1 “Americans spend more money on music than they do on prescription drugs or sex …”
Huron, D. (2001). Is music an evolutionary adaptation? Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 930: 51.
2 “… the average American hears more than five hours of music per day.”
The average American watches five hours of television per day, and that alone has to account for a lot of music listening—comedies, dramas, commercials, even news programs are presenting music nonstop. Add in music in public places such as train stations, restaurants, office buildings, and parks, and music wafting in from a neighbor’s yard or apartment, and you’ve got lots of music. See acnielsen.com for statistics.
3 “… a catchy song about a murderous psychopath who kills the judge at his own trial …”
Lennon, J., and McCartney, P. (1969). Maxwell’s silver hammer [Recorded by the Beatles]. On Abbey Road [LP]. London: Apple Records.
4 “… a song promising to keep a promise …”
Prosen, S. (1952). Till I waltz again with you [Recorded by Theresa Brewer]. On Till I Waltz Again With You [45rpm record]. Coral Records.
5 “… a song mourning the loss of a parent …”
Crowell, R. (2001). I know love is all I need. On The Houston Kid [CD]. Sugar Hill Records.
6 “Ten thousand years ago humans plus their pets and livestock accounted for about 0.1 percent of the terrestrial vertebrate biomass inhabiting the earth; now we account for 98 percent.”
MacCready, P. (2004). The case for battery electric vehicles. In The Hydrogen Energy Transition: Cutting Carbon from Transportation, edited by D. Sperling and J. Cannon. San Diego, CA: Academic Press, pp. 227–233.
I first heard about this from Daniel Dennett, at a talk he gave at McGill University in 2006.
7 “We’re also a highly variable species.”
Even within the contemporary United States, there are subcultures of people who eat dirt, avoid eating anything with a face, or who eat only food that has been ceremonially blessed by their religious leaders. Americans speak more than three hundred different languages; some read right to left, some left to right, some up to down, many not at all. And music? A survey I conducted of one thousand Canadian college undergraduates last year revealed that they identified sixty separate genres of music overall that they listen to, genres that were distinct and ranged from ancient Sufi music to Swedish death metal; from the indigenous folk singing of the Ural Mountains to the heavily processed vocal stylings of Nine Inch Nails. If this much musical variety emerges from North American college students, imagine the variety that exists worldwide and age-wide.
8 “By definition, a ‘song’ is a musical composition intended or adapted for singing.”
This book is called The World in Six Songs, not The World in Six Musical Works. Musicologists generally make a distinction between “song” and longer musical forms, and a “song” is typically understood to have words. This distinction is meant to imply that song is a subset of music, and this does seem to follow intuition. Most of us don’t think of Wagner’s Ring Cycle or Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony as songs. But suppose you had never heard the latter before, and then one day, you hear your grandfather puttering around the yard humming “bum-bum-bum-baaah, bum-bum-bum-baaah.” You would be perfectly justified to ask him just what is this song you hear him bum-bum-bumming, and neither the language police nor the musicology marshals should have any cause for alarm that important communicative barriers, essential to the maintenance of an orderly society, have been breached. Just as the Aleutians are reputed to have twenty words for snow, so do we have many words for different forms of music: jingles, ditties, tunes, melodies, airs, anthems, arias, odes, ballads, canticles, carols, chants, chorales, choruses, hymns, lullabies, numbers, operas, pieces, rhapsodies, refrains, cantatas, shanties, strains, verses (not to mention words for specialized musical forms such as sonatas, cantatas, symphonies, quartets, opuses) … and the distinctions between them all can be interesting. These different musical forms typically convey different types of messages—we don’t expect an anthem to lull a baby to sleep, nor do we expect a chorale to sell tickets to a Monster Truck smashing competition. But what is the use of this distinction between song and music?
Actually, the Aleutians don’t have any more words for snow than we do in English. See the excellent and amusing essay: Pullam, G. (1991). The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax. In The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and Other Irreverent Essays on the Study of Language, edited by G. Pullam. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 159–174.
9 “… John Denver took Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony and added lyrics to the melody?”
The melody for “Annie’s Song” is very close to the main theme for Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, Andante cantabile, during the part when John Denver sings “You fill up my senses.” For the next line, “like a light in the forest,” Denver writes a variation of that theme, staying well within Tchaikovsky’s original harmonic context. Denver, J. (1974). Annie’s song. On Annie’s Song [CD]. Delta Records. (1997). Tchaikovsky, P. I. (1888). Symphony no. 5 in E minor, op. 64 [Recorded by M. Jansons (Conductor) and the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra]. On Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5 [CD]. Chandos Records. (1992).
10 “… ‘Happy Birthday’ has been translated into nearly every language on earth (even into Klingon, as viewers of Star Trek: The Next Generation can attest; the song is called ‘qoSlIj DatIvja’”.
For a pronunciation guide, see http://www.kli.org/tlh/sounds.html.
11 “I have actually known people named Maggie Mae, Roxanne, Chuck E., and John-Jacob (think Rod Stewart, the Police, Rickie Lee Jones, and an old children’s song), and they are astonished when people sing these songs to them as though no one has ever thought to do this before.”
In a fit of what I thought was my own cleverness, I asked Rosanne Cash on first meeting her if it was true that she had a brother named “Sue.” I was making reference to the song written by Shel Silverstein and made famous by her father, Johnny Cash, “A Boy Named Sue.” Rosanne rolled her eyes, and lest the gesture was lost on me—after all, at this point, she had every reason to think that I was dim-witted—she said, “You have no idea how many people have asked me that.” I suppose I am dim, because it took me several months of playing this encounter over in my mind (and wishing I had said something more intelligent to so beautiful and charming a woman) that I realized that the joke, weak as it was, was poorly formed. The hero of the song is a man who himself was named Sue by his father. Johnny is singing the song as Sue. In fact, at the end of the song the narrator sings “If I ever have a son I think I’ll name him Bill, or George—anything but Sue!” So the proper way to make the joke would have been to ask Rosanne if it was true that her father was named Sue, not her brother. When I next met with her—thank goodness, she either has a huge heart full of forgiveness or forgot me between meetings—I pointed this out to her and she said that she had already been through this dizzying chain of reasoning, and that it continued to surprise and amaze her that virtually every one of her tormentors asked her about a brother, no one getting the (fictional) familial connection right. Silverstein, S. (1969). A boy named Sue [Recorded by Johnny Cash]. On This Is Johnny Cash [LP]. Harmony Records.
12 “When a man loves a woman / Spend his very last dime / …” Lewis, C., and Wright, A. (1966). When a man loves a woman [Recorded by Percy Sledge]. On When a Man Loves a Woman [LP]. Muscle Shoals, AL: Atlantic.
13 “It is unlikely that either language or music was invented by a single innovator or at a single place and time …”
Individual songs are “invented” of course, as are individual words such as “Vietnamization,” or “soundscape,” but this is not the same thing as inventing music or language themselves.
14 “… perspective-taking … ”
Psychologists call this “theory of mind,” a term introduced by David Premack and Guy Woodruff in 1978 and used commonly in the developmental psychology literature. It is similar to what Piaget called “objectivity.” I find “theory of mind” to be a bit too jargony, so I’m going to use the term “perspective-taking.” Stated this way, the link becomes clearer to Einstein’s recognition of the importance of the perspective of the observer; this is fundamentally the same notion, that different observers will perceive the same events differently. Premack, D. G., and Woodruff, G. (1978). Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 1(4): 515–526.
15 “… octave equivalence … ”
An octave can be thought of as an interval between two notes when one is half or twice the frequency of vibration of the other. A typical adult male speaking voice has a frequency of 110 Hz, an adult female 220 Hz. (Hz = Hertz, and is a unit of measurement equal to 1 cycle of vibration per second.)
16 “… we don’t think babies are cute because they are intrinsically or objectively cute …”
Cuteness is a product of the perception and interpretation of a mind, human or otherwise. It is not an inherent property of any object.
17 “What distinguishes us most is one thing no other animals do: art.”
I leave aside the controversial question of elephant art and other similar demonstrations. When given brushes, paints, and some instruction, elephants will paint on canvases, and generally their paintings are best described as “abstract.” A few paintings resemble flowers, but it is difficult to determine the extent to which these flowers were more the product of zealous human instructors. Given appropriate instruments, elephants will also make sound together in something that resembles music, and which my colleague Ani Patel has studied, noting that they can maintain a remarkably steady beat. Without the interference of humans, there is no evidence that elephants or other animals would engage in these activities on their own, and calling them artistic expression strikes me as a case of gross anthropomorphism combined with wishful thinking.
18 “Traditionally poetry has been discussed in terms of these forms (rhyming patterns, metrical patterns, number of lines).”
In 2008, Helen Vendler adopted a more flexible attitude toward form—form with her is virtually synonymous with style:
Each poem is a new personal venture made functional by technical expertise; the poet’s moral urgency in writing is as real, needless to say, as his technical skill, but moral urgency alone never made a poem. On the other hand, technical expertise alone does not suffice, either. Form is the necessary and skilled embodiment of the poet’s moral urgency, the poet’s method of self-revelation.
Vendler, H. (2008, January–February). Poems are not position papers. Harvard Magazine 25.
19 “In defending poetry not of the ivory tower sort, he [John Barr] writes: …”
Barr, J. (2007). Is it poetry or is it verse? Poetry Foundation. Retrieved December 1, 2007, from http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/feature.html?id=178645, chap. 1.
20 “‘Poems are hypothetical sites of speculation, not position papers.’” Vendler, H. (2008, January–February). Poems are not position papers. Harvard Magazine 25.
21 “… a Lakoffian meta phor …”
Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
22 “‘Art, in my opinion, has remained a key to survival.’”
Read, H. (1955). Icon and Idea. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
23 “Drawings, paintings, sculpture, poems, and song allow the creator to represent an object in its absence …”
Here I am borrowing liberally from: Storr, A. (1992). Music and the Mind. New York: Ballantine Books, p. 2.