The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature by Daniel J. Levitin Read Free Book Online Page B

Feel Good)” may not have changed the course of human history, but it has been enjoyed by millions of people over many millions of hours. To the extent that we are the sum total of all our life’s experiences, it has become a part of our thoughts, and (as neuroscientists know) that means a part of the very wiring of our brains.
    But that is not the same as guiding human destiny. The World in Six Songs is the story of just how music has changed the course of human civilization, in fact, the story of how it made societies and civilizations possible. Other art forms—poetry, sculpture, literature, film, and painting—can also fit into these functional categories, but this is the story of music and its primacy in shaping human nature. Through a process of co-evolution of brains and music, through the structures throughout our cortex and neocortex, from our brain stem to the prefrontal cortex, from the limbic system to the cerebellum, music uniquely insinuates itself into our heads. It does this in six distinctive ways, each of them with its own evolutionary basis.
     
     
     
    I attended the annual meeting of Kindermusik teachers this summer. Parents, children, and teachers came from more than sixty countries to participate in workshops and listen to lectures. The highlight of the conference for me was the music before the keynote speech. Fifty young children, between the ages of four and twelve, sang this song, based on a traditional German folk song, accompanied with syncopated clapping and synchronized movement:
    All things shall perish from under the sky
Music alone shall live
Music alone shall live
Music alone shall live
Never to die.
     
    Pairs of children from different countries took turns at the microphone, singing lines from the song in their native languages: Cantonese, Japanese, Romanian, !Xotha, Portuguese, Arabic, with each stanza ending in the English refrain in three-part harmony:
    “Music alone shall live, never to die.”
    And the music that will never die has been with humans since we first became humans. It has shaped the world through six kinds of songs: friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion, and love.

CHAPTER 2
     
    Friendship or “War (What Is It Good For?)”
     
    I. It is the near twilight hour, the fog hanging thick, close to the ground like a heavy, leaden weight. Imagine that you’re an early human, sleeping with your villagers, huddled together on the ground, near the dying embers of the fire circle. First there is a feeling that disturbs your sleep—not all of your group is roused, but you notice that a few others were also disturbed—by a vibration more than a sound. And you wonder: Was it real or a dream? Rumbling, a boom-boom-ka-boom like distant thunder, like rocks tumbling. The earth shakes and then the sound comes closer, louder; your body is being assaulted. Drums are coming toward you, a purposeful, synchronized stampede, like fifty rhinoceroses, coordinated, all of one mind, as though they have devised a terrible, directed plan for attack and total destruction. It has to be real, you think, but it is a sound you’ve never heard before. What starts as a quiver of apprehension turns into collective fits of shaking as all of your family and friends wake and tremble with helplessness, all the gumption draining out of your bodies before you even know what is going on. The terrifying synchrony of it, the bone-shaking intensity of it, the sheer loudness. Do you run or prepare to fight? You sit frozen, in awe, paralyzed. What in the world is happening? As they crest the hill, you see them, and for a brief moment before the deafening sounds knock you senseless you see a band of warriors banging on drums in an eerie demonstration of coordinated, malevolent power.
    Throughout history, tribes often attacked their enemies stealthily, in the dead of night while their opponents slept. Clever tribespeople, lucky recipients of a bit more cognitive capacity than their neighbors (thanks