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Fifty thousand years ago, Homo sapiens crafted flutes from animal bone. Later, Ice Age artists painted glorious horse and bison images on cave walls, and, one acoustic expert concludes, placed the images precisely where the cave’s topography would have best amplified the sounds of singing or instrument playing.
Then, just five years ago, under a jet-black, star-pocked summer sky at FedEx Field outside Washington, DC, more than thirty thousand of us swayed to the saxophone solo as Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band played “Jungleland.” It was a moment so sweet as to be transcendent, a moment that connected me to my love, sitting next to me in the night’s air; to the band in its soulful intensity; to my youth in New Jersey, young and wild-hearted; and to the ancient past of my species.
From anthropology we know that human ancestors gathered together not only to hunt and to bury their dead, but also to transform themselves—their moods and their motivations—by creating music. Such discoveries as animal bone flutes and the acoustics of early human dwellings bolster a claim common to Daniel J. Levitin’s The World in Six Songs: How The Musical Brain Created Human Nature (Dutton, 368 pages, $25.95) and Jeffrey B. Symynkywicz’s The Gospel According to Bruce Springsteen: Rock and Redemption from Asbury Park to Magic (Westminster John Knox, 197 pages, $16.95). Music links us to the best in each other, the joy and the hope and the redemption, and may lead us to the sacred.
Levitin, director of the Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition and Expertise at McGill University, has written the more expansive of the two books. The World in Six Songs pulses between poles of creativity: the findings of paleoanthropology and neuroscience on the one hand, poetic remarks by Sting, Joni Mitchell, and the other musical luminaries whom Levitin counts as friends on the other.
The six songs of the title are actually categories of song: friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion, and love. Each is “distinctive” and “with its own evolutionary basis.” Like sprinkles that top a cake, lyrics gild the chapters devoted to each of these types. This aspect of the book is pure fun, causing song after song to spool out into the brain as the eye encounters familiar lyrics: “Imagine me and you, I do / I think about you day and night, it’s only right ..."
Levitin’s six-part scheme yields a nicely organized book but offers little explanatory power. Music of the Mbuti people (called here “African pygmy music”) is religious, Levitin says, because it is used to communicate with forest spirits. Religious songs are “radically different” from all others because they are “tethered to a particular time and place.” Yet they are often joyous, including the Mbuti’s. The song types aren’t so distinct after all.
Levitin binds into a triad three aspects of human evolutionary behavior: music making, religious ritual, and the strengthening of communal bonds. This same linkage is discussed more fully by Steven Mithen in The Singing Neanderthals. Mithen’s archaeology leads him to explore Ice-Age caves as music-filled sites of religious expression. From the beginning, music was entwined with religiosity.
Levitin sends theorizing about the evolution of music down the rabbit hole of all things uniquely human and hard-wired. Though he evokes the notion of an animal-human continuum, Levitin too quickly dismisses musical abilities of other animals. Songbirds and whales produce songs of complex hierarchical structure. As Tecumseh Fitch at the University of St. Andrews has noted, the bimanual drumming of chimpanzees (on trees) and gorillas (on their bodies) is a good candidate for a precursor to human instrumental music. Levitin considers “perspective-taking” to be a property unique to the human musical brain, but robust data show that apes do understand that their social partners experience different mental states than their own.
The religious use of music is uniquely human. Levitin roots all human music in our gene-boosting past, in a curious way. Although it’s a sure bet that universal human behaviors were favored genetically in prehistory, Levitin goes too far: “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.”
Whoa! Music doesn’t feel good intrinsically? Anyone who praises God through song in temple, mosque, or church might offer a second opinion here. Or let’s test a hypothesis, even apart from the sacred: Play for a group of friends a recording (or one of YouTube’s clips) of Luciano Pavarotti singing “Nessun Dorma,” from Puccini’s La Bohème. Prediction: People will respond with visible emotion. The song is a thing of beauty. We humans created that beauty, and it is more than a vehicle for reproductive success, just as we are more than a vehicle for our genes.
If lyrical analysis is your thing, pleasures await in The Gospel According to Bruce Springsteen, written by Unitarian Universalist minister Symynkywicz. “Bruce Springsteen is a man of deep faith,” he notes, “whose spiritual and religious values seldom lie far beneath the surface of his work.” Record after record, he parses Springsteen’s lyrics, from the mythic moving together of “Spirit in the Night” and the under-the-hood redemption of “Thunder Road” to the overt Catholic imagery of songs on The Rising.
The ways in which Springsteen’s religious sensibilities—or at least the reflection of them in his lyrics—change over the years are nicely captured. Something is missing, though. Music’s spirituality emerges primarily from performance and constructive listening, rather than from lyrics alone. The spirituality in Springsteen’s music is co-created moment-by-moment between the band and the concert crowd (or between the band and the lone, at-home, ear-budded listener). Each song’s nuances shift, night after night, in the playing and in the hearing. To pinpoint on paper these aspects of dynamic connection through music isn’t easy, but in his laser-beam focus on lyrics, Symynkywicz misses the chance to try.
Dynamic connection: It comes alive in Springsteen’s “Radio Nowhere.” The pounding chorus changes from “I just wanna hear some rhythm” to “I just wanna hear your rhythm.” For millenia, we humans have tapped into the rhythms of each other’s emotions and celebrated the rhythms of our not-wholly-knowable universe by coming together to make music.
Barbara J. King is a professor of anthropology at the College of William and Mary, and is the author of Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion.
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