Two books on music and the brain

Two books on music and the brain:
One holds up, the other doesn't

DAN COREN

A neurological researcher named Jill Bolte Taylor recently recounted her recovery from a massive stroke. And last month a New Yorker article titled “The Eureka Hunt” explored the nature of sudden intuitive insights. This flurry of media items about brain function and cognition stimulated me to revisit two recent provocative books about music and the brain: Daniel Levitin’s This Is Your Brain on Music and Oliver Sacks’s Musicophilia.

More than anything else, it is Levitin’s eagerness to share his knowledge— his infectious love of his topic— that sustains This Is Your Brain on Music. Levitin also possesses the rare ability to explain complex technical material in layman’s terms. His treatment of musical pitch in the opening chapter of the book, “What is Music,” is the best I’ve seen anywhere about this elusive topic.

That being said, I find that, with the exception of the excellent opening chapter, his book doesn't hold up well to renewed acquaintance.

A weak example from Haydn

Levitin’s roots are in rock and jazz, and he rarely ventures into the world of classical music. The few times that he does are painfully inept.

On pages 92-93 of the paperback edition, for example, Levitin offers a discussion of the tune that gives Haydn’s 94th Symphony its nickname, the “Surprise”— the opening of the slow movement. (Follow this link to hear the whole movement, as well as several other free samples from the online music service Rhapsody. )

It is one of music’s most mysterious qualities that certain passages maintain their ability to astonish and delight even though you’ve heard them dozens of times. But of all the examples of this phenomenon that Levitin could have chosen, this tune strikes me as childishly inane. It’s the musical equivalent of sneaking up behind somebody and shouting, ”Boo!”

Besides, Levitin’s plodding description of the tune, when it’s not too confusing to follow, is simply wrong. He doesn’t, for example, seem able to distinguish between the intervals of an octave and a fifth.

Between questionable and inaccurate

Later (p. 234), Levitin unaccountably uses Mahler’s Fifth Symphony— a work that, even by the standards of Mahler’s own earlier symphonies, is a tough work even for a Mahler aficionado like me to comprehend— as an example of symphonic normality. Again, practically every statement Levitin makes about Mahler’s music is somewhere between questionable and blatantly inaccurate.

(I’m not the only one who has noticed this passage. Follow this link, search for “Mahler’s Fifth,” and you’ll find a discussion that nails Levitin for his inaccuracies.)

Think about it. How did passages like these get into an allegedly scientific book on music? If nothing else, they illustrate yet again the low level to which the standards of editing have fallen in today’s publishing world. I can’t help wondering if Levitin treats scientific material with the same intellectual sloppiness as he does music.

Oliver Sacks, the quiet observer

If you’re are a musician like me, or a would-be musician who has always yearned for greater gifts— a better ear, more technique, the ability to compose (and I can’t think of any musical acquaintances, no matter how talented, who don’t feel some of that yearning)— the lesson of Oliver Sacks’s Musicophilia is the old adage, “Be careful what you wish for.”

Sacks has been writing for decades about the terrible ways that the human brain can go wrong. While Levitin jumps around like a hypermanic kid who has just discovered science for the first time, Sacks’s style in Musicophilia remains one of quiet, compassionate detachment.

Again and again, Sachs gently relates stories in which musical talents— sometimes more a curse than a gift— took over the minds of people whose brains were compromised in one way or another, often by the depredations of aging. And he makes the compelling case that the deepest musical responses, even in people who never were particularly “musical” (whatever that means) earlier in life, often persist long after dementia has robbed its victims of just about everything else.

Atypically, Sacks here and there injects comments about his own mortality and about his own complicated and at times painful love for music. If you don’t find Musicophilia to be as dark and frightening as it is moving, that’s probably because you’re still young enough to think yourself immortal.

A fictitious stand-in

One of the main characters in Richard Powers’s 2006 novel The Echo Maker— the cognitive neurologist, Gerald Weber— struck me as a very thinly disguised stand-in for Oliver Sacks. Sacks/Weber doesn’t come off well in the novel; he is consumed with self-doubt, painfully aware that his mode of observation is quickly being displaced by more precise observational techniques.

Sacks himself, in his preface to Musicophilia, writes as if he had read The Echo Maker. New technologies, he says, “allow us to see the living brain as people listen to … music. … These new insights of neuroscience are exciting beyond measure, but there is a … danger … that the simple art of observation may be lost.”

If I were Sacks, I wouldn’t get too worried just yet. The New Yorker article I cited above shows very clearly that, despite what seems to be an inexhaustible supply of suggestive studies and speculation, our sum of hard knowledge about how the brain works and how it processes music can be summarized thus:

• The right and left side of the brain control different sorts of things (the right is more intuitive, the left more analytical) but their collaboration is synergetic and only partially understood.

• Certain stimuli are associated with increased neural activity and blood flow to specific parts of the brain.

Don’t get me wrong. In my heart I believe that, if only we had sufficient knowledge, everything having to do with the brain would, in fact, turn out to be completely determined by quantifiable neurochemical reactions. But I quickly get tired of reading about intriguing technical data that might, or might not, actually mean something. Here is an all-too-typical passage from This Is Your Brain on Music:

“Recent results studying the electrophysical responses of humans and monkeys to … chords that sound dissonant by virtue of their frequency ratios … show that neurons in the primary auditory cortex … synchronize their firing rates during dissonant chords, but not during consonant chords. Why that would create a preference for consonance is not yet clear.”

For now, I’ll take Sacks’s thoughtful, lucidly written musings any day.



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