Jay Schulkin - Reflections on the Musical Mind: An Evolutionary Perspective

Reflections on the Musical Mind

Reflections on the Musical Mind

AN EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE

Jay Schulkin

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright 2013 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street,

Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

press.princeton.edu

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Schulkin, Jay.

Reflections on the musical mind : an evolutionary perspective / Jay Schulkin.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-691-15744-3 (hardcover)

1. MusicPsychological aspects. 2. MusicOrigin. 3. Musical ability. I. Title.
ML3830.S247 2013

781'.11dc23

2013003296

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Sabon

Printed on acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Contents

FOREWORD

W hen scientific breakthroughs lead to a new level of understanding, some of the scientists involved may, from their improved vantage point, begin to see familiar things in a different light. Music can be one of those familiar things. The tremendous strides made in the nineteenth century in the study of waves and vibration, for example, enabled the great physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz (18211894) to see that the ear is constructed like an extremely sensitive frequency analyzer, and that musical consonance and dissonance could be linked to the interactions of the many frequencies registered in the inner ear. Musicians found Helmholtzs research both fascinating and inspiring, and a whole literature of music theory developed around it. The famous physicist Ernst Mach (18381916), in thinking about those component frequencies, realized that if two versions of the same tune started on different pitches, one higher, one lower, it would be possible for none of the component frequencies to match. This meant that the two versions were the same not by virtue of common sensations (those frequencies) but by virtue of some holistic quality recognized by the minda Gestalt quality. His fresh insight inspired a generation of psychologists working in the 1920s.

In the second half of the twentieth century, the science of mind was transformed first by a cognitive revolution and then by a revolution in neuroscience. Jay Schulkin, a researcher in behavioral neuroscience, inherited the advances of the first of these revolutions as a student and is today recognized as a distinguished participant in the second. From the fresh perspective of this new science Schulkin looks at music and sees a host of exciting connections between the laboratory and the concert stage, car radio, or iPod. The many aspects of musicits social, emotional, cognitive, somatic, and evaluative componentsall have their analog in activities of the human brain. So it makes sense for a neuroscientist, especially one well versed in music, to explain these connections. While Helmholtz detailed the gross anatomy of the ear, Schulkin helps us to understand the fine structure of neurons in the brain and the many special molecules that enable the transmission and modulation of information conveyed from neuron to neuron. These molecules are facts of biology and come with their own traces in the long evolutionary record of life on earth.

Jay Schulkin arrived for graduate study in philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania two years before I arrived there for graduate study in music history and theory. Though we never met as students, our intellectual lives crossed in the person of a storied professor, Leonard B. Meyer (19182007). Meyer was a famous humanist, yet one with an abiding interest in science. His curiosity was infectious and knew no disciplinary bounds. When I first entered Meyers office, issues of the journal Science were strewn on the same table with a score of Arnold Schoenbergs adventurous Pierrot Lunaire. For Meyer, the love of inquiry and intellectual exploration was something shared by great artists and great scientists alike. He was sure that musical rhythms must be grounded in our physical bodies and their movements, and he was convinced that musical syntax was just another manifestation of how humans interpret the meaning of patterns of every kind. Schulkin is able to show how these speculative ideas from a scholar of music find concrete support in the realm of neuroscience. Meyer would be justly proud.

Two recent books have brought the subject of music cognition to a broad audience. The first of these, This is Your Brain on Music by music psychologist Daniel Levitin (2006), provides an engaging tour of the many phenomena involved in the act of listening to music. In the second, Musicophilia (2007), the famous clinician Oliver Sacks relates how changes in the brain can dramatically affect a persons musical abilities and enjoyments. Schulkins Reflections on the Musical Mind is for the person who has been intrigued by those discussions and now wants something more, something that can serve as a bridge between the core issues of music and the thousands of scientific studies that each address some particular facet of how our brains engage with meaningful patterns of sound. By taking an evolutionary perspective and asking the difficult why questionsWhy do we have music? Why might it be beneficial for society? Why is music linked with dancing? Why do we respond emotionally to music?Schulkin engages his reader in issues that have been debated for centuries but that now can be examined afresh.

Robert O. Gjerdingen

Preface

M usic has always played an important role in my life. As a young child, the activity I most enjoyed was playing the clarinet. My teacher, Mark Dashinger, taught in the basement of a building in the Bronx called the Coop, a socialist-oriented remnant from an earlier period. My junior high school music teachers were Mrs. Fragelo and Mr. Masteranglo. The only course in which I received the highest grade, and the only subject that really captured my interest, was the music class.

All three of these teachers assumed I could read music, and I could, a bit, but what I was doing was hearing a piece of music and playing it back almost verbatim. And that was my main talent as a kid. It was a nice talent, but since I had everybody thinking I could read music, it backfired when it came time for tryouts at music schools.

My grandfather spent time with the parents of George and Ira Gershwin, and eventually bought their restaurant from them. I was told on one occasion that George came home from high school and handed his father a sheet of paper with some music on it that he had written. The father did not think much of it and gave it to my grandfather. When he went home, he handed it to my grandmother, who, I am told, threw out the piece. I never talked to my grandfather about the Gershwins, but I grew up playing their music, as well as much of the music of the early and mid-twentieth century. My grandfather, however, loved Brahms.

Amid the turbulence of growing up in the mid-1960s, I spent a lot of time playing music with my two friends, Douglas Mafei and Jeffrey Dix. Improvisation was our aesthetic delight. My two cousins, Freddie and Michael Kaplan, who were Borscht Belt funny and musical with it, worked in a music store in the Bronx; it was always a delight to visit them.