MUSIC OF THE SPHERES:

Exploring the role of music in human life (Robert S. Boyd, July 14, 2003, Philadelphia Inquirer)

Charles Darwin, the father of evolutionary theory, wrote in 1871: "As neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least use to man in reference to his daily habits of life, they must be ranked among the most mysterious with which he is endowed."

Experts have proposed various explanations for the universality of music. Darwin suggested it evolved in our animal ancestors as a sexual system, designed to attract mates. "In this view, animal song became part of courtship, and then part of human nature," Hauser said.

Others observe that music creates social cohesion, strengthening group bonds against outsiders. School pep songs or military marches are obvious applications.

Many assert that the most important function of music is to regulate or influence emotions. "Some sequences of notes are happy, some are sad," Hauser said. "Music affects our emotional response."

It isn't clear which of these theories about the origin of music is correct. "We really can't distinguish between these hypotheses," Hauser
acknowledged. "Everything is open to debate."

It's interesting that later the story seems to suggest something quite otherwise:

Researchers are particularly interested in studies comparing the musical abilities of adults with those of human babies and animals. For example, experiments with very young infants showed that they react differently to harmonious and discordant chords, demonstrating that a sense for music is inherited.

According to [Sandra Trehub, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto], 4-month-old infants are content to listen to unfamiliar folk
melodies, but show signs of distress - fussing, squirming, turning away - when dissonant notes are introduced into the melody.

"Toddlers commonly invent songs before they can reproduce conventional songs," she noted. "Similarly, school-age children create songs and chants, such as 'eenie-meenie-miney-mo,' that share a number of features across cultures, including repetition, rhythmic patterning, rhyme and alliteration."

Even monkeys apparently sense the concept of a musical octave.

According to Anthony Wright, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston, rhesus monkeys, like humans, tended to judge a tape-recorded song, such as "Old McDonald Had a Farm," to be the same when it was shifted up or down by one or two octaves.

But when the melody was transposed by a half-octave, thereby changing its key, the monkeys no longer recognized the tune, a fact they showed by failing to turn their heads toward the speaker.

Comparisons between music and language offer fresh insights into brain function.

[Marc Hauser, a neuroscientist at Harvard University] pointed out that music resembles language in that most people in all cultures instinctively know whether a sentence in their language is grammatical or not. Similarly, almost everyone can tell whether certain patterns of sound are music or mere noise, even if these sounds have never been heard before.

"There are other stimuli that nearly everyone recognizes as unmusical, such as a 'sour' note in a melody," he said.

"For too long, the neuroscience of language has been studied in isolation," wrote Aniruddh Patel, a scholar at the Neuroscience Institute in San Diego. "Music is now stepping into this breach, and via comparative analysis with language, providing a more complete and coherent picture of the mind than can be achieved by studying either domain alone."

This seems to suggest that music accords to some pre-existing order, an order recognizable even to babies and animals. But how could this be if it is a mere social construct?

Here's an appreciation of a little-remembered composer that suggests an answer to the puzzle of music, Death and Rapture (Robert R. Reilly, November 2001, The Crisis)

This is the month of Christmas, but December is also the end of the centennial year of the birth of British composer href=http://www.musicweb.uk.net/finzi/>Gerald Finzi (d. 1956), a self-professed agnostic. Can I reconcile my duty to reflect on the Nativity, while at the same time celebrating Finzi? Several Christmases ago, I was able to accomplish a similar feat in CRISIS with Ralph Vaughan Williams (another agnostic) and his magnificent Christmas cantata, Hodie Christus Natus Est. Like Vaughan Williams, Finzi seems to have been that special breed of believing agnostic who can write sublime, religiously inspired music.

How could this be? In my own experience with agnostics, I have found that they are often particularly close to God-intimate enough to hold a personal grudge. Usually, it has to do with a misunderstanding as to who He really is or what He has done. Frequently, their objections to God concern things to which God Himself objects, like the suffering of children or death. [...]

Finzi's frequent encounters with death easily explain his attraction to the poetry and pessimism of Thomas Hardy, another English agnostic, many of whose poems Finzi set to music. During the latter part of his relatively short life, Finzi lived under the death sentence of Hodgkin's disease, which carried him off at age 55. It's only natural that he should have been fixated on the transitory nature of things. It's harder to explain Finzi's love for the works of 17th-century English metaphysical poets and his penchant for setting explicitly religious texts. What was the source of hope for this pessimist?

The answer comes from Finzi's profound appreciation for and immersion in the beauty of nature. Haunted by death and enflamed by nature's beauty-where could Finzi go to deal with the dichotomy between death and beauty? Ineluctably, he turned to traditional Christian texts. He wrote a Magnificat, In Terra Pax, For St. Cecelia, Lo, the Full, Final Sacrifice, and other such religious works. What creates the tension in Finzi's works is the intense experience of beauty juxtaposed with the looming presence of death. Beauty and death do not comfortably coexist. Beauty signals a certain message that death denies.

That is the conundrum of human existence that Finzi's music so movingly captures with a kind of melancholy grandeur.

Finzi is the composer of beginnings and endings, of birth and death. The two musical bookends of his work in a thematic, if not a chronological, sense are his two masterpieces, Dies Natalis, Op. 8, and Intimations of Immortality, Op. 29. In Dies Natalis, Finzi set the text of Thomas Traherne's poem of that name for tenor and orchestra. [...]

As the texts he set demonstrate, Finzi held the Platonic view that we come from the divine, are soiled by this world, and "forget" our origins. He humorously remarked on this in one of his Crees Lectures in 1953: "We all know that a dead poet lives in many a live stockbroker. Many of these people, before they fade into the light of common day, have had an intuitive glimpse which neither age, nor experience, nor knowledge, can ever give them."

In our experience of beauty, Finzi thought, we "recollect" and gain a dim intimation of our immortality. In fact, this is exactly how Finzi describes the process of his creative work and the nature of its rewards: "The essence of art is order, completion and fulfillment. Something is created out of nothing, order out of chaos; and as we succeed in shaping our intractable material into coherence and form, a relief comes to the mind (akin to the relief experienced at the remembrance of some forgotten thing)."

Rather than intimations of immortality, mightn't we understand music to offer intimations that the Universe is Ordered? Mightn't the relief we feel on hearing great music come from this sense that just as Creation was the ordering of chaos, so too is is music our imitation. however paltry, of Creation?


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On My Philosophy (Karl Jaspers) Posted by Orrin Judd at July 14, 2003 1:50 PM