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Human attitudes and specifically human ways of thinking about the world are the results of dance and song.

JOHN BLACKING¹

Music brings about similar physical responses in different people at the same time. This is why it is able to draw groups together and create a sense of unity. It does not matter that a dirge or funeral march may be appreciated in a different way by a musician and by an unsophisticated listener. They will certainly be sharing some aspects of the same physical experience at the same moment, as well as sharing the emotions aroused by the funeral itself. Music has the effect of intensifying or underlining the emotion which a particular event calls forth, by simultaneously co-ordinating the emotions of a group of people.

It must be emphasized that making music is an activity which is rooted in the body. Blacking believes that ‘feeling with the body’ is as close as anyone can get to resonating with another person.

Many, if not all, of music’s essential processes can be found in the constitution of the human body and in patterns of interaction of bodies in society … When I lived with the Venda, I began to understand how music can become an intricate part of the development of mind, body, and harmonious social relationships.²

It is generally agreed that music causes increased arousal in those who are interested in it and who therefore listen to it with some degree of concentration. By arousal, I mean a condition of heightened alertness, awareness, interest, and excitement: a generally enhanced state of being. This is at its minimum in sleep and at its maximum when human beings are experiencing powerful emotions like intense grief, rage, or sexual excitement. Extreme states of arousal are usually felt as painful or unpleasant; but milder degrees of arousal are eagerly sought as life-enhancing. We all crave some degree of excitement in our lives; and if stimuli from the environment are lacking, we seek them out if we are free to do so. Not all music is designed to cause arousal. Satie wrote music designed only to provide a comforting background. This has been succeeded by the kind of ‘wallpaper’ music played in elevators, which soothes some people and provokes fury in others. However, this is an exception and not the kind of listening being discussed at this point. Lullabies may send children to sleep; but we listen to Chopin’s Berceuse or the Wiegenlieder of Brahms and Schubert with rapt attention.

Arousal manifests itself in various physiological changes, many of which can be measured. The electro-encephalogram shows changes in the amplitude and frequency of the brain waves which it records. During arousal, the electrical resistance of the skin is diminished; the pupil of the eye dilates; the respiratory rate may become either faster or slower, or else become irregular. Blood-pressure tends to rise, as does the heart rate. There is an increase in muscular tone, which may be accompanied by physical restlessness. In general, the changes are those which one would expect in an animal preparing for action; whether it be flight, fight, or mating. They are the same changes recorded by the polygraph or ‘lie detector’ which demonstrates arousal in the form of anxiety, but which, contrary to popular belief, cannot prove guilt or innocence.

Recordings of muscle ‘action potentials’ on another instrument, the electro-myograph, show marked increases in electrical activity in the leg muscles whilst listening to music, even when the subject has been told not to move. In the concert hall, the physical restlessness induced by arousal is often insufficiently controlled. Some people feel impelled to beat time with their feet or drum with their fingers, thereby disturbing other listeners. There are tracings recording the increase in Herbert von Karajan’s pulse-rate while conducting Beethoven’s Overture, Leonora No. 3. Interestingly, his pulse-rate showed the greatest increase during those passages which most moved him emotionally, and not during those in which he was making the greatest physical effort. It is also worth noting that recordings of his pulse-rate whilst piloting and landing a jet aircraft showed much smaller fluctuations than when he was conducting.³ Music is said to soothe the savage breast, but it may also powerfully excite it.

What seems certain is that there is a closer relation between hearing and emotional arousal than there is between seeing and emotional arousal. Why else would the makers of moving pictures insist on using music? We are so used to hearing music throughout a film that a short period of silence has a shock effect; and movie-makers sometimes use silence as a precursor to some particularly horrific incident. But a love scene in a film is almost inconceivable without music. Even in the days of silent films a pianist had to be hired to intensify and bring out the emotional significance of the different episodes. A friend of mine, visiting the Grand Canyon for the first time, found himself disappointed at his lack of response to this awesome sight. After a while, he realized that he had seen the Grand Canyon many times on the cinema screen and never without music. Because his sight of the real thing lacked such musical accompaniment, his arousal level was less intense than it had been in the cinema.

Seeing a wounded animal or suffering person who is silent may produce little emotional response in the observer. But once they start to scream, the onlooker is usually powerfully moved. At an emotional level, there is something ‘deeper’ about hearing than seeing; and something about hearing other people which fosters human relationships even more than seeing them. Hence, people who become profoundly deaf often seem to be even more cut off from others than those who are blind. Certainly, they are more likely to become suspicious of their nearest and dearest. Deafness, more than blindness, is apt to provoke paranoid delusions of being disparaged, deceived, and cheated.

Why is hearing so deeply associated with emotion and with our relationship with our fellow human beings? Is there any connection with the fact that, at the beginning of life, we can hear before we can see? Our first experience of hearing takes place in the womb, long before we leap into the dangerous world and begin to look at it. David Burrows, who teaches music at New York University, writes:

An unborn child may startle in the womb at the sound of a door slamming shut. The rich warm cacophony of the womb has been recorded: the mother’s heartbeat and breathing are among the earliest indications babies have of the existence of a world beyond their own skin.⁴

A dark world is frightening. Nightmares and infantile fears coalesce with rational anxieties when we come home at night through unlit streets. But a silent world is even more terrifying. Is no one there, nothing going on at all? We seldom experience total silence, except in the artificial conditions of those special rooms in psychological laboratories in which darkness is combined with sound-proofing to exclude input to our senses as completely as possible. As Burrows points out, we are dependent on background sound of which we are hardly conscious for our sense of life continuing. A silent world is a dead world. If ‘earliest’ and ‘deepest’ are in fact related, as psychoanalysts have tended to assume, the priority of hearing in the emotional hierarchy is not entirely surprising; but I think it unlikely that this is the whole explanation.

The details of the physiological responses outlined above need not detain us. We have all experienced them, and we are all aware that the condition of arousal can be exciting or distressing according to its intensity. The important point to recognize in this context is that, with a few exceptions, the physical state of arousal accompanying different emotional states is remarkably similar. Sexual arousal and aggressive arousal have in common fourteen physiological changes. The Kinsey team found that there were only four respects in which the physiology of anger differed from the physiology of sex. Although there are rather more physiological differences between the state of fear and the states of anger and sexual arousal, fear still shares nine of the same items of physiological change with the other two, including increase in pulse-rate, increase in blood-pressure, and increase in muscular tension.⁵

It is easy to appreciate that we enjoy becoming sexually aroused; less easy to acknowledge that we like being frightened, and still less easy to accept that we may welcome the excitement of being angry. But many people enjoy the fear induced by ghost stories or horror films; and some will admit that ‘justified’ wrath against an enemy is exhilarating. The fact is that human beings are so constituted that they crave arousal just as much as they crave its opposite, sleep. Whilst we may deliberately and reasonably affirm that we want our morning newspaper to contain no accounts of disasters, there is no doubt that tragedy is stimulating, as the proprietors of the tabloids know only too well.

One of Freud’s cardinal errors was to suppose that what human beings most wanted was a state of tranquillity following the discharge of all tensions. He treated powerful emotions as an intrusion, whether they were instigated by stimuli from without or caused by instinctual impulses from within. For Freud, the main function of the central nervous system was to see that the tensions caused by such emotions were discharged, either directly or indirectly, as soon as possible. He called this dominating feature of mental life the Nirvana principle. In Freud’s scheme, there is no place for ‘stimulus hunger’; that is, for the need which human beings have to seek out emotional and intellectual stimuli when they are placed in a monotonous environment or when they have been in a state of tranquillity for so long that they have become bored.⁶

Freud died in 1939. If he had been alive in the 1950s and 1960s, he would have become aware of research into the effects of shielding human beings from as many incoming stimuli as possible. Although Nirvana-like bliss and relief from tension can sometimes be achieved by exposing people to short periods of voluntary isolation in the sound-proof, light-proof rooms already referred to, longer periods of solitary confinement usually lead to desperate efforts to find something stimulating which will relieve monotony. Human beings suffer from stimulus hunger as well as from stimulus overload; and those who have experienced months or years alone in prison cells find that doing mental arithmetic, recalling or writing poetry, or other mental activities, are absolutely necessary if they are not to sink into apathy or despair.⁷

It seems obvious that one reason why people seek to listen to or to participate in music is because music causes arousal, which may be intense at times, but which is seldom unbearably so. When, in A la Recherche du temps perdu, Mme Verdurin protests at her husband’s suggestion that the pianist shall play a particular sonata in F sharp on the grounds that it will make her ill, we do not believe her, and Proust did not intend us to do so.

‘No, no, no, not my sonata!’ she screamed, ‘I don’t want to be made to cry until I get a cold in the head, and neuralgia all down my face, like last time. Thanks very much, I don’t intend to repeat that performance. You’re all so very kind and considerate, it’s easy to see that none of you will have to stay in bed for a week.’⁸

Every concert-goer is familiar with the histrionic member of the audience who demonstrates his or her intense sensibilities by sighing, groaning, or clapping ecstatically; and who then looks around with rolling eyes to make sure that these antics have been noticed.

This is not to deny that music can provoke intense, genuine emotional arousal, from ecstatic happiness to floods of tears. This does not happen with everyone. The unmusical person, as one would expect, is less physiologically aroused than the musical person. Even in people to whom music means a great deal, responses vary with their mood. One would not expect a depressed person to respond to music as vigorously as an elated person; although music has been known to break through the carapace of melancholy and enable the depressed person to regain access to the feelings from which he had been alienated.

There is another aspect of arousal which is relevant to music. There is some measure of agreement about the nature of certain well-known musical works, whether they are jolly, uplifting, humorous, martial, impressive, and so on. No one calls Rossini’s overture to The Barber of Seville tragic; no one thinks of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony as merely pretty. Roger Brown, one of the world’s experts on the development of language in children, has also studied reactions to music. His research has demonstrated that there is widespread consensus between listeners about the emotional content of different pieces of music even when these pieces are unknown to, or not identified by, the different listeners. That is, whether a piece of music is considered poignant, wistful, elegiac, boisterous, rustic and so on, does not depend upon previous knowledge of the piece in question, or upon identifying the context in which it was composed.⁹

But it is simplistic and inaccurate to suppose that the emotions expressed in the music – sadness, joy, or whatever other emotion seems displayed – are necessarily those aroused in the listener. Peter Kivy, author of an influential, award-winning book on music, The Corded Shell, repeatedly affirms:

We must separate entirely the claim that music can arouse emotion in us from the claim that music is sometimes sad or angry or fearful … a piece of music might move us (in part) because it is expressive of sadness, but it does not move us by making us sad.¹⁰

Othello’s suicide is profoundly moving; but it does not make us feel suicidal. What moves us is the way in which Shakespeare (and Verdi) made sense out of tragedy by making it part of an artistic whole. As Nietzsche realized, even tragedy is an affirmation of life.

In spite of Roger Brown’s demonstration that the general emotional tone of a piece of music will probably be similarly perceived by different listeners, there will always be disputes about specific details when criticism is carried further. This does not imply that one listener is more or less perceptive than the other. Both may have experienced arousal; and both will therefore agree that the music has had a powerful effect upon them. It is natural enough, given the varying backgrounds from which listeners come, and the very different life-experiences to which they have been exposed, that what they read or project into any given piece of music may also be rather different. What is interesting is that there is as much consensus as there appears to be.

The idea that music causes a general state of arousal rather than specific emotions partly explains why it has been used to accompany such a wide variety of human activities, including marching, serenading, worship, marriages, funerals, and manual work. Music structures time. By imposing order, music ensures that the emotions aroused by a particular event peak at the same moment. It does not matter that the kind of emotions excited in different individuals may vary. What matters is the general state of arousal and its simultaneity. Because of its capacity to intensify crowd feeling, music has a power akin to that of the orator.

Ellen Dissanayake, in the paper from which I quoted in the last chapter, believes that the importance of physical movement as a constituent of musical behaviour has been underestimated. She points out that children up to the age of four or five find it difficult to sing without moving their hands and feet. The close relationship between music and bodily movement is not confined to pre-literate societies. The composers Roger Sessions and Stravinsky have both stressed the connection with the body; and Stravinsky not only composed superb music for ballet, but also insisted that instrumentalists be visually perceived whilst playing. This may be one reason why so many musicians dislike recorded performance. They want to see the players’ movements as well as hear the sounds they make.

Stravinsky, in old age, asked:

What is the ‘human measure’ in music? … My ‘human measure’ is not only possible, but also exact. It is, first of all, absolutely physical, and it is immediate. I am made bodily ill, for example, by sounds electronically spayed for overtone removal. To me they are a castration threat.¹¹

There can be no doubt that seeing the movements which musicians make during live performance is, for many people, an important reason for going to concerts as opposed to listening to music at home on radio or disc. Some of the greatest conductors, like Richard Strauss and Pierre Monteux, kept their physical movements to a minimum; others are more flamboyant. But some listeners confess that their appreciation of a particular work is increased by observing the gestures of a conductor.

There is pleasure to be gained from seeing the co-ordinated bowing of the various string sections, just as there is from seeing other examples of group co-ordination, like gymnastic displays. Virtuoso instrumentalists not only play music which is technically inaccessible to the amateur, but also give people the same sort of pleasure which they gain from seeing a great athlete or juggler in action. This may not be directly connected with the appreciation of music itself; but it does underline the physicality of musical performance.

Debussy wrote:

The attraction of the virtuoso for the public is very like that of the circus for the crowd. There is always a hope that something dangerous may happen.¹²

This view was shared by the violinist Jascha Heifetz who claimed that every critic was eagerly awaiting an occasion on which his impeccable technique would let him down.

Because music affects people physically and also structures time, it is sometimes used when a group of people are performing repetitive physical actions. Some songs are working songs which alleviate boredom and co-ordinate the actions of threshing, pounding, reaping, and the like. It has been suggested that music originated because rhythmically organized work was discovered to be more efficient; but this sounds like a notion derived from a Protestant, capitalist ethic transposed backward in time. Even if Vico was wrong in supposing that dancing preceded walking, dancing probably antedated organized work; and the rhythmic movements of the dance are usually linked with music.

Our modern equivalent to the use of music in co-ordinating agricultural labour is the provision of music in factories. Opinion is divided as to its effects. Judging from its use in agriculture, one might expect that music would improve performance of the routine operations which are common in factory work. Repetitive movements are less tedious when synchronized with musical rhythms. The provision of music is certainly popular amongst factory workers. However, the heightening of morale is not necessarily accompanied by increase in output. Whilst music probably enhances the performance of routine tasks, especially those in which repetitive physical actions prevail, it tends to interfere with the performance of non-repetitive actions which need thinking about. For example, there is evidence suggesting that music increases the number of errors in typing.¹³

The order which music brings to our experience is rhythmic, melodic and also harmonic. As the great violinist Yehudi Menuhin puts it:

Music creates order out of chaos; for rhythm imposes unanimity upon the divergent; melody imposes continuity upon the disjointed, and harmony imposes compatibility upon the incongruous.¹⁴

The effect which music has upon repetitive physical actions is predominantly rhythmic. Rhythm is rooted in the body in a way which does not apply so strikingly to melody and harmony. Breathing, walking, the heartbeat, and sexual intercourse are all rhythmical aspects of our physical being. In some pre-literate cultures rhythm is so highly developed that Western musicians cannot reproduce its complexities. Grosvenor Cooper and Leonard Meyer, who were both professors of Music at the University of Chicago, begin their book The Rhythmic Structure of Music by writing:

To study rhythm is to study all of music. Rhythm both organizes, and is itself organized by, all the elements which create and shape musical processes.¹⁵

We take for granted the fact that rhythm imposed from outside has an effect upon our own capacity for organizing our own movements. For instance, a military band playing a march orders our strides and also reduces fatigue.

David, a six-year-old autistic boy, suffered from chronic anxiety and poor visual-motor co-ordination. For nine months, efforts had been made to teach him to tie his shoe-laces without avail. However, it was discovered that his audio-motor co-ordination was excellent. He could beat quite complex rhythms on a drum, and was clearly musically gifted. When a student therapist put the process of tying his shoe-laces into a song, David succeeded at the second attempt.

A song is a form in time. David had a special relationship to this element and could comprehend the shoe-tying process when it was organized in time through a song.¹⁶

The effects of music upon patients with neurological diseases causing movement disorders are sometimes astonishing. Some patients can make voluntary movements to the sound of music which they cannot accomplish without it. The disease known as paralysis agitans, or Parkinsonism, causes an inability to co-ordinate and control voluntary movement. In his famous book on sufferers from post-encephalitic Parkinsonism, Awakenings, the neurologist Oliver Sacks describes a patient who suffered from recurrent ‘crises’ characterized by intense excitement, uncontrollable movements, forced repetition of words and phrases, and other symptoms. Dr Sacks writes:

By far the best treatment of her crises was music, the effects of which were almost uncanny. One minute would see Miss D. compressed, clenched and blocked, or jerking, ticcing and jabbering – like a sort of human bomb; the next, with the sound of music from a wireless or a gramophone, the complete disappearance of all these obstructive-explosive phenomena and their replacement by a blissful ease and flow of movement as Miss D., suddenly freed of her automatisms, smilingly ‘conducted’ the music, or rose and danced to it.¹⁷

Dr Sacks later writes of these terrible cases: ‘The therapeutic power of music is very remarkable, and may allow an ease of movement otherwise impossible.’¹⁸ One of Dr Sacks’s patients who had taught music described herself as ‘unmusicked’. When frozen into immobility by the disease, she would remain helplessly unable to move until she was able to recall tunes she had known in her youth. These would suddenly release her ability to move again.

Fortunately, the epidemic disease of encephalitis lethargica which caused this type of Parkinsonism has disappeared; and only sporadic cases are now recorded. But Parkinsonism is common in the elderly, and is said to occur in 1 in 200 people over the age of fifty. It is due to loss of cells in the substantia nigra; the part of the brain which produces dopamine. This is a chemical neurotransmitter which is involved in the passage of impulses from the brain to the voluntary muscles.

Happily, most of us who listen to music do not do so because we need it as treatment for neurological disease; but the physical effects of music are undoubted, and, as we have seen, can be measured in people who are perfectly normal.

Occasionally, music’s effect upon the brain can be the opposite of therapeutic. In rare cases, music can provoke an epileptic fit. The neurologist Macdonald Critchley described one patient whose epileptic attacks were exclusively brought on by music. Playing a record of Tchaikovsky’s Valse des Fleurs caused emotional distress followed by a typical grand mal; that is, a major epileptic seizure with convulsive movements, frothing at the lips, and cyanosis.¹⁹ Such attacks are without doubt ‘organic’; that is, the result of music as a physical stimulus acting directly on the brain, not secondary to the emotional effects of music. This can be shown by provoking a fit whilst the electro-encephalogram records the electrical activity of the patient’s brain.

In most cases of musicogenic epilepsy, the seizures are induced by music played by an orchestra. Less commonly, a single instrument, piano, organ, or the ringing of bells may cause an attack. In very rare instances, even the recall of music can be sufficient provocation. Musicogenic epilepsy raises many unsolved neurological problems which it would be inappropriate to discuss in this context. But this rare phenomenon convincingly demonstrates that music has a direct effect upon the brain.

Music and speech are separately represented in the two hemispheres of the brain. Although there is considerable overlap, as happens with many cerebral functions, language is predominantly processed in the left hemisphere, whilst music is chiefly scanned and appreciated in the right hemisphere. The division of function is not so much between words and music as between logic and emotion. When words are directly linked with emotions, as they are in poetry and song, the right hemisphere is operative. But it is the left hemisphere which deals with the language of conceptual thought. This difference between the hemispheres can be demonstrated in a variety of ways.

It is possible to sedate one hemisphere of the brain whilst leaving the other in a normal state of alertness. If a barbiturate is injected into the left carotid artery, so that the left hemisphere of the brain is sedated, the subject is unable to speak, but can still sing. If the injection is made into the right carotid artery, the person cannot sing, but can speak normally. Stammerers can sometimes sing sentences which they cannot speak; presumably because the stammering pattern is encoded in the left hemisphere, whilst singing is predominantly a right hemispheric activity.

The electrical activity of different parts of the brain can be recorded by means of the electro-encephalogram. It can be demonstrated that, if recordings of speech are played to six-month-old babies, the left hemisphere of the brain will show more electrical activity than the right. But if recordings of music are played, the right hemisphere shows the greater electrical response.

If different melodies are played simultaneously through right and left earphones (so-called ‘dichotic listening’), the melody heard through the left earphone will be better recalled than that heard through the right. This is because the left ear has greater representation in the right hemisphere of the brain. The right hemisphere processes the perception of melody more efficiently than the left. If words are similarly presented, the reverse is true since the left hemisphere specializes in processing language.

Patients who have suffered brain damage or disease may lose the ability to understand or make use of language without losing musical competence. The great Soviet neuro-psychologist A. R. Luria studied a composer named Vissarion Shebalin who, following a stroke, suffered from severe sensory aphasia; that is, he was unable to understand the meaning of words. Yet he continued to teach music and composed his fifth symphony which Shostakovich said was brilliant.²⁰ Luria’s famous patient, Zasetsky, whom he studied for many years, received a terrible bullet wound during the Second World War which extensively damaged the left side of his brain. His capacity to use and understand language was at first badly impaired. Amongst many other losses of cerebral function, his spatial perception was grossly distorted and his memory fragmented. Yet he liked music just as much as he had done before he was wounded, and could easily remember the melodies of songs, though not their words.²¹

Howard Gardner reports the case of an American composer who suffered from a form of aphasia which left him with a persistent reading difficulty. But, although he could not understand the meaning of printed words, he had little difficulty with musical notation, and was able to compose music just as well as he could before his aphasia.²²

The musician portrayed in Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat suffered from a brain lesion which, although he could see, made it impossible for him to recognize the essential nature of objects, as the title of the book indicates. Yet his musical abilities were unimpaired: indeed, he could only dress himself, eat a meal, or have a bath, if he did so whilst singing. Music became the only way by which he could structure the external world or find meaning in it.²³ This case might be illuminatingly compared with that of the autistic boy, David, described earlier.

There are very few instances of brain lateralization in other animals, although, interestingly enough, bird-song is one exception. In birds, a functioning left hypoglossal nerve is essential for the production of song.

The development of hemispheric specialization is certainly connected with the development of language as an uniquely human phenomenon. Moreover, language is not only a superior means of communication between human beings, but also an essential tool for understanding and thinking about the world. We do not necessarily think in words. The scanning and sorting of information goes on unconsciously as part of the creative process, and can certainly take place during sleep. There is no reason to confine the use of the term ‘thinking’ to conscious deliberation. But, if we are to formulate our thoughts, express them, and convey them to our fellows, we must put them into words. Although language appears to be understood by both hemispheres to some extent, formulating thoughts in words, and creating new sentences, are functions of the left hemisphere.

It is worth noting that children with lesions in the right hemisphere may be competent at reading, but poor at communicating their feelings. Their speech is often monotonous and inexpressive, lacking just those emotional/intonational aspects of speech recognized earlier as being important in communication between mothers and infants.

It is probably the case that as a listener to music becomes more sophisticated and therefore more critical, musical perception becomes partly transferred to the left hemisphere. However, when words and music are closely associated, as in the words of songs, it seems that both are lodged together in the right hemisphere as part of a single Gestalt. Since the word order of a song is fixed, the innovative verbal skills which belong in the left hemisphere are not required.

Musical gifts are multiple and not always found together in the same person. There is often a wide discrepancy between musical interest and musical talent. Many of those to whom music is immensely important struggle for years to express themselves as composers or executants without avail. Others who are auditorily gifted, as shown by musical aptitude tests, are not necessarily very interested in music. Teachers of music agree that enthusiasm for music becomes increasingly important for success as a child grows older. Musically gifted children may fail to realize their full potential because their interest in music declines.²⁴

It is my impression, and no more than an impression, that this discrepancy between interest and talent is more often encountered in music than in other subjects. For example, those who are not mathematically gifted seldom long to be mathematicians; but musical enthusiasts often confess that their lack of musical talent is their greatest disappointment.

The discrepancy between interest in, and talent for, music may be explicable in terms of hemispheric specialization. We have already observed that critical appreciation of music is partly a function of the left hemisphere. People who score highly on a test of musical aptitude tend to show left hemisphere advantage, regardless of training.²⁵ Perhaps emotional response to music is chiefly centred in the right hemisphere, whilst executive skills and critical analysis are functions of the left hemisphere. Sloboda quotes the case of a violinist with damage to the left hemisphere who retained some musical abilities whilst suffering impairment of others. A great deal of further research is required to establish the neurological correlates of the varied skills which music requires, but what seems certain is that there is no one centre in the brain which houses them all.

As we pointed out earlier, the language used both by philosophers and scientists is neutral and objective. It eschews the personal, the particular, the emotional, the subjective. No wonder it is principally housed in a separate part of the brain from that concerned with the expressive aspects of music. Whilst it is perfectly possible to study music from a purely objective, intellectual point of view, this approach alone is insufficient.

Any attempt to understand the nature of music must take into account its expressive aspects and the fact that the parts of the brain concerned with the emotional effects of music are distinct from those which have to do with appreciation of its structure. Recordings of blood-pressure, respiration, pulse-rate and other functions controlled by the involuntary, autonomic nervous system taken from the same subject demonstrated that, when he was completely involved with the music there were marked changes in the tracings recording evidence of physiological arousal; when, however, he adopted an analytical, critical attitude, these changes were not apparent.²⁶

This is objective confirmation of the art historian Wilhelm Worringer’s well-known dichotomy, empathy and abstraction; categories which are just as applicable to music as to the visual arts with which he was primarily concerned.²⁷ Worringer claimed that modern aesthetics was based upon the behaviour of the contemplating subject. If the subject is to enjoy a work of art, he must absorb himself into it, make himself one with it. But this empathic identification with the work is only one way of approaching it. The other is by way of abstraction. Aesthetic appreciation is also a matter of discovering form and order, which requires detachment from the work. These two attitudes are linked with extraversion and introversion. In individuals, one or other attitude is usually predominant and, when exaggerated, leads to mutual misunderstanding. Empathic identification with a musical work may so emotionally involve the listener that critical judgement becomes impossible. In contrast, an exclusively intellectual, detached approach may make it difficult to appreciate the music’s emotional significance. Many disputes both in psychology and in aesthetics arise because each participant claims that whichever attitude he personally adopts is the only valid one.

Although appreciation of a musical work necessarily involves perception of both form and expressive content, it is interesting that the two can be artificially separated. Many years ago, I acted as a ‘guinea-pig’ for one of my colleagues who was investigating the effects of the drug mescaline. Whilst still under its influence, I listened to music on the radio. The effect was to enhance my emotional responses whilst concurrently abolishing my perception of form. Mescaline made a Mozart string quartet sound as romantic as Tchaikovsky. I was conscious of the throbbing, vibrant quality of the sounds which reached me; of the bite of bow upon string; of a direct appeal to my emotions. In contrast, appreciation of form was greatly impaired. Each time a theme was repeated, it came as a surprise. The themes might be individually entrancing, but their relation with one another had disappeared. All that was left was a series of tunes with no connecting links: a pleasurable experience, but one which also proved disappointing.

My reaction to mescaline convinced me that, in my own case, the part of the brain concerned with emotional responses is different from the part which perceives structure. The evidence suggests that this is true of everyone. The appreciation of music requires both parts, although either may predominate on a particular occasion.

In connection with the perception of form and structure it is worth recalling that the auditory apparatus is itself primarily concerned with symmetry and closely linked with balance. The labyrinth or inner ear contains the complex vestibular organ which orients us to gravity, and provides essential information about the position of our own bodies, by registering acceleration, deceleration, angles of turn et cetera. Such internal feedback is needed if we are to be able to control our own movements and relate them to changes in the environment.

It also makes possible our upright posture. Equilibrium or balance can only be maintained if we are constantly informed about tilts of the body, backward, forward, right or left. A tilt in one direction immediately elicits a compensatory muscular reaction in order to prevent our falling and restore our balance.

From an evolutionary perspective, the vestibular apparatus antedates the auditory system which developed from it. Although the two systems remain functionally separate, the vestibular nerve and the cochlear nerve, which respectively convey information from the vestibular apparatus and the auditory apparatus, run in close parallel.

The auditory system is designed to record the nature and location of vibrations in the air, which we perceive as sounds. Experience tells us which sounds are dangerous or threatening, and which are likely to be harmless. By turning our heads so that the sound in each ear is of equal volume we accurately locate the direction of its origin. Hearing and orientation are closely allied.

We are so accustomed to thinking of sight as the primary sense by which we learn how to find our way around that we are apt to forget that hearing can also be used in this way, as it certainly is by the blind. Repeated visual encounters with a particular area become internalized as a picture which can be recalled at any time and in any place. The tapping sticks of the blind provide an auditory map of the immediate environment based on variations in sound alone which also becomes internalized as a schema.

Anyone who has experienced sea-sickness or who has been drunk knows that impairment of one’s sense of balance and equilibrium is extremely unpleasant. In contrast, anything which increases our feeling of being securely balanced and in control of our movements enhances our sense of well-being. Marching soldiers swing their arms symmetrically as they march; and also march better to music. Music can order our muscular system. I believe that it is also able to order our mental contents. A perceptual system originally designed to inform us of spatial relationships by means of imposing symmetry can be incorporated and transformed into a means of structuring our inner world. For example, writers who ‘hear’ their sentences as if read aloud tend to write better prose than those who merely see them. A writer considering how best to express a particular point may finally exclaim ‘I see how to put it.’ It is often equally appropriate to say ‘I hear how to put it.’

The Greeks of Plato’s day considered that the right type of music was a powerful instrument of education which could alter the characters of those who studied it, inclining them toward inner order and harmony. Equally, the wrong type of music could have seriously bad effects. Both Plato and Aristotle shared this view of music, although they did not always agree as to which type of music was beneficial and which harmful. Plato, in The Republic, reports Socrates as saying:

And therefore, I said, Glaucon, musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful, or of him who is ill-educated ungraceful; and also because he who has received this true education of the inner being will most shrewdly perceive omissions or faults in art and nature, and with a true taste, while he praises and rejoices over and receives into his soul the good, and becomes noble and good, he will justly blame and hate the bad, now in the days of his youth, even before he is able to know the reason why; and when reason comes he will recognise and salute the friend with whom his education has made him long familiar.²⁸

Plato, who was not averse to strict censorship, wanted to banish from the ideal State styles of music which were sorrowful, plaintive or associated with indolence and drinking. There were only two styles which should be tolerated: one for use in battle or in times of misfortune, when a man’s resolve might need boosting; the other to be used in times of peace, when he is either seeking to persuade God or man in moderate fashion, or else himself is yielding to persuasion in an equally balanced way. Such music might be used to represent his prudence and moderation.

These two harmonies I ask you to leave; the strain of necessity and the strain of freedom, the strain of the unfortunate and the strain of the fortunate, the strain of courage, and the strain of temperance; these, I say, leave.²⁹

As Glaucon points out, this leaves only the Phrygian and Dorian modes from amongst those in common use. The term ‘mode’ as employed by the Greeks is difficult to define exactly in modern terms, for it referred both to the scale and also to the type of melody; but the general sense is clear enough.

Aristotle believed that,

men are inclined to be mournful and solemn when they listen to that which is called Mixo-Lydian; but they are in a more relaxed frame of mind when they listen to others, for example the looser modes. A particularly equable feeling, midway between these, is produced, I think, only by the Dorian mode, while the Phrygian puts men into a frenzy of excitement.³⁰

Indeed, Aristotle thought Socrates wrong to permit the Phrygian mode to be added to the Dorian, because he believed it to be too orgiastic and emotional. For educational purposes, he recommended the Lydian mode because of its power to combine orderliness with educative influence.

The Phrygian mode, according to the great classical scholar E. R. Dodds, was used both in the Dionysiac rituals of the Archaic Age and later in the Corybantic rituals of the fifth century BC. Both seemed to have been based upon the notion of ‘catharsis’: that is, upon the idea that individuals could be purged of irrational impulses or cured of madness if they temporarily lost all inhibitions and ‘let go’ in an ecstatic fashion.³¹

Plato was conservative as well as severe. Socrates says that it was necessary that

music and gymnastic be preserved in their original form, and no innovation made… for any musical innovation is full of danger to the whole State, and ought to be prohibited. So Damon tells me, and I can quite believe him – he says that when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them.³²

We may not share the Greek view that particular modes have different effects upon listeners. But we recognize that some composers habitually select certain keys when they want to express particular emotions. It is generally agreed that Mozart used G minor to express tragedy or melancholy; for example, the Piano Quartet K. 478, the String Quintet K. 516, the Symphonies K. 183 and K. 550. Perhaps the Greek idea of linking certain modes with particular emotions is not so far from our own perceptions as at first appears.

Plato anticipated, or perhaps invented, the notion of mens sana in corpore sano which became the supposed aim of English public school education. What was needed was a proper balance between the physical and mental. He believed that those who simply pursued athletics became violent and uncivilized, whilst those who only exposed themselves to music became soft and feeble. Plato suggested that there are two principles of human nature, the spirited and the philosophical, which are served by gymnastics and music respectively.

And he who mingles music with gymnastic in the fairest proportions, and best attempers them to the soul, may be rightly called the true musician and harmonist in a far higher sense than the tuner of the strings.³³

Centuries later, the historian Edward Gibbon makes use of a similar dichotomy. Indeed, he may have learned it from Plato.

There are two very natural propensities which we may distinguish in the most virtuous and liberal dispositions, the love of pleasure and the love of action… To the love of pleasure we may therefore ascribe most of the agreeable, to the love of action we may attribute most of the useful and respectable qualifications. The character in which both the one and the other should be united and harmonized would seem to constitute the most perfect idea of human nature.³⁴

Plato wrote in the Timaeus:

All audible musical sound is given us for the sake of harmony, which has motions akin to the orbits in our soul, and which, as anyone who makes intelligent use of the arts knows, is not to be used, as is commonly thought, to give irrational pleasure, but as a heaven-sent ally in reducing to order and harmony any disharmony in the revolutions within us. Rhythm, again, was given us from the same heavenly source to help us in the same way; for most of us lack measure and grace.³⁵

Theon of Smyrna, a Platonist who flourished between AD 115 and 140, left a treatise concerning arithmetic, astronomy, and the theory of musical harmony which he called ‘Mathematics useful for reading Plato’.

The Pythagoreans, whom Plato follows in many respects, call music the harmonization of opposites, the unification of disparate things, and the reconciliation of warring elements… Music, as they say, is the basis of agreement among things in nature and of the best government in the universe. As a rule it assumes the guise of harmony in the universe, of lawful government in a state, and of a sensible way of life in the home. It brings together and unites.³⁶

It goes without saying that Plato and Aristotle were two of the most intelligent men who have ever lived. Their view of the physical universe has been superseded by modern scientific discoveries, as has that of Newton. But music and art are in a different category. Unlike science, art is not superseded, and nor are views about its meaning and significance. The great music of the past is great today. Bach’s Mass in B minor has not been displaced by Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis. Bartók’s quartets have not supplanted those of Beethoven. Modern masterpieces of music enlarge our sensibilities; but they do not surpass or replace those masterpieces which have preceded them. The views of Plato and Aristotle on music and the other arts are not outdated. They are not like theories about the physical world which can be proved or disproved. They are as worthy of critical appraisal today as they were when they were first formulated. Although scientific discovery has displaced the Greek view of the universe, the Greek perception of music may have been nearer the truth than our own.

Music is so freely available today that we take it for granted and may underestimate its power for good or ill. The idea that some modes should be forbidden and others encouraged may make us smile. In Britain, we cannot imagine our rulers banning a scale or key, partly because we would think this an unwarranted interference with personal liberty, but also because, as I suggested in the introduction, music is seldom taken seriously by politicians and educationalists who are not themselves musicians. This is not always the case elsewhere. Allan Bloom’s well-known attack on American education, The Closing of the American Mind, contains a chapter on music in which the author expresses considerable anxiety about the effect which rock music has upon students. Bloom recognizes that great music is powerfully educative, and fears that rock has banished any interest in, or feeling of need for, any other kind of music.

In Stalin’s Russia, contemporary European music, including jazz, was virtually banned, and Russian composers were subjected to many restrictions and a flood of instructions. Shostakovich’s opera The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was banned in 1936, and the composer wisely withheld a number of other works which he feared would not conform to the dictates of ‘socialist realism’. Although such censorship is deplorable, it does imply some recognition of the power and importance of music in the lives of ordinary people.

The power of music, especially when combined with other emotive events, can be terrifyingly impressive. At the Nuremberg rally of 1936, the thunderous cheers of the vast crowd eventually drowned the music of the massed bands which played Hitler in. But the bands were there long before Hitler appeared, preceding his rhetoric with their rhetoric, preparing the huge gathering for Hitler’s appearance, binding them together, arousing their expectations, aiding and abetting Hitler’s self-dramatization, making it credible that a petit bourgeois failure had turned himself into a Messiah. The Greeks were right in supposing that music can be used for evil ends as well as for good. There can be no doubt that, by heightening crowd emotions and by ensuring that those emotions peak together rather than separately, music can powerfully contribute to the loss of critical judgement, the blind surrender to the feelings of the moment, which is so dangerously characteristic of crowd behaviour.

Rousseau would not have been surprised by Hitler’s oratorical style, which accords with his ideas about the development of speech. It is interesting that at the Nuremberg rally, as on many other occasions, Hitler’s speech was not intended to convey information but took on the quality of an incantation or chant. Hitler’s voice was harsh and unmusical, but he used language in the way it is used in religious ritual. As the historian and German scholar J. P. Stern points out in his perceptive account of this Nuremberg rally, Hitler used a declamatory style superimposed upon near quotations from biblical texts.

How deeply we feel once more in this hour the miracle that has brought us together! Once you heard the voice of a man, and it spoke to your hearts, it awakened you, and you followed that voice. Year in year out you followed it, without even having seen the speaker; you only heard a voice and followed it.

Now that we meet here, we are all filled with the wonder of this gathering. Not every one of you can see me and I do not see each one of you. But I feel you, and you feel me! It is faith in our nation that has made us little people great, that has made us poor people rich, that has made us wavering, fearful, timid people brave and confident; that has made us erring wanderers clear-sighted and has brought us together!

So you have come this day from your little villages, your market towns, your cities, from mines and factories, or leaving the plough, to this city. You come out of the little world of your daily struggle for life, and of your struggle for Germany and for our nation to experience this feeling for once: Now we are together, we are with him and he is with us, and now we are Germany!³⁷

Considered intellectually, this speech is rubbish. Considered emotionally, its effect was overwhelming. Hitler was using words to reinforce the effect which the music, the banners, the searchlights, and the processions had already induced. He was both arousing his audience and making them experience the same, or closely similar emotions, simultaneously. Over and over again, Hitler stressed the feeling of unity: unity with him, unity with each other. The language which Hitler used is not the conceptual language which is used for abstract thought or exchange of information. It is rhetoric of a hypnotic persuasiveness, exploiting the basic human need to belong; to feel part of a social group; to be united with one’s fellow countrymen. In spite of his harsh voice and his vulgar turns of speech, Hitler’s incantatory style affected crowds in rather the same way as can some music. It looks as if Rousseau was right when, in the passage already quoted from Maurice Cranston’s biography, he affirmed that ‘Earliest languages… were chanted; they were melodic and poetic rather than prosaic and practical.’³⁸

Hitler’s adoration of Wagner’s music began early in his life and persisted until his own Götterdämmerung-like finale. If he became depressed his friend and financial backer Hanfstaengl, who was also a pianist, would play some Wagner for him and he would respond ‘as to an energizing drug’.³⁹ It is interesting that Hitler’s favourite composer is the one most generally recognized to be able to overwhelm people emotionally, for this is what Hitler did with his speeches. There must be people still living who heard Hitler speak who look back upon their emotional response to his oratory with horror. I guess that only an exceptionally detached, independent-minded intellectual could have attended events like the Nuremberg rallies without being temporarily swept off his feet.

Today, we are beginning to understand some of the physiological mechanisms by means of which music affects us. But the human brain is immensely complex and our knowledge of how music impinges upon it is incomplete and elementary. We know that how the brain develops is partly determined by the external stimuli to which it is exposed. It would not surprise me to learn that exposure to music with a reasonably complicated structure facilitates the establishment of neural networks which improve cerebral function. This has not yet been demonstrated; but we can affirm with confidence that Plato and Aristotle were right. Music is a powerful instrument of education which can be used for good or ill, and we should ensure that everyone in our society is given the opportunity of participating in a wide range of different kinds of music.