Response: "To Tug Hearts, Music First Must Tickle the Brain"

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/19/science/19brain.html?pagewanted=4

Scientists are trying to understand what makes music expressive? The day will come sooner when men will understand women.

While I applaud efforts to understand why we can be moved by certain musical experiences, especially in populist writing of this kind, I have to admit I tend to find this type of over-generalized journalism a little frustrating. How can you talk about “music” as if it were one thing and lump together (gulp) Paul Simon and Chopin? It does not take a “music scientist” (whatever that is) to figure out that different kinds of music evoke their own contexts and appeal to different sides of us: emotional, intellectual, physical, spiritual. I play Bach; I research Paganini; I dance to Tito Puente. They push different buttons in me. And that’s just me!

The article is a fruit salad of apples and oranges. The break in the ostinato pattern Paul Simon describes is a rhetorical effect. The “sun” metaphor in the repeating melody Yo Yo Ma plays is a facet of phrasing. Practising musicians master an entire palette of effects, rhetoric and phrasing included, that give expression to the music they are playing—and the role of performers in relation to composers varies greatly depending on the style and genre, a sensitivity to which is developed over years of study and experience. The Hermann Hesse quote is taken out of context: the violinist wishes to “disappear” into the music because that is the aesthetic ideal of Werktreue, or fidelity to a work, which is specific to a particular musical tradition, not all. Expression is a tough nut to crack. It resists generalization.

Admittedly musicologists have not been terribly thorough in accounting for emotional (or physical) responses to musical stimuli, since the discipline by its nature favors thought. But neither is Western science poised to unravel the mysteries of how musical input works on our complex mechanisms. Computerized manipulations of a pianist’s note durations playing Chopin may be well meaning, but if the conclusion is that people prefer listening to the playing of a human being over that of a machine, then how worthwhile was the funding for the research? I mean, DUH!

Daniel Levitin, who is featured in this article, is doing fine work involving audiences in interactive concerts in collaboration with my friend Edwin Outwater—at which listeners are asked to respond in real time to a live performance of Beethoven (“Beethoven and Your Brain”). We need more events like this that promote appreciation of classical music in a way that is accessible, fun, and not condescending.

I’ve always thought that books about musical performance are like books about riding a bicycle. We can try to put the ineffability of music into words but let’s try harder not to forget that verbalizing such experiences falls way short of the experiences themselves. It’s hard enough to be present to experiences as they happen, musical or otherwise, without running the risk of ruining them by jumping to conceptual formulations.