Thursday, November 25, 2004

 
Somehow this post of several days ago was dated Jan 2006. It preceded, I think, the NRO stuff about Pinker 'n genetics....

Music of the Anglospheres
Or: Spandrel Time*
Or: "We are the hollow men"**

Derb's Nov 22, 2001 piece, "Sing, con Allegria!" concludes with, "There you have the proof: we were meant to sing, in our very cells and fibers. Postindustrial civilization, which neither sings nor dances, leaves hollow places in our spirit. So sing! — if only while driving your car." The Nov 12, 2004 issue of *Science* magazine(sorry- paid link) carried a 3 page article, "Seeking the Key to Music" in its "News Focus" section: "...In 1997, cognitive scientist Pinker, then of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, threw down the gauntlet in his book *How the Mind Works*, when he suggested that music itself played no adaptive role in human evolution. Rather, Pinker argued , music was 'auditory cheesecake,' a byproduct of natural selection that just happened to 'tickle the sensitive spots' of other truly adaptive functions....Music, Pinker maintained, is what the late paleoontologist Stephen Jay Gould called a 'spandrel,' after the decorative but nonfunctional spaces left by arches in Gothic buildings." Much of the rest of the article is devoted to fleshing out the observation that, "But many researchers disagree, arguing that music clearly had an evolutionary role." Evidence and speculation based on 32,000 year old bone flutes, the 1000 song repertoire(what, no "Top Forty"?-a thousand song set could make hearts ache and a drowsy numbness pain)of nightingales, human maternal speech, a 500,000 year old circle of hand axes in Sussex , U.K.(The authors wisely refrained from postulating a direct line of descent going from hand axes to the modern "ax"(Brit: axe)or guitar, or that unskilled juvenile hominids may have put on exhibitions of air, er, rock. I, obviously, did not.) A study was also cited, "...which aimed to look at the effects of music in a social setting, the endorphin levels of churchgoers who attended Anglican services with and without singing, were monitored by indirect methods that measured tolerance to pain. (Measuring endorphins directly requires an invasive lumbar puncture.)[The authors also avoided any reference to the band, "Spinal Tap"]After services, parishoners who had sung were able to endure having a fully inflated blood pressure cuff on their arms for significantly longer than those who had not sung."["I vow to thee my brachial artery"?]A suggestion is made that,"...music might have put groups of hominids into a collective endorphin high, making them feel positively disposed disposed towards their fellow hominids-and thus more likely to cooperate and survive."
Sadly most ancient music has not survived, although one suspects that before Martin Luther's hit, there were many hymns that went something like, "Ein feste burg ist unser Baal."
Incredibly,(this is Science magazine, not the left-leaning Scientific American)there is not even a nod to the use of song in that human social activity which involves favorable disposition to ones' people or comrades and antipathy to their enemies: war. If only from the movies, virtually anyone can summon up something like a google of memories-from the Welsh(more like monkeys than men and who sing too much according to a tongue-in-cheek ditty cited by Derb)and Zulus singing in "Zulu," to the "Dessauer Marsch"(Here's to you my friend, and you, my friend....")in the submarine epic(cited on this site with respect to dubbing in the Sex Pistols' "Sub Mission")"The Enemy Below." I should note that I found the tune for "I vow to thee my country," at least as played on a web wav sans lyrics to be uninspiring -tho plenty of other Brit songs found at some of the same sites did release a few endorphins here.
While it may be indicative of my own lack of musical taste, one of my earliest(and vaguer) memories of loving a song involved some schlocky movie with, I think, some "Dondi" war time adoption story line-I didn't give a crap about the lil' orphan but was bowled over by(again, I think)the U.S. Marine Corps Hymn(the shores of Tripoli an' all that). I'm surely not alone in this(one wonders what measurements one could get from veterans of the "greatest generation" upon hearing that, and other, hymns), tho Mr. Derbyshire does ("The Only Hope for Elian"2000)quote Clemenceau: ""Military law is to law as military music is to music". -getting late

*, **: Apologies to Mr. Derbyshire, whose endorphins haven't been released by the works of Lillian Hellman(reminds me; gotta' check for a Wav of "The Internationale") or TS Eliot.

posted by James at 9:01 PM