The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature

by Levitin, Daniel J.

  Or consider these lines, from “Begin the Beguine,” where the song title itself is a visual and auditory wordplay:To live it again is past all endeavor,

  Except when that tune clutches my heart,

  And there we are, swearing to love forever,

  And promising never, never to part.

  Notice in the third line the internal rhyme in there and swear. The first and third lines rhyme, as they ought to, ending with endeavor and forever. But Porter adds an additional rhyme to these in the middle of the fourth line with the repetition of never. I sure wish I could write like that! (I’d lure bright fish, I’d swish as I sat, my heart would go pitter pat, if only I could dish out fine lines such as that!)

  Of course some people don’t care about this sort of wordplay as much as they do about the content; they may study lyrics intently, looking for wisdom, sage advice, just as many of us did in the sixties. Rock stars were our poets; we felt that they had hard-won life lessons to pass on to the rest of us.

  Others learn the lyrics syllable-by-syllable as a means of recalling the music, but don’t pay much attention to the lyrical content itself. I had a girlfriend who was born and raised in Belgium, and we spent many wonderful vacations visiting her family and friends in her hometown Mons (Bergen in Flemish), where she went to university at the Faculté de Polytechnique there. Every one of her friends knew the Eagles’ song “Hotel California” syllable-for-syllable, but most of them didn’t speak a word of English. They had no idea what they were saying when they sang “warm smell of co-li-tas/rising up through the air/up ahead in the distance/I saw a shim-mer-ing light.” Not knowing English, they didn’t know where the beginnings and endings of words were. Just as my little sister used to think that “The Star-Spangled Banner” spoke of a particular kind of lamp called a donzerlee light (for “dawn’s early light”), my Belgian friends thought there must be a type of lamp called a “murring light” (from shim-mer-ing light). And what was this thing called a “prizzonerzeer” that all of us are (“we are all just prisoners here . . .”)? They were even more curious to know what the song meant, and I had to confess that as much as I loved the song—I had even learned the guitar solo note-for-note to impress fellow musicians—I didn’t have the slightest idea what it was about. The emotional impact of the line “you can check out anytime you like/but you can never leave” was not diminished at all by the fact I didn’t know what Don Henley was trying to say.

  This is the power of the song lyric—the mutually supporting forces that bind rhythm, melody, harmony, timbre, lyrics, and meaning in a song allow some of the elements to fill in for others when there is ambiguity, contradiction, or outright opacity, as is the case with “Hotel California.” That the literal meaning is not apparent in that song—or for that matter, in almost any song by Steely Dan, the kings of cryptic lyrics—doesn’t reduce the power of the song. Each song’s elements add up to an artistic result. The whole invokes meaning but does not constrain it. In fact, this is one of the features that gives songs their power over us: because the meaning is not perfectly defined, each of us as listeners becomes a participant in the ongoing process of understanding the song. The song is personal because we’ve been asked or forced to fill in some of the meaning for ourselves.

  Many of us feel a peculiarly intimate relationship with popular songwriters because it is their very voices that we hear in our heads. (And it is for this reason that poetry fans so highly value recordings of a favorite poet reading his or her own works.) Most of us listen to songs we like hundreds of times. The voice, nuances, and singer’s phrasing become embedded in our memories in a way we don’t get with poetry that we read to ourselves. We feel we know something about the lives, the thoughts and feelings of our favorite songwriters because we know several or dozens of their songs. And because of the mutually reinforcing constraints of rhythm, melody, and accent structure—combined with a shot of dopamine or other neurochemicals that are known to accompany music listening—our relationship with song becomes vivid and long-lasting, activating more regions of the brain than anything else we know of. The connection to some songs is so long-lasting that patients with Alzheimer’s disease remember songs and song lyrics long after they’ve forgotten everything else.

  The Beatles ushered in an era of singers writing their own songs. Although Chuck Berry wrote his, and Elvis cowrote a few of his own, it wasn’t until the Beatles and their enormous commercial success—followed by the success and writing of Bob Dylan and the Beach Boys, among others—that fans began to expect musicians to write their own material. The Beatles even cultivated this sort of personal connection to their audience. In their early songs, Paul McCartney says, he and John intentionally—somewhat calculatingly—tried to inject personal pronouns into as many of the early lyrics and song titles as they could. They took seriously the task of forging a relationship with their fans in a very personal way. “She Loves You,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “P.S. I Love You,” “Love Me Do,” “Please Please Me,” “From Me to You.”

  Still, it is important to note that some people ignore the lyrics more or less, and are drawn primarily to rhythm and melody. Although many people are attracted by the storylines of opera, equal numbers report that they don’t even try to follow the plot, enjoying simply the colorful scenery and the beautiful vocal sounds they hear. Even in pop, jazz, hip-hop, and rock, legions of people believe that the lyrics function primarily as an afterthought, something to hang the melody on. “What do lyrics have to do with music?” many demand. “They’re just there so that the singer doesn’t have to go ‘la la la’ with the melody all the time.” And as far as many people are concerned, “la la la” would be just fine.

  But for those who love lyrics, for whom “la la la” won’t do, there are many rewards in studying the ways in which the best of them are crafted. While researching this book, Sting and I discussed the relationship between poetry and lyrics. Both of us being Joni Mitchell fans, we discussed her song “Amelia” as an example of a lyric we admire:I was driving across the burning desert

  When I spotted six jet planes

  Leaving six white vapor trails

  Across the bleak terrain

  It was the hexagram of the heavens

  It was the strings of my guitar

  Oh Amelia, it was just a false alarm.

  Note the repetition of the long i sound in I and driving in the first line; the repetition of the d sound in driving and desert in that same line; the repetition of the s sound in spotted and six in the second line. Of course there is also the alliteration in hexagram of the heavens. The song features a prominent guitar, connecting the music to the lyric. I love that she mentions her six-string guitar in the sixth line of the song, just one subtle element among many that create an internal consistency in this lyric. There is the semantic connection between a desert and a plain, both flat expanses of terrain, a connection implied by her choice of the homonym planes in the second line.

  Of course, some of these connections may be only coincidence, things the writer herself did not notice. But these sorts of connections are prevalent in all great poetry, displaying the subtle workings of and intricate connections among imagination, intellect, and the subconscious. Even if a poet wasn’t aware herself of all that could be read into a particular poem, great poems reward this sort of analysis, and lesser poems do not—the deeper you look, the less interesting they seem. And the imagery is palpable—a burning desert, white vapor trails, bleak terrain. The song draws pictures with words. It also has metaphor, the drive across the desert being a Lakoffian metaphor for a relationship.

  Many of Sting’s own lyrics have a literary sensibility, coupled with a real ease of expression—the very sensual quality I spoke of earlier. Take his song “Russians” for example:In Europe and America

  There’s a growing feeling of hysteria

  Conditioned to respond to all the threats

  In the rhetorical speeches of the Soviets

  Mister Khrus
hchev said, “We will bury you”

  I don’t subscribe to this point of view

  It would be such an ignorant thing to do

  If the Russians love their children too

  How can I save my little boy

  From Oppenheimer’s deadly toy

  There is no monopoly of common sense

  On either side of the political fence

  We share the same biology

  Regardless of ideology

  Believe me when I say to you

  I hope the Russians love their children too

  The lyrics roll right off the tongue, easily. They’re easy to say, and they feel good in the mouth. Repetitions of vowel and consonant sounds—the phonology—give the verse forward momentum. The meaning is artfully veiled in metaphors. The last line of the first verse mentions children, the first line of the next verse a “boy,” and then the atom bomb is described in terms of children and boys, “Oppenheimer’s deadly toy.” The poet delights in stringing together familiar phrases that reverberate in our collective memory—“rhetorical speeches,” “we will bury you,” “the political fence,” and so on. The message is cast in terms of a hope that the “monsters” that inhabited each opposing side of the Cold War (for that is how we were raised to see our enemies, as subhuman monsters) will find common ground and hopefully common sense in their love for their children. This echoes General William Westmoreland’s Vietnam War-era pronouncement (made famous in the chilling documentary Hearts and Minds) that there was no shame in accidentally killing North Vietnamese children because “the Oriental mind doesn’t put the same high price on life as does the Westerner.”

  As we saw that good poetry must, Sting’s words create a rhythmic pulse. We can see this visually by adding diacritical marks showing the accent structure. The first line begins somewhat leisurely with eight syllables, and only two of them are stressed. The second line picks up the pace with eleven syllables, three of which are stressed, and more than half of which (six) begin with consonants. This trend continues in line three, where nine of the ten syllables begin with consonants. The combined effect of all these consonants is like a series of small explosions (they literally are explosions as air is thrust out of your mouth, something it doesn’t do with vowels) and these serve to propel the lyric forward.

  In normal English speech, we tend to raise the pitch of syllables that are stressed or accented and lower the pitch of unstressed syllables, as is the case in many (but by no means all) languages. If we violate this in English, it becomes confounded with the rising intonation we normally use to indicate a question. For example, we would normally say the word Eu-rope by making the first syllable a little louder than the second and by dropping the pitch of the second (unstressed) syllable. Lowering a pitch like this usually makes the syllable sound unstressed. If instead, holding loudness manipulations the same (that is, keeping /Eu/ no louder than /rope/), I raise the pitch of the second syllable, it sounds like I’m asking a question, or like I’m unsure that I’ve chosen the right word. (Or like I’m fifteen? Ya know? Like, where every statement sounds like it’s a question? Even assertions? Like this?)

  In “Russians,” Sting artfully interposes pitch accents and linguistic accents. This breathes life into the lyrics by introducing the unexpected, and allowing the text and melody to mutually support (but not entirely determine) one another. Where the melody rises, it sometimes rises on syllables that are unstressed. Such a technique would not work well in a dance or funk song, where the linguistic and melodic accents need to line up in order to give an unambiguous sense of the beat. Think “I Got You (I Feel Good)” by James Brown:I feel good, I knew that I would

  . . .

  I feel nice, like sugar and spice

  So good, so nice, I got you

  Apart from the fact that all (but one) of the words are monosyllabic, the accent structure of the melody supports the accent structure of how this might be spoken—contributing to the pounding insistence of the groove.

  “Russians” delivers as a song lyric because it marries text to melody, and because the lyrics feel effortless. It succeeds as a poem because even without the melody, it conveys its own rhythm, the forward momentum created by its accent structure and use of plosive consonants.

  “Amelia” and “Russians” demonstrate great beauty in language and expression, used to convey an intensely imaginative interpretation of their subjects. Rather than delivering a literal description, they effectively capture feelings and impressions of events by telling us the most evocative parts of the story—often with figurative language, instead of the sort of objective details we would get in a newspaper article. We sense in them also a drive toward art—an unstoppable internal force that impelled the writer to write. In these lyrics, as in many great works of art, we feel an inevitability about them—that they have always existed and were just waiting to be discovered. When attached to the song, the words evoke additional emotions because of the harmonic tension that the musical notes add. Together, the lyrics plus melody, harmony, and rhythm bring nuances and shades of meaning that the words alone can’t deliver.

  Both poetry and lyrics and all the visual arts draw their power from their ability to express abstractions of reality. When the poet Herbert Read wrote,

  I believe he was referring to this abstraction process that is intrinsic in the creation and appreciation of all artistic objects, and that is a feature of the musical brain. Drawings, paintings, sculpture, poems, and song allow the creator to represent an object in its absence, to experiment with different interpretations of it, and thus—at least in fantasy—to exert power over it. Songs and poems derive their ultimate power in this way.

  Art, at the dawn of human culture, was a key to survival, a sharpening of the faculties essential to the struggle for existence. Art, in my opinion, has remained a key to survival.

  Songs give us a multilayered, multidimensional context, in the form of harmony, melody, and timbre. We can experience them in many different modes of enjoyment—as background music, as aesthetic objets d’art independent of their meaning, as music to sing with friends or sing along with in the shower or car; they can alter our moods and minds. Each of the elements of melody, rhythm, timbre, meter, contour, and words can be appreciated alone or in combination. “I Got You (I Feel Good)” may not have changed the course of human history, but it has been enjoyed by millions of people over many millions of hours. To the extent that we are the sum total of all our life’s experiences, it has become a part of our thoughts, and (as neuroscientists know) that means a part of the very wiring of our brains.

  But that is not the same as guiding human destiny. The World in Six Songs 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. Other art forms—poetry, sculpture, literature, film, and painting—can also fit into these functional categories, but this is the story of music and its primacy in shaping human nature. Through a process of co-evolution of brains and music, through the structures throughout our cortex and neocortex, from our brain stem to the prefrontal cortex, from the limbic system to the cerebellum, music uniquely insinuates itself into our heads. It does this in six distinctive ways, each of them with its own evolutionary basis.

  I attended the annual meeting of Kindermusik teachers this summer. Parents, children, and teachers came from more than sixty countries to participate in workshops and listen to lectures. The highlight of the conference for me was the music before the keynote speech. Fifty young children, between the ages of four and twelve, sang this song, based on a traditional German folk song, accompanied with syncopated clapping and synchronized movement: All things shall perish from under the sky

  Music alone shall live

  Music alone shall live

  Music alone shall live

  Never to die.

  Pairs of children from different countries took turns at the microphone, singing lines from the song in their native langua
ges: Cantonese, Japanese, Romanian, !Xotha, Portuguese, Arabic, with each stanza ending in the English refrain in three-part harmony:

  “Music alone shall live, never to die.”

  And the music that will never die has been with humans since we first became humans. It has shaped the world through six kinds of songs: friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion, and love.

  CHAPTER 2

  Friendship or “War (What Is It Good For?)”

  I. It is the near twilight hour, the fog hanging thick, close to the ground like a heavy, leaden weight. Imagine that you’re an early human, sleeping with your villagers, huddled together on the ground, near the dying embers of the fire circle. First there is a feeling that disturbs your sleep—not all of your group is roused, but you notice that a few others were also disturbed—by a vibration more than a sound. And you wonder: Was it real or a dream? Rumbling, a boom-boom-ka-boom like distant thunder, like rocks tumbling. The earth shakes and then the sound comes closer, louder; your body is being assaulted. Drums are coming toward you, a purposeful, synchronized stampede, like fifty rhinoceroses, coordinated, all of one mind, as though they have devised a terrible, directed plan for attack and total destruction. It has to be real, you think, but it is a sound you’ve never heard before. What starts as a quiver of apprehension turns into collective fits of shaking as all of your family and friends wake and tremble with helplessness, all the gumption draining out of your bodies before you even know what is going on. The terrifying synchrony of it, the bone-shaking intensity of it, the sheer loudness. Do you run or prepare to fight? You sit frozen, in awe, paralyzed. What in the world is happening? As they crest the hill, you see them, and for a brief moment before the deafening sounds knock you senseless you see a band of warriors banging on drums in an eerie demonstration of coordinated, malevolent power.