 I
keep looking to nature for answers -- about instinctive knowledge,
communication, human behaviour, community, the learning process, and
dozens of other subjects -- and I nearly always find credible answers.
That shouldn't be surprising, but perhaps because I was born in a city
and raised to believe human achievement was something magnificent, it
still is. But occasionally a subject comes up that nature provides no
plausible explanation for, not even an intriguing clue. Someone asked
me, last week, if I could live the rest of my life in wilderness, in
the community of people I love, but without any memory of civilized
life, as a tribe of amnesiacs, what is the first 'human' thing I would re-invent. My answer to this hypothetical but important question, without hesitation, would be the arts, and most especially music.
I am delighted and reassured to know that anthropologists believe art
and music have been part of human culture at least three times as long
as language has, so I suspect others might answer this question the
same way. They are, in my opinion, the only essential things that
nature did not provide us with, the only essential artefacts of our
species' existence.
What got me thinking about music, or at least human
music, as 'unnatural' is that it is the only sensory or emotional
experience that our dog, Chelsea, does not appear to share. She loves
to sit on the hill behind our house, gazing at the sunset, taking in
the smell of rain, listening to the sounds of birds, feeling the wind
on her face, enjoying a bit of cheese or peanut butter on a cracker,
all evidently with the same relish that I enjoy these sensual things.
But she appears unmoved by the breathtaking progression of Bach's Little Fugue, the transporting romance of Rachmaninoff's Second Symphony, the intricate cultural fusion of a Mark Knopfler soundtrack or Jon Elias' astonishing Prayer Cycle. None of this music has words, so the barrier is not language. When I listen to the second movement of Ravel's Piano Concerto in G (free download here,
though it's not a great version -- if you like what you hear get the
much better version by Louis Lortie with the London Symphony Orchestra)
whose first six minutes is so remarkably simple and measured that even I
can play it, I cannot help but be overwhelmed. This has nothing to do
with any association with important events or memories from my past --
although I have been a fan of Ravel's music for 37 of my 53 years, I
was unaware of the existence of the Concerto in G
until just four years ago, when I heard it driving home after a very
ordinary day of work, and was so moved I had to pull over to the side
of the road to wipe the spontaneous tears from my face. But when I play
it at home, still so overwhelmed that I cannot sit still as I listen to
it, Chelsea looks at me as if I've taken leave of my senses. Perhaps I
have. But it troubles me that these sounds, this harmonic plinking of
wood on metal wires, does not touch her. It is not of her world.
So in the last week I've been trying to discover why.
What is it about 'man-made' music that so fills us with emotion that
its impact is comparable to the most extraordinary of nature's sensory
and sensual wonders, yet leaves our fellow creatures unmoved? I've read
everything I can find about psychoacoustics and about the 'aesthetics'
of music, and come up empty. I appreciate that music is simply sound
waves that follow certain rules: A melodic line, a persistent rhythm
with variations, a set of surprisingly mathematical harmonies, both
deliberate (written into the score) and inherent in the physical
instrument used to create the sounds (overtones), and dynamics (the
volumes of the melodic and harmonic notes and overtones). I'm aware
that all of these characteristics can be represented quite well in a
1600-year-old (or possibly much older)
universal written language called musical notation, and captured quite
precisely in remarkably small digital files. I'm also aware that
different cultures have different musical aesthetics -- they prefer
different scales, different kinds of melodic lines, different
harmonies, different rhythms, and different musical dynamics -- and
that an 'appreciation' for music composed according to different
aesthetic rules can take time to learn. The same could be said, of
course, for other cultural aesthetics such as cuisine or fashion.
My theory for how these different aesthetics evolved is different from
the scholars', some of whom believe appreciation must be learned
through a complex intellectual process involving study, and some of
whom believe human music itself has evolved from simple to complex over
time as this human invention was 'studied and refined'. I find such
theories arrogant and needlessly convoluted. It seems probable to me
that we learned melody from the masters -- the birds, whose melodic
lines are astoundingly sophisticated, varied and individual. And the
theory that harmony was invented by 'learned' scholars seems to me
patently absurd. It seems far more likely that we discovered by trial
and error -- perhaps from people who could not reach the 'taught' notes
of unison singing, mimicking the melodies of others -- that certain
combinations of tones, like certain combinations of colours, were inherently pleasant to the human senses, long before the scientists discovered the mathematics of consonance and dissonance.
We learn in musical history that certain scales and harmonics were once
considered 'demonic', and actually forbidden by some human cultures.
Most likely, the elites of those times realized that some of these
structures evoke anger or sadness, while other more 'acceptable'
musical structures are uplifting, so in order to maintain order, morale
and discipline, it was necessary to ban these 'negative musics' much
the way today's elites ban the use of 'mind-altering' drugs that have
analogous effects on citizen and worker morale and productivity.
But why is it that certain
phrases, rhythms, and harmonic sequences provoke drug-like elation in
us, even without words to reinforce their 'meaning', while others
provoke anger, sadness, and a host of subtler emotional responses? More
importantly, if this is an evolutionary development, why are we often more
moved by artificially-created sounds than we are by the most wonderful
natural 'musics' -- the plaintive cry of the loon or the (to a
surprising number of people) unpleasant moan of the mourning dove, the
tympany of water, the graceful music of windswept trees, the choral
whistling of spring peeper frogs, even the howl of a wolfpack? What
evolutionary purpose does our profound emotional and intellectual
response to man-made music, sounds that are alien and unevocative to
the rest of Earth's species, serve? Is it simply a by-product of our
love of pattern, with which nature endows all creatures to instil in
them a passion to learn and study, and hence enables them to outsmart
and outlive the non-learners and non-students? Is it a code that allows
us to communicate with each other without the messages being
intercepted by 'unappreciative' other creatures, and did we abandon the
use of that code prematurely in favour of a simpler invented system of
clicks and grunts called 'human language' better suited to
civilization's artificial constructs and needs? Is it really true that
'appreciation' of music requires a brain specialized in abstraction,
and that it is for that simple reason that Chelsea has no apparent
appreciation of the harmonic plinking of Ravel's Concerto in G?
Or is the weighty sadness that inspires this piece an emotion that only
humans, with their recently acquired sense of tragedy and learned
helplessness, can or need feel?
These are profoundly important questions, I think, and they are
questions that I cannot answer, no matter how deeply I call on my
instincts and my still-inadequate but growing knowledge of nature to
explain them. I'm open to hypotheses.
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
