And music has been there to imprint these thoughts on our memory, sometimes long after a ritual or ceremony has ended, and long after an epiphany or revelation has passed. Music is able to do this because of its internal structure. Like human languages, human music is highly structured, organized, and hierarchical. Although the details of musical syntax remain to be worked out, there exist multiple redundant cues in music that constrain the possible notes that can occur in a well-formed melody. The human brain is an exquisitely sensitive change detector, and to be such, it has to register minute details of the physical environment in order to notice any violations of sameness, any deviations from the ordinary. The newest evidence, from the laboratories of Dick Aslin and Elissa Newport at the University of Rochester, and of Jenny Saffran at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, shows that even human infants are sensitive to patterns and structure, detecting even minute changes in a musical sequence, and noticing when a sequence or chord progression is atypical.
The most surprising conclusion from this work is the
way
in which human infants accomplish this: Their brains (as do those of adults) compile statistical information about which notes are most likely to follow other notes (an ability afforded by the
rearrangement
or computational abilities of the musical brain). They do the same for language, learning a complex calculation of probabilistic regularities as to which speech sounds are most likely to follow which others. It is in this way that infants “bootstrap” a working knowledge of speech and music and a sophisticated awareness of what combinations are typical and which are atypical in the language and music to which they’ve been exposed.
What’s exciting about this research is that it offers a parsimonious explanation for how both language and music are acquired. It also offers a compelling account of
why
music is so memorable, why we can still sing along with a song on the radio we haven’t heard since we were fourteen years old, and why songs serve as such effective mnemonic devices for the knowledge of civilizations and the following of rituals and religious practice. The reason is because of the multiply embedded cues of melody and rhythm, constrained by form and style, as encoded in a series of statistical maps and, ultimately, statistical inferences.
The musical brain doesn’t
have
to remember every note or every chord sequence; rather, it learns the
rules
by which notes and chord sequences are (typically, in a given culture) created. Violations of those rules are encoded as surprising events and so remembered as schema-breaking exceptions. We don’t have to relearn every time a friend gives us his phone number that there are going to be seven digits plus an area code—this information is
schematized
. We don’t need to learn that the candle-lighting song for a particular ceremony uses only certain notes in a certain pattern, because the choice of notes is constrained by the form (the scales) of our culture’s music; we learn the exceptions and the rules, not every single note.
Music is therefore a highly efficient memory and information transmission system. We don’t like it because it is beautiful, we find it beautiful because those early humans who made good use of it were those who were most likely to be successful at living and reproduction. We are all descended from ancestors who loved music and dance, storytelling, and spirituality. We are descended from ancestors who sealed mating rituals and wedding ceremonies with song, as we do now (or at least boomers like me) with “The Wedding Song (There Is Love),” the Carpenters’ “Close to You,” Nat King Cole’s “Unforgettable,” and Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are.” Songs like these remind us during life cycle events that we are part of a chain of continuing ceremony and ritual, participating as our ancestors did, binding our collective past to our personal future.
The Psalms of the Old Testament—reportedly written by King David—were all written as songs to commemorate, uphold, and celebrate the world’s first monotheistic religion. The Catholic Mass, Handel’s
Messiah,
the liturgical chants drawn from the Qur’an, and thousands upon thousands of other songs are intended to do the same. (Dan Dennett has suggested that atheists would do well to have some rousing pro-science gospel-like songs.) Some of the most beautiful music ever written has been songs of religion, songs of praise to God. Religious thoughts takes us outside ourselves, lift us up higher, elevate us from the mundane and day-to-day to consider our role in the world, the future of the world, the very nature of existence. The power of music to challenge the prediction centers in our prefrontal cortex, to simultaneously stimulate emotional centers in the limbic system and activate motor systems in our basal ganglia and cerebellum serves to tie an aesthetic knot around these different neurochemical states of our being, to unite our reptilian brain with our primate and human brain, to bind our thoughts to movement, memory, hopes, and desires.
Two final and important ways in which religious music has functioned in the formation of human nature are its ability to
motivate
repetitive action, and to bring what psychologists call
closure
. Obtaining closure ameliorates the very human tendency to obsess, to “stress out” over the unknown, to dwell on things that are beyond our immediate control. We pray for a sick child and then move on. We pass through a rite of passage and become in the eyes of society an adult. Rituals, religion, and music unite memory, motion, emotion, control over our environment, and ultimately feelings of personal security and safety, and agency. Some form of ritual is an integral part of the daily lives of children and adults in every culture. The sheer diversity of it is surprising, from people gathering sticks and bundling them in a certain way, to brushing one’s hair one hundred times before going to sleep, to singing songs of praise upon arising in the morning, or whispering “I love you” to your partner before closing your eyes.
My mother’s mother—the piano-playing grandma—followed a daily ritual of her own making after we bought her that electronic keyboard for her eightieth birthday. Every morning she woke up with a sense of purpose, a goal, and that was to sing her song, “God Bless America.” Who said you can’t teach an old grandmother new tricks? Learning the sequence of finger movements kept her mind active and challenged, especially as she began to add chords when she was eighty-nine. It gave her a sense of mastery, of accomplishment. And the particular song she chose to sing gave her pride in being alive and living in a free society. She played that on-awakening song every morning until she was ninety-six, adding in a personal prayer of thanks for her health, her family, her home, and her dog. Then one day she passed away.
I flew to Los Angeles for the funeral. She had a plot next to my grandfather Max’s, way outside of town to the north. It was cold that morning and we could see our breath in puffs of steam rising toward the sky as the rabbi spoke the ancient prayers, the familiar cadences we had all known since childhood, the guttural sounds of Hebrew and Aramaic that reminded me of her own throaty German accent. I helped to carry her casket to the grave site, along with my father, uncles, and cousin Steven. The casket seemed too light to hold my grandmother, a woman of such determination, such strength and power that she had saved her entire family from the hands of the Nazis through the sheer force of her
will
. After the casket was lowered into the ground, we each picked up a fistful of dirt and, in the Jewish tradition, threw the damp earth into her grave. We sang from the Bible, Psalm 131, according to the ancient Aramaic tune that Jews have been singing some version of for two thousand years. The tune’s Middle Eastern, minorish sound, with odd, exotic intervals, evokes stone buildings and walled cities:
Lord, my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty;
neither do I exercise myself in things too great,
or in things too wonderful for me.
Surely I have stilled and quieted my soul;
like a weaned child with its mother,
my soul is with me like a weaned child.
O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time forth and forever.
It was not the memorial speeches that brought us to tears, not the lowering of her casket into the ground, but the haunting strains of that hymn that broke through our stoic veneer and tapped those trapped feelings, pushed down deep beneath the surface of our daily lives; by the end of the song there wasn’t a dry cheek among our group. It was this event that helped all of us accept the death of my grandmother, to mourn appropriately, and, ultimately, to replace rumination with resolution. Without music as a catalyst, as the Trojan horse that allowed access to our most private thoughts—and perhaps fears of our own mortality—the mourning would have been incomplete, the feelings would have stayed locked inside us, where they might have fermented and built up tension, finally exploding out of us at some distant time in the future and for no apparent reason. Grandma was gone; we had shared the realization and etched it in our minds, sealed with a song.
Many of the greatest music of all time has been religious—from the Song of Solomon to Handel’s
Messiah,
to “Amazing Grace.” Scientists and other religious skeptics often deride the religious by posing the following question: If God is so great that he created the entire universe, why would he care whether we praise him or not—why would such a powerful being be so psychologically needy that he wants us to sing to him?” But modern religious thinkers who believe in the existence of God indisputably suggest that the primary reason for this is to benefit the singer, not God. “God doesn’t need our praise,” Rabbi Hayyim Kassorla says. “He is not vain, he doesn’t need us to tell Him He is great. But because He designed us, He knows what
we
need. He dictated that we should sing songs of religion and belief because He knows they help us to remember, they motivate us, and they bring us closer to Him; He knows that they are what we need.”
CHAPTER 7
Love or “Bring ’Em All In”
R
omantic love songs are a sham that perpetuate a lie on unsuspecting young kids,” said Frank Zappa. “I think one of the causes of bad mental health in the United States is that people have been raised on ‘love lyrics.’ ”
Joni Mitchell says, “There’s no such thing as romantic love. It was a myth invented in ancient Sumeria, repopularized in the Middle Ages, and one that is clearly not true. Romantic love is all about ‘I’ this and ‘I’ that. But true love is about ‘other.’ ”
For two such different people to agree on the ultimate deception of romantic love—an avant-garde composer best known for perverse, cynical lyrics of the “Kenny picked his nose and left it on the window” type and one of the great romantic poets of our time—there must be something to the idea. Virginia Woolf described romantic love as “only an illusion. A story one makes up in one’s mind about another person.”
But what about all those shamelessly romantic love songs I loved so much when I was thirteen? The bubblegum songs?
Imagine me and you, I do
I think about you day and night, it’s only right
To think about the girl you love and hold her tight
So happy together
There’s Elvis’s “Love Me Tender” and “(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear,” Tommy Roe’s “Dizzy” (and oh, what a great string part!), the Archies’ “Sugar, Sugar” (sung by Ron Dante, who was back a few months later with “Tracy” by the Cuff Links), the Jackson Five’s “I Want You Back,” Gary Puckett and the Union Gap’s “Over You,” the Ohio Express’s “Yummy Yummy Yummy.” Not to mention great love songs from my parents’ generation, such as “Our Love Is Here to Stay” as sung (in my favorite versions) by Ella Fitzgerald or by Nat King Cole:
It’s very clear, our love is here to stay
Not for a year, but forever and a day
I can’t see me lovin’ nobody but you
For all my life
When you’re with me, baby the skies’ll be blue
For all my life
After these poetic statements about the writer’s love in general, the lyric playfully turns to specifics to involve a metaphor for the longlastingness of their love:
In time the Rockies may tumble, Gibraltar may crumble
They’re only made of clay, but our love is here to stay
Like many preteens, I “learned” about love from songs like this, from fairy tales and Disney movies. The message in these is that when you find the right person (and there is only one “right person” for each of us), you will know it’s love because you will want to be with that person all the time, she will make you feel good, happy, and fulfilled, and you will never have a disagreement. In 1988, when I was working for Columbia Records, a friend of mine in the company played me an album that had just been finished by a new singer-songwriter with the audacious name of Parthenon Huxley. The first two lines of the second song on the album caught my attention: “I fell in love when I was twenty-one/I knew it was love, it was more fun than being alone.”
That
is what love felt like to me—the discovery that there was no one in the world I would rather be with. The night before I got married, Julia Fordham dedicated a song to us at one of her concerts, saying it was “for a love that is filled with shiny, limitless newness.” I sensed in her voice a world-weary knowledge of some transformation she thought would inevitably occur, but I didn’t stop to figure out what she might have meant.