Few non-fiction authors these days are allowed by their publishers to write a book without the word 'how’ in the subtitle, and Philip Ball is no exception. The Music Instinct promises to explain 'how music works and why we can’t do without it’. I wonder if Ball – a consultant editor for Nature and one of the most gifted popular science writers in the world – had a fight with Random House about the glib subtitle. A central argument of this book is that, while we can learn extraordinary things about the effect of music on the brain, its workings are ultimately mysterious. So mysterious, in fact, that in some respects we know less about them than we think we do.
Ball has previously written 'a biography of water’, a book about Chartres cathedral and medieval cosmology, and the award-winning Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another, which applies mathematical models to everyday life. His doctorate is in physics, but he can’t see an interdisciplinary boundary without wanting to sneak across it. Likewise, he writes equally authoritatively about classical music, jazz, pop and rock, moving smartly from one to the other. 'The sustained, wavering trill is as much a feature of Jimi Hendrix’s guitar playing as it is of the keyboard compositions of Couperin,’ he notes – not to show off, but as a prelude to a discussion of how the improvised embellishments of Baroque music gradually became ossified into the score.
Such is his enthusiasm for different genres that it isn’t clear which is his first love – he even finds room for Joyce Grenfell, the mark of a true polymath – although I did wonder if, despite the tiresome proselytising of Radio Three, he finds 'world music’ more interesting to read about than to listen to.
Many of the things Ball can tell us about the workings of music come into the category of facts that we ought to know but probably don’t, thanks to a mixture of our own laziness and the arrogant impenetrability of the music theorists who hog the field. For example, the overtones of notes create mathematical patterns that exist independently of the brain’s interpretation of them – and when we do organise them, into scales and melodies, we are drawn naturally to uneven spaces that help us orientate ourselves. Some of this may be inculcated in the womb; some of it is learnt in early childhood.
Ball recognises that our concepts of musical beauty and harmony are cultural conventions – but there is also a physiological dissonance created by tones played so close together that the acoustic waves interfere with one another. So at least some of the ugliness of atonal music is produced by physics, not the bourgeois prejudice excoriated by Boulez and Stockhausen.
Incidentally, I’ll always be grateful to Ball for revealing that the contorted serial sequences in atonal music are generally too complex for the brain to recognise; if you enjoy its spooky textures, don’t beat yourself up about failing to separate out the tone rows, because no one can without knowing the score backwards (which may well be how the composer has instructed it to be played). For example, Pierre Boulez indicated that his widely acclaimed Le Marteau sans Maître, published in 1954, was a serial piece. But it took until 1977 for a musicologist to discover the series. As Ball writes: 'In other words, for over 20 years no one could deduce, let alone hear, the organisational “structure” of this masterpiece… The unusual sonorities are, for a time, diverting in their own way. But it shows that there is no intelligible organisation of pitch (and, one might add, of rhythm either). One can hardly blame audiences for suspecting that what is left is musically rather sparse.’
Ball takes swipes at fogeys as well as modernists: he notes, for example, that when Roger Scruton compares the classical masters to degenerate pop music, he chooses bad pop music, which is 'rather like assuming that classical music is equally well represented by Czerny or Beethoven’. That’s a beautifully crafted jibe and there’s a lively humour throughout this book which makes up for any disappointment we might feel at its necessarily tentative conclusion.
Ball endorses the well-established theory that music stirs up emotion by manipulating our expectations of which note will follow another. But there is no correlation between the sentiments ostensibly expressed by the music and those it provokes in us: if sad music made us sad, there would be no Mahler or Morrissey on our iPods. In the end, he says, music possesses 'a set of emotions that we have yet to name and perhaps do not need to’. In some respects, it lies 'beyond words’ – but not, thankfully, beyond Ball’s remarkable capacity to use words to open our ears.
The Music Instinct: How Music Works and Why We Can’t Do Without It
By Philip Ball
BODLEY HEAD, £20, 452pp
Available from Telegraph Books 0844 871 1516