ø Review: The World in Six Songs by Daniel J. Levitin

Review: The World in Six Songs by Daniel J. Levitin

25 November 2008 102 views No Comment

Music is one of the most intimately human forms of self-expression. Many people spend years of their lives creating and sustaining a very unique taste in music that they argue defines who they are. Daniel J. Levitin, in his new book 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: friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion, and love. Suddenly it’s 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 was himself involved in.

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 giving it a unique perspective that straddles two very different fields. A cognitive psychologist by training, Levitin runs the laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition, and Expertise at Montreal’s McGill University. He had previously dropped out of college to pursue life as a musician, and once he achieved a measure of success came back to academic life, earning his Ph. D.

The World in Six Songs is the latest in a series of books that chronicle and correlate 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: “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 sets 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 readers interest before exploring neuroscientific research findings and examples from 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 sixties and seventies antiwar protests. He spends nearly twenty pages depicting his feelings as they related 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,” 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 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.

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