The World in Six Songs, Part Two

By Daniel Levitin
August 26th, 2008

Part Two

Much of the world’s music is now available on compact disc, or on the medium that is rapidly replacing it, digitized sound files on computers (generically—and somewhat inaccurately—referred to as MP3s). We live in a time of unprecedented access to music. Virtually every song ever recorded in the history of the world is available on the Internet somewhere—for free. And although recorded music represents only a small proportion of all the music that has ever been sung, played, and heard, there is so much of it—estimates suggest 10 million songs or more—that recorded music is as good a place as any to start to talk about the music of the world.

Thanks to intrepid musicologists and anthropologists, even rare, indigenous, and preindustrial music is now available to us. Cultures that have been cut off from industrialization and Western influence have had their music preserved, and by their own accounts, it may have been unchanged for many centuries, giving us a window into the music of our ancestors. The more I listen to music like this and to Western artists that are new to me, the more conscious I become of how large music is and how much there is to know.

The diversity of our musical legacy includes songs that tell stories about people, such as “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” or “Cruella De Vil”; there’s a catchy song about a murderous psychopath who kills the judge at his own trial; songs exhorting us to buy this meat product and not that (Armour hotdogs versus Oscar Mayer wieners); a song promising to keep a promise; a song mourning the loss of a parent; music made on instruments believed to be one thousand years old and on instruments invented just this week; music played on power tools; an album of Christmas carols sung by frogs; songs sung to enact social and political change; the fictional Borat singing the equally fictional national anthem of Kazakhstan, boasting about his country’s mining industry:

Kazakhstan greatest country in the world
All other countries are run by little girls
Kazakhstan Number One exporter of Potassium
All other countries have inferior Potassium

 

and a song about suburban noise pollution:

Here comes the dirt bike
Beware of the dirt bike…
Brainwashing dirt bike
Ground-shaking dirt bike
Mind-bending dirt bike
In control
Soul-crushing dirt bike.

[They Might Be Giants]

In spite of all this diversity, I have come to believe that there are basically six kinds of songs, six ways that we use music in our lives, six broad categories of music. No less. I have been making and studying music for most of my life—I had a career producing pop and rock records for a number of years and now I direct a research laboratory studying music, evolution, and the brain. Yet I was concerned when I started this project that I might be blinkered. I didn’t want to discover I was being ego- or ethnocentric. I didn’t want to be culturally biased, or fall prey to any of a number of other insidious biases of gender, genre, or generation, or even pitch bias or rhythm bias. So I asked a number of musician and scientist friends what they thought all music has in common.

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