How does our music-making ultimately matter? Traditional, pre-literate ways of sharing music ask us to learn by mirroring, so making together music this way builds community, frees us for compassion, and unleashes our creativity. Here are some significant sources for this argument:
Mario Iacoboni, Mirroring People, the Science of Empathy and How We Connect With Others, Picador
Iacoboni, an M.D. neurological researcher at UCLA writes wonderful, page-turning scientific argument. Experiments he describes make very good sense and the logic of what they prove is satisfyingly compelling. He’s a pioneer researcher on mirror neurons and lays out clearly the emerging research that specific brain structures in our brain (and the brains of some other primates, whales and dolphins, and elephants) allow us to simply and directly read the affective state of our fellows (and some other mammals). Iacoboni and de Waal (below) are lead researchers in the emerging science of empathy/compassion. Both are realistic about how mirroring also contributes to competition and sometimes violence, but both see in our ability to take the role of the other, to feel the other’s experience, an inborn (I’d say God-given, but that’s not their argument) basis for the kind of communication that makes community possible
Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy, Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society, Harmony Books, New York
De Waal is a primatologist. Like Iacoboni, English is his second language and like Iacoboni, his ease and clarity writing it are enviable. The two books make an intriguing complementary pair. Iacoboni gives us a guided tour of the brain (ours and those other mammals). De Waal watches the behaviors a mirroring brain makes possible. Like Darwin himself (whom he quotes well), de Waal sees that cooperation, collaboration and compassion are evolutionary adaptations that are as decisive as competition. Like Darwin and Iacoboni, he acknowledges the contradictory and mixed character of primates (and other mammals whose behavior is shaped by mirroring/imitation).
Stephen Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals, The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body, Harvard University Press, Cambridge
Mithen draws evidence from neurology, paleontology, cross-cultural studies in language development in infants, and archaeology to argue for the evolution of human language and community from our ancestors’ ability to make primordial melody and gesture. I suspect the title is not his. Despite the title, he’s not writing about Neanderthals. Mithen’s real subject is music’s importance to the formation of primal community. From the primal communication that makes possible primal human community and early human’s collaborating systematically for survival. In Mithen’s evolutionary theory of language, human language comes from music, sentences from melodies, and finally words emerge from sentences. His extended argument is compelling, but with its breadth of data from different disciplines, also complex. For me this book demanded a slow, patient reading. It’s from Mithen’s evidence that I say that feeling is the vessel for articulated meaning.
Daniel J. Levitin, This is Your Brain on Music, The Science of a Human Obsession, Penguin Group, USA, and The World in Six Songs, Penguin Group, USA
I am still reading these two, and I began with the second book (Six Songs) and have been dipping into Brain on Music. Mithen’s empirically based vision is more foundational, but Levitin is more accessible. If Levitin makes a full argument of language coming from music, I haven’t seen it yet. In Six Songs he does argue that music has recognizable meaning and that melodies communication is something more substantial and consistent that the personal taste and preference of the listener.
Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild, M.I.T. Press, Cambridge
Hutchins counters what Episcopal Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori called ‘the heresy of individualism.’ It’s not that there’s no self or ‘I,’ but that thought and personal purpose emerge from communication. Thinking is interactive and conversational. The community that’s working together is essential to thought and my ‘I’ emerges in a specific community. For ‘in the wild’ research, Hutchins does in depth observation of people navigating ships and boats in the ocean. Hutchins sees ‘self’’ as a kind of local center, free but also born to and inseparable from a wider human system. And the thinking system Hutchins discovers from observing isn’t just the ‘we’ that thinks, faces into contradiction, etc. but the broad sensory connection with natural context and human artifact.
A fascinating example of the artifact making the ‘us’ that thinks more powerful and effective is Atul Gawande’s “The Checklist,” a New Yorker article in his Annals of Medicine series: Gawande describes the discovery that flying the B-17 (World War II bomber) was complex enough that it took a literal checklist for the crew to fly it safely and compares it to a physician-researcher finding the checklist practice in hospital critical care units reduced infection rate on major I.V. lines from nearly inevitable to negligible. Systematic address of complexity can enlarge what communities’ thinking can accomplish.
Barbara Bradley Hagerty, The Fingerprints of God, The Search for the Science of Spirituality, Riverhead Books, Penguin Group, New York
NPR religion writer Barbara Hagerty travels widely to interview a spectrum of neurological researchers whose personal faith ranges from Pentecostal to Agnostic or Atheist. For her it’s ‘fingerprints of God,’ but she knows better than to argue from measurable brain activity to proof of communication with a divine Other. The question she the research does address is what we can observe that prayer and religious practice do to and with our experience. Healing, restoring relationship, reducing anxiety, sparking creativity? All that is demonstrable.
Andrew Newberg, M.D. and Mark Robert Waldman, How God Changes your Brain, Breakthrough Findings from a Leading Neuroscientist, Ballantine Books , 2010
I found Hagerty more satisfying than Newberg, but commend Newberg for evidence of one consistently demonstrated finding (various researchers confirming the same outcome) – that praying to a compassionate, forgiving God opens new neural pathways and makes us smarter, more creative, and more flexible in our thinking, and that praying to a judgmental, condemning God actually measurably decreases the richness of brain activity and makes us less creative, less flexible, and dumber.
And finally, I recommend these two fascinating and complementary articles on the work of teaching and making an effective learning community, both directed to research on teaching in K-12 schools, but readily applicable to our work returning teaching/learning to the community’s liturgical worship, not as ‘rehearsal’ or preparation, but part of the formational work of liturgy itself:
Malcolm Gladwell, Annals of Education: Most Likely to Succeed: How do we hire when we can’t tell who’s right for the job?, The New Yorker, December 15, 2008
Elizabeth Green, Building a Better Teacher, New York Times, March 2, 2010
This is a work in progress. I welcome your responses to any of this material and also want to hear of additions you may find to the conversation about music and how music shapes and empowers us in community.
