{"id":14961,"date":"2024-05-30T15:23:21","date_gmt":"2024-05-30T15:23:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/healthyaging.net\/magazine\/?p=14961"},"modified":"2024-06-02T11:11:43","modified_gmt":"2024-06-02T11:11:43","slug":"what-does-it-mean-to-be-musical","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/healthyaging.net\/magazine\/spring-summe-2024\/what-does-it-mean-to-be-musical\/","title":{"rendered":"MUSIC: What Does It Mean to Be Musical?"},"content":{"rendered":"
The following excerpt is from the book,\u00a0<\/em>Music and Mind, Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness\u00a0by Renee Fleming. Five-time Grammy award winner Renee Fleming is a highly acclaimed soprano who has performed in opera houses, concert halls, and theaters worldwide. An advocate for research on the interrelation between health and the arts, she launched a joint effort between the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Most recently, Flemming published <\/em>Music and Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness, a collection of essays on the impact of music and arts on health and the human experience from scientists, artists, creative arts therapists, educators, and physicians. Following is one of the essays from her new book.<\/em><\/h5>\n

By Daniel J. Levitin, PhD, FRSC <\/p><\/p>\n

M<\/span>usic is a human universal: it exists in every society we know of, both now and throughout tens of thousands of years of human history.<\/p>\n

And just as languages differ across societies, so do their musics. The richness and breadth of musical expression is astonishing, and its ubiquity tells us that it is an important part of what it means to be human. Many of us find that our musical experiences are the most profound in our lives. As Friedrich Nietzsche famously said, \u201cWithout music, life would be a mistake.\u201d<\/p>\n

To get started, we should probably define what we mean by the word \u201cmusic.\u201d And yet, for all of music\u2019s intimacy with us, trying to define it is fiendishly difficult. The music of the Cameroon Pygmies has little in common with the music of the Tuvan throat singing of Mongolia, and neither would appear to have much in common with a Mozart opera or the music of Nine Inch Nails.<\/p>\n

The definition I have gravitated to is that of composer Edgard Var\u00e8se, who said that \u201cmusic is organized sound.\u201d This inclusive definition allows us to accept as music anything that the creator intends to be music. That doesn\u2019t mean we will like it, but it skirts the problem of trying to find common rhythmic, timbral, or spectral features that unite so many different forms of expression. (It is the same definition that allows the work of Marcel Duchamp to be considered visual art.)<\/p>\n

Whatever music is, we have clear tastes and preferences, much as we do for visual art or food\u2014even those of us who consider ourselves musical omnivores don\u2019t like all music equally. We have our favorites. And we have our favorite musicians, the ones who can move us emotionally more often, more deeply, and who can move us to states of ecstasy where we lose all sense of self, time, and space. When this happens, we might say that the music creator is highly musical. And that those people who, as listeners, are moved, must also be highly musical, even if they don\u2019t play an instrument or compose themselves. They are receptive musically.<\/p>\n

Our culture shares in a collective myth, that musical talent is something you\u2019re born with. This is a topic that has fascinated me for decades and what drove me to the field. As a child, I took music lessons alongside my friends in school. It became clear by seventh grade that some of the kids were just better than others, and it seemed to have little to do with practice. I\u2019d see classmates practice an hour a day or more and get nowhere, while others never practiced but made great progress on their instruments, just on the fifty minutes a day that we all had in school band.<\/p>\n

In my twenties I entered the music business, working as a record producer and arranger, and eventually was hired as an A&R manager for a record label (a fancy name for \u201ctalent scout\u201d). During that hair decade of the \u201980s when I was at Columbia\/ CBS Records, I started to wonder why some people just seemed to be better than others. Did Ella Fitzgerald and Ray Charles have something in their brains that no one else had? Or did they just have more of some special substance? In the parlance of cognitive science, were these differences of kind or differences of degree?<\/p>\n

As I sat in the control room of the Automatt, the former CBS studios in San Francisco, Carlos Santana was on the other side of the glass playing a solo. And as he did so, I felt the hair stand up on the back of my neck. My body shivered as if I were cold. I looked at my bare arms and saw goose bumps. There he was, plucking on some metal wires stretched across a piece of wood, and there I was, having a powerful physiological reaction. Later that afternoon he offered to let me play his guitar\u2014a very special instrument, wired through a very particular chain of amplifier electronics, a system he had worked for years to hone. That guitar and that amp were famous, and now I would be able to play them and create the same sounds he did! I picked it up, fully expecting to sound like Carlos Santana, but I didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

I just sounded like me. I handed it back to him. He played a few notes and sounded like Carlos. He handed it back to me, and when I played it, I still sounded like me. \u201cWait a minute,\u201d I said. I went to the other room and got my guitar and amp. \u201cWould you play this?\u201d He did. And he still sounded unmistakably like Carlos. It wasn\u2019t the equipment; it was the fingers and the brain and the body and the experiences of Carlos that gave him his sound. But of course the sound, Carlos\u2019s tone and timbre, were just the medium through which he sent his message, a message that reaches millions of people around the world. From a technical standpoint, there are thousands of guitarists who can do what he does\u2014go to any bar and listen to the band playing a Santana song, and they can play his solos note for note.<\/p>\n

It is something else. If it\u2019s musicality, where does that musicality come from?<\/p>\n

Environmental factors such as deliberate practice certainly play a role in musical ability, yet most individuals do not become experts despite many hours of practice. Growing empirical evidence suggests variables other than practice (e.g., intelligence, personality, or physical traits) influence performance (and many of these expertise\u2011related traits are highly genetic). Simply put, genetic factors are essential for outstanding levels of musical ability.<\/p>\n

Music is a model system for understanding what genes can accomplish and how they relate to experience. Increasingly, neuroscientists are collaborating with geneticists to understand the links between genes, brain development, cognition, and behavior. Identifying genetic components that underlie musical ability can help us to predict who will succeed or, more interestingly, what types of musical instruction and intervention will be most effective for individuals according to their genetic profiles.<\/p>\n

Successful genotyping (determining differences in genetic makeup by examining DNA sequences) requires an accurately described phenotype (observable characteristics or traits). Unfortunately the latter has not yet been accomplished for musicality, creating a significant hurdle to further progress. Part of the difficulty in describing the musical phenotype is its heterogeneity, the wide variety of ways in which musicality presents itself.<\/p>\n

Several questionnaires have been designed to assess specific aspects of musical behaviors\u2014such as music receptivity, music preferences, music sophistication, music perception skills, music engagement, music involvement, absorption in music, and use of music for mood regulation. A comprehensive and psychometrically validated instrument to assess the multidimensional nature of musicality across a broad range of individuals is still needed to fully acknowledge this construct in future research and practice in the field.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, as science works out the various ways to reliably and validly measure musical behaviors and musicality, we can go to the source. We can ask musicians what they think is going on. Over the last thirty years, I\u2019ve asked every musician I know whether they think that their talent is a product of \u201ctalent\u201d\u2014meaning that they were \u201c just born with it\u201d\u2014or the product of hard work, or some combination of both. Every single musician I asked, with one exception, said that music never came easy to them, it was always a lot of work.<\/p>\n

If there is a musician alive today who would just seem to be a naturally born musical genius, someone from whom music oozes and who can\u2019t help but be musical, it would probably be Stevie Wonder. When I asked him, he said, \u201cI think that we\u2019re all put here to do the thing that we do. It gets to us just discovering what that is. And believing in what that is, and holding on to what that is and nurturing what that is.\u201d He recalled the thousands, possibly tens of thousands of hours of hard work he had to put into that nurturing and that it didn\u2019t always come easy or naturally. Surely if Stevie Wonder thinks musicality isn\u2019t the product of a particular brain region, if Stevie believes that musical ability comes as a result of a lot of practice, that should tell us something.<\/p>\n

Other musicians scoffed at the idea that they were \u201c just born with it\u201d: Paul Simon, Rosanne Cash, Bobby McFerrin, Sonny Rollins. (The one exception was Joni Mitchell, who said it just came easy to her\u2014but then, in the next breath, admitted that she sometimes worked on a single lyric for six months.)<\/p>\n

Also in the meantime, we can begin to look at, and hopefully better understand, what goes on in the brains of musicians.<\/p>\n

Excerpt from MUSIC AND MIND<\/a><\/em> by Ren\u00e9e Fleming, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. \u201cWhat Does It Mean to Be Musical\u201d Copyright \u00a9 2024 by Daniel J. Levitin PhD, FRSC, who is James McGill Professor Emeritus of Psychology, McGill University.<\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Are you born with it or is it be learned?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":14963,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[186,188],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-spring-summe-2024","category-spring-summer-2024-columns"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/healthyaging.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14961","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/healthyaging.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/healthyaging.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/healthyaging.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/healthyaging.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14961"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/healthyaging.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14961\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15273,"href":"https:\/\/healthyaging.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14961\/revisions\/15273"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/healthyaging.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/healthyaging.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/healthyaging.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/healthyaging.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}