Steven Pinker laid down the evolutionary-psychological law about music. “Music,” he put it, “is auditory cheesecake.” For those who avoid cheesecake, whether administered orally or aurally, he added: music is “a cocktail of recreational drugs that we ingest ... to stimulate a mass of pleasure circuits at once.”
Understandably, some people took against this remark. Humanity accords cheesecake (and even recreational drugs) a certain respect, but to equate them with music? A universal element of human culture that is at the same time unknown in animal societies, music seems to reach to the very core of what it means to be human. The sense of communal identity in many tribal societies is built and maintained through musical activity, while the average Western citizen allows music a role in his or her sense of individual identity vastly more formative than any other art form.
Those taking umbrage at Pinker’s cheesecake quip fell into two opposing camps. On the side of evolutionary science, many thought he had simply failed to grasp the nettle: Since it is indisputably the case that humankind in some sense needs music, there must be an evolutionary account that explains this need along the lines attempted by Darwin’s theory of sexual selection. On the side of the humanities, Pinker had gone wrong in appearing to trivialize music simply because science proved unable to offer a convincing explanation as to why we should value it.
Music has been understood as lying at the origins of distinctively human culture — or at the heart of our attempt at self-definition — for centuries. In the 18th century, both Condillac and Rousseau identified music, alongside language, as separating man from animal, substituting biblical legends of the fall of man with something both more secular and optimistic. Indeed, Rousseau went so far as to suggest that music’s importance lay precisely in offering alienated modern man a kind of spiritual link with his less depraved ancestors. Since then, of course, Darwinian accounts of man’s ascent have flourished, but it is only recently that advances in cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary psychology have suggested the possibility of providing scientific answers to the question of why the play of abstract sounds should have become something, in Philip Ball’s phrase, “we can’t do without.”
Ball is an award-winning popular science writer. His “biography” of water stands as an exemplar among the glut of synecdochic histories of this kind, and the more recent Universe of Stone, about the cathedral at Chartres, succeeds admirably in communicating to its readers the same sense of wonder that allowed medieval minds to conjure heaven in stone and glass. His latest book is exemplary for different reasons. While the title obviously nods in the direction of Pinker’s book The Language Instinct, his method is much more modest, taking the form of a survey of current knowledge and, more importantly, its limits.
Much as in a primer in the old-fashioned sense, Ball flits between rudimentary briefings on chords, scales and sound-waves, to accounts offered by scientists, philosophers, musicologists and (for once) musicians themselves, trading narratives against each other rather than sculpting a grand one of his own. Popular songs are used to label theories: The theory that music is instrumental in group selection and survival is advanced under the banner of the New Seekers’ I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing, while the “Ronettes theory” (Be My Baby) covers the idea that adult musicality is an extension of the process of cognitive stimulation that begins with the sounds mothers (historically) and fathers (more and more) make to soothe and excite their infant offspring. The pace is kept fast throughout, with pull-out boxes to fill knowledge gaps where necessary — useful even for specialist readership: Though a professional writer on music myself, I have somehow managed to get by without bothering to learn how the human ear works.
Despite its breezy tone, The Music Instinct’s greatest virtue consists in conveying the impression that answers to genuine questions about music won’t come to anyone in too much of a hurry. Music, after all, is something we spend time engaged in playing, listening to, studying, practicing and loving. Indeed, it is the necessarily temporal structure of musical experience, and the way that musical “ideas” cannot be reduced to instantly communicable concepts, that guarantees its importance to us.
We do not love music because it exercises our brains or makes us more attractive to members of the opposite sex, but because we have lived with it since we came into being: It is entwined in our common and individual consciousness to the extent that, simply put, we would not be ourselves without it. In contemplating the mysteries of music we are also thereby contemplating the mystery of ourselves. Because of this, easy answers tend to be irrelevant. Ball, thankfully, doesn’t try to provide any, but rather sends the reader back to the music a better listener.
Even by the standards of Ukraine’s International Legion, which comprises volunteers from over 55 countries, Han has an unusual backstory. Born in Taichung, he grew up in Costa Rica — then one of Taiwan’s diplomatic allies — where a relative worked for the embassy. After attending an American international high school in San Jose, Costa Rica’s capital, Han — who prefers to use only his given name for OPSEC (operations security) reasons — moved to the US in his teens. He attended Penn State University before returning to Taiwan to work in the semiconductor industry in Kaohsiung, where he
On May 2, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫), at a meeting in support of Taipei city councilors at party headquarters, compared President William Lai (賴清德) to Hitler. Chu claimed that unlike any other democracy worldwide in history, no other leader was rooting out opposing parties like Lai and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). That his statements are wildly inaccurate was not the point. It was a rallying cry, not a history lesson. This was intentional to provoke the international diplomatic community into a response, which was promptly provided. Both the German and Israeli offices issued statements on Facebook
May 18 to May 24 Pastor Yang Hsu’s (楊煦) congregation was shocked upon seeing the land he chose to build his orphanage. It was surrounded by mountains on three sides, and the only way to access it was to cross a river by foot. The soil was poor due to runoff, and large rocks strewn across the plot prevented much from growing. In addition, there was no running water or electricity. But it was all Yang could afford. He and his Indigenous Atayal wife Lin Feng-ying (林鳳英) had already been caring for 24 orphans in their home, and they were in
Perched on Thailand’s border with Myanmar, Arunothai is a dusty crossroads town, a nowheresville that could be the setting of some Southeast Asian spaghetti Western. Its main street is the final, dead-end section of the two-lane highway from Chiang Mai, Thailand’s second largest city 120kms south, and the heart of the kingdom’s mountainous north. At the town boundary, a Chinese-style arch capped with dragons also bears Thai script declaring fealty to Bangkok’s royal family: “Long live the King!” Further on, Chinese lanterns line the main street, and on the hillsides, courtyard homes sit among warrens of narrow, winding alleyways and
RSS