The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature (4 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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One important thing that makes us human, one thing we have that separates us from all other species on our planet, has been noted by psychologists and biologists. It’s not the fact that we have a language to communicate with—other animals, such as birds, whales, dolphins, even bees, have sophisticated signaling systems. It’s not that we’ve learned to use tools (chimpanzees do that), that we have built societies (ants have those), or learned to deceive (crows and monkeys). It’s not that we’re bipedal and have opposable thumbs (primates) or that we often mate for life (gibbons, prairie voles, angelfish, sandhill cranes, termites). What distinguishes us most is one thing no other animals do:
art.
And it’s not just the existence of art, but the centrality of it. Humans have demonstrated a powerful drive toward making art of all different kinds—representational and abstract, static and dynamic, creations that employ space, time, sight, sound, and movement.
Our urge toward artistic expression shows up in cave paintings, and decorations on otherwise solely utilitarian items, such as thirty-thousand-year-old water jugs. Some of the earliest cave paintings show humans dancing. Nearly one hundred years ago the
Encyclopedia Britannica,
in its 1911 edition, stated that poetry had exerted “as much an effect upon human destiny as . . . the discovery of the use of fire.” Equating poetry with fire is both metaphorically satisfying and dramatic (the fire in men’s and women’s souls? the burning desire to express feelings with rhythm and rhyme?). But are we meant to believe that poetry actually exerted such a profound effect on the course of human events?
Britannica
argues just this—that poetry, and presumably lyrics, have changed history, started and stopped wars, documented the history of humankind, and changed men’s [sic] minds about the course of their lives.
Apart from signaling creativity and the ability to engage in abstract thinking, the development of the artistic (poetic, musical, dancing, and painting) brain allowed for the metaphorical communication of passion and emotion. Metaphor allows us to explain things to people in indirect ways, sometimes avoiding confrontation, sometimes helping another to see that which she has difficulty understanding. Art allows us to focus another’s attention on aspects of a feeling or a perception that he might not otherwise see, literally framing the point of interest in a way that it becomes separated from a background of competing ideas or perceptions.
The auditory arts of music and poetry hold a privileged position in human history, and we see this reflected in our own time in neurological case studies. Individuals suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, victims of strokes, tumors, or other organic brain trauma, may lose the ability to recognize faces, even of people they’ve known their entire lives. They may lose the ability to recognize simple objects such as hairbrushes or forks. But many of these same patients can still recite poetry by heart, and sing songs that they knew as children. Verse—whether spoken or sung—appears to be deeply encoded in the human brain. Many artists throughout history have felt an overwhelming drive to write music and poetry, on battlefields, in dungeons, on their deathbeds. This drive no doubt arose from those same frontal cortex mutations and adaptations that made art possible in the first place, the structural changes that gave rise to language and art in general. We write and recite music and poetry not because it feels good intrinsically, but because those ancestors of ours for whom it felt good are the ones who survived and reproduced, passing on this visceral preference. We are a musical species today because our ancestors were, going back tens of thousands of years.
But we are not today as much of a poetic species as the historical record suggests we used to be, having traded poems for songs over the last several hundred years. The average fourteen-year-old will hear more music in a month than my grandfather heard in his entire life. An iPod today easily holds twenty thousand songs, more than the libraries of seven urban radio stations, an order of magnitude more songs than an entire tribe of our hunter-gatherer ancestors would have encountered in their entire lives. Before looking at the six songs that shaped human nature, it is important to take a closer look at just what a song is and isn’t with respect to its lyrics; whether the words are poetry by definition (or what poetry actually is, if indeed it is something different). Do lyrics convey the same meaning when they are divorced from their music?
In the introduction to his book of lyrics, Sting writes:
The two, lyrics and music, have always been mutually dependent, in much the same way as a mannequin and a set of clothes are dependent on each other; separate them, and what remains is a naked dummy and a pile of cloth. Publishing my lyrics . . . [invites] the question as to whether song lyrics are in fact poetry or something else entirely. . . . My wares have . . . been shorn of the very garments that gave them their shape in the first place.
 
The shape of lyrics is influenced by different things than the shape of poetry—the melody and rhythms of music provide an extrinsic framework, whereas poetry’s structure in intrinsic. In music, some notes are accented relative to others, by virtue of their pitch, loudness, or rhythm; these accents constrain the words that will fit well with the melody, and help establish the musical mannequin on which the lyrical clothing will be hung. In poetry, on the other hand, different conventional structures and forms that poets impose on themselves carry meaning—epics, elegies, and odes may signal history, mourning, and love. Traditionally poetry has been discussed in terms of these forms (rhyming patterns, metrical patterns, number of lines). Sonnets were for love. Epics suited couplets. Dirges were for misery.
I’ve been writing songs all my life, but my friends who are
real
songwriters tell me that while my melodies are strong, my lyrics are not. I think of myself as a verbal person, so the irony of this is clear to me. I have to confess that for most of my life I never engaged much with poetry, and didn’t really understand it, in spite of having taken a course in it in college in the 1970s. About ten years ago, my friend Michael Brook (a composer of instrumentals and film scores) suggested that if I wanted to make my lyric writing better, I should read poetry.
The next day, coincidentally, I ran into my old poetry professor, I’ll call him Lee, on campus where—following a most unlikely path through the music industry—I had become a professor myself. We went for coffee together and I told him of my desire to become a better lyricist. I asked him to explain how poetry and song lyrics differ. Once again, I found I was asking the wrong question!
“Lyrics
are
poetry,” Lee explained. “They are two varieties of the
same thing.
The lyrics of popular songs are only a particular kind of poetry. You seem to believe there exists an absolute distinction between the two, and there doesn’t. Lyric poetry has been around since the beginnings.” Lee mentioned the treasure trove of medieval and Elizabethan lyrics—the poems/songs of Campion, Sydney, Shakespeare (and Schubert’s “Who Is Sylvia?”, for example, and other lieder). He pointed out that it is not uncommon for written poetry to be later rendered into song, as in Jonson’s “Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes,” or Burns’s poems or William Bolcom’s music-making with Blake and Roethke.
This sentiment was echoed more recently by John Barr, president of the Poetry Foundation, and himself a respected poet. In defending poetry not of the ivory tower sort, he writes:
People who care about their poetry often experience genuine feelings of embarrassment, even revulsion, when confronted with cowboy poetry, rap and hip-hop, and children’s poetry. . . . Their readerly sensibilities are offended. (If the writing gives them any pleasure, it is a guilty pleasure.) The fact that Wallace McRae, Tupac Shakur, and Jack Prelutsky wrote these works for large, devoted audiences simply adds insult to the injury. Somewhat defensively, the serious poetry crowd dismisses such work as verse, not poetry, and generally acts so as to avoid it, if at all possible, in the future. . . . The result is a poetry world of broad divides.
 
Of course song lyrics do have something that conventional poems don’t—the melody, the mannequin on which Sting was saying he had hung his lyrical clothes. That is, most poems, by definition, have to convey an emotional message through some combination of rhyme, meter (the way the sounds are organized in time, including their accent structure), metaphor, and verbal imagery that add up to great beauty of expression. They also must convey a sense of movement—a forward, rhythmic momentum all their own. Song lyrics may do all these things, but they don’t have to. They always have the music there to help them along, melodies and harmonies that can provide accent structures, forward motion, and a kind of harmonic-textual context. In other words, lyrics are not
intended
to stand alone (and as to the words of poems, to quote another Sting lyric, “they dance alone”).
Lee and I met once a week for that academic term. He brought in some of his favorite written poetry; I brought in my favorite popular music lyrics (which he never failed to remind me were also poetry). I came to see that, whatever its form, written poetry is characterized by a kind of music. Accent structures in words naturally make a sort of melody. In the word
melody
itself the first syllable is stressed, which makes it louder than the others, and most native English speakers will give it a higher pitch than the other syllables. The word
melody
has a melody! Good poetry plays with speech sounds to create a pleasing set of pitch patterns, and good poetry contains rhythmic groupings that are songlike. When a poem succeeds, it is a sensual experience—the way the words feel in the mouth of the speaker and the way they sound in the ears of the hearer are part of the encounter. Unlike prose, most poems ask to be read aloud. This is why poetry lovers usually do so. Just reading the poem is not enough. The reader needs to
feel
the rhythms. Song lyrics ask to be sung; reading them doesn’t typically convey all the nuance of expression that was imbued in them during their creation.
Occasionally, a song lyric
can
stand completely on its own, but Lee was quick to point out that this doesn’t make it any better than one that cannot; it is simply another feature of that particular piece of writing. But through our weekly meetings, I gained a deep appreciation for the interplay between sound and form, between meaning and structure, that characterizes both forms of writing.
One characteristic of poetry and lyrics, compared to ordinary speech or writing, is compression of meaning. Meaning tends to be densely packed, conveyed in fewer words than we would normally use in conversation or prose. The compression of meaning invites us to interpret, to be participants in the unfolding of the story. The best poetry—the best art in any medium—is ambiguous. Ambiguity begets participation. Poetry slows us down from the way we normally use language; we read and hear poetry and stop thinking about language the way we normally do; we slow down in order to contemplate all the different reverberations of meaning it contains.
The spiritual or emotional aspects of art are perhaps their most important qualities. Poetry is no exception—it is written in order to capture feelings and personal, subjective interpretations of events, rather than to deliver a mere description—you might say that it is the right-brain equivalent of a news report. As Helen Vendler (a Harvard professor and leading poetry critic) says, “Poems are hypothetical sites of speculation, not position papers. They do not exist on the same plane as actual life; they are not votes, they are not uttered from a podium or pulpit, they are not essays. They are products of reverie.”
Once in a while we run into people who can recite poetry from memory. We all know people who memorize song lyrics and drop them into conversation at opportune moments. What makes a good lyric or poem? That it is easy to remember? I have lyrics bouncing around in my head all the time, and they are released from their neural prison at even the slightest provocation. During an uncharacteristic weeklong rainstorm at Stanford, it seemed as though my brain had a mind of its own (!), calling up one rain song after another. It began in one of those Jungian synchronicity experiences that Sting writes about. I was listening to the song “Rain” when I heard a crack of thunder followed by a few taps of light droplets on my roof. Within minutes, the rain was pounding. I raced outside to put the top up on my car (California—it was a convertible of course) and to bring in the dog, who was already cowering underneath the hydrangeas. I had the first verse of that Beatles song stuck in my head (“When the rain comes/they run and hide their heads”), and to get it unstuck I tried to think of another song. The first one that came to mind was “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” by Bacharach and David, a great song, but one that—from hard-won experience—I knew would be stuck in my head for a solid week if I didn’t nip this one in the bud, and fast.
It’s funny how memory works—instead of a segue to another Bacharach and David composition (“Do You Know the Way to San Jose?” or “I Say a Little Prayer”) or another B. J. Thomas record (“Hooked on a Feeling,” “I Just Can’t Help Believing”) or another song with the same I-I maj 7-I7-IV chord progression (“Everybody’s Talkin’,” “Something”), my frontal cortex was bent on searching my hippocampus for a song with “rain” in the title, and instantaneously, unconsciously, my brain delivered “You and Me and Rain on the Roof ” by the Lovin’ Spoonful. I love this song. The melody descends the scale from the fifth degree,
sol,
down an octave to the
sol
below, suggesting the Greek lydian mode, and I knew from experience that there was little danger this would get stuck in my head, but it would at least push out the Bacharach melody. Why was I trying to get rid of that? Oh yes, because the Beatles’ “Rain” was reverberating around in there. Oh no! Soon I had that back. Quick! Think of John Sebastian. Ahhhh. “You and me and rain on the roof . . .” Sol - fa - mi - re - do - sol - la - sol.

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