The World in Six Songs, Part One

By Daniel Levitin
August 26th, 2008

Part One

Taking it from the top

or “The Hills Are Alive…”

On my desk right now I have a stack of music CDs that couldn’t be more different: a eighteenth-century opera by Marin Marais whose lyrics describe the gory details of a surgical operation; a North African griot singing a song, offered to businessmen passing by in the hopes of securing a handout; a piece written 185 years ago that requires 120 musicians to perform it properly, each of them reading a very specific and inviolable part off of a page (Beethoven’s Symphony no. 9). Also in the pile: forty minutes of groans and shrieks made by humpback whales in the Pacific; a North Indian raga accompanied by electric guitar and drum machine; a Peruvian Andes vocal chorus of how to make a water jug. Would you believe an ode to the gustatory pleasures of homegrown tomatoes?

Plant ‘em in the spring eat ‘em in the summer
All winter with out ‘em’s a culinary bummer
I forget all about all the sweatin’ & diggin’
Every time I go out & pick me a big ‘un
Homegrown tomatoes, homegrown tomatoes
What’d life be without homegrown tomatoes?
Only two things that money can’t buy
That’s true love & homegrown tomatoes.

[Guy Clark]

That all these are music may seem self- evident to some, or the stuff of argument to others. Many of our parents or grandparents or children say that the music we listen to isn’t music at all, it’s just noise. Noise by definition is a set of sounds that are random, confused, or uninterpretable. Could it be that all sound is potentially musical if only we could understand its internal structure, its organization? This is what the composer Edgar Varèse was driving at when he famously defined music as “organized sound”—what sounds like noise to one person is music to another, and vice versa. In other words, one man’s Mozart is another’s Madonna, one person’s Prince is another’s Purcell, Parton, or Parker. Perhaps there is a key to understanding what is common to all these collections of sounds, and to what has driven humans since the beginning to engage with them so deeply as not just sound but music.

Music is characterized both by its ubiquity and its antiquity, as the musicologist David Huron notes. There is no known culture now or anytime in the past that lacks it, and some of the oldest human- made artifacts found at archaeological sites are musical instruments. Music is important in the daily lives of most people in the world, and has been throughout human history. Anyone who wants to understand human nature, the interaction between brain and culture, between evolution and society, has to take a close look at the role that music has held in the lives of humans, at the way that music and people coevolved. Musicologists, archaeologists, and psychologists have danced around the topic, but until now, no one has brought all of these disciplines together to form a coherent account of the impact music has had on the course of our social history. This book is a lot like making a family tree, a tree of musical themes that have shaped our ancestors’ lives: their working days, their sleepless nights—the soundtrack of civilization.

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