At least, that’s how I want to say it after reading Robert Jourdain’s Music, The Brain, and Ecstasy: How Music Captures our Imagination. Jourdain explores the phenomenon of music from seemingly every angle—the anatomy of the ear, the neurology of hearing, the physics of sound, the mathematics of harmony, the art and craft of composition, and the psychology of performance—integrating all theses fields of study to explain music’s power to transport the listener.
“Music makes us larger than we really are,” he writes, “and the world more orderly than it really is. We respond, not just to the beauty of the sustained deep relations that are revealed, but also to the fact of our perceiving them. As our brains are thrown into overdrive, we feel our very existence expand and realize that we can be more than we normally are, and the world is more than it seems.”
Listening to Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 certainly has that effect on me, and, mysteriously enough, it continues to have that effect, no matter how often I hear it.
Jourdain argues that music "works" on us by triggering deep physiological responses in our neurological structures that are evolutionarily “trained” to perceive subtle layers in sonic relations—the inner relationships, that is, between different sounds as they occur in an organized sequence. He suggests that this ability is the result of eons of evolution that refined our sensitivity to sonic relations, as a way of heightening our chances of survival. As a result, our brains are structurally attuned to the subtle (and often not-so subtle) relationships between sounds that well-crafted music presents us with. As a result, music has a unique ability to engage both the right and left hemispheres of our brains at once, stimulating pleasure both through its orderly structure, and through its close association with memories, emotion, and sensory arousal.
This physiological response, he goes on to suggest, interacts on a deep subconscious level with our specific cultural conditioning, which we use to make meaning out of the organized sounds of a musical performance. Our culture trains us to expect certain things of the music we hear, prompting reactions of delight (or disgust) as those expectations are met and/or subverted. At the same time, our bodies resonate physically with the rhythmic patterns of music, responding kinesthetically to the elegant structure it imposes on time. All of these responses—the neurological, psychological, kinesthetic, and cultural—he argues, were inadvertently wired into the human animal, as evolutionary processes naturally selected certain traits that better-fitted us for survival, helping us to avoid being eaten by the proverbial lion on the primordial savannah, and predisposing us to a kind of social interaction that would better ensure the propagation of our species.
I’m not sure how directly he argues that last point, but it is certainly one of the corollaries of his study. The seemingly-spiritual response music produces in us is really little more than a pleasurable biproduct of evolutionary forces that were themselves the result of decidedly unmusical events: those of our ancient ancestors who were less adept at interpreting the meaning implicit in that subtle rustling in the grass on the savannah died in the springing lion’s paws; those who were better at it survived, and passed on to subsequent generations a deep sensitivity to the meaning of sound. Those of our primaeval parents who responded well to the socially organizing effect of cooperative sound-making stayed together and were more likely to survive and pass on that predilection to their progeny. Those who didn’t simply died, and passed on nothing.
Listening to Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 certainly has that effect on me, and, mysteriously enough, it continues to have that effect, no matter how often I hear it.
Jourdain argues that music "works" on us by triggering deep physiological responses in our neurological structures that are evolutionarily “trained” to perceive subtle layers in sonic relations—the inner relationships, that is, between different sounds as they occur in an organized sequence. He suggests that this ability is the result of eons of evolution that refined our sensitivity to sonic relations, as a way of heightening our chances of survival. As a result, our brains are structurally attuned to the subtle (and often not-so subtle) relationships between sounds that well-crafted music presents us with. As a result, music has a unique ability to engage both the right and left hemispheres of our brains at once, stimulating pleasure both through its orderly structure, and through its close association with memories, emotion, and sensory arousal.
This physiological response, he goes on to suggest, interacts on a deep subconscious level with our specific cultural conditioning, which we use to make meaning out of the organized sounds of a musical performance. Our culture trains us to expect certain things of the music we hear, prompting reactions of delight (or disgust) as those expectations are met and/or subverted. At the same time, our bodies resonate physically with the rhythmic patterns of music, responding kinesthetically to the elegant structure it imposes on time. All of these responses—the neurological, psychological, kinesthetic, and cultural—he argues, were inadvertently wired into the human animal, as evolutionary processes naturally selected certain traits that better-fitted us for survival, helping us to avoid being eaten by the proverbial lion on the primordial savannah, and predisposing us to a kind of social interaction that would better ensure the propagation of our species.
I’m not sure how directly he argues that last point, but it is certainly one of the corollaries of his study. The seemingly-spiritual response music produces in us is really little more than a pleasurable biproduct of evolutionary forces that were themselves the result of decidedly unmusical events: those of our ancient ancestors who were less adept at interpreting the meaning implicit in that subtle rustling in the grass on the savannah died in the springing lion’s paws; those who were better at it survived, and passed on to subsequent generations a deep sensitivity to the meaning of sound. Those of our primaeval parents who responded well to the socially organizing effect of cooperative sound-making stayed together and were more likely to survive and pass on that predilection to their progeny. Those who didn’t simply died, and passed on nothing.
While Jourdain’s exploration of the phenomenology of music was profoundly fascinating, I have to be honest that, as a Christian reader, I felt it proved far more than it meant to. The word “ecstasy” literally means “standing outside one’s self" (or something along those lines). But if Jourdain’s fundamental assumptions are true, and meaning is only to be found in the random forces of a faceless evolution, then there is, actually, nowhere outside ourselves to stand. Throughout the book, he continually refers to things like the “elegant structures” of music, making value judgements regarding how “beautiful” some forms of music are and how crude others. Yet throughout my reading, I kept wondering: on what basis—if his basic argument was true—could we safely speak of music in terms of its "beauty" or "elegance"? Probably the most we could say is that certain types of organized sound are more effective at achieving its evolutionary effect, and others less so, but this is a far cry from describing something as intrinsically beautiful.
For all his talk about ecstasy, Jourdain has very little to say concretely about how and why music transports us the way it does, and where, in particular, it is transporting us to. As a Christian reader, in fact, the overall effect of Music, The Brain, And Ecstasy on me was not to cause me to stand in awe at the mysterious results of eons of blind evolutionary processes. Rather, it led me continually back to my deepest faith commitments: if the effect of music on the human psyche really is as complex and mysterious as Jourdain continually insists it is, where could so complex and mysterious a phenomenon have come from?
More to the point: what is really happening in us, when carefully structured and aesthetically pleasing sounds strike our bodies and elicit a response that can only be described, for lack of a better word, as spiritual? The evolutionary answers to those questions—like the ones Jourdain proposes—leave me personally feeling empty and cold. In the words of Puddleglum to the godless Green Witch: “Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one, and the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. That’s why I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can, even if there isn’t Narnia.”
If you’re not a fan of Narnia, perhaps a more concrete quote would help. In his book The Devil’s Delusion, philosopher David Belinski surveys the many confident claims of the evolutionary atheist—and he’s writing as an atheist himself, mind you—but he looks at the wild claims evolutionary atheism makes, of having made the “God Illusion” unnecessary. At the end of his survey he offers this humble acknowledgement: “We live by love and longing, death, and the devastation that time imposes. How did [these things] enter the world? And why? The world of the physical sciences is not our world, and if our world has things in it that cannot be explained in their terms, then we must search elsewhere for their explanation.”
The best of music, I think, puts us in poignant remembrance of the love and longing, the death and devastation that indeed marks our existence, assuring us that there are things in this world that cannot be explained purely in terms of the physical sciences; and whatever else is happening when a rapturous—or stirring, or alarming, or exciting—piece of music washes over us, and we feel it, and respond, we are being pointed out of our world to another. Not that the music itself can bring us there, but it reminds us that such a place exists, a place where the most satisfying answers of all are offered us. To quote C. S. Lewis in quite a different vein: "If I find in myself desires that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probably explanation is that I was made for another world." It is our longing for that other world, I think, that the aesthetic effect of music stirs up in us.
It's not for nothing that even in the earliest biblical witness, people responded to their experience of God in song, and in the fullest glimpse of his throne room that we're offered, we're told it's pulsing with the indescribable music of heaven.
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