GRACE NOTES

By Kathe Lieber

MUSIC AND THE MIND: BOOKS TO DEEPEN YOUR APPRECIATION OF MUSIC

…music over the years has proved to be an adventure, never experienced exactly the same way twice. It has been a source of continual surprise and satisfaction for me.

—Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music: Understanding a Human Obsession

In my compact apartment, the music room and library happily cohabitate—a space where I indulge in my twin passions (with side trips to the kitchen and wine cellar, of course). Lately, I’ve been doubling my pleasure by reading about music, revisiting a couple of books that have greatly enhanced my appreciation of music over the years. You’ll want to dip into them repeatedly and digest the information slowly, with frequent stops to consult your personal playlist.

I recall being blown away by This Is Your Brain on Music when it first came out. Levitin has a formidable CV: neuroscientist, professional musician, best-selling author, and Professor Emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at McGill University. Along the way, he’s been a session musician, producer of pop and rock records, stand-up comic, and would-be llama farmer. But it’s his curious and capacious mind, capable of untangling and explaining complex concepts in readerfriendly terms, that makes this book such a delight. Levitin delves into the major elements of music: pitch, timbre, key, harmony, loudness, rhythm, meter, and tempo, explaining how the brain and the ear interpret them, with many musical illustrations. For example, the ending of “A Day in the Life” on the CD of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band includes a few seconds of sound at 15 KHz that most adults over 40 can’t hear. (I’ll pause now so you can go and listen for yourself.)

—Paul Simon

Perhaps my favourite section of the book is where Levitin discusses music and the mind. “Musical activity,” he writes, “involves nearly every region of the brain that we know about, and nearly every neural subsystem.” The brain has a capacity of reorganization that vastly exceeds what was previously believed, an ability called neuroplasticity. Through experience, we learn to associate different sounds with different feelings: car horns with danger, for instance, or certain friends’ voices with stress or serenity. Infants, adolescents, and adults all learn to appreciate music in very different ways.

the same author. Here, Levitin probes why we listen to what we like to listen to. “…one man’s Mozart is another’s Madonna, one person’s Prince is another’s Purcell, Parton, or Parker.” Scant attention has been paid to the origins of music, although “Americans spend more money on music than they do on prescription drugs or sex, and the average American hears more than five hours of music per day.” He notes that “Virtually every song ever recorded in the history of the world is available on the Internet somewhere—for free.”

There’s more, much more, including emotion, anticipation, and instinct, but I’ll refer you to the source—one of the most rewarding reads you’ll ever come across. At the very end of the book, Levitin tells us that his favourite pieces of music are Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, “Joanne” by Michael Nesmith, “Sweet Georgia Brown” by Chet Atkins and Lenny Breau, and “The End” by the Beatles. Yes, of course, I dropped everything and went to listen, with fresh ears.

Next up: The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature, by

Levitin zeroes in on six kinds of songs: songs of friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion, and love. What are the common factors? Well, says Levitin, the real question is not what all musics have in common, but how they differ. This takes him deep into the role the musical brain has played in shaping human nature and disparate cultures over the past 50,000 years or so. His primary focus is music with lyrics—the songs that surround us. Trying to avoid ethnocentric biases, he addresses the broad and continuously evolving spectrum of diverse forms of music. What sets humans apart from other animals is that we make art, all kinds of art, and music is a powerful part of our art. No less a source than the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica stated that poetry has had as much of an effect on human destiny as the discovery of fire. Lyrics are poetry, and the lyrics to popular songs just happen to be a particular kind of poetry. Think about that for a moment.

Before there was language, of course, there were sounds. As the human brain evolved, rudimentary verbalizations stimulated the types of neural structures to support language in its broadest sense. From there, it was a hop, skip and a jump to three key cognitive abilities: perspective-taking, representation, and rearrangement. Humans learned to encode relations between different things—a cornerstone of all human musical systems.

Language, music, poetry, and art developed, made possible by the evolution of a common brain structure. Creative brains, Levitin says, became more attractive during centuries of sexual selection. But how? Well, by the basic principle of Darwinian natural selection. “…humans who just happened to find creativity attractive may have hitched their reproductive wagons to musicians and artists, and—unbeknownst to them at the time—conferred a survival advantage on their offspring.” on the gene that gave rise to these feelings.”

In nearly all popular music, melody serves as the scaffolding on which the lyrics hang. Poetry, in tandem with melody and harmony, is meant to convey an emotional message and a sense of momentum. Most of us, Levitin points out, listen to songs we like over and over and over again. “…because of the mutually reinforcing constraints of rhythm, melody and accent structure—combined with a shot of dopamine or other neurochemicals that are known to accompany music listening—our relationship with song becomes vivid and long-lasting, activating more regions of the brain than anything else we know of.”

Not until the Beatles burst onto the musical scene did fans begin to expect that musicians would write their own material. Lennon and McCartney intentionally (according to Sir Paul) injected personal pronouns into as many lyrics and song titles as they could: “She Loves You,” “Please Please Me, “From Me to You.” I’ll have to return to my Beatles archive yet again to listen for this— hardly a hardship.

“Making and listening to music, then, feels good not because of anything intrinsic in the music. Rather, those of our ancestors who just happened to feel good during musical activities are the ones who survived to pass

And that’s the wonderful thing these two books accomplish: they send you back to your music library (and of course to Google, YouTube, etc.) to listen as you contemplate how the music came to be. It takes a neuroscientist with a restless intellect and a far-ranging passion for music to make these connections and write about them so thoughtfully. That brain belongs to Daniel Levitin.