of the muscles and a loss of awareness of time and place. When we’re engaged in the music making ourselves, and creating elaborate motor movements, we reach the
flow
state mentioned in Chapter 2, similar to an athlete being “in the zone.” When we’re not explicitly moving (or merely swaying with the beat), the state is different, more like a state of hypnosis, and differences in brain waves are also observed between the two states.
Like many Americans, I was entirely unfamiliar with these types of music and my own childhood experiences with religious music—in a Reform Jewish synagogue that tried to emulate and assimilate aspects of American suburban Protestantism—exposed me to slow, serious, and joyless music. “Whites are afraid to show their emotions, particularly joy,” Joni Mitchell told me. “I think it goes back to the original sin and the biblical accounts of Adam and Eve being
embarrassed
—that has negatively impacted white social interactions for centuries. Most white singers don’t have anywhere near the emotion that black singers do—Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith—every single note is invested with all the feeling of human existence. In my younger days, I had my little white girl folk voice, and I didn’t know how to put emotion in it, and I also hadn’t experienced enough of the world to really express life’s emotions fully. Black culture is much more balanced, they put a value on emotion and spirituality. White culture wants to keep all of that stuff quiet and tucked away.
“Some of our deepest feelings come through the spirit,” Joni continued. “To the extent that religion is a manifestation of spirit, it really ought to reflect the full range of feelings, especially joy. The ballet I wrote (
Shine
) is Gnostic, because Gnosticism rides the cusp, in a way, of all spiritual thought. It absorbed just about every religion, and put the goddess back in, it was earth-friendly, woman-friendly, and all the things that religion isn’t at this time. It saddens me so deeply what we, the Woodstock generation, have done to our planet. And nobody listens! We keep trashing it, ruining it, there won’t be anyone left fifty years from now and its purely our Tower of Babel arrogance that has brought us to this. Only humans have the stupidity to destroy their own planet. You talk a lot about ‘evolution’ in
The World in Six Songs,
but maybe it would be more accurate to talk about humans as the products of
devolution,
of a relentless pursuit of perfection in stupidity and arrogance. Even religion today has lost its ability to pull us out—now it’s all warrior gods. My song ‘Strong in the Wrong’ is a direct attack on these subversions of religion. On the other hand, the Gnostic God is a thing within you whereby you lose your self-consciousness and transcend. It’s more like Buddhism, in that way. So the Buddhists in the dance troupe kind of lit up because, it’s not like the Buddhists are afraid to do a Catholic dance, but man! the Catholics are sure afraid to do a Buddhist dance.”

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