The rudiments of music were taken from nature by prehistoric man, and over the years they have become more and more woven into our genes, says musicologist Michael Spitzer. He shows how we did that in his interesting book 'The Musical Man' by means of a journey through time.
Music is an important part of my life. The radio is always on at home and I go to a lot of concerts and festivals. Although I don't play an instrument, I still dare to call myself musical. Singing along with my favorite bands out loud and (somewhat) clean is certainly fine.
The book 'The Musical Man' by musicologist Michael Spitzer therefore seemed like a perfect fit for me. Spitzer, professor of music at the University of Liverpool, promises to take the reader on a thrilling journey through the history of music from prehistoric times to the present day, underpinned by scientific discoveries that have led to our current musical culture. An impressive promise, which the musicologist ultimately partly succeeds in.
Emotion
It is fascinating to read that music is intertwined with our doings on many levels, and how closely emotions and music are connected. But the pure history is also interesting and provides new insights. For example, that the inspiration for our music often comes from nature and that prehistoric man made the first rhythms by hitting flints together. And how the receptors with which fish detect movement resemble the way our hearing centers process sounds.
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Unfortunately, Spitzer has a tendency to get bogged down in details here and there. For example, he should have left out the explanation of all ancient Indian musical terms, and the fifty-page first chapter about the underlying vision of the book is very extensive. The book only really gets going after this, when the musicologist starts talking about the musicality that we develop during our lives. Here he describes special scientific discoveries, such as the biological differences in the brains of people who actively play music themselves and people who do not. And how as young people we listen to music that boosts our mood – we put on angry music when we are grumpy – while as older people we do just the opposite, and listen to happy music when we are sad.
Music theory
While reading, you notice that Spitzer assumes a certain music-theoretical knowledge of the reader. For someone who does not play an instrument and actually never does anything with music notation, it is not always clear what he is talking about. This may also be due to his obvious strong preference for classical music. He sometimes explains terms such as thirds, fifths and portamento, and sometimes he does not, and the examples he mentions are almost always from the classical domain, so that as a relative layman you cannot always follow the reasoning.
Still, there are enough interesting and surprising parts in De Muzikale Mens that make you forget the more difficult parts. Spitzer knows how to illustrate how music plays a very important role throughout history. According to the musicologist, this probably started with earlier hunter-gatherer peoples who sang an apparently disorganized stream of words and sounds to each other to communicate over longer distances. But as humans settled down, they were able to develop larger instruments and music increasingly took on a fixed form and social function.
This developed further and can be traced through history through remains found from musical instruments and the first tentative forms of musical notation. It is funny to see how many drawings of music-making people can be found in earlier times of peace and progress and more remains of instruments are also found, while times of war leave fewer musical traces. And although the exact development is of course difficult to trace, Spitzer follows the idea that music has developed through Egyptian, Greek and Jewish peoples and religions, among other things, into a form that we would now reasonably recognize.
Imitating composers
In addition to the past, he also takes an interesting look at the future. It may well be full of algorithms that create personal songs based on our music taste and artificial intelligence that imitate the great composers of the past and present. Will musicians become redundant? Fortunately, Spitzer knows how to reassure himself and us:the music that the machines make is (still) capable of evoking the same emotions as music composed by humans.
Spitzer is concerned that fewer and fewer people are making music themselves, but are only listening to it 'passively', and is also afraid that artificial intelligence may continue that trend. But I don't think he has anything to fear, because that listening experience is almost never really passive. Sing along, move your head to the beat – even if you're sitting in a chair listening to a concert, the music moves you.
Whatever music will look like in the future, I think this book at least makes it clear that music is a vital part of our history and that we really won't just lose this part. In any case, I will contribute to that. At the next concert I will sing and dance as loud as possible, and try to experience the music as our ancestors did.