Music and the Mind. Anthony Storr

Blacking claims that singing and dancing preceded the development of verbal interchange.

      There is evidence that early human species were able to dance and sing several hundred thousand years before homo sapiens sapiens emerged with the capacity for speech as we now know it.²²

      It may even have been the case, as the eighteenth-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico suggested, that human beings danced before they walked. He also thought that poetry came before prose, and that men naturally embodied their feelings. attitudes, and thoughts in symbols. The metaphorical use of language, according to Vico, preceded the literal or scientific; and he is not the only philosopher to think this. Heidegger wrote:

      Poetry proper is never merely a higher mode (melos) of everyday language. It is rather the reverse: everyday language is a forgotten and therefore used-up poem, from which there hardly resounds a call any longer.²³

      The objective language generally used by scientists and philosophers, which is concerned with conceptual thought and with demonstration and proof rather than with evocation, and which usually avoids metaphor as far as possible, is quite different from the ‘musical’ language used by poets, by the pre-literate, or even by those who are not highly educated in the Western tradition. ‘The magnet loves iron’ is not a scientific explanation of magnetism, but is a naturally anthropomorphic way of speaking found the world over.

      A world in which men naturally talk of the lips of a vase, the teeth of a plough, the mouth of a river, a neck of land, handfuls of one thing, the heart of another, veins of minerals, bowels of the earth, murmuring waves, whistling winds and smiling skies, groaning tables and weeping willows^* – such a world must be deeply and systematically different from any in which such phrases are felt, even remotely, to be metaphorical, as contrasted with so-called literal speech. This is one of Vico’s most revolutionary discoveries.²⁴

      As Isaiah Berlin points out, all the metaphors listed above are taken from the human body. When human beings looked upon the external world and tried to describe it, it was natural that they did so in terms of their own subjective, physical experience. The language of science had not yet become dissociated from the language of poetry and music, and the notion that the phenomena of the external world could only be understood if anthropomorphism was excluded had not yet developed. The behaviourist idea that human beings can only properly be comprehended when their actions are observed with scientific objectivity rather than assessed by means of empathic understanding was far in the future. Vico would have agreed with John Blacking in supposing that a people’s music is one important key to understanding their culture and their relationships.

      In ancient Greece, which is usually considered to be the birthplace of Western civilization, music was both ubiquitous and supremely important. Although we know little about how Greek music actually sounded, classical scholars refer to it as ‘an art which was woven into the very texture of their lives’.²⁵

      As in our culture, elaborate instrumental skills were the preserve of professional musicians; but the Greeks considered that instruction in singing and in playing the lyre should be a regular part of education for every freeborn citizen. Music was an important feature of domestic celebrations, feasts, and religious rituals, and musical competitions were held alongside athletic contests. Poetry and music went hand in hand: the poetry of Homer, for example, was originally recited to the accompaniment of the lyre.

      For the Greeks, music and poetry were inseparable. The poet and the composer were frequently the same person, so that often words and music were created together. The Greek word melos indicated both lyric poetry and the music to which a poem is set: it is the origin of our word ‘melody’. It is worth noting that, in spite of its mathematical connections, music accompanied the subjective language of poetry rather than the objective language of intellectual argument. We can imagine The Odyssey being chanted to musical accompaniment; we cannot imagine The Republic being similarly treated.

      First of all, early poetry was song. The difference between song and speech is a matter of discontinuities of pitch. In ordinary speech, we are constantly changing pitch, even in the pronunciation of a single syllable. But in song, the change of pitch is discrete and discontinuous. Speech reels around all over a certain portion of an octave (in relaxed speech about a fifth). Song steps from note to note on strict and delimited feet over a more extended range.

      Modern poetry is a hybrid. It has the metrical feet of song with the pitch glissandos of speech. But ancient poetry is much closer to song. Accents were not by intensity stressed as in our ordinary speech, but by pitch. In ancient Greece, this pitch is thought to have been precisely the interval of a fifth above the ground note of the poem, so that on the notes of our scale, dactyls would go GCC, GCC, with no extra emphasis on the G. Moreover, the three extra accents, acute, circumflex, and grave, were, as their notations , , , imply, a rising pitch within the syllable, a rising and falling on the same syllable, and a falling pitch respectively. The result was a poetry sung like plainsong with various auditory ornamentation that gave it beautiful variety.²⁶

      The Greek word for this is . It cannot easily be translated; for it signifies musically determined verse, or music and poetry in one. Whereas modern Western verse is primarily linguistic, words which may or may not be set to music,

      The ancient Greek verse line behaved differently. Here the musical rhythm was contained within the language itself. The musical-rhythmic structure was completely determined by the language. There was no room for an independent musical-rhythmic setting; nothing could be added or changed.²⁷

      Gradually, the musical component shrank, to be replaced by a system of accents; that is, by dynamic stresses which bore little relation to the original rhythm and which were not intoned at different pitches. Thrasybulos Georgiades, from whose book Music and Language I have just quoted, thinks that the original was replaced by prose and music as separate forms. Linguistically determined poetry followed, with verse rhythms governed by stress rather than pitch. It then became possible to set both prose and poetry to music in the ways familiar to us. So language and music could be recombined where this was thought appropriate, as, for example, in the Christian liturgy; but only after their initial unity had been disrupted and their independence from each other had been established.

      Rousseau may well have been right in thinking that there was no distinct speech apart from song at the beginning of history. The psychoanalyst Anton Ehrenzweig, himself an accomplished musician, wrote:

      It is not unreasonable to speculate that speech and music have descended from a common origin in a primitive language which was neither speaking nor singing, but something of both. Later this primeval language would have split into different branches; music would have retained the articulation mainly by pitch (scale) and duration (rhythm), while language chose the articulation mainly by tone colour (vowels and consonants). Language moreover happened to become the vehicle of rational thought and so underwent further influences. Music has become a symbolic language of the unconscious mind whose symbolism we shall never be able to fathom.²⁸

      If song and speech were initially more closely linked, and then became separated, it is understandable that the differences in their functions became accentuated. One can imagine that, as prose became less metaphorical, less anthropomorphic, more objective, and more precise, people would use this kind of speech for conveying information and expounding ideas, whilst reserving poetic and musical communication for religious and other rituals. However, even the speech used by scientists and mathematicians to explain and convey their ideas is never entirely devoid of varieties of tone, emphasis, and pitch. If this were the case it would be so monotonous that no one would listen to it.

      Today, we are accustomed to listening to instrumental music which has no necessary connection with the human voice or with public ceremonies. We have also developed language to the point at which it can be used for scientific description or for conceptual thought without prosody, metaphor, or the expression of subjective feeling. Seen from the perspective of history, these changes are recent. I think that they are also connected. If we consider together the ideas of Vico, Rousseau, and Blacking, we can perceive that language and music were originally more closely joined, and that it makes sense to think of music as deriving from