cognitive dissident

Levitin, Daniel. This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (New York: Dutton, 2006)

Daniel Levitin's This Is Your Brain on Music "is about the science of music, from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience--the field that is at the intersection of psychology and neurology." (p. 11, Introduction) As such, some of its passages are strongly reminiscent of Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia:

The story of your brain on music is the story of an exquisite orchestration of brain regions, involving both the oldest and newest parts of the human brain, and regions as far apart as the cerebellum in the back of the head and the frontal lobes just behind your eyes. It involves a precision choreography of neurochemical release and uptake between logical prediction systems and emotional reward systems. When we love a piece of music, it reminds us of other music we have heard, and it activates memory traces of emotional times in our lives. (p. 188)

Levitin's insights are often stronger due to his work as a musician and producer before getting into neuroscience, and he uses his experiences with rock and pop artists to illustrate his points. When Levitin notes that "The Police made a career out of violating rhythmic expectations," (p. 111) this would have been a good place for Levitin to mention "Murder by Numbers" and its quirky 2-against-3 pattern during the drums-and-vocals intro; I've never heard a 12/8 time signature done quite like that, at least not in a pop song. Sting's post-Police solo career has also been marked by rhythmic adventurism: "Straight to My Heart" (7/4) from Nothing Like the Sun, "Seven Days," (5/4) "Love Is Stronger than Justice," (7/4) and "St Augustine in Hell" (7/8) from Ten Summoner's Tales and "I Was Brought to My Senses" (7/4) from Mercury Falling are prime examples.

Those who were intrigued by Alex Ross' The Rest Is Noise, myself included, may disagree with Levitin's rather harsh assessment of modern classical music:

Contemporary "classical" music is practiced mostly in universities; it is listened to by almost no one; it deconstructs harmony, melody, and rhythm, rendering them all but unrecognizable; it is a purely intellectual exercise, and save for the rare avant-garde ballet company, no one dances to it either. (p. 257)

Your Brain on Music is filled with great anecdotes, one of which was perhaps the inspiration for his next book, The World in Six Songs:

He [John Pierce, former Bell Labs VP] knew about my previous career in the music business, and he asked if I could come over for dinner one night and play six songs that captured all that was important to know about rock and roll. Six songs to capture all of rock and roll? I wasn't sure I could come up with six songs to capture the Beatles, let alone all of rock and roll. The night before he called to tell me that he had heard Elvis Presley, so I didn't need to cover that.

Here's what I brought to dinner:

1) "Long Tall Sally," Little Richard

2) "Roll Over Beethoven," the Beatles

3) "All Along the Watchtower," Jimi Hendrix

4) "Wonderful Tonight," Eric Clapton

5) "Little Red Corvette," Prince

6) "Anarchy in the U.K.," the Sex Pistols (p. 49)

Levitin, Daniel. The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature (New York: Dutton, 2008)

In The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature, Levitin proposes to tell a larger story--with six categories of songs instead of six individual songs. He writes that this book "is the story of just how music has changed the course of human civilization, in fact, the story of how it made societies and civilizations possible:" (p. 39)

Music, I argue, is not simply a distraction or a pastime, but a core element of our identity as a species, an activity that paved the way for more complex behaviors such as language, large-scale cooperative undertakings, and the passing down of important information from one generation to the next. This book explains how I came to the (some might say) radical notion that there are basically six kinds of songs that do all of this. They are songs of friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion, and love. (pp. 3-4)

Levitin discusses each type of song in turn and praises the persistence of art-making under horrific circumstances,

Our drive to create art is so powerful that we find ways to do it under the greatest hardships. In the concentration camps of Germany during World War II, many prisoners spontaneously wrote poetry, composed songs, and painted--activities that, according to Viktor Frankl--gave meaning to the lives of those miserably interred there. (p. 18)

but misses a chance to discuss Quartet for the End of Time, which Olivier Messiaen composed during his time at the Stalag VIII-A camp. The quality of Levitin's observations suffers as he strays into other areas. For example, his remark that "One can argue that among the most significant events in all of human history was the invention of monotheism" is correct, but the tangent that follows is error-laden:

Monotheism transformed the dominant worldview from one in which events happened for no apparent reason (at the whim of capricious gods) to one in which there existed a logic and order in things (according to the plan of the one true God). The laws of nature and natural processes were seen as the product of a rational, intelligent being. The advent of monotheism put an end to child sacrifice (which was ubiquitous in the pre-monotheistic world) and ushered in an era of logic. This swiftly led us to the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment, and science. (pp. 221-2)

That's an interesting timeline--it ignores (polytheistic) Greek contributions to science and glosses over the period when monotheism was actually dominant: the thousand years after the fall of the Roman Empire known as the Dark Ages. Christian dogma and dominance eventually began to weaken with the Renaissance's rebirth of classical knowledge, leading to the Age of Reason (early 17th century) and the Enlightenment (18th century), but crediting monotheism with the successes of science and civilization--while denying its culpability for the millennium that "quickly" passed under its rule--is ludicrous. The idea that the "capricious whims" of polytheism's gods were transformed in any real sense by monotheism is also untrue. A single god's ways are no less mysterious than those of many gods, as myriad Biblical examples of Jehovah's capriciousness demonstrate.

Outside of that lapse, Levitin's Six Songs is a solidly enjoyable book--although it doesn't quite live up to its predecessor Your Brain on Music.

links:
Your Brain on Music website
Levitin's paper "Life Soundtracks: The Uses of Music in Everyday Life"