Music and the Mind

When the tribe met to sing their own song-cycle on ritual occasions, song-owners had to sing their particular verses in the right order. Songs also transcended language barriers and constituted a means of communication between individuals who could not communicate in other ways.

When a culture is under threat, music may become even more significant. Bruno Nettl, Professor of Musicology and Anthropology at the University of Illinois, discussing the music of the Flathead Indians, suggests that

the uses of music in Flathead culture are mainly to accompany other activities, perhaps in order to validate them as done in a properly Flathead fashion … Music supports tribal integrity when many peoples, whites and other Indian tribes, because of the onset of modernization and Westernization, come into a position of influencing the Flathead.39

E. O. Wilson, the Harvard socio-biologist, writes that, in primitive cultures,

Singing and dancing serve to draw groups together, direct the emotions of the people, and prepare them for joint action.40

One joint action for which sounds produced by musical instruments may help to prepare people is that of warfare. Attacks upon enemies are often initiated by blowing horns and trumpets which both arouses the aggressiveness of the attackers and is supposed to terrify the enemy.

The Muras and other tribes of the Orinoco region performed wild overtures on horns before commencing their attack; the Samoans blew conch-shells, and the savages of Guiana began their advance with a screech of horns and trumpets.41

Such sounds are also used to frighten away evil spirits.

Music can sometimes symbolize rebellion. It may be permissible to express anti-government attitudes in songs, the words of which would invite arrest if they appeared in a newspaper article. Under some regimes, night-club satirists are given a licence denied to the ordinary citizen. The song ‘Lilliburlero’ became an epitome of anti-Catholic sentiments, and is said to have contributed to the revolution of 1688 and to the subsequent defeat of James II at the Battle of the Boyne.

Continuity and stability are served by tunes which everybody knows; but music can also create new patterns of joint experience. Blacking gives examples of African drum patterns which when combined and performed by several players can create new cultural products.

Through musical interaction, two people create forms that are greater than the sum of their parts, and make for themselves experiences of empathy that would be unlikely to occur in ordinary social intercourse.42

The mnemonic power of music is still evident in modern culture. Many of us remember the words of songs and poems more accurately than we can remember prose. That music facilitates memory has been objectively confirmed by the study of mentally retarded children who can recall more material after it is given to them in a song than after it is read to them as a story.43

Some people who are primarily interested in classical music are disturbed to find that they recall the words and lyrics of popular songs more easily than they remember the music which means most to them. I think this is because popular songs are simple, endlessly repeated and difficult to avoid. This also accounts for their nostalgic quality. Anniversary ‘evenings out’ are seldom accompanied by the ‘Eroica’. Repetition can make any type of music memorable. Professional musicians, especially conductors and instrumental soloists, are required to remember huge quantities of classical music, and can usually do so without too much difficulty because they have studied it and played it repeatedly.

In Western societies the importance of music as a means of defining and identifying a culture has declined, but it has not disappeared. Particular pieces of music continue to be associated with particular societies, and come to represent them in the same way as a national flag. ‘They are playing our tune’ is a phrase which can have a much wider significance than our habitual reference of it to the courtship memories of a mated couple. In Britain we never refer to ‘God Save the Queen’ as ‘our tune’; nevertheless it symbolizes the structure of our society and the allegiance which is still expected of us. It is ironic but not inexplicable that in the USA the same tune is used for ‘My Country, ‘tis of Thee’. To play the hymn ‘Abide With Me’ at football matches is in dubious taste; but those who join in singing it feel an enhanced sense of joint participation, even if they do not believe the words which they are singing, or subscribe to the Christian beliefs which the hymn expresses.

It is not surprising that Church leaders have doubted whether the feelings which music arouses are genuinely religious. Music’s power to fan the flame of piety may be more apparent than real; more concerned with enhancing group feeling within the congregation than with promoting the individual’s relation with God. St Augustine reveals that he was so entranced by the pleasures of sound that he feared that his intellect was sometimes paralysed by the gratification of his senses. On the other hand, the beauty of music could also aid the recovery of faith.

So I waver between the danger that lies in gratifying the sense and the benefits which, as I know, can accrue from singing. Without committing myself to an irrevocable opinion, I am inclined to approve of the custom of singing in church, in order that by indulging the ears weaker spirits may be inspired with feelings of devotion. Yet when I find the singing itself more moving than the truth which it conveys. I confess that this is a grievous sin, and at those times I would prefer not to hear the singer.44

It will never be possible to establish the origins of human music with any certainty; however, it seems probable that music developed from the prosodic exchanges between mother and infant which foster the bond between them. From this, it became a form of communication between adult human beings. As the capacity for speech and conceptual thought developed, music became less important as a way of conveying information, but retained its significance as a way of communicating feelings and cementing bonds between individuals, especially in group situations. Today, we are so accustomed to considering the response of the individual to music that we are liable to forget that, for most of its history, music has been predominantly a group activity. Music began by serving communal purposes, of which religious ritual and warfare are two examples. It has continued to be used as an accompaniment to collective activities; as an adjunct to social ceremonies and public occasions. We share these functions of music with pre-literate cultures. In our society, one cannot imagine a Coronation or a State funeral taking place in the absence of music. We know less than we would like about what musical activities went on in the past in private houses; but it is important to recall that the modern concert, in which instrumental music is performed in a public concert hall as a separate entity unaccompanied by voices and in the absence of any ceremony, was not a prominent feature of musical life in England until the late seventeenth century. Since then, music as a distinct form in its own right has continued to grow in importance. During the same period, the performer has become more sharply differentiated from the listener. The individual listener’s response to music is a principal theme of this book.

*For example, Haydn’s The Creation, Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ Symphony, Delius’s On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring, Strauss’s Sinfonia Domestica.

*Pole makes passing reference to this in one footnote, but makes no acknowledgement to Spencer.

*All these examples are taken directly from Vico’s Sanza Nova.

CHAPTER II MUSIC, BRAIN AND BODY

Human attitudes and specifically human ways of thinking about the world are the results of dance and song.

JOHN BLACKING1

Music brings about similar physical responses in different people at the same time. This is why it is able to draw groups together and create a sense of unity. It does not matter that a dirge or funeral march may be appreciated in a different way by a musician and by an unsophisticated listener. They will certainly be sharing some aspects of the same physical experience at the same moment, as well as sharing the emotions aroused by the funeral itself. Music has the effect of intensifying or underlining the emotion which a particular event calls forth, by simultaneously co-ordinating the emotions of a group of people.

It must be emphasized that making music is an activity which is rooted in the body. Blacking believes that ‘feeling with the body’ is as close as anyone can get to resonating with another person.

Many, if not all, of music’s essential processes can be found in the constitution of the human body and in patterns of interaction of bodies in society … When I lived with the Venda, I began to understand how music can become an intricate part of the development of mind, body, and harmonious social relationships.2

It is generally agreed that music causes increased arousal in those who are interested in it and who therefore listen to it with some degree of concentration. By arousal, I mean a condition of heightened alertness, awareness, interest, and excitement: a generally enhanced state of being. This is at its minimum in sleep and at its maximum when human beings are experiencing powerful emotions like intense grief, rage, or sexual excitement. Extreme states of arousal are usually felt as painful or unpleasant; but milder degrees of arousal are eagerly sought as life-enhancing. We all crave some degree of excitement in our lives; and if stimuli from the environment are lacking, we seek them out if we are free to do so. Not all music is designed to cause arousal. Satie wrote music designed only to provide a comforting background. This has been succeeded by the kind of ‘wallpaper’ music played in elevators, which soothes some people and provokes fury in others. However, this is an exception and not the kind of listening being discussed at this point. Lullabies may send children to sleep; but we listen to Chopin’s Berceuse or the Wiegenlieder of Brahms and Schubert with rapt attention.

Arousal manifests itself in various physiological changes, many of which can be measured. The electro-encephalogram shows changes in the amplitude and frequency of the brain waves which it records. During arousal, the electrical resistance of the skin is diminished; the pupil of the eye dilates; the respiratory rate may become either faster or slower, or else become irregular. Blood-pressure tends to rise, as does the heart rate. There is an increase in muscular tone, which may be accompanied by physical restlessness. In general, the changes are those which one would expect in an animal preparing for action; whether it be flight, fight, or mating. They are the same changes recorded by the polygraph or ‘lie detector’ which demonstrates arousal in the form of anxiety, but which, contrary to popular belief, cannot prove guilt or innocence.

Recordings of muscle ‘action potentials’ on another instrument, the electro-myograph, show marked increases in electrical activity in the leg muscles whilst listening to music, even when the subject has been told not to move. In the concert hall, the physical restlessness induced by arousal is often insufficiently controlled. Some people feel impelled to beat time with their feet or drum with their fingers, thereby disturbing other listeners. There are tracings recording the increase in Herbert von Karajan’s pulse-rate while conducting Beethoven’s Overture, Leonora No. 3. Interestingly, his pulse-rate showed the greatest increase during those passages which most moved him emotionally, and not during those in which he was making the greatest physical effort. It is also worth noting that recordings of his pulse-rate whilst piloting and landing a jet aircraft showed much smaller fluctuations than when he was conducting.3 Music is said to soothe the savage breast, but it may also powerfully excite it.

What seems certain is that there is a closer relation between hearing and emotional arousal than there is between seeing and emotional arousal. Why else would the makers of moving pictures insist on using music? We are so used to hearing music throughout a film that a short period of silence has a shock effect; and movie-makers sometimes use silence as a precursor to some particularly horrific incident. But a love scene in a film is almost inconceivable without music. Even in the days of silent films a pianist had to be hired to intensify and bring out the emotional significance of the different episodes. A friend of mine, visiting the Grand Canyon for the first time, found himself disappointed at his lack of response to this awesome sight. After a while, he realized that he had seen the Grand Canyon many times on the cinema screen and never without music. Because his sight of the real thing lacked such musical accompaniment, his arousal level was less intense than it had been in the cinema.

Seeing a wounded animal or suffering person who is silent may produce little emotional response in the observer. But once they start to scream, the onlooker is usually powerfully moved. At an emotional level, there is something ‘deeper’ about hearing than seeing; and something about hearing other people which fosters human relationships even more than seeing them. Hence, people who become profoundly deaf often seem to be even more cut off from others than those who are blind. Certainly, they are more likely to become suspicious of their nearest and dearest. Deafness, more than blindness, is apt to provoke paranoid delusions of being disparaged, deceived, and cheated.

Why is hearing so deeply associated with emotion and with our relationship with our fellow human beings? Is there any connection with the fact that, at the beginning of life, we can hear before we can see? Our first experience of hearing takes place in the womb, long before we leap into the dangerous world and begin to look at it. David Burrows, who teaches music at New York University, writes:

An unborn child may startle in the womb at the sound of a door slamming shut. The rich warm cacophony of the womb has been recorded: the mother’s heartbeat and breathing are among the earliest indications babies have of the existence of a world beyond their own skin.4

A dark world is frightening. Nightmares and infantile fears coalesce with rational anxieties when we come home at night through unlit streets. But a silent world is even more terrifying. Is no one there, nothing going on at all? We seldom experience total silence, except in the artificial conditions of those special rooms in psychological laboratories in which darkness is combined with sound-proofing to exclude input to our senses as completely as possible. As Burrows points out, we are dependent on background sound of which we are hardly conscious for our sense of life continuing. A silent world is a dead world. If ‘earliest’ and ‘deepest’ are in fact related, as psychoanalysts have tended to assume, the priority of hearing in the emotional hierarchy is not entirely surprising; but I think it unlikely that this is the whole explanation.

The details of the physiological responses outlined above need not detain us. We have all experienced them, and we are all aware that the condition of arousal can be exciting or distressing according to its intensity. The important point to recognize in this context is that, with a few exceptions, the physical state of arousal accompanying different emotional states is remarkably similar. Sexual arousal and aggressive arousal have in common fourteen physiological changes. The Kinsey team found that there were only four respects in which the physiology of anger differed from the physiology of sex. Although there are rather more physiological differences between the state of fear and the states of anger and sexual arousal, fear still shares nine of the same items of physiological change with the other two, including increase in pulse-rate, increase in blood-pressure, and increase in muscular tension.5

It is easy to appreciate that we enjoy becoming sexually aroused; less easy to acknowledge that we like being frightened, and still less easy to accept that we may welcome the excitement of being angry. But many people enjoy the fear induced by ghost stories or horror films; and some will admit that ‘justified’ wrath against an enemy is exhilarating. The fact is that human beings are so constituted that they crave arousal just as much as they crave its opposite, sleep. Whilst we may deliberately and reasonably affirm that we want our morning newspaper to contain no accounts of disasters, there is no doubt that tragedy is stimulating, as the proprietors of the tabloids know only too well.

One of Freud’s cardinal errors was to suppose that what human beings most wanted was a state of tranquillity following the discharge of all tensions. He treated powerful emotions as an intrusion, whether they were instigated by stimuli from without or caused by instinctual impulses from within. For Freud, the main function of the central nervous system was to see that the tensions caused by such emotions were discharged, either directly or indirectly, as soon as possible. He called this dominating feature of mental life the Nirvana principle. In Freud’s scheme, there is no place for ‘stimulus hunger’; that is, for the need which human beings have to seek out emotional and intellectual stimuli when they are placed in a monotonous environment or when they have been in a state of tranquillity for so long that they have become bored.6

Freud died in 1939. If he had been alive in the 1950s and 1960s, he would have become aware of research into the effects of shielding human beings from as many incoming stimuli as possible. Although Nirvana-like bliss and relief from tension can sometimes be achieved by exposing people to short periods of voluntary isolation in the sound-proof, light-proof rooms already referred to, longer periods of solitary confinement usually lead to desperate efforts to find something stimulating which will relieve monotony. Human beings suffer from stimulus hunger as well as from stimulus overload; and those who have experienced months or years alone in prison cells find that doing mental arithmetic, recalling or writing poetry, or other mental activities, are absolutely necessary if they are not to sink into apathy or despair.7

It seems obvious that one reason why people seek to listen to or to participate in music is because music causes arousal, which may be intense at times, but which is seldom unbearably so. When, in A la Recherche du temps perdu, Mme Verdurin protests at her husband’s suggestion that the pianist shall play a particular sonata in F sharp on the grounds that it will make her ill, we do not believe her, and Proust did not intend us to do so.

‘No, no, no, not my sonata!’ she screamed, ‘I don’t want to be made to cry until I get a cold in the head, and neuralgia all down my face, like last time. Thanks very much, I don’t intend to repeat that performance. You’re all so very kind and considerate, it’s easy to see that none of you will have to stay in bed for a week.’8

Every concert-goer is familiar with the histrionic member of the audience who demonstrates his or her intense sensibilities by sighing, groaning, or clapping ecstatically; and who then looks around with rolling eyes to make sure that these antics have been noticed.

This is not to deny that music can provoke intense, genuine emotional arousal, from ecstatic happiness to floods of tears. This does not happen with everyone. The unmusical person, as one would expect, is less physiologically aroused than the musical person. Even in people to whom music means a great deal, responses vary with their mood. One would not expect a depressed person to respond to music as vigorously as an elated person; although music has been known to break through the carapace of melancholy and enable the depressed person to regain access to the feelings from which he had been alienated.

There is another aspect of arousal which is relevant to music. There is some measure of agreement about the nature of certain well-known musical works, whether they are jolly, uplifting, humorous, martial, impressive, and so on. No one calls Rossini’s overture to The Barber of Seville tragic; no one thinks of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony as merely pretty. Roger Brown, one of the world’s experts on the development of language in children, has also studied reactions to music. His research has demonstrated that there is widespread consensus between listeners about the emotional content of different pieces of music even when these pieces are unknown to, or not identified by, the different listeners. That is, whether a piece of music is considered poignant, wistful, elegiac, boisterous, rustic and so on, does not depend upon previous knowledge of the piece in question, or upon identifying the context in which it was composed.9

But it is simplistic and inaccurate to suppose that the emotions expressed in the music – sadness, joy, or whatever other emotion seems displayed – are necessarily those aroused in the listener. Peter Kivy, author of an influential, award-winning book on music, The Corded Shell, repeatedly affirms:

We must separate entirely the claim that music can arouse emotion in us from the claim that music is sometimes sad or angry or fearful … a piece of music might move us (in part) because it is expressive of sadness, but it does not move us by making us sad.10

Othello’s suicide is profoundly moving; but it does not make us feel suicidal. What moves us is the way in which Shakespeare (and Verdi) made sense out of tragedy by making it part of an artistic whole. As Nietzsche realized, even tragedy is an affirmation of life.

In spite of Roger Brown’s demonstration that the general emotional tone of a piece of music will probably be similarly perceived by different listeners, there will always be disputes about specific details when criticism is carried further. This does not imply that one listener is more or less perceptive than the other. Both may have experienced arousal; and both will therefore agree that the music has had a powerful effect upon them. It is natural enough, given the varying backgrounds from which listeners come, and the very different life-experiences to which they have been exposed, that what they read or project into any given piece of music may also be rather different. What is interesting is that there is as much consensus as there appears to be.

The idea that music causes a general state of arousal rather than specific emotions partly explains why it has been used to accompany such a wide variety of human activities, including marching, serenading, worship, marriages, funerals, and manual work. Music structures time. By imposing order, music ensures that the emotions aroused by a particular event peak at the same moment. It does not matter that the kind of emotions excited in different individuals may vary. What matters is the general state of arousal and its simultaneity. Because of its capacity to intensify crowd feeling, music has a power akin to that of the orator.

Ellen Dissanayake, in the paper from which I quoted in the last chapter, believes that the importance of physical movement as a constituent of musical behaviour has been underestimated. She points out that children up to the age of four or five find it difficult to sing without moving their hands and feet. The close relationship between music and bodily movement is not confined to pre-literate societies. The composers Roger Sessions and Stravinsky have both stressed the connection with the body; and Stravinsky not only composed superb music for ballet, but also insisted that instrumentalists be visually perceived whilst playing. This may be one reason why so many musicians dislike recorded performance. They want to see the players’ movements as well as hear the sounds they make.

Stravinsky, in old age, asked:

What is the ‘human measure’ in music? … My ‘human measure’ is not only possible, but also exact. It is, first of all, absolutely physical, and it is immediate. I am made bodily ill, for example, by sounds electronically spayed for overtone removal. To me they are a castration threat.11