The Music Instinct: How Music Works and Why We Can’t Do Without It by Philip Ball
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is a fabulous book. There is one main question it tries to answer: What does music mean?
This question is not an easy to answer question. The short answer is that we don’t know. Because we don’t know, it’s also somewhat difficult to know where to start. Ball manages though, to get the ball rolling. Still, it’s a wild ride, as what music means (to us) is also, what is it? How is it? What are the mechanics? How do various groups react to it? And how do we find, in all these loose structures, tons of opinions and endless variations, any kind of universal over-arching box for which we can place music in a sock drawer and be done with it?
Even given such a huge domain, one which touches us so intimately as music touches us, Ball manages to designate borders around this cloud of what “music” is. His main push lies in the classical music tradition… which has very much to do with an interplay of themes and melodies, harmonies of sonic form — that
in the Baroque period, when composers aimed to portray the states of the soul, such as rage, excitement, grandeur or wonder. They were not trying to tell us how they felt, but were offering something like symbols of ideas and feelings in a systematic language that their audiences understood. They employed stock figures and devices, often drawn from the principles of classical rhetoric, such as the inventio (finding a musical subject) and its elaboratio or exposition. No one believed that the music had some intrinsic, mystic power to evoke these things; they simply expected the audience to know the language. During the Classical era and the Age of Enlightenment, in contrast, the objective was to make music that was ‘natural’, that moved and entertained with its grace and lyricism — as music historian Charles Burney wrote, this made music ‘the art of pleasing by succession and combination of agreeable sounds.’
It was in the nineteenth century, when composers started to believe music had an intrinsic potential to express raw emotion without the mediation of agreed conventions, that they and their audiences lost sight of the strictly conventional assignation of meaning and started to think that music produced immediate imaginative suggestion. [In this same time period] composers were less likely to produce works commissioned for particular patrons, audiences or events, but instead felt they were writing for eternity. […] The composer, like the painter, was no longer a craftsperson but a priest, prophet and genius.
In a way, music was most natural when people were “expected to just know” even though music at that time was made of Baroque rhetorical devices. But when the medium of music became a thing in-itself, music detached from this naturalness of rhetoric and became lovely sounds. Eventually that became Romanticism, as the theme emerged from chaos, wrought from pain and angst in the medium, and so composers themselves were also hardpressed. The genius himself is the creation of genius… the genius is so beyond, that the conventions that are used, the rhetorical devices are blasted apart, but somehow loosely held enough together in our contemporary era.
Ball also writes that the best music shows us how to hear, but it has no linguistic equivalent as if language is the true language of reality. Instead, Ball says music is simply itself, it has no deeper meaning in language (although we may think it does) in that others can hardly verify that meaning in its specificity. This is another way of saying that Ball means that meaning can only be verified as being “out there” if “enough” people can independently find that meaning in its object. Because music cannot be verified this way, music becomes “a little bit of the Real” that we can directly apprehend.
This is his meaning too when he points out that music cannot have developed for our evolutionary advantage because processing music is not assigned to a specific part of the brain like other functions (such as speech or movement or counting). Instead, music lights up the entire part of the brain, including areas as “basic” as our motor skills in processing rhythm… or rather, does rhythm excite our motor skills? Either way, inasmuch as anyone wants to see meaning in music, a meaning which they most likely could just as easily find anywhere else in the universe because of how they specifically are, we also see ourselves in music… struggling, finding brief happiness, being gloomy, running naked in a field, flying through the air, laughing with friends, having sexy time… music can tell us of how we each individually are just as it can remind us to be appropriately happy or sad as we have learned to listen to it as being those emotions.
Just as over time, music has changed its meaning, or its ability to speak to us, so our expectations of ourselves have changed too. When music becomes the work of geniuses, we need to find geniuses out there who can write such music. When music was natural, obvious and everything good, so was our idea of society, our progress as a species, our ideas of God and universe. Music has served historically, as a mirror to us. Many non-Western cultures use music differently, but in each, they are moved by it, place it appropriately in their social setting, and enjoy it as a group activity. Music is the glue that binds us in as much as it reminds us of who we need to be, who we are already and who we think we should be.
Ball’s book is not that thick. But it is a moving, touching piece, that reaches the range of what we think are our ways of knowing reality (logic, science, history, math, art) and applies each in turn to music, to find out how it is music is able to show us what we are, to be our partner in time and reality. But despite all these approaches, Ball succeeds not only in exciting us but also showing us how each area is somehow adequate and inadequate… for each aspect of music is always simply what it is, each study may serve to show patterns, assignations, but these qualities quickly dissolve into the body of music again. If doing anything, but only reminding us of the different ways we can enjoy and participate in music.
In other words, by trying to tell us what music is, Ball manages to tell us what it is not. Rather than dampening our spirit, this rejection of the limits of music only heightens our wonder at the wide variation of music, the huge range of effect it has on us, personally and collectively. In a self reflexive way, not knowing what music is allows us to not only enjoy it (which is great), but also see ourselves reflected in it. Music falls through the cracks in languaged meaning to be only what it is, outside of language. In this way, literally, through music we can reach ourselves just as we reach the world totality.
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