Why music and whence its harmonies?
Bjorn Merker - Uppsala University
As human beings, we tend to take music for granted, yet from the perspective of natural history it is a rare phenomenon, indeed. Darwin called the human capacity to enjoy and produce musical notes amongst the most mysterious faculties with which we are endowed. This because such a capacity lacks any obvious utility with regard to our daily habits of life, yet it is universally present in all human cultures, from the arctic to the tropics, and from hunter-gatherers to industrial societies. In the context of some perceptive remarks about the emotions aroused in us by music Darwin quoted "Chinese annals" to the effect that "Music hath the power of making heaven descend upon earth." Not only did Darwin fully appreciate the uniqueness of human music, but he believed that music preceded language in human evolution, and in fact supplied the foundation upon which language developed at a rather late stage of human prehistory. He believed that we sang before we talked, and placed the origin of our capacity for song squarely in that inexhaustible source of esthetic extravaganzas in nature, the same source that gave us the peacock's tail, the pair duets of the singing apes - the gibbons - and the underwater concerts of humpback whales, namely the mating game between the sexes and its associated rivalries.
Yet tracing our capacity for song to such a source tells us only that we can expect music to be elaborate, but very little about its actual structural characteristics and peculiarities. Why discrete pitches? Why durations with proportional values? Why the prominence of whole integer ratios in the frequencies making up consonant, harmonious sounds? Regarding such questions there is a tradition, persisting over thousands of years of cultural history, attempting to trace significant aspects of music to quite another source in non-human nature, namely to matter itself, that is, to the physics of vibrating, swinging and rotating bodies with their resonances and phase relations. When you strike a sonorous body it generates not only the fundamental which is most conspicuous to our ear, but fainter harmonics trailing off the fundamental like a long and thinning tail of ever higher and fainter pitch steps. This is the harmonic series or the overtone series, the lower reaches of which bear a conspicuous relation to musically harmonious intervals. These relations were explored by numerous musicians and theorists among whom Pythagoras is a pioneer and patron saint, and of whom we have a representative in our midst in the person of Mikis Theodorakis.
The intuitive appeal of the Pythagorean program notwithstanding, when theorists tried to work it out in detail with regard to actual musical traditions and practices, problems arose. This has led some to reject outright what has been called "this acrobatic theory of natural resonance", accusing it of ignoring the fact that "a wide diversity of intervals and pitch steps are used in the different scales of different musical cultures", intervals which are difficult to reconcile with any straightforward application of the harmonic series. In my remarks I will conclude that the problems such critics cite are real enough, but that their abandonment of the theory of resonance as an explanation for musical intervals, scales, harmonies, and tonal relations may be premature. The reason for this is that a number of recent developments, which include findings on the perception of tone sequences in animals, evidence regarding the organization of hair-cells in the inner ear related to their "otoacoustic emissions", and developments in nonlinear dynamics are converging on a very elegant and appealing new theoretical synthesis, a synthesis in which the Pythagorean whole integer ratios and resonance phenomena indeed emerge as the rock bed upon which musical scales, harmonies and tonal relations appear to rest.
Part VIII
|
You are here:
