New Feature!  Do you love music theory and music criticism?  Have you ever wondered why people like what they like?  Philip Ball’s new book tackles these topics and more.

Philip Ball – The Music Instinct: How Music Works and Why We Can’t Do Without It

We need to talk about music, but this is hard.  Very few people can do it.

Ball’s statement applies to music critics, but also to himself.  A glut of recent books on music (Musicophilia, This Is Your Brain On Music) have offered facile and tangential inquiries, but Ball’s is the first comprehensive, well-written prose music statement in quite some time.  The Music Instinct synthesizes the research of many different fields and presents itself as a primer, a personal reflection and a treatise.

In his introduction, Ball writes, “Some analyze music in obsessive detail; others are puzzled by any need to discuss it.”  Those who are reading this review likely fall into the former category, but are also familiar with those in the latter.  Who among us has not seen a teenager’s eyes gloss over when we’ve asked, “Why do you like Ke$ha?” and have heard the response, “I don’t know, I just do?”  Perhaps, when we were kids, the opposite occurred: we began to wax rhapsodically to our parents about some incredibly long song (in my case, Pink Floyd’s “Dogs”), but were unable to keep their attention.  The Music Instinct sets out to explain the reasoning behind such reactions.  Sure, we all have different taste, but why?  What makes one song better than another?  Are specific keys and notes able to elicit specific emotions?  Ball’s stated intentions are as follows:  “I hope this book might encourage you … to listen again to music that you previously dismissed as too boring, too complicated, too dry, too slushy, or just plain incomprehensible.”  He’d certainly be a fan of some of the more esoteric music covered on our site; but he wouldn’t want us to dismiss something due to a perceived sense of simplicity or familiarity.

After a startlingly clear opening, Ball delves into the world of music theory, attempting to explain the basics of notes, rhythms, tempos and timbres through didactic prose, frequently punctuated by charts, enlightening asides and home-spun anecdotes.  While this section is necessary for understanding what comes after, it does tend to be a bit dry, especially for those familiar with the basic principles of music.  The music theory-educated will prefer to skip forward to just past the 200-page mark (approximately halfway through the book) to get to the application of principles.  This is not a knock on Ball’s abilities to explicate complicated ideas in accessible fashion, but an encouragement to those who are eager to get to the newer arguments and observations.  Those who do peruse this earlier section will be graced by a number of quotable factoids: that babies do respond to Mozart, but also to U2; that in some cultures, “music” is inseparable from “dance”; and that definitions of “atonal” are not static.

Ball really hits his stride in his “Appassionato” chapter.  Here he explains that while music does not have to be enjoyed in order to be appreciated (a point made in the introduction), most people play music in order to feel good.  (“Feeling good” is itself relative; some people play sad songs when they are sad, in order to delve deeper into the emotion – see Morrissey and The Cure).  However, numerous attempts to identify a “sad” or “happy” note or sequence have fallen short.  “The feeling,” writes Ball, “is not in the music, but what it reminds us of.”  In other words, we bring our own expectations to music, based on our own experiences.  This is why different cultures react in different ways to the same music.  Ball mentions a tribe whose members walk away from a recording of classical music, because the symphony has no drumbeat.  (As an aside, I once terrified a group of children in Kenya by playing Front Line Assembly.)

The “Capriccioso” chapter is the book’s apex.  In this chapter (subtitled, Is music about notes, or patterns, or textures?) Ball addresses styles and genres.  “How do you know what you like?” he writes.  “There’s no accounting for taste.  Or is there?”  In his groundbreaking 1998 study, Music, the Brain and Ecstasy, Robert Jourdain claimed that we adopt our musical preferences in middle school, based on the preferences of our peer group, and that we never change.  Ball raises the age range a bit (15-25), but otherwise draws the same conclusion.  This is why middle-aged people are still listening to The Eagles and older people are resistent to anything past Sinatra.  (And why, sadly, many of us will one day be searching in vain for a post-rock retirement home.)  We also prefer our compostions to be moderately complex – neither not complicated nor too simple, as Goldilocks would put it, “just right.”  This is bad news for performers such as Daniel Bjarnason, but perhaps also for the local mall band.  Even more alarmingly, we prefer our performers to be professionals – in one experiment, listeners were told that one band was critically acclaimed, while another was comprised of novices.  The experiments flipped the bands, but  listeners consistently graded the truly inferior group higher than they did the veterans.

Toward the end of the book, Ball tosses in a short discourse on recommendations.  Anyone who has been annoyed at Amazon, Pandora or any other recommendation machine will find much to appreciate about the author’s observations.  For example, search engines are unable to determine if we want “the happy Mozart or the Requiem,” or if we prefer the early or late-period Beatles.  But he adds a warning to those who seek only to hear more of what they already like:  “If all we ask of music … is that it provide us with more of what we already know and like, then we are the poorer for it … we risk becoming blind to what music can do.”  The author goes on to imply that given the difficulties of talking about music, the instrumental music critic has the hardest task of all (we appreciate that!), but that “the measure of good art criticism is surely not that it tells us what we should think, but that it stimulates us to imagine possible ways of experiencing.”

The Music Instinct is not a perfect book; along with the aforementioned observation about it being two books in one, the author has an annoying tendency to telegraph (“We’ll be covering that in Chapter 5”) and occasionally struggles to find suitable synonymns (“horror/horrify” is overused), but Ball’s incisive commentary, his intelligent yet highly readable prose and his theoretical constructs make this book a must-read for anyone interested in why we like the music we do.  Add to this the random anecdote, such as the fact that “Plato disapproved of purely instrumental music” (Boo, Plato!) or that “(female) sedge warblers and starlights may choose males with the most elaborate songs”, and the end result is the rare text suitable for both the classroom and the couch.   

We need to talk about music, but this is hard.  Very few people can do it.  In The Music Instinct, Philip Ball does it, and he does it well.

The Music Instinct was published in the U.K. by Bodley Head on February 4, and is slated for release in the U.S. by Oxford University Press on September 1, with a better-looking cover.

-Richard Allen 

Written By: host
Date Posted: 8/9/2010
Number of Views: 681