AUTHOR: Daniel J. LevitinTITLE: The World in Six Songs PUBLISHER: Sire368 Pages
Music is one of the most intimate human forms of self-expression. Many people spend years of their lives creating and sustaining a unique taste in music that they believe defines who they are.
Daniel J. Levitin, in his new book, The World in Six Songs, argues for a somewhat different paradigm. Humans as a species have ingrained six basic forms of music into their identity which, over thousands of years, have shaped human nature side-by-side with evolution. These six kinds of songs concern the ideals of friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion and love. Suddenly, it is as if one's taste in music is simply a variation on the larger human concert.
In his first book, the New York Times-bestseller This is Your Brain on Music, Levitin explored the fascinating intersection of neuroscience and music. This book was a primer on the ways in which music and the human brain interact, bringing together a large amount of cutting-edge research, much of which Levitin himself was involved with. The World in Six Songs sings a similar tune, drawing upon anthropology, sociology, psychology and neuroscience to show both how music evolved over centuries of human civilization and how it evolved us.
Levitin led an extraordinary life before reaching the hallowed halls of academia. He brings much of his past as both a musician and producer into his book, providing a unique perspective that straddles two very distinct fields. A cognitive psychologist by training, Levitin runs the laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition and Expertise at Montreal's McGill University. His climb into academia was by no means typical. Levitin had previously dropped out of college to pursue life as a musician, and, once he achieved a certain measure of success, he came back to academic life by earning his Ph.D.
The World in Six Songs is the latest in a series of books that chronicles and correlates neuroscientific discoveries, bringing a somewhat obscure field to a wider public audience. These books, the most recent of which include Jonah Lehrer's Proust Was a Neuroscientist and Oliver Sacks's Musicophilia aim to explore a subset of this genre: the convergence of science and art on the playing field of the mind.
Levitin's place in the scientific community is similarly built on a foundation of art, he explains in The World in Six Songs: "I've come to see art and science as occupying two ends of a continuum that wraps around on itself like a circle so that the two meet at a common point." Unfortunately, the lofty goal of relating the two that Levitin set for himself in writing this book proves to be a bit out of reach.
Though engaging for the most part, The World in Six Songs runs into major difficulties in almost every section. Levitin's approach to writing introduces the topic anecdotally to gain the reader's interest before exploring neuroscientific research findings and examples from daily life that corroborate his central argument. However, Levitin often meanders a bit too far in his anecdotes, which, though unquestionably drawn from an interesting life, are only incidental to the main thrust of the book.
In the chapter on "Friendship" songs, Levitin describes his personal journey through '60s and '70s antiwar protests. He spends nearly 20 pages depicting his feelings as they relate to the larger antiwar zeitgeist that took over many Americans at the time. This account is emotionally charged as Levitin finds long-sought closure (while standing in a hotel room where John Lennon himself had staged a protest) for the unnecessary deaths of important figures like Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, the Kent State massacre victims as well as his own grandfather.
While fascinating, this section of the book is only thinly related to Levitin's six-song thesis. He makes his point that protest songs brought people together in the friendship of a common goal but uses an excessive amount of autobiography in lieu of science.
In fact, at several other points in the book, it is as though Levitin takes his idea too far by drawing vast, evolutionary scale conclusions from more straightforward songs about heartbreak. While discussing Marvin Gaye's "Heard It Through the Grapevine," in the new book, Levitin describes how the subject of the song, whose girlfriend is cheating on him, is actually encoding a useful adaptive message to the species: "It is maladaptive in the long run for a male ... [to be] tricked into sharing his resources with a child that is not his."
Though Levitin bandies about ideas of how music affected evolutionary thinking, this is not always revolutionary thinking. The sum of his arguments doesn't lead the reader to a new way of looking at human nature and music, but rather it provides a few interesting conversation pieces.
Though fascinating, his personal stories seem more like padding than support. His correlations between evolution and music come off as more speculation than reason. In fact, much of the book seems like mere homage to a lifelong iPod playlist with only infrequent attention-grabbing science.
Though his aim may wander, Levitin's writing style is always clear and concise. His anecdotes are interesting on a personal level, and the scientific discoveries he explores are easy to swallow, even if his thesis isn't. His enthusiasm and admiration for his subject are so palpable that the reader will certainly feel an intense liking for Levitin the musician-scholar, and will eagerly wish him success - the next time around.
