The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature Read Online Free PDF Page A

events? Britannica argues just this—that poetry, and presumably lyrics, have changed history, started and stopped wars, documented the history of humankind, and changed men’s [sic] minds about the course of their lives.
    Apart from signaling creativity and the ability to engage in abstract thinking, the development of the artistic (poetic, musical, dancing, and painting) brain allowed for the metaphorical communication of passion and emotion. Metaphor allows us to explain things to people in indirect ways, sometimes avoiding confrontation, sometimes helping another to see that which she has difficulty understanding. Art allows us to focus another’s attention on aspects of a feeling or a perception that he might not otherwise see, literally framing the point of interest in a way that it becomes separated from a background of competing ideas or perceptions.
    The auditory arts of music and poetry hold a privileged position in human history, and we see this reflected in our own time in neurological case studies. Individuals suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, victims of strokes, tumors, or other organic brain trauma, may lose the ability to recognize faces, even of people they’ve known their entire lives. They may lose the ability to recognize simple objects such as hairbrushes or forks. But many of these same patients can still recite poetry by heart, and sing songs that they knew as children. Verse—whether spoken or sung—appears to be deeply encoded in the human brain. Many artists throughout history have felt an overwhelming drive to write music and poetry, on battlefields, in dungeons, on their deathbeds. This drive no doubt arose from those same frontal cortex mutations and adaptations that made art possible in the first place, the structural changes that gave rise to language and art in general. We write and recite music and poetry not because it feels good intrinsically, but because those ancestors of ours for whom it felt good are the ones who survived and reproduced, passing on this visceral preference. We are a musical species today because our ancestors were, going back tens of thousands of years.
    But we are not today as much of a poetic species as the historical record suggests we used to be, having traded poems for songs over the last several hundred years. The average fourteen-year-old will hear more music in a month than my grandfather heard in his entire life. An iPod today easily holds twenty thousand songs, more than the libraries of seven urban radio stations, an order of magnitude more songs than an entire tribe of our hunter-gatherer ancestors would have encountered in their entire lives. Before looking at the six songs that shaped human nature, it is important to take a closer look at just what a song is and isn’t with respect to its lyrics; whether the words are poetry by definition (or what poetry actually is, if indeed it is something different). Do lyrics convey the same meaning when they are divorced from their music?
    In the introduction to his book of lyrics, Sting writes:
    The two, lyrics and music, have always been mutually dependent, in much the same way as a mannequin and a set of clothes are dependent on each other; separate them, and what remains is a naked dummy and a pile of cloth. Publishing my lyrics . . . [invites] the question as to whether song lyrics are in fact poetry or something else entirely. . . . My wares have . . . been shorn of the very garments that gave them their shape in the first place.
     
    The shape of lyrics is influenced by different things than the shape of poetry—the melody and rhythms of music provide an extrinsic framework, whereas poetry’s structure in intrinsic. In music, some notes are accented relative to others, by virtue of their pitch, loudness, or rhythm; these accents constrain the words that will fit well with the melody, and help establish the musical mannequin on which the lyrical clothing will be hung. In poetry, on the other hand,