The Musical Human: A History of Life on Earthby Michael Spitzer (Music 780.9 Spi)
When we talk about music history
books, we’re usually not going particularly far back in history. Most general
music histories only trace back to the earliest history we have of written
music, which is to say western civilization’s written music history, and there
just isn’t a lot of written music that’s survived that’s much older than the
most recent millennium. Music, which is of course literally made of sound and
dissipates immediately after it is played, relied on oral history before that,
and although we can find the occasional ancient flute-like instrument, we know
almost nothing about the music that might have been played before notation. And
written music is lacking, too: the further you go back, the less we understand
the notational systems that were used, and there are likely rhythms and
ornamentations associated with some of the earliest plainchant music that we
simply don’t know about. Yet we know that music is an important part of our
society now, and that it seemed to have a similar cultural weight in previous
eras, so it’s likely that it played an important role farther back than we can
normally look, even if it remains invisible to us, unlike early tools and cave
paintings.
If music is anything like other
forms of expression, from painting to poetry to sculpture, it seems likely that
it played important roles in the lives of early humans, too, but how do we look
for it? Professor Michael Spitzer from the University of Liverpool has
published a book that attempts to look for signs of music further back in time
than other music histories have dared to tread. It’s called The Musical Human: A History of Life on Earth, and
you can borrow it from Polley. There’s nothing quite like it, and the writing
style keeps things engaging, too, while we search for the musical mysteries in
our collective past.
The book is divided into three main
parts: “Life,” History,” and “Evolution.” The first chapter, named “Voyager”
after the spacecraft carrying a record of sounds from our planet deep into
space, acts as somewhat of an introduction to the book and its format. We’re
about to take an unusual path into history, dipping further back into time in
three stages, rather than the typical history book that starts in ancient times
and progresses toward the present. This is because of the problem I mentioned
earlier — we simply can’t look very far into music history using our
conventional methods of historical research. There is no physical remnant of
music other than instruments and music notation in more recent times and mostly
western parts of the world, and then the occasional instrument (or what appears
to us to be an instrument or two) further into “prehistory,” or the
pre-civilization part of our past. In “Voyager,” Spitzer starts by identifying
what a person can discern about how our music sounds from looking at music
notation, going increasingly further back in time. The further you go, our
forms of notation lack descriptions of tempo, dynamics, phrasing, expression,
rhythm, and harmony. It’s likely that there were performance practices in place
for the music contained in these written documents that accounted for some or
all of these missing nuances, but we’ll likely never know. This is going to be
a challenging subject.
So Spitzer has chosen three general
lines of attack. In Part One, “Life,” he explores the present-day conditions of
music, and what we understand about music’s global commonalities and regional
particularities. In this section, he stays mostly within the “recording era” of
the last century or so to find important principles and associations that we
can travel further back in time with in Part Two, “History.” So what are a few
of these important principles? In terms of interrelationships between people,
he finds that group creativity is generally more common than individual
creativity in the creation of music: outside of the Western composer tradition,
music generally seems to come from group effort, which we see in various forms
of world music and within our own pop bands today. The social implications of
music reach farther than composing and performing, of course: he observes the
various ways which music accompanies all of us through our days in modern life,
whether we are making it ourselves or not. Young folks making music with the
latest digital technologies still find it to be a social activity, connecting
with people in person and online. Music becomes the soundtrack in our
workplaces and stores. In folk traditions of recent history, we had various
kinds of songs made to lend themselves to different situations, from religious
ceremonies to work songs to songs about romantic relationships or mourning that
we can all identify with at different times, and contemporary music still
contains these messages and impulses, even if it’s marketed under different
kinds of contemporary genre names.
Other parts of Spitzer’s
speculations into deeper history will require examining some biological
concepts, so he introduces the present-day understanding of some of these
ideas, too: Music can influence our emotions, and in doing so it also has
measurable effects on things changing the collective heart rates of audiences.
We perceive musical pitches as going “up” or “down,” while there isn’t really a
physical correlate for the idea, but he looks for one in the development of the
Organ of Corti in our ears, which he presents as a functional refinement of the
lateral line found in fish. Now we can say that music relates to motion and
emotion!
The writing style of the book
appeals to me, but it might not be for everyone. In attempting to dive into
musical prehistory, the author draws from anecdotes throughout human experience
and musical traditions, and in doing so, it can feel like you’re in the
narrative equivalent of a street race course. I enjoyed speeding around all of
these cultural corners, but if you ever start to feel lost, he occasionally
slows down to summarize where we’ve gone so far, and where we’re about to go
with what we’ve learned.
Keep this in mind as you dive into
the middle part of the book, “History,” where the book travels between
different places and eras at breakneck speed. By music history standards, this
section starts mostly in prehistory, where we’ve tried to make sense of what
music might have been like by looking at remnants of musical instruments
(concepts like the harp being developed out of the hunting bow, for example).
Here, Spitzer looks for distinctions in the kinds of music that might have been
made by different kinds of human societies like hunter-gatherers that traveled
versus early agricultural areas that were settled, mostly by looking at the
kinds of instruments and literary or pictorial representations of music they
left behind. For readers who (like me) have mostly a background in the history
of the Western musical tradition, there is a lot of material here about music
from the historical record that’s totally new information. From there, we move
around a lot, but gradually pull toward present time again, collecting cycles
of information that show how music was used by different cultures and
conquering empires over time, what changed and what remained the same.
The final section, “Evolution,” is
somewhat speculative by nature, but it’s a fascinating look into the truly
ancient past of music, when it might not have been “music” in the way we think
of it now, but instead a spectrum of useful sounds for various animals. Spitzer
attempts to find the point at which early humankind might have embraced music
in a manner that would still be recognizable to us. Then he takes us into the
speculative future as well, where perhaps machines or artificial intelligences
will make music that transcends our current conception of its possibilities.
He ends with a kind of summary of
the threads that have come through this whirlwind of a book, “eleven lessons on
music’s nature.” If you’ve found yourself occasionally lost amidst the many
anecdotes in this book, you’ll find Spitzer’s intended takeaways presented here
in a more direct format. I found it fun that he boiled things down to eleven
“lessons,” which presumably would start to repeat again at the octave if there
were a 12th. Even though I felt like I was comfortably following along
throughout, there are so many concepts afoot that this is an effective way to
draw out some primary themes for final consideration.
Back to the beginning of the book,
Spitzer lays out a “Big Idea” that he intends to argue for throughout the book.
This is mostly about the idea of the “nature of music” and humankind’s
relationship to — or betrayal of — that nature. And in the end, I don’t know that
he successfully makes his case, at least for me. Truth be told, I don’t
especially care about a fundamental “nature of music,” and to the extent that
music is an extension of the human experience, I don’t think we can betray it,
either. But for me, reading through the many
historical twists and turns in this book is more satisfying than discovering a
unified field theory of music would be, anyway.
(If you enjoy this, you may also
wish to try A Million Years of Music: The Emergence of Human Modernity
by Gary Tomlinson or Music: A Subversive History by Ted Giola.)
( publisher’s official The Musical Human web page ) | ( Wikipedia entry
for Michael Spitzer )
Recommended
by Scott S.
Polley Music Library
Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?
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