book review: Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy
Music, The Brain, And Ecstasy: How Music Captures Our Imagination by Robert Jourdain, explores the way the brain processes and perceives music. Who should read this book? Anyone who is interested in how music affects people. This includes serious listeners as well as performers. Things like learning a piece of music and hearing a piece of music performed are described in terms of human brain physiology. Lots of information from studies of the brain helps justify some of the assertions the author makes. If you’ve ever wondered how some music can affect you so powerfully as to make you shudder or get “goose bumps,” then read this book. If you’ve ever wondered about the differences in the way a musician percieves a performance and how the audience perceives it, then read this book. If you’ve ever pondered whether there’s even such a thing as innate musical talent, then read this book.
The real gold mine for musicians is in chapters 6 (performance) and 7 (listening). You don’t have to be a musician to read this book–it’s anything but a theory text. Rather than taking a descriptive approach (composers do things this way) or a prescriptive approach (composers should do things this way), the book seeks to account for the uniquely human trait of creating and consuming music. By better understanding how humans perceive music, we musicians can do a better job at producing quality music.
This book is not a serious scholarly work on music cognition. And good thing too, that material is pretty inaccessible. Instead, this book attempts to present research and recent discoveries from that field to a general audience. Again, no theory knowledge is required to use this book. What you’ll get is a series of discussions that connect brain physiology to musica-related experiences.
The discussions are at least thought-provoking, even if they aren’t representative of state-of-the-art in music cognition research. The bulk of the material rings true from my perspective as a performing professional musician. There are individual things about the discussion that I occasionally take issue with, but the book is extremely useful on the whole. I just want you to know that chapter 6 and 7 are worth the work it takes to get to them.
Heres a brief taste of chapter 6:
Recent work with brain scans has confirmed Couperin’s advice that musicians should get an early start. It’s been found that the bridge between the two sides of the brain (the corpus callosum) is 15 percent larger in adults who started playing the piano before the age of eight than in those who started later.
Jourdain then goes on to discuss how virtuosity is probably not determined by gross neurology as much as by how our minds are organized during performance. A very interesting and pertinent discussion for an aspiring virtuoso.
And from chapter 7:
We triumph over this chaos by not passively hearing with our brain stems, but by actively listening with cerebral cortex, which searches for familiar devices and patterns in music. Listening is led by anticipation. Even when a piece is entirely new to our ears, we make sense of it by perceiving constituent parts that we already know well. A musical object is not so much something that strikes our brains as something that our brains reach out and grab by anticipating it.
This then develops into a discussion of how anticipation of musical events is crucial to listening and learning music. Very relevant stuff for us. There is a lot of material, most of it I expect a musician will not have previously encountered, but yet I also found myself agreeing along the way with descriptions and accounts of phenomena I had experienced and conteplated the basis of (like absolute pitch).
This is a great book. I’d like to express thanks to Fabio Cacace for turning me on to this. I had previously done a lot of reading in psychoacoustics, but not much in music cognition. I’m now headed gleefully down that path.
