The reasons for the insistence that the Torah be transmitted orally are a matter of speculation. One proposal is that the success of the Jewish people, one of the oldest continuously living civilizations in the world, is due to especially close ties between parents and children and the bond created through the oral transmission of knowledge—knowledge which, in the case of the Torah, intimately binds family history, moral lessons, political history, codes of daily conduct, and instructions for maintaining an orderly, just society. If the information had been written down and learned by reading, the knowledge transmission would have flowed in one direction, from book to student. The oral transmission enabled—virtually
required
—interaction, questioning, participation; what the physicist-turned-Torah-scholar Aryeh Kaplan called a
living teaching
. Indeed, the ancient Hebrew scholars wrote that “the Torah is meant to be alive, to be spoken.” Like the poetry we encountered in Chapter 1, it is meant to be
heard,
both in the ears of the people and in the minds of those who have learned it and can play the song of it back in their heads at will, in times of scholarship, trouble, or praise. It’s also been proposed (somewhat less logically) that the restriction on writing the Torah down existed because some knowledge of customs and traditions would be lost if it was committed to writing—that the sum total of the knowledge known by the people exceeded what could be written down. When the rabbis decided sometime between 150 B.C.E. and 200 C.E to commit all the teachings to writing, much debate and disagreement indeed ensued, about many details. (All of the debate is captured in the Talmud—in fact, that is primarily what the Talmud
is
—a record of what were essentially judicial proceedings and deliberations about what precisely the oral teachings were and how they were to be interpreted.)
From a memory standpoint, the cantillation (as the Torah melody is known) provides the same sorts of constraints that other songs do—perhaps even more—facilitating the memorization and preservation of an enormous amount of text. Without recordings, however, it is impossible to know for sure how well the original words of sacred texts such as the Torah and the Qur’an were preserved through their oral transmission. We don’t know, and
can’t
know, the extent to which melodies changed, rhythms were rewritten, emphases were altered. But the fact that different subgroups of contemporary Jews sing different melodies suggests that there was no one magic formula for preserving the information—time and tide would have caused minor changes as in the child’s game of telephone, and over generations these differences could have become considerable, and they would have become amplified. Humans are a highly adaptive species. As we moved to new locations, to communities with their own musical cultures and traditions, original melodies may well have become altered or distorted by the influence of local songs. Even the prosody of the new languages (the “music” of the language) has been shown to influence the songs of that linguistic culture. As the Mongols entering southern Europe on horseback, the Armenians dispersing to Paris, and Italian-Americans crooning in Hoboken found, local sounds pull at the immigrants’ long-preserved melodies and rhythms, creating new hybrids that continue the cultural evolution of their songs, at the possible expense of losing some of their original (melodic and textual) information.
The existence of different melodies for Torah today suggests that errors may indeed have crept into the text when it was transmitted orally—if melodies can change, so can words. (In fact, much of the discussion during the compilation of the Talmud in the first few centuries C.E. acknowledged that some errors by then had
already
crept in, and concerned how to resolve those errors.) Indeed, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls reveals that multiple versions of the sacred texts exist. From both a cognitive and a theological perspective, the errors are mostly relatively minor and unimportant, of the type we saw in Rubin’s study of ballads.
Across all these examples, a common thread emerges: Knowledge songs tell stories, recount an ordeal, a saga, a particularly noteworthy hunt—something to immortalize. The demonstrated power of song-as-memory-aid has been known to humans for thousands and
thousands
of years. We write songs to remind ourselves of things (as in Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line”) or to remind others of things (as in Jim Croce’s “You Don’t Mess Around with Jim” or Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop”). We write songs to teach our young, as in alphabet songs and counting songs. We write them to encode lessons that we’ve learned and don’t want to forget, often using metaphor or devices to raise the message up to the level at which art meets science (rather than simple observation), making it at once more memorable and more inspiring, as Andy Partridge does in “Dear Madam Barnum” (performed by his band XTC). The name Madam Barnum is clearly made up, meant to portray her as the ringleader in some abusive emotional circus she has subjected the poor songwriter to, and from which he now hopes to extricate himself:
I put on a fake smile
And start the evening show
The public is laughing
I guess by now they know
So climb from your high horse
And pull this freak show down
Dear Madam Barnum
I resign as clown
Songwriters often invoke a well-known tale or legend in the context of a new song. In “Dear John,” the writer of this song (Aubry Gass, and as sung by Hank Williams) is again encoding an experience into a song, presumably so that he won’t forget that it was his own misbehavior that caused his woman to leave him; he weaves into the message two well-known Old Testament references:
Well when I woke up this mornin’,
There was a note upon my door,
Said “don’t make me no coffee babe,
’cause I won’t be back no more,”
And that’s all she wrote, Dear John,
I’ve sent your saddle home.
Now Jonah got along in the belly of the whale,
Daniel in the lion’s den,
But I know a guy that didn’t try to get along,
And he won’t get a chance again,
And that’s all she wrote, Dear John,
I’ve fetched your saddle home.
Note the interesting shift to the third person in the second verse (“I know a guy that didn’t try to get along”), a conceit to make us think that it isn’t actually he who was left by a woman, a move that underscores the point that he’s sending the message out to others as a warning: Don’t do what I did; treat your woman right.
Hard-won lessons are a staple of knowledge songs, from Paul Simon’s “Run That Body Down” to Ani DiFranco’s aptly titled “Minerva” (after the Roman goddess of knowledge) to the Magnetic Fields’ “You Love to Fail.” As with Aubry Gass’s, the songs seem to be simultaneously directed from the songwriter to him- or herself and to all of us. Guy Clark, one of my all-time favorite songwriters, brings a lifetime of lessons seemingly learned the hard way into his song “Too Much,” a romp that is made all the more fun (and memorable) by the form he imposed on himself: Every line of the verse begins with the same two words (“too much”), compiling a litany of everyday pleasures, too much of which will cause the various calamities specified at the end of each line:
Too much workin’ll make your back ache
Too much trouble’ll bring you a heartbreak
Too much gravy’ll make you fat
Too much rain’ll ruin your hat
Too much coffee’ll race your heart tick
Too much road’ll make you homesick
Too much money’ll make you lazy
Too much whiskey’ll drive you crazy
. . .
Too much limo’ll stretch your budget
Too much diet’ll make you fudge it
. . .
Too much chip’ll bruise your shoulder
Too much birthday’ll make you older
Part of what makes the song memorable is the obvious
fun
that the composer had in writing it, reflected in the joy the performers bring to playing it. The sense of whimsy is enhanced by decomposing the familiar idiom “carrying a chip on your shoulder” to yield “too much chip’ll bruise your shoulder.” In “too much limo’ll stretch your budget,” he taps into our memory associations of limos and “stretch limos” to use both senses of the word
stretch
. (It is no wonder that Clark is a favorite of many of the best songwriters in the business, including Rodney Crowell, whom Guy mentored.)
A song like “Too Much” turns the memory process into a game—the first part of each line cuing the second part or vice versa. If we forget the line, logic can often deliver it to us just as it does in “I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly.” It is worth making the cultural point that these sorts of songs are found in every society we know of. And the fact that children tend to love these songs is evidence that our ancestors found this sort of mental play both rewarding and an efficient form of learning and information transmission.
Up until this point, I’ve been considering songs as they are recalled and sung by one individual at a time. But knowledge songs—from Huron’s yellow school bus songs to Torah cantillation—are more typically sung by groups of people. In this context their position as a foundation of culture and their durability become even more apparent. I’ve already described the social bonding that comes from synchronous music making, and the neurochemical effects of singing, but there are manifest cognitive benefits that are conferred to the group-as-a-whole, apart from any benefits to the individual when people sing together. Group singing shows a special ability in retrieving information that a lone individual might not be able to recall, an
emergent property
. Emergent behavior occurs when groups can do things that individuals cannot. Ant and bee communities are examples of emergence where intelligence arises out of a multiplicity of relatively simple and seemingly unmotivated actions. No single ant “knows” that the hill needs to relocate, for example, but the actions of tens of thousands of ants result in the hill being moved, efficiently, effectively, even “intelligently.” The Stanford biologist Deborah Gordon writes, “The basic mystery about ant colonies is that there is no management.” No ant stands at the periphery of the colony directing traffic.: “Hey you! Stop playing ‘rub-the-feelers’ with that worker ant and get a move-on! Come on guys, break it up, there’s enough moldy peanut for every—HEY BUDDY! What’re you, taking a break? Go help those guys carrying the heavy praying mantis carcass!” With no ant in charge, how on earth do ants get anything done?
Ant colonies exhibit behavior very similar to that of other systems with a very large number of units or components, all of which interact, and the consequences of whose interactions change over time. Physicists call these
nonlinear dynamical systems.
(They’re called
nonlinear
because the effects of these interactions can’t simply be added up, they sometimes have to be expressed as powers, or other higher mathematical functions. They’re called
dynamical
because the influence of one event at the beginning can have profound effects later in time as that initial effect is carried forward.) In systems like these—which include rain forests, stellar transits, the stock market, and even the faddish propagation of hit songs—small, seemingly chaotic, and unrelated behaviors can end up having large effects as they interact, spread, and develop over time. In other words, extraodinarily simple individual units—like ants, neurons, atoms, or musical notes—can generate complicated and often counterintuitive global behavior.
On the surface, you might think that groups remember knowledge songs better because they spread out the memory burden among a greater number of people. But it’s not the case that ten singers each remember a different line—there is no prior agreement, no coordination of the learning or recall. Instead, due to a variety of differences among individuals (and these differences can be genetic, environmental, based on IQ, personal motivation, personal taste, and random factors) some people are going to remember some parts of a song better than they remember other parts. There may be nothing systematic about it, and the remembered parts could even change from day to day and week to week.
But something special happens when a group starts to sing together—something extraordinary from a cognitive (and dynamic complex systems) perspective, something you’ve probably experienced yourself in any place where people come together to sing: football games, church, campfires, or political rallies. On your own, you might get stuck after the first line of the song. Singing with a single friend, your companion might remember the first word of the second line and that keeps you going for another few words, but then neither of you can remember the third line just now. In a large group,
no one
has to be able to recollect the entire song. Just one person singing the first syllable of a word can trigger a recollection in another group member to bring the second syllable of that same word, which in turn can cue a group of people to that whole word and the next three words after it. Imagine this notion propagated through a large group of dozens or hundreds of people, and throughout every syllable of the song—a sort of group consciousness emerges in which no single member of the group can be said to know the song, but the group itself does.