How Music Works

by David Byrne

  Statistics like these really put an end to the argument questioning the utility of learning to play music, and they make a strong case for the importance of the arts remaining part of a school curriculum.

  Recent programs that nurture creativity don’t all focus exclusively on school kids. A program called the Creators Project is funded by Intel, the computer chip manufacturer, and Vice, a magazine and media company. Intel provides funding and Vice decides who gets it. Their support is sometimes thrown to established artists and musicians to help them manifest or realize a project that otherwise would have been beyond their financial and technical means. I recently saw theatrical pieces by Bjork and Karen O that were funded by the Creators Project. They’re also seeking out emerging and unknown artists, and their pockets are fairly deep, their support wide-ranging (with projects in China, Buenos Aires, Lyon, and around the Cern atom smasher). Significantly, they are supporting artists and musicians who are working on the fringes of popular culture. So while I might have wondered earlier why Silicon Valley hasn’t shown support for the arts, here is a big exception—and they’re not funding symphony halls or museums, they’re funding live shows in warehouses and in other oddball venues.

  THE FUTURE

  I have nothing against the music performed in opera houses or much of the art in the spectacular new museums that have been thrown up in the last couple of decades—in fact I like quite a lot of it. The 1 percent are certainly entitled to their tasteful shrines—it’s their money after all, and they do invite us to the party sometimes. I wonder, however, if those places and what they represent, along with their healthy budgets, hint at some skewed priorities that will come back to bite us in the ass before too long.

  I’m not the only one who believes that future generations will view our present arts budgets with bafflement. The slashing of state and federal budgets for teaching music, dance, theater, and visual arts in grades K–12 will have a profound effect on the financial and creative future of the United States and other countries that are following our example. In California, the number of students involved in music education dropped by half between 1999 and 2004. Participation in music classes, many of which are now no longer available anyway, dropped 85 percent. The other arts have had similar fates, and the humanities have suffered as well.

  A study done by the Curb Center at Vanderbilt University (Mike Curb is, among other things, a songwriter and record producer who dropped Frank Zappa and the Velvets from MCA, claiming they advocated drug use!) found that arts majors developed more creative problem-solving skills than students from almost any other area of study. Risk taking, dealing with ambiguities, discovering patterns, and the use of analogy and metaphor are skills that are not just of practical use for artists and musicians. For example, 80 percent of arts students at Vanderbilt say that expressing creativity is part of their courses, while only 3 percent of biology majors and about 13 percent of engineers and business majors do. Creative problem solving is not taught in those other disciplines, but it is an essential survival skill.30 If one believes, as I do, that creative problem solving can be learned, and is something that can be applied across all disciplines, then we’re chopping our children’s legs off if we slash the budgets for classes in the arts and humanities. There’s no way these kids will be able to compete in the world in which they are growing up.

  In his book Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks described an interesting experiment conducted by Japanese scientists:

  [They] recorded striking changes in the left hemisphere of children who have had only a single year of violin training, compared to children with no training… The implication of all this for early education [in the arts] is clear. Although a teaspoon of Mozart may not make a child a better mathematician, there is little doubt that regular exposure to music, and especially active participation in music, may stimulate development of many different areas of the brain—areas which have to work together to listen to or perform music. For the vast majority of students, music can be every bit as important educationally as reading or writing.31

  Roger Graef, who has written about the effectiveness of arts programs in UK prisons, believes that violence, like art, is actually a form of expression. Prisons, he says, are therefore ideal arenas for art creation and expression. Art can serve as an outlet for the violent feelings of inmates in a way that does not harm others, and that actually enhances their lives. Making art, Graef writes, “can break the cycle of violence and fear.”32

  He claims that the remedy for violence is an agency that will defeat feelings of impotence. Historically, religion has successfully done this, and the rise of fundamentalism might be viewed as a reaction to increasing feelings of alienation and inconsequentiality around the world. Making music might act as an antidote to those feelings too, as those cultural and music centers in the Brazilian favelas attest. In those UK prisons, the quality of the work is beside the point, as it was in Brazil. And, unlike religion, no one has ever gone to war over music.

  However, grant-giving organizations often take the opposite view. Most arts grants focus on the work, rather than on the process that the work comes out of. The product seems to be more important than the effect its production process has. Sadly, Graef learned that it is hard for many of the inmates he worked with to continue making art outside of prison. They find the professional art world elitist and its “posh buildings” intimidating. Without a support system, and with their work being judged by criteria that are foreign to them, they lose the outlet for frustration that they had discovered.

  Education advisor Sir Ken Robinson points out that every educational system on the planet was designed to meet the needs of nineteenth-century industrialization. The idea, as Tom Zé implied, was to “manufacture” good workers. What the world needs now are more creative thinkers and doers, more of Zé’s defective humanoids. But the educational system hasn’t evolved to do that. As Robinson writes:

  I’ve lost track of the number of brilliant people I’ve met, in all fields, who didn’t do well at school. Some did, of course, but others only really succeeded, and found their real talents in the process, once they’d recovered from their education. This is largely because the current systems of public education were never designed to develop everyone’s talents. They were intended to promote certain types of ability in the interests of the industrial economies they served.33

  Canadian composer and music teacher R. Murray Schafer originated the concept of the soundscape. The soundscape, as he defines it, can be thought of as our sonic surroundings and involves the study of how that acoustic environment gives us a sense of place. A soundscape that is out of whack, he says, makes us feel impotent. The soundscape of a bureaucratic office building’s lobby tends to make you feel small and insignificant. Schafer’s pedagogy begins with trying create awareness, to help students hear their sonic environment:

  What was the last sound you heard before I clapped my hands?

  What was the highest sound you heard in the past ten minutes? What was the loudest?

  How many airplanes have you heard today?

  What was the most interesting sound you heard this morning?

  Make a collection of disappearing or lost sounds, sounds that formed part of the sonic environment but can no longer be heard today.

  Schafer writes, “For a child of five, art is life and life is art. Experience is a kaleidoscopic and synesthetic experience, but once the child is in school they get separated—art becomes art and life becomes life.” He proposes a radical solution: that we abolish all study of the arts in a child’s first years at school. This seems counterintuitive to me—isn’t that precisely when we’re supposed to encourage children’s creativity? “In their place,” he suggests, “we substitute subjects that encourage sensitivity and expression.” He says that the focus should not be on anything specific, but on general awareness of the world around us. This might be admirable, but it seems unlikely that it would be adopted widely.34

  Funding future cr
eativity is a worthy investment. The dead guys won’t write more symphonies. And the output of a creative generation doesn’t confine itself to concert houses; it permeates all aspects of a city’s life. Creativity is a renewable resource that businesses can and do tap into. By this I don’t mean that businesses are looking for painters and composers, but that the habit of creative problem-solving translates to any activity we find ourselves engaged in. If the talent and skills are not there, if they’re not nurtured, then businesses will be forced to look elsewhere. The arts are good for the economy, and their presence makes for more interesting living as well. Cutting those school arts budgets makes economic recovery harder, not easier. It will leave us with a generation that isn’t as used to thinking creatively or in collaboration with others. In the long run there is a greater value for humanity in empowering folks to make and create than there is in teaching them the canon of great works. Nothing against those great works, but maybe they have been prioritized out of proportion to their lasting value. I have discovered many of them at various points in my life, and yes, they have had a profound impact. In my opinion, though, it’s more important that someone learn to make music, draw, photograph, write, or create in any form, regardless of the quality, than it is for them to understand and appreciate Picasso, Warhol, or Bill Shakespeare—to say nothing of opera as it is today.

  There are some classical works that I do genuinely enjoy, but I never got Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven—and I don’t feel any worse for it. There’s plenty left to love and enjoy. I have gradually come to appreciate a wide variety of music didn’t have to be forced on me. I resent the implication that I’m less of a musician and a worse person for not appreciating certain works. Sometimes the newest thing on the block is indeed five hundred years old, and sometimes the way forward is through the past—but not always! We certainly don’t have to stay back there. By encouraging the creativity of amateurs, rather than telling them that they should passively accept the creativity of designated masters, we help build a social and cultural network that will have profound repercussions.

  I know it’s not exactly the same as learning the skills involved in mounting a multidisciplinary work like opera, but I would say: show someone three chords on the guitar, show them how to program beats, how to play a keyboard, and if you don’t expect virtuosity right away, you might get something moving and affecting. You as a listener, or as a creator, might be touched in a way that is every bit as deep as you would be by something that demands a more complicated skill set. Everyone knows you can make a song with almost nothing, with really limited skills. The beginner can enjoy that, it’s a source of instant positive feedback, and they don’t feel inadequate because they’re not Mozart. I wish I’d learned to play a keyboard, but I gravitated to where my interests (and abilities) took me. I didn’t take guitar lessons. Over time (a lot of time) I learned a lot more chords and I began to be able to “hear” harmonies and tonal relationships. And, of course, I learned a lot more grooves over the years, and how to instinctively feel and enjoy them. I learned these things; I wasn’t born knowing them. But even at first, playing only a few notes, I found I could express something, or at least have fun using my extremely limited means and abilities. When I made something, even something crude, I would momentarily discredit and ignore the nagging feeling that said that if I couldn’t match the classical or high-quality model then I was somehow less of an artist. My gut was telling me that what I was doing was just fine.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Harmonia Mundi

  “You are the music, while the music lasts.”

  —T.S. Eliot

  So far, we’ve covered how music is distributed, how it’s affected by architecture, and a lot more, but why do we need music? Does it even matter? Where did it come from?

  Far from being merely entertainment, music, I would argue, is a part of what makes us human. Its practical value is maybe a little harder to pin down, at least in our present way of thinking, than mathematics or medicine, but many would agree that a life without music, for a hearing person, is a life significantly diminished.

  Everything started with a sound. “In the beginning was the Word,” the Bible tells us. We are told that it was the sound of God’s voice that caused the Nothing to become Something. I’m not given to being literal about such things. I doubt that “Word” here means a syllable or an actual utterance. I can more easily picture this “Word,” this sonic event, referring to a celestial vibration than to an actual word. Maybe we could go a step further and imagine that this ancient metaphor reflects some kind of intuition regarding the Big Bang, which one can view as a kind of really really big “sound,” one that still radiates out from its theoretical beginning and from which was made our world and all the others. If that was the “Word” God was shouting, then we’re all in agreement. At any rate, it seems significant that the chosen metaphor was a word and not a drawing, a text, or even a dance.

  Though sound could conceivably be, in this scenario, the key to creation, the Big Bang wasn’t exactly music. Lots of theories attempt to explain how music first came into being. Some say music originated with the non-verbal sounds mothers make to their children, while others connect music to sounds in nature or animal utterances, or as a means of inducing warriors into a trance state. The musicologist Joseph Jordania suggests that complete silence is often perceived as a sign of danger, so humming and whistling were used to fill those scary empty spaces. The jury is still out on which of these theories is correct, but all agree that music emerged at the same time people did.

  The earliest evidence we have of early man actually making music dates back about 45,000 years. Neanderthals and other “cave dwellers” were playing flutes that seem to have been based around what we now call diatonic scales. The diatonic scale is the musical scale familiar to most of us today—seven notes, the eighth note being the octave of the first one. If you play the white notes of a piano from C to C, you are playing a diatonic scale. To the left is a photo of one of these flutes that was found in Divje Babe, in what is now Slovenia.A

  A Canadian musicologist, Bob Fink, proposes that the notes produced by the holes in this bone flute are the start of a diatonic scale— do, re, mi, fa.1 Fink suggests that if one imagines an extended version of the flute,B then the rest of the diatonic scale we use could be played on it. Not everyone buys this, but there is strong evidence that the Sumerians (c. 3100–2000 BCE) and the Babylonians (c. 2000–1600 BCE) used this same scale. A diatonic scale on cuneiform tablets found in Nippur (present day Iraq) dates from 2000 BCE. Musical instruments have been found at Mesopotamian burial sites, and pictures of musicians at ceremonies playing lyres, drums, and flutes are on a mural in the Tomb of the Harpists in Egypt that dates to 1200 BCE. The prevalence of relationships and intervals between notes that produce fifths, fourths, and sixths on these instruments correspond to consonant harmonies we still recognize. “Consonant,” in this case, means harmonies that are felt to be “stable” and settled, while dissonant harmonies are felt to be unstable, temporary, and “want” to move on to something else. Consonant, according to these discoveries, is what we as humans generally find harmonically comfortable to listen to, and this has led scientists to believe that we might have an innate biological predisposition toward certain musical relationships.

  Here is a reproduction of a tablet found in Ugarit, present-day Syria, with the oldest bit of complete written music on it, from 1400 BCE.C It is described as a hymn to Nikkal, the goddess of orchards. There are instructions for the singer, and for the accompaniment music to be played on a lyre. Other cuneiform fragments describe how to tune the lyre, which is how we know they were using a diatonic scale. To my surprise, some of these hymns even cite the name of the composer. Already some individuals were recognized as being good at this thing called music.

  What did ancient music sound like? Though we can figure out the notes that the flutes and lyres played—we can either play them or reconstruct them—it’s a little hard
er to know what singers sounded like or how their songs were structured. Did the singers holler or whisper? Did they sing with chest tones or whine through their noses? Musicologist Peter van der Merwe suggests that Mesopotamian singers sang with intense but inwardly directed emotion, somewhat like contemporary Assyrian musicians do. They sing as if listening to themselves. It’s a gesture that conveys intensity, and implies that you are communicating with your interior feelings, as if the song were a message from someplace deep inside rather than simply being the manifestation of the ego of the person performing. The implication is that the singer is not so much a performer as a conduit, a vehicle. There’s a pretty direct connection between this kind of singing and contemporary Flamenco vocalizing. Not much has changed.

  There are nine-thousand-year-old flutes in China that can play scales very similar to these Mesopotamian ones, which begs the question: Did we evolve to prefer certain notes more than others? Have we developed a neurological “ear” that is predisposed to enjoy the structured sounds that humanity has come to call music? Even infants prefer the harmonies we think of as consonant, and they can distinguish different scales. Infants can also hear what are called “relational pitches,” which means that you can sing “Happy Birthday” to a baby starting on any note you choose, and if the child knows the song, there’s a good chance she will still recognize it. That might not sound so special, but it’s actually quite difficult, because the absolute notes will change completely if the singer starts on a different key. The third note in the melody will no longer be A, for example, but what we think of and recognize as a melody will be the same. Machines can’t do this yet—they can only compare melodies to an absolute reference. To present-day machines, a song that starts in the key of C is different from one that starts in B, even though the melody might be identical. We have evolved many extremely specialized skills—physical and neurological—that seem to be related to music making. It’s something that must be important to our being homo sapiens, and despite cultural differences, musical forms and structures are often shared. We’ve been asking ourselves why we have this special relationship for a long, long time. What larger patterns in the universe make us gravitate to specific musical relationships and forms?