Another musical mystery tour

Abstract

They say that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, and they have a point. Beyond technical description, musical experience rests ultimately with music itself. If I compare the entry of the second subject in Schubert's B flat sonata to a shaft of sunlight, it is hardly illuminating unless the music has a similar effect on you, in which case my saying it is superfluous. Writing about music and the brain, on the other hand, might be a more promising proposition. Music is of great antiquity and exists in all human societies, only humans produce and appreciate it, and (despite certain similarities to language) it is unlike other complex cognitive functions. From the scientific perspective, therefore, music illustrates a universal mode of brain operation with unique features that cannot easily be captured by studying other brain processes. There are metaphysical analogies, too. Like the brain itself, music has the property of emergence: a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. Artists and writers have always recognized this. In Amadeus (1980), Peter Shaffer has Salieri rail against ‘the cage of those meticulous ink strokes’ that contains the mystery. You would never guess from looking at the marks on the page (Fig. 1), any more than our mental lives could be predicted from inspecting a brain on the pathology slab. When Philip Larkin (a jazz critic of great acuity) describes the impact of his favourite saxophone solo as ‘like an enormous yes’ (Larkin, 1964) we know just what he means, but what was the question, again? Perhaps this metaphysical dimension accounts for why, in contrast to the poets, psychologists and neuroscientists were for a long time oddly reticent on the subject of music. Freud hardly mentions it, while William James considered it an accident of evolution—a bit like …