This article is from American Scientist:
Musicians dedicate their lives to focused, disciplined, and repeated practice. Moreover, playing music offers an unlimited capacity for improvement: Musicians constantly strive for nuance, defter technique, and better synchrony with their ensembles. Articles implying a link between musicianship and brain plasticity started to appear: Violinists had enlarged motor brain areas dedicated to the hand; expert musicians made finer judgments about sounds that differed subtly in timing or pitch.
We suspected something more might be going on with music. Playing music could affect more than our ability to process melodies and rhythms; it might trigger much broader cognitive and sensory changes. With our colleagues Gabriella Musacchia, Erika Skoe, Patrick Wong, and Mikko Sams, our lab decided to investigate. We recruited a cohort of college students, half of whom had been avid musicians for several years and the other half were musically naive. We then measured electrophysiological responses to speech and music—brain waves that tell us the integrity of sound processing in the brain.
In a pair of papers published in 2007, we reported that the musicians had heightened responses to the subtle acoustic details of speech, suggesting that music training generalizes to language. Indeed, the musicians’ brains could encode acoustic details of Mandarin speech too subtle for most English speakers to detect, suggesting that music training might enable a listener to be a more precocious language learner.
There is a lot more there, so read the whole thing.
We quickly discovered that music training forges a remarkably similar brain signature across all ages. Musicians’ brains more quickly and accurately encode certain ingredients of speech sounds than do those of nonmusicians. Music training improves the brain’s ability to process speech sounds against a noisy background, such as the din of a busy restaurant. This neural resilience made sense, because musicians also had a superior ability to understand speech in a noisy environment. Moreover, they had stronger memory and attentional skills than did nonmusicians. Although there were developmental variations, with certain aspects of brain function being fine-tuned later in life than others, music training seemed to have a strikingly consistent effect across the lifespan.
Some of the most surprising results came from musicians in their sixties and seventies, who showed stronger memory, attention, and hearing abilities than did contemporaries who had never participated in music training. We also found direct evidence for differences in brain function between older musicians and nonmusicians. Neural responses to speech generally slow as we age. Not so in lifelong musicians: A 65-year-old musician’s neural responses are indistinguishable from those of a 25-year-old nonmusician. The responses of a 65-year-old who played music as a child but hadn’t touched an instrument in decades fell in the middle: faster than those of a peer who had never played music but slower than those of a lifelong musician. Musical experience early in life imparts lifelong neuroplasticity.
And I suspect that there are lot of other, not easily measurable, benefits. Take for example, the learning of the disciplines of practice, of delayed gratification through slow practice, of developing the skills to communicate mood and atmosphere to listeners and a whole bunch of other things that are hard to find words for.
These kinds of "music makes you smarter" arguments may well be true, but they are not particularly effective advocacy methods. The best advocacy angle I've seen is that music is an effective weapon against depression, as Steve Dillon put it. Music is an essential technology for social and emotional well-being, a way to build emotional resilience, family bonds, and community cohesion. This to me is the real reason to have universal music education: to equip people to be happier. If that also happens to make them smarter or more disciplined, that's great.
ReplyDeletei agree with Mr Hein although I quail at the use of the term technology to describe music. I made the point earlier that music has lost its autonomy since the medieval period when it was part of the quadrivium. Sadly, people are continually forced to justify it on utilitarian grounds. Fortunately research appears to indicate that music indeed has practical benefits too. I would include the sister art dance as well.
ReplyDeleteIt's worth separating out "music" from "music in Western Europe." The idea of music as an autonomous art form never took hold in some societies. In many places it has been inseparable from dance, religious ritual, or other "utilitarian" purposes. Here in the US, European tradition is only one influence. Our entire popular culture and a growing percentage of our "art" music comes out of the African diaspora, where music's purpose has always had a community function, both for religion and recreation. Taking the long view, music as an "autonomous" art form will probably look like a strange outlier, an idea tied to a specific historical era and a specific set of places.
ReplyDeleteHaving recently finished Fredrik deBoer's book The Cult of Smart I can imagine him responding to any version of "music makes you smarter and that's why there should be more music education" with a blunt "and the not-smart and never-will-be-smart kids should get a music education, too."
ReplyDeleteEthan raises a good point about how the social function of music has always been significant. I like a lot of music that is considered "autonomous music" at one level but the non-musical, social and often ritual/liturgical component of music is normative through even most of Western music history. As Taruskin has put it, it wasn't until Kant we started getting a pivot toward what became the ideology of music as an autonomous art. I finished three different books by Mark Evan Bonds on how that process happened I am going to have to try writing about later this year and, thankfully, they're all pretty affordable in their Kindle editions.
The paradox (or irony?) that there are both progressive and conservative arguments against Romantic era art-religion and that at least every once in a while they converge on a shared understanding that music has a social/ritual/non-musical anchor intrigues me of late. :)
Let me offer a very brief argument for art as religion. Stepping back a bit and taking an overview of the course of recent history, it is hard not to conclude that the WEIRD countries (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Developed) seem to have lost their way. I see this as a crisis of meaning and Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson has fleshed this out. Traditionally individuals sought meaning in family relationships, religion and, from the 19th century, in art. More and more in the 20th century these have fallen away and individuals have tended to seek meaning in narcissistic indulgence, material accumulation and sexual invention. Looking at the results, art as religion doesn't seem so bad!
ReplyDeleteAlthough I can appreciate that for those who are secular art can play the role of religion in sociological or emotional terms I can also appreciate that the last ten years has revealed a kind of, if you will, set of Donatist controversies about art as religion.
ReplyDeleteThe first one is the extent to which artists have exploited women, whether in Hollywood or, in literature what we could call the Hemingway precedent. Defenses of art tend to be more passionate than defenses of athletics because the movies that Roman Polanski or Woody Allen have made are less ephemeral than an athletic or gymnastics victory guided by a Sandunsky or a assisted by a Nassar. But the question of art as religion can be broached in comparably sacramental terms--is the equivalently sacramental function of art as compared to a religious rite sufficiently sacred that the ethical problems of the person mediating the rite (art) can be ignored and if so, why?
The second quasi-Donatist controversy involves what low church Protestants might liken to the question of the priesthood of all art-religion believers, i.e. tensions about what art gets canonized and whose art gets canonized. Or, as I have put it at my blog, the challenge with art religion is the canon is generally closed and, as progressives point out, the default closed canon in Western contexts tends to be dead white guys. To put it still another way, if Star Trek is a secular progressive total-work-of-art that envisions a future idealized humanity which also attempts to bring that humanity about by depicting it the franchise, no matter how much it changes over the last half century, defaults to a U.S.-centric concept of idealized humanity--a blunter way to put it is all variants of Star Trek are distillations of U.S. cultural imperialism no matter how progressive/woke/liberal it may be.
Knowing that egalitarian authoritarian impulses have permeated religious traditions for thousands of years I know that the secular variants within art religion in the West are experiencing tensions similar to those experienced by people within religious traditions. Attacks on a canon of dead white guys are not attacks on art religion as such but on the outdated nature of the by now institutionally vetted canon. An intra-art-as-religion set of stances presents a situation that may have challenges. Progressive and conservative people within a religion can agree on rites and sacraments even when they fight about other issues but that's within a religion that generally inspires and catalyzes the arts; within a more overtly non-religious art-religion, however, there are few non-artistic ways of mediating potential tensions over the quasi-sacramental nature of the art besides appealing to politics.
I've read bits of Jordan Peterson but I admit to some skepticism about how well a new wave of post-Jungian analysis applied to personal journeys and the arts is going to remedy temptations to egoism since ... after all ... Joseph Campbell got hooked up to Star Wars. As I've put it elsewhere at my blog, the other challenge of art-as-religion is that it's generally made by people who want the highbrow art religion not the lowbrow art religion that can manifest in Star Wars, Star Trek, superhero movies or other pulp genres. But Loki shows up in the MCU like he does in The Ring cycle, right? ;)
Brilliant comment as always! I bow to your command of the history of religion. I had entirely forgotten about the Donatist heresy. It does have application to the current situation. I would argue that while art as religion certainly has many problems, you could do worse: ideology as religion, for example, which is where we seem to be going.
ReplyDeleteDonatism was a heresy and I would also argue that requiring artists to be morally perfect is an ideological bridge too far.
I want to quibble with this statement: "the challenge with art religion is the canon is generally closed and, as progressives point out, the default closed canon in Western contexts tends to be dead white guys." I disagree entirely that the canon is closed. That presumes that all the aesthetic judgements have been made and finalized. Not true, of course. Every time a listener chooses a particular CD or stream or buys a ticket to a concert an aesthetic judgement is made, just as one is made every time a composer jots something into a sketch or erases something from a score. These judgements are ongoing and fluid as we are all living beings.
The important thing about Peterson is not that he is a Jungian or influenced by Nietzsche, it is that he sees the problem of the individual in society as a problem of finding meaning.
The canon may not be closed but consider the entry requirements that are on option. You make reference to market actions that can select for a canon but doesn't that bring us back to what Richard Taruskin has described as the distinction between the academic canon (what you have to study to get academic credentials) and the repertoire canon (what everyone else voluntarily exchanges their money for being able to hear)?
ReplyDeleteBut that is, as I trust we both know, not the way progressives usually formulate the objection--WHO gets to make the decisions that establish canonicity and what canons count? Michael Jackson should be somewhere near the top of a popular music canon on the basis of market presence but is that the "only" reason? I don't think so and I'm not even that big of a Jackson fan compared to Stevie Wonder, for instance.
Since I reject art religion in general there isn't, from my position, an actual Donatist controversy regarding the arts but for those who do subscribe to an art religion explaining what it is about a work of art is sacred enough that whoever made it can be excused for being a heel seems to need an explanation. People can come up with reasons to keep watching WoodY Allen films despite assuming the worst allegations about him are true because, as Richard Brody put it, Woody Allen's films are art but Louis C. K. doesn't make art as Richard Brody defines it so nobody should distribute the man's films even though the man is supposed to be free to make them. But why? Brody doesn't exactly explain that.
The concern I've raised about Peterson is that he's the newest iteration of a pattern going back generations. I'm not telling people to not read Peterson but I AM saying that Joseph Campbell saw the problem of the individual in society as a problem of finding meaning, too, thus my concern that I'm not sure that Peterson is going to be more effective than Campbell in the long run.
We seem to be working our way towards some kind of understanding. Let me first clarify my position: I value the arts very highly for largely aesthetic reasons, but I am pretty sure that they have wide social value as well. But I do stop short of considering art as being actually sacred. I think my point was that there are worse choices than making art a sort of religion.
ReplyDeleteTaruskin's distinction is a useful one, but doesn't it come down to saying that the intellectual elite in art make different choices than the ordinary listener? And there is a fair amount of overlap, after all.
The complaint of progressives about WHO decides who is in the canon surely can't have any traction in popular music because that really comes down to everyone gets a vote: album sales. And when it comes to classical there is a serious amount of canon-fiddling going on right now with the upshot being uncertain. Is Clara Schumann going to be put in the first rank of composers? And what, apart from gender, is that going to be based on?
As far as the Donatist heresy goes, isn't it best decided the way that one was historically: if the sacraments are still the sacraments even if the priest is imperfect then surely a Woody Allen film can have aesthetic value whatever the director's moral status. Similarly, a film can be morally objectionable based on its content irrespective of the moral status of the people responsible. I think we could find examples of that.
Oh no, Peterson's observations do not need to be unique, I'm sure they are not, to be valuable.
The proposal that there's a Donatist controversy is one element but I think the other challenge/crisis is that there's still a push for a "Reformation" in art religion that progressives want that can be likened to a push for the priesthood of all believers in art religion. That, actually, may be where there are more points of tension and where folks who are labeled as "woke" are seen as a threat to more established Western canons. My proposal is that "within" Western art religion we can see this in a less overtly "threatening" way than has been by, at the risk of proposing a specific name or group, folks like Norman Lebrecht or John Borstlap at the Future Symphony Institute who see the Western canon as under attack. But we've seen comments from Ethan Hein that the canonized musical works themselves aren't really what concerns him as much as how they get presented. He's mentioned that seeing the canonical works as something we can learn from and build from/with (sampling, reusing, etc) suggests that Borstlap and Lebrecht are potentially in a camp where they view what I would describe as a "priesthood of all believers in art-religion" as an attack on Western art-religion itself. In a sense it IS that because I don't personally subscribe to art religion but for those who don't subscribe to those arts being sacred/elevating works another possibility can be on the table, which is where my proposed "priesthood of all believers" in art religion comes in, that the active participation of everyone who loves the arts in making music now is more important than whether or not Beethoven stays in the active canon. As Hindemith used to put it, there aren't any "deathless" musical works, everything has a shelf life and at some point the complexity of keeping symphonic repertoire active may preclude the symphony as a genre from surviving. The symphony won't "die" but it may lose its former pride of place. There are worse things than enjoying symphonies, of course, and yet paradoxically I do worry a little bit that advocates for Florence Price have been so vocal about getting her symphonies performed they have done so in a moment when highlighting her chamber music might do more to secure her potential place in a revised United States musical canon.
ReplyDeleteSo I think/I hope we are getting toward some kind of understanding.
As always, it seems that dealing with the issues in a serious way involves getting down to the details, which is where the ideological approach fails, in my view, because it tends to impose a simplistic sketch over the reality.
ReplyDelete