No one, for example, knows how music originated. Despite Beethoven’s storms and Messiaen’s bird songs, few scholars believe it began as an imitation of natural sounds. Storr thinks it probably developed from the “crooning, cooing tones and rhythms” in the vocal but nonverbal exchanges between mothers and infants; this helps explain its power to make us weep or exult. But music moves us literally as well as figuratively-as anyone who’s tried to still a tapping foot can testify. Of all the arts, it has the closest link to the body. Its rhythms are an analogue to “breathing, walking, the heartbeat and sexual intercourse.” Our sense of musical “space”-one tone being “higher” than another-may derive from the proximity of the auditory system to the ear’s vestibule, which provides the cues for physical orientation. And music effects physiological changes. Researchers monitoring Herbert von Karajan’s pulse rate while he conducted found “the greatest increase during those passages which most moved him emotionally, and not during those in which he was making the greatest physical effort.”
Freud, who wrote (and cared) little about music, assumed that a basic human drive was to still the emotions; Storr considers this “Nirvana principle” antiquated. Sensory-deprivation experiments of the ’50s and ’60s, he argues, clearly showed “human beings suffer from stimulus hunger as well as from stimulus overload.” Music is an abstract representation of, and a concrete stimulus to, the surge of emotion: no wonder it’s “one of the fundamental activities of mankind.” In preindustrial societies, ceremonial music was “a way of enhancing and co-ordinating group feelings”; in urban society, intense solitary listening has become a psychic tonic for those “cut off from the life of the body and the capacity to feel.”
But musical emotion differs from the genuine article in its reassuring orderliness. Indeed, Storr writes, we crave it partly for “its power to structure our auditory experience and thus to make sense out of it.” Finding and creating pattern is as deep-rooted and instinctual as, say, the drive to reproduce; as Storr notes, we can’t help but see three dots as a triangle. “Anything which lessens our distress at being surrounded by chaos, or promotes our shaky sense of control and mastery,” he writes, “gives us pleasure.” Storr’s thesis, in other words, is that we crave music both for the unruly passions it lets loose and for the rule it imposes on them. If he hadn’t already told us that music was a quintessentially human endeavor, we could have guessed.
