Category Archives: Reviews

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Finding Our Musical Melting Point

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Metals have a melting point.  Zinc turns to liquid at about 800 degrees. That’s low for a metal, but an appropriate analogy for some of us who begin to get gooey at the sound of even the simplest music. Music can easily soften our hardened selves.

There are rough estimates by those who study such things that perhaps five to ten percent of the population suffers from what is sometimes called “musical anhedonia.”  The “condition, if that’s the word, is the clinical term clinicians like Oliver Sacks have used to describe a person who is mostly immune to the pleasures of music.

Ironically, the condition is probably harder on avid music lovers than the people with this trait. Those of us who are “sound centric” are surely mystified by the indifference of persons who could care less about a particular concert or recording. We all know the experience, and we may wonder why someone is not capable of appreciating what is at the doorstep of their ears.

If the indifference of a person is total and across the spectrum of all musical forms or genres, it could well invoke a degree of pity, akin to the feeling we might experience if someone says that the Grand Canyon they visited was “nothing special.” What a loss  to never really know a great avenue of human experience.

Can He Be Serious?

In How the Mind Works the influential psychologist, Stephen Pinker, partly reflects this vacuum of feeling. He compared music to “cheesecake:” certainly nice, but “biologically functionless. . .” That’s stunningly dismissive, and at least a little offensive. The comparison of a piece of unhealthy food with a consequential form of human expression (the most consequential?) suggests the very kind of indifference that is so puzzling about musical anhedonia. Pinker misses the impacts of the far richer domain of music, which in its ubiquitous 12-note forms may well be the world’s only universal language.

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 within a person 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 the many pieces of music that send us to welcome arcadias. Those characteristics represent our musical melting points: triggered perhaps by a chord sequence in an old pop hit, a particular mix of voices or instruments (doubling a cello with a voice always works for me), or the “resolution” of a dark piece of classical music into a sunnier major key.

I surely saw swoons a few years ago that you can see as well in a video clip from PBS’s In Performance at the White House (seen here via YouTube). The guests were in the East Room listening to singers that meant a lot to the Obamas. When the multi-talented Usher and the band took the stage and led into the first notes of the Marvin Gaye classic, Mercy Mercy Me, the faces of the staffers and First Family in attendance lit up like a Christmas display. The audience swayed; they smiled and sang along. Some found it impossible to not move with the rhythm of Gaye’s catchy and knowing lyrics. It is a representative moment of what so many musicians and appreciators live to hear again and again. We anticipate the chance to add greater depth to our lives through auditory magic, be it from Gaye, or Taylor Swift, or Haydn, or Basie.

In The Sonic Imperative: Sound in the Age of Screens I tried to describe conventional theories about music with ordinary words, and mostly failed. Music is its own idiom: all expression and feeling, but little stipulation. It often surpasses the limited meanings possible with ordinary language. We need it to fill in the gaps between what we can verbalize and the far more inexplicable impulse to reach toward what we feel.

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Do We Still Notice Neighborhoods?

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In the heyday of its usage decades ago, “neighborhood” carried connotations of an entire micro-geography known especially well to its children. It represented the most important of all places: home.

“There goes the neighborhood” has been a punchline for innumerable jokes over the years, some unfortunately racist. But I like the line as Rodney Dangerfield used it when he heard that a friend had bought a nearby burial plot. In the heyday of its usage decades ago, the idea of a “neighborhood” carried connotations of an entire micro-geography that was usually well known to its children.  The lines connecting the rest of the world were then more easily mapped out in steps rather than URLs.

Like most pre-adolescents growing up in the middle of the last century, I roamed these nearby streets and saw friends “just a few doors down the block.” An urban or suburban child’s world was mostly contained in the 20 or 30 homes that shared the same adjoining streets. The quarter acre lots in a typical city meant that schoolmates and the occasional weird neighbor were close at hand. And since children used to spend hours of “free range” roaming in their neighborhoods, the quirks of the place were as well-known as the picked-over ruins of an ancient town. Parents were usually happy to have their offspring out of the house, with the proviso to “be home in time for dinner.”  It was often true for the next generation as well. If we couldn’t find our daughter in a late afternoon, a call to the folks next door or to the elderly couple behind our house usually located her.  She and her brother did a much better job of collecting neighborhood friends than their parents.

 

The Inward Turn to Screen Time

The Washington Post recently noted that “the average American child spends five to eight hours a day in front of a digital screen, often at the expense of unstructured play in nature.” What an unnatural and inward turn this endless screen time represents, at least when compared to the childhoods observed by writers like Annie Dillard,1 Bill Bryson,2 or Lin-Manuel Miranda.3

If you were still in your first decade of life, the rules of a typical middle-class family usually meant that two blocks joined by an alley or back fences were the outer boundaries for exploration. Becoming a little older meant that more distant parks and stores were fair game, within easy reach on the freedom machine of a bicycle. Of course, there was always a chance of being crushed by a neighbor’s 70s-era car with the brakes and steering of a boat. Somehow most of us managed to stayed clear enough to survive.

I now think of the idea of a neighborhood now as mostly a real estate variable, meaning an area of “comparable” properties closest to the home that buyers are considering. The term seems to have lost earlier echoes of richness that included a specific topography and a web of interpersonal connections. Cul-de-sacs and some apartment buildings are still likely to preserve some of this intimacy; linear streets, not so much.  With many exceptions, courteous but cool relations with the folks down the street seem like the norm.

Overall, identifying one’s own neighborhood added what is now missing in the lives of so many: a sense of place. The common experiences of neighbors can add meaning to the simplest of activities. They make the world seem less alien or strange: a positive perception that was more likely when stories about the abuse and safety of children were less prominent. A good deal of that local and less dire news has died with city newspapers, leaving aggregated national news with troubling events that scare parents.  Now, even front yards and neighborhood roaming are usually off limits.

As physical spaces, the idea of neighborhoods has not gone away, but they also seem less important as seedbeds supporting the important work of connecting with others. Serendipitous encounters help take the strangeness out of a community. And friendly neighbors have always been good for sharing an onion, a tool, or a child.

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1 An American Childhood, 1987
2 The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, 2006
3 In the Heights, 2021.