Music on brain continued.
Loved the book! I would like to meet the author. He has a lot to tell. Mr. Levitin has made a great effort here. My wife, daughter, and sister-in-law teach music. It is hard to understand why it is so difficult for school systems to understand the basic need of music education. My wife has over 950 kids a week. Each get 30 minutes of music per week. I find it discusting. When music is a basic need, we cut the children short on the primiss of test scores that don't seem to get better when music education is short changed. Read the book, you will understand better.
A different kind of book from his first
Daniel Levitin's first book, "This is Your Brain on Music," was a fairly
dense "science for non-scientists" book (as one of the previous
reviewers put it) that only occasionally let its insights take wing, as
he felt the need to establish the legitimacy of the scientific findings
he was presenting. As a rock guitarist who became a recording engineer
who became a record producer who became a research scientist, he made
sure in his first book to show that what he was talking about was
empirically-based science, not a late-night dormitory bull-session.
Fairly late in that book, he described, with evident distaste, the claim
of another scientist that music (and by extension all art) is a useless
"hitchhiker" that developed as a trivial consequence of the brain's
linguistic and patterning abilities.
This book is his extended - and poetic - cry of rebuttal to that belief.
Here he stakes out his counter-argument: that the musical and artistic
abilities of the brain develop first and pave the way for the
acquisition of language and for bonding into families and societies.
Don't expect another research-based book like the first. Here, what he
showed in the first book is assumed, as the scaffolding for a leap
into philosophy, with the empirical sources for this book being music
and society themselves. The book itself is a suite: the chapter on songs
of comfort - with a focus on the blues - had me in tears by the end.
He's doing here what Jacob Bronowski did in The Ascent of Man: using his
scientific insight to meditate on what it means to be human, and on how
what we do makes us who we are. This book is an important contribution
in that tradition, as well as heartfelt work of art.
Very disappointing
I looked forward to reading this after I finished Your Brain on Music, but The World in Six Songs is more about chatty name dropping than it is about music or neurology. A pleasant light read for the non musician perhaps, but not much meat.
nice try
I thoroughly enjoyed "This is Your Brain on Music" and anticipated a similar combination of witty, widely observed (pop, jazz, classical), and helpfully presented (science-for-non-specialists) material. All those qualities are present but distractingly encumbered by puffery (yes, yes, you lunch with rock stars and academic luminaries) and organization-by-digression. The dangers of first success? A timid editor? I'd wait for a revised edition.
An entertaining and informative examination of the human brain and culture as revealed by music
Daniel Levitin is both a rock musician and a cognitive scientist. That is, he looks at how the brain behaves as you perceive things. Music is one of those interesting puzzles that allows people like Levitin to see the brain behave in ways different than our other everyday behaviors, even speech. He wrote an interesting book "This Is Your Brain On Music" that I liked and reviewed. You can see it here: This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession
In this book, the author uses what he knows about music (almost always popular music) and the brain to speculate about what these imply about human evolution and how our development as a species and in our various social cultures was influenced by music and how these inner human qualities influence the expression of music.
The title's use of "six songs" is a bit misleading, though it is nicely poetic and provocative at the same time. Levitin is really talking about six TYPES of songs. The six categories are Friendship, Joy, Comfort, Knowledge (teaching and memory songs), Religion, and Love. Also included in each of these six are the opposites. So, really it is twelve categories. Nor does he deal with purely instrumental music much, or the uses of music that fall outside of these categories. Art music, for example, he assumes is included in what he writes. But the kinds of music he writes about, while art, are not art music any more than butchers and surgeons are the same because they both cut meat. Nor does he deal with categories such as introspection, abstract instrumental music (non-programmatic music or absolute music), or complicated forms that deal with many of these categories (such as opera, passion plays (they are more than just religion), or even Broadway musicals). Heck, what about Ralph Sampson playing the banjo in something like "Cuttin' the Cornbread"? It isn't really telling you about cornbread. We enjoy it and it makes us happy, but it doesn't fit into these categories anymore than a Bach Fugue or Suite or Stravinsky's Piano Sonata does.
While you can lump all kinds of pieces into these broad categories, after awhile they contain so many disparate items that the names become somewhat useless. For example, where would you put Schubert's "Erlkönig"? As fear (the opposite of comfort)? Well, it is also fantasy, drama, it also has the father and son connection where the father fails to save the son despite his best efforts because he cannot see, comprehend, or believe in what the son sees. Or maybe it was just a fever after all and the son's dealing with the phantom was just the son's hallucination. Or what about "Auf dem wasser zu singen"? Is this merely about ecstasy? Or is it about the glorious sensory impressions of being on a boat on the water in the light of sunny day? This is a song about mortality and existence but isn't about love, comfort, religion. Maybe you could put it in the joy category. But I think that it would be stretching it quite a bit to lump it in with "I heard it through the Grapevine" or "Suspicious Minds". But this becomes the problem of categories.
This is a very entertaining book that will help you learn more about what scientists currently know and suspect about our brain. Obviously, the science knows a lot more than it did, but not nearly as much as they will down the road. Some of what they are certain of today will become outmoded. But no one knows what that is yet.
Levitin writes in a breezy and entertaining style. He drops lots of names and that is both fun and, at times, a tad irritating. However, I recommend the book pretty strongly. Not only for what you will learn about how your brain works, but because Levitin talks about art and music in ways beyond what the mere consumer of music usually considers and he does it without sounding academic, or using dense or complex language. The book is actually fun.
Get it and enjoy it.
Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, MI
