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I have used the word song as a convenient shorthand and, in its most inclusive sense, as a stand- in for music in all its forms, to refer to any music that people make, with or without melody, with or without lyrics. I’m particularly interested in that portion of musical compositions that people remember, carry around in their heads long after the sound has died out, sounds that people try to repeat later in time, to play for others; the sounds that comfort them, invigorate them, and draw them closer together. I confess that I unwittingly came to this project with the bias that the best songs become popular and are sung by many. Maybe my background in the music industry put that bias in place. After all, “Happy Birthday” has been translated into nearly every language on earth (even into Klingon, as fans of Star Trek: The Next Generation can attest; the song is called “qoSlIj DatIvjaj”).

Pete Seeger set me straight on this, telling me about how in some cultures, the best songs are meant to be sung and played for only one other person! Seeger is the great folk singer- songwriter who penned such songs as “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”, “If I Had a Hammer,” and “Turn, Turn, Turn” (the latter with lyrics taken from Ecclesiastes).

“Among American Indians,” Seeger explained, “a young man got his eye on a girl and he would make a reed flute and compose a melody. And when she came down to get a pail of water at the brook, he would hide in the weeds and play her his tune. If she liked it, she followed and saw where things led. But it was her special tune. A tune wasn’t thought of as being free for everybody. It belonged to one person. You might sing somebody’s song after they’re dead to recall them, but each person had a private song. And of course today, many small groups feel their song belongs to them and they’re not happy when it becomes something that belongs to everybody.”

The fact is we are all biased to some degree by our specific life history and culture. I carry the biases of an American male growing up in California in the 1950s and 1960s. But I was lucky to have been exposed to a wide variety of music. My parents took me to see ballet and musicals before I was five, and through them (The Nutcracker and Flower Drum Song) I gained an early appreciation for Eastern scales and intervals—neuroscientists now believe that such early exposure to other tonal systems is important for later appreciation of music outside one’s own culture.

Just as all of us can acquire any of the world’s languages as young children if we are exposed to them, so too can our brains learn to extract the rules and the structures of any of the world’s musics if we’re exposed to them early enough. This doesn’t mean that we can’t learn to speak other languages later in life, or learn to appreciate other musics, but if we encounter them as young children, we develop a natural way of processing them because our brains literally wire themselves up to the sounds of these early experiences. Through my father I developed a love of big bands and swing, through my mother a love of piano music and Broadway standards. My mother’s father loved Cuban and Latin music, as well as Eastern European folk songs. Hearing Johnny Cash on the radio when I was six conditioned me for country, blues, bluegrass, and folk music.

A sentiment that I’ve heard many times is that classical music cannot be compared to anything else. “How can you honestly say that that repetitive, loud garbage called rock and roll is even close to the sublime music of the great masters?” To take this position is to ignore the inconvenient fact that a major source of joy and inspiration for the great masters themselves was the “common” popular music of their day. Mozart, Brahms, and even great-grandaddy Bach took many of their melodic ideas from ballads, bards, European folk music, and children’s songs. Good melody (let alone rhythm) knows no boundaries of class, education, or upbringing.

 

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