Category Archives: Reviews

Loving What is Available to our Ears

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“Swoon” is an old but good word. I see it as a particular form of ecstasy.

There are rough estimates by those that study such things that perhaps five to ten percent of the population experience what is sometimes called “musical anhedonia.”  This is the clinical term used to describe a person who is mostly immune to the pleasures of music. The late polymath and neurologist Oliver Sacks isolated and studied this phenomenon, which can be imagined as an unaccountably empty room in a person’s otherwise complex life. I would guess that there is an additional ten or fifteen percent who can’t muster much enthusiasm for any form of music. They would have probably included my father, who was in most ways a great dad. But for him music was a disposible experience: occasionally OK, but not worth much attention. During my high school years we had some tense exchanges over how much of my summer work money should be spent on the glories of the Count Basie Band or North German organ music. Record stores were one of the joys of my life but alien places for him. If music meant anything, it was bandleader Lawrence Welk’s corny covers of pop songs on ABC television. Welk is perhaps what Jello with marshmellows is to those who love fine dining. We did the smart thing and declared a truce.

Ironically, a person’s musical anhedonia is probably harder on avid music lovers than the people with this trait. Those of us who are “sound centric” are surely mystified by others who are indifferent. We all know the experience of discovering that a person we are close to is not appreciating what is at the doorstep of their ears. The effect is like taking someone to the Grand Canyon and discovering that they see it as nothing special. What does not produce a rich and fulfilling experience in another can be a puzzle.

A comment once made by the influential psychologist Stephen Pinker partly reflects this unexpected vacuum of feeling. He once compared music to “auditory cheesecake:” certainly OK, but “biologically functionless.”

Really?

The statement is stunningly dismissive. The comparison of a piece of unhealthy food with a consequential form of human expression suggests the kind of indifference that is so puzzling about musical anhedonia. More than most, a psychologist should know that most of us need music to complete the space between what we can verbalize and and experience that goes beyond what words can express. Music can be its own therapy.

The Victorians understood what it meant to “swoon” over something. The word has gone out of favor but was usually meant to suggest a profound emotional response to someone or something: a trigger to feelings of ecstasy. Old it is. But it’s a good word, and it works for all of us who can name exactly what it is about a musical forms that can send us to welcome arcadias. Those prompts represent our musical melting points: perhaps a chord sequence in an old pop hit, a mix of voices or instruments, the “resolution” of a dark section of a classical piece that resolves in sunnier key.

There were surely saw swoons to see a few years ago in a video concert of In Performance at the White House. The guests were in the East Room listening to singers that meant a lot to the Obamas. When the singer Usher led into the first chords of the Marvin Gaye classic, Mercy Mercy Me, the faces of the staffers and First Family in attendance lit up like signs in Times Square. Check out the video below. The audience swayed; they smiled; many found it impossible not to move with the rhythm of Gaye’s catchy song. It’s as good a representative moment as any to sense why so many musicians and appreciators live to listen.

Is Music Translatable?

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Media theorist Marshall McLuhan reminded us that one medium is not easily translated into another.

Almost to the day that I finished a 600-page biography of composer John Williams, a friend sent me a copy of an article by the critic Jacques Barzun affirming the idea that music is not easily reducible to meaningful discussion.  The issue is whether the stipulative qualities of ordinary language can add much to what musicians have “said” in the non-stipulative patterns of organized sound that are so attractive. Any discussion here is a thought experiment; It probes the nature of our love affair for sounds that–strictly speaking–do not “mean” any one thing.

Tim Greiving’s new book, A Composer’s Life: John Williams, is an exhaustive review of the hundreds of scores the composer produced, starting with episodic television in the 60s and carrying through to the serialized epics of Star Wars (1977), Harry Potter (2002), Jurassic Park (1993), and many other Steven Spielberg epics. Who can forget the feeling of being lifted by the climax of E.T. the Extra Terrestrial (1982), when soaring score matched a soaring Henry on a bike taking the alien back to the mother ship? In its way it was grand opera, with audiences sharing the thrill of an injustice being set right. Williams sought the same impact in scores for films like Schindler’s List (1983) and Jaws (1975).

Greiving is effective in connecting the dots of Williams life, and is especially interesting in suggesting the commercial and logistical arrangements necessary to bring an orchestral score to the screen. I’m less certain the book’s detailed discussions of various motifs or specific chord progressions adds much to the pleasure that happens when we experience them. That observation gets us back to the question at hand. Greiving’s otherwise excellent study does begin to drag in extended discussions less memorable films in mostly forgotten films.

Of course we learn something from the mostly Italian expressions passed on by the composer in a score. It means something that Williams wrote a significant amount of music with the manuscript notation of “Religioso,” especially in his big memorial set pieces like Saving Private Ryan’s Hymn to the Fallen (1998). But, in the end, notations of expression or naming the unique tonal moves of a piece may hardly matter to anyone except the musicians and avid appreciators. The key question is whether there is more to say in ordinary language. Does insight or wonder stop with the music itself, leaving our discussions as unsubstantial afterthoughts?

An easy answer is that words about musical form can enhance what we are hearing. Libraries of words about music can be vast and maybe compelling and revealing. That is surely what Leonared Bernstein thought in his famous 1973 Norton Lectures at Harvard. If there ever was a valiant effort to marry musical sounds with their meanings, these six lectures are it.  It is no surprise that Bernstein leans heavily on what may be the slight cheat of using generative linquistics to bring its music to life. It suggests that music is just another “language:” a common but perhaps limiting metaphor that needs a harder look.

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Barzun notes that some musical authorities believe that “anything you say about music, other than technical, will be silly or irrelevant.”  Media theorist Marshall McLuhan similarly reminded us, one medium is not easily translated into another. The problem is when we begin to think of various forms of exchange as simple “carriers” of meaning. The metaphor suggests that content and the vehicle that carries it are distinct and easily separated. This is often how we think about language. But while It may help to learn about classical music’s Sonata form or the A-A-B-A structure of a lot of pop music, full appreciation hardly depends on knowing these patterns. And we are not going to get far by falling back onto the overworked and false dualism that music is a form of feeling separate from rationality. But speaking phenomenologically, these effects involve the whole individual.  Music marries the two.

In this regard, Barzan hints of an insight that he dismisses too soon. In passing, he reminds us that some people have what is called “synesthesia,” or the perception of a particular color tied to a note or sound. Indeed, spin out this idea to its more general application and we have real translation that converts or compliments music as experience. Most of us have sense-experiences that we tie to particular songs or scores we know well.  Barzan is surely right to note that “Whatever the cause, the tie between inarticulate sounds and bodily states [that we can verbalize] is a fact of experience.”  This is clearly written on the faces of pop singer Laufey’s stageside audiences as as with listeners of the “affirmation of life” last movement of Gustav Mahler’s 5th Symphony. Surely it is natural to use favored images or experiences as touchstones for our enthusiasms.

And a final caveat. Since experience is processed mostly using the reservoir of a person’s available language, it may well be that we lack the kind of descriptive terminology that would do more justice to an attempt at rich translation. Might a sophisticated discussion of any work needs a better terminology than is usually available to a person who thinks and speaks in mostly one idiom? This is in addition to the reminder that turning music’s open-ended form into any stipulative language is bound to have limitations.