How Music Works

by David Byrne

  These emotional connections might help explain why music has such a profound effect on our psychological well-being. We can use music (or, for better or worse, others can use it) to regulate our emotions. We can pump ourselves (or others) up, or calm others (or ourselves) down. We can use music to help integrate ourselves with a team, to act in concord with a group. Music is social glue—it holds families, nations, cultures, and communities together. But it can tear them apart as well. As much as music sometimes seems to be a force for good, it can be harnessed to swell nationalistic pride and stoke belligerent warmongering, too. Beyond these applications for communities and nations, it’s also a cosmic telegraph that links us to a world beyond ourselves, to an invisible realm of spirits, gods, and maybe even to the world of the dead. It can make us physically well, or horribly ill. It does so many things to us that one can’t simply say, as many do, “Oh, I love all kinds of music.” Really? But some forms of music are diametrically opposed to one another! You can’t love them all. Not all the time, anyway.

  MUSIC AND RITUAL

  Music features in most religious and social ceremonies around the world. Ethnomusicologist Alan P. Merriam points out that social organization is marked at almost every point in the lives of communities by song—birth songs, lullabies, naming songs, toilet training songs (I want to hear those!), puberty songs, greeting songs, love songs, marriage songs, clan songs, funeral songs. A Sia Indian who lives in a pueblo in northern New Mexico said, “My friend, without songs you cannot do anything.” Without music, the social fabric itself would be rent, and the links between us would crumble.

  Ritualistic music has to be repeated in the same way, in more or less identical circumstances every time that ritual is performed. If you get it right, you are, it is assumed, in accordance with the patterns and order of the universe, but woe unto you if you screw it up. According to Hindu scripture, the inaccurate singing of a raga can be fatal to the singer. Apache shamans ran the same risk if they sang off-key. In Polynesia, a careless performer might be executed. In the context of a ritual, there is no concept of an “original” creation of a piece of music, a composer, or a first performance. Such music is thought to have always been there, that it exists outside history, like a myth. Our task as performers and participants is simply to keep it alive. In this sense, music and the rituals it is part of keep the world going.

  The urge to notate music, especially music that was going to be used in rituals, emerged naturally from a need to get it absolutely right before performing for the gods—the music being played had to be correct, and the same each time. Written music is thus a useful means of maintaining continuity, but it can also stifle change and innovation. The strict ordering of music was originally a byproduct of theocratic and even political control. Written notation is fairly accurate, but it’s also imperfect, it’s not an exact “recording” of a piece of music. Lots of expressive, textural, and emotional nuances are lost with any kind of notation—they simply are not transcribable. However, as long as the written symbols and notes are accompanied by oral instruction and some modeling and physical demonstrations, one can imagine that this ritual music would stay the same and get passed on largely intact. It’s presumed to be healing; spiritual and social agency would be maintained. But if that instructional thread gets broken, if all that’s left is the written music, then there will be a lot of guesswork involved, and what gets passed down might bear little resemblance to the original. This inaccuracy isn’t all that bad for music, but it’s not good for serving the interests of the powers that be. For all we know, the sound of a performance of Mozart’s music in his time might be somewhat intolerable to our own ears—we can play the same notes, but we have modernized his pieces and many other musical forms so that they are palatable to contemporary sensibilities. Even the instruments themselves have changed—and in many ways that is what has allowed the music to stay alive and somewhat popular. Similarly, moving liturgical music away from its original Latin—a language almost no one understands anymore—diminishes some of its power and mystery. The Church inevitably loses some of its deep cosmic power when the hymns are written in languages everyone speaks.

  THE GREAT DISENCHANTMENT

  Penelope Gouk of the University of Manchester wrote a wonderful essay called “Raising Spirits and Restoring Souls: Early Modern Medical Explanations for Music’s Effects.” By “early modern,” she means the late seventeenth-century. At that time, a more modern, scientific conception of the universe was beginning to take hold. The scientific method, with its experiments and proofs, had—or so they claimed—no place for the Music of the Spheres and ethereal harmonic spirits. Music was now to be explained by science; it was a symptom of something greater, something scientific that would describe how the physical world works. Music was no longer viewed as the motor that drives everything. It was the physics of the universe that drove music. The universe was no longer enchanted, and music’s all-powerful place was usurped by science.

  Those religious rituals that had provided a reason for music to be written down in the first place began to be looked down on, too. The Protestant ethic and the Enlightenment viewed ritual—both social and religious—as superfluous. A lot of rituals were therefore tossed out, and much music went with them. But people like and even need rituals. Humanity’s unmet needs demanded satisfaction, and people eventually found an outlet in a newly emerging secular and social rituals that also involved music. The first public concert was in London in 1672. It was organized by a composer and violinist named John Banister shortly after he was fired from the royal band. The price was one shilling, and the audience could make requests. Who could say that music performances—in opera halls, cabaret bars, rock clubs, and outdoor festivals—are not rituals? They all have their own very special sets of prescribed behaviors associated with them, they heal and consecrate community bonds. The ritual was preserved under another name.

  VISUAL CULTURE VS. ACOUSTIC CULTURE

  Marshall McLuhan famously proposed that after the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution, we shifted from an acoustic culture to a visual one. He said that in acoustic culture, the world, like sound, is all around you, and comes at you from all directions at once. It is multilayered and nonhierarchical; it has no center or focal point. Visual culture has perspective—a vanishing point, a direction. In visual culture an image is in one very specific fixed spot: it’s in front of you. It isn’t everywhere at once.

  McLuhan claims that our visual sense began to get increasingly bombarded by all the stuff we were producing. It began to take precedence over our auditory sense, and he said that the way we think and view the world changed as a result. In an acoustic universe one senses essence, whereas in a visual universe one sees categories and hierarchies. He claims that in a visual universe one begins to think in a linear fashion, one thing following another along a timeline, rather than everything existing right now, everywhere, in the moment. By blocking your sight, a wall can erase the existence of a man shouting on the other side, but you can hear things happening all around you—left, right, front, and back—even things that are happening behind the wall, like that shouting man. We tend to downplay the influence of some of our senses, especially our sense of smell, partly because it can work on us subconsciously and partly because we don’t have the words to describe the myriad smells that affect us every day.

  The way we imagine what our senses do is affected by our cultural biases as well as by the way our language limits our perception. What we refer to simply as the sense of touch actually includes separate sensors for vibration, texture, temperature, and movement—each of which could have qualified as a separate sense, should our culture have deemed them important. The Hausa in Africa identify only two senses: seeing and experiencing. The experiencing sense includes intuition (why don’t we include that as a sense?), emotion, smell, touch, and hearing. The Ivilik Inuit, who live in northeast Labrador, don’t think of space in visual terms the way we do (possibly because their vi
sual environment is almost devoid of features and landmarks); they think of space by referencing their other senses.

  I read a short piece in the New York Times recently about a nine-year-old named Matthew Whitaker who was born twenty-three weeks premature, weighing just under two pounds. He has never been able to see. Every Saturday, he travels to New York from his home in Hackensack, New Jersey, for a full day of music lessons. He plays seven instruments.

  “He hears everything as music,” said his father, Moses Whitaker. “The fax machine sounds like an A. The copy machine is a B flat. The jackhammers are making the drum beats that he likes.” When the subway rumbles, Matthew taps his cane on the ground to recreate the noise. He hums along with the city—the fast cars and fast talkers. When asked to describe New York, he stands and pivots a full 360°, pointing his fingers in front of him. “New York City is a circle of sounds,” he says. “There is music everywhere. Everybody has a smile on their face. It’s musical, it’s dark and so beautiful.”8

  What Matthew describes is a kind of re-enchantment of the world. Of course those magical and unexplainable parts of the world didn’t just go away; as both Freud and Jung argued, they burrowed into our unconscious, knocking around in there and affecting everything we do, and they emerge from time to time in different forms. This might happen via urban myths, goth-inspired fashion shoots, folk tales, horror movies, Japanese anime monsters, experimental music, or the power of pop songs and the somewhat theatrical and ritualized ways that singers perform them. We’re fascinated and drawn to stuff that science can’t explain—the transcendent, the uncanny, things that affect us without words—and music both touches on and emanates from those mysteries. It reconnects us to that lost time of enchantment.

  I think that this semi-mystical sense of the world has also begun to re-emerge explicitly as music over the last fifty years or so. A lot of postwar musicians and composers began to think of music in completely new, or maybe in completely old, ways. John Cage is maybe the most famous of them. He likened his view of music to what was then contemporary architecture. Those modern buildings and houses had lots of massive glass walls and windows, and in Cage’s view this meant that the outside world was being allowed in, was being considered part and parcel of the architecture, instead of being shut out. Compartmentalization, the difference between inside and outside, between the environment and oneself, was breaking down. Art, too, was being made of junk from the street—Cage’s friends Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg were making art out of everyday stuff, as did Duchamp before them. Couldn’t music, Cage reasoned, be similarly inclusive? He answered the question in a fairly literal way—by including street sounds, speech, accidents, and thumps into his compositions. This might not have been what Pythagoras had in mind, but still, Cage was inviting the universe in.

  Erik Satie might have been one of the earliest to imagine that music could be something more than what it had been relegated to in Western culture. “We must bring about a music which is like furniture, a music which will be part of the noises of the environment… softening the noises of the knives and forks, not dominating them, not imposing itself.”9 He wrote some pieces that he referred to as furniture music, which weren’t exactly the proto-ambient music you might imagine, but they’re pleasant, if fairly repetitious, and soon, as he hoped, one begins to ignore them. This was a radical idea—that you would write music with the idea that some of it might not be heard. But things went further than that.

  Bing Muscio (his real name!) of the Muzak corporation said that the music his company produced should be heard but not listened to. At one point, Muzak was the largest music network in the world. It had at least 100 million listeners—or non-listeners, if you prefer. Though we don’t have traditional Muzak to complain about anymore, its concept was ingenious. Its inventors noted that the efficiency experts who had insinuated themselves into the American workplace were concerned that workers were alert at some points in their work day and, typically, had an energy slump in the mid-to late afternoon. The bosses wanted a flat graph—constant and efficient workflow all day long. This brings us back to Ken Robinson and Tom Zé’s ideas of industrial capitalism as a producer of human machines. The technologists at Muzak thought they had a solution to this productivity problem: they would smooth out those curves using music. Calm music would be played during energetic hours, and slightly more energetic music was programmed later to pull workers out of a slump. People believed it worked.

  Rather than licensing existing recordings to play in shops and workplaces that subscribed to their service, as is usually done now, Muzak hired musicians to replay familiar songs and instrumental pieces in ways so that the music intentionally wouldn’t be listened to. The dynamics (the changes in volume level), and even the higher and lower pitches, were ironed out. It seemed as if Muzak had sucked the soul out of the songs, but in fact they had created something entirely new, something close to what Satie imagined: furniture music, music that was clearly a useful and (to their subscribers) functional part of the environment, there to induce calm and tranquility in their shops and offices. Why is it that Satie’s compositions, Brian Eno’s ambient music, or the minimal spaced-out work of Morton Feldman all seem fairly cool, while Muzak is deemed abhorrent? Is it simply because Muzak alters songs that are already familiar to everyone? I think it’s something else. The problem is that this music is intended to dull your awareness, like being force-fed tranquilizers. Of course, not everyone objected—Annunzio Paulo Montovani recorded a series of lush, string-heavy albums billed as “beautiful music,” and he was the first artist to sell a million stereo records.

  The concept of a musical soporific doesn’t work across the board, though. Not every activity is improved by adding a soundtrack. I can’t listen to music while I write this, though I have friends who have music playing constantly in their studios while they paint, do Photoshop work, or design web pages. But my attention is always drawn to music. One recent study claims that analytical work is hindered by music, while creative work can get a boost. I guess it depends on the creative work, and on what kind of music you’re talking about.

  NO MUSIC

  In 1969, UNESCO passed a resolution outlining a human right that doesn’t get talked about much—the right to silence. I think they’re referring to what happens if a noisy factory gets built beside your house, or a shooting range, or if a disco opens downstairs. They don’t mean you can demand that a restaurant turn off the classic rock tunes they’re playing, or that you can muzzle the guy next to you on the train yelling into his cell phone. It’s a nice thought though—despite our innate dread of absolute silence, we should have the right to take an occasional aural break, to experience, however briefly, a moment or two of sonic fresh-air. To have a meditative moment, a head clearing space, is a nice idea for a human right.

  Cage wrote a book called, somewhat ironically, Silence. Ironic because he was increasingly becoming notorious for noise and chaos in his compositions. He once claimed that silence doesn’t exist for us. In a quest to experience it, he went into an anechoic chamber at Bell Labs, which was a room isolated from all outside sounds, with walls designed to inhibit the reflection of sounds. A dead space, acoustically. After a few moments he heard a thumping and whooshing, and was informed those sounds were his own heartbeat and the sound of his blood rushing through his veins and arteries. They were louder than he might have expected, but okay. After a while, he heard another sound, a high whine, and was informed that this was his nervous system. He realized then that for human beings there was no such thing as true silence, and this anecdote became a way of explaining that he decided that rather than fighting to shut out the sounds of the world, to compartmentalize music as something outside of the noisy, uncontrollable world of sounds, he’d let them in: “Let sounds be themselves rather than vehicles for manmade theories or expressions of human sentiments.”10 Conceptually at least, the entire world now became music.

  Others used length and duration to create
music that more closely resembled phenomena in the world. In the mid-1980s, Morton Feldman wrote a string quartet that lasts six hours. “My whole generation was hung up on the twentyto twenty-five-minute piece. It was our clock. We all got to know it, and how to handle it... Before my pieces were like objects; now they’re like evolving things.”11 Music, in this way of thinking, became a space you inhabited rather than a discrete object. There’s a similarity here to the Chinese musical tradition that sees each tone as a musical entity in itself. This is a very different approach from the classical Western view, which says that music is about relationships between pitches and notes rather than about the sound of the notes themselves. Chinese composer Chou Wen-Chung wrote an essay in 1971 in which he seems to agree when McLuhan says that in the West, how things are organized is more important than what those things are. Newer Western composers seem to be moving toward some meeting place in the middle; their compositions ask us to see music and notes as form, as things, as an environment and a place of deep listening. In a way this is reminiscent of the cosmic monochord. They have heightened their work by making very little happen—nothing goes on or changes, often for very long periods of time. The repetition and stasis force you—if you don’t turn off your stereo or leave the perfomance—to sink deeper into the piece. It becomes a part of your surroundings, or similar to a natural sound like waves or wind. Things change just like they do in the natural world, but very slowly.