THE SELECTION of Daniel Barenboim as this year’s Reith lecturer represents yet another homage to music as a great cultural force. As Plato said: “Music uses sound to educate the soul in virtue” and most educated persons have since concurred. To a scientist, though, music can appear as a throwback to a primeval, swampy stage of human evolution.
Consider a recent paper written by Dr Mario Mendez, a neurologist at the University of California. Dr Mendez was describing a patient who, in his fifties, had suffered a stroke that crippled his understanding of language. So, for example, the patient could not understand a simple request such as “touch your chin”. But after his stroke, the patient, who had been unmusical, discovered a passion for music, and the attending of concerts became his main activity. So deep was his newfound love of music that he would often answer Dr Mendez’s questions by breaking into song. It was as if, following his brain damage, the patient had traded language for music.
Autistic people seem to have made a related trade. The greatest determinant of musicality is pitch: the better your pitch, the more likely you are to enjoy music. And perfect pitch (the ability to sing a note to order) is rare among adults — perhaps only 1 in 10,000 has it. Yet perfect pitch is common among the autistic, as if they had traded emotional empathy for music.
And musical savants are not rare. In his book Musical Savants: Exceptional Skill in the Mentally Retarded, Leon Miller, of the University of Illinois, described 13 people who were indeed mentally retarded. Typically, their IQs and social skills were so rudimentary that they could not speak or dress themselves. But musically they were gifted, not only playing well but also composing creatively. And, typically, they had perfect pitch.
The best explanation for these unexpected findings comes from baby talk.We all, when we talk to babies, instinctively use a cootchy-coo language that is essentially musical. We do so because babies do not understand words but they do understand pitch and the other elements of song — “the melody is the message”, as Dr Anne Fernald says. Dr Fernald, a psychologist at Stanford University, has shown that babies respond appropriately, with smiles or frowns, to praise or admonishment when delivered in baby talk, even if the language is foreign. “What a good girl!”, delivered in French, provokes a happy smile in an English nursery.
And singing is even better. Babies are even more attentive to songs than to baby talk, and studies on mothers have shown that, in the privacy of their homes, 100 per cent of mothers — even the unmusical ones — sing to their babies because singing so effectively influences babies’ moods.
And the babies respond because, as Jenny Saffron of the University of Rochester, New York, has shown, we humans are born with perfect pitch. But babies lose their perfect pitch when language kicks in. We can see, therefore, how musical savants might arise, because intelligence and language are separate from music. So we can also see that, paradoxically, most adults with perfect pitch have had to relearn it through training.
Biologically, perfect pitch and musical composition are no big deal. Songbirds have perfect pitch and, despite their tiny brains, they can be good composers, employing many of the repetitions that characterise human music such as refrains, rhymes and reprises. So the winter wren will, from the adults around him, learn a set of songs that he will then dissect into shorter phrases to rearrange into thousands of different songs. The chocolate-backed kingfisher moves up and down its own scale, while the appropriately named music wren sings with a near-perfect scale.
And Neanderthals, too, may have had perfect pitch. In The Singing Neanderthals, Steven Mithen, an archaeologist at Reading University, argues that Neanderthals sang but did not speak, and that it was Homo sapiens’s development of language about 100-200 thousand years ago that allowed us to create the superior skills that, in their turn, allowed us to drive the Neanderthals into extinction. Thus music may not only not be of great cultural significance, it might even be an evolutionary hindrance, which may explain why babies discard perfect pitch.
Music still has its human uses, of course, but they are emotional, not intellectual. Music is certainly the food of sex, as the young understand. Geoffrey Miller, of the University of New Mexico, has examined the gender and age of the singers of 6,000 recent jazz, rock and classical albums, and showed that 90 per cent of commercial songs are produced by males, and that their peak age of production is 30 (the peak age for male success in coition, apparently). And music facilitates other drives: religions use music to sustain faith and to suspend disbelief, as do dictators — Hitler and Stalin were keen on music but Churchill and Roosevelt were largely indifferent.
High intelligence and high articulacy can, of course, coexist with high musicality, but none of these are ethical goods, so unless we are to revere the moral examples of songbirds and dictators, we must conclude that Plato was wrong and that music does not educate the soul in virtue but, rather, in lust and superstition. And Barenboim’s claim that “making music and playing it in an orchestra is the best way to understand democracy” may not survive scrutiny either. Wagner and Karajan would have disagreed.
