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Music, the mundane and apathy How Robert Jourdain's new book killed my imagination. "You'll leave this book with quite an education. Be assured, music will never seem the same again." Or so claims Robert Jourdain in the introduction to his new book, "Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy: How Music Captures Our Imagination" (Morrow). Oh yeah? I can't recall another book that has inspired me to write FUCK YOU in the margin so many times. Quite an education, indeed: I learned things like, "a great melody is magic"; that in the Baroque era "they wanted to do Baroque things"; and -- you better sit down -- when music "brings us to ecstasy ... above all, it is beautiful." Other than enlarging my anatomical vocabulary with regards to the human ear (how 'bout that "tectorial membrane"!) the only thing I learned is that when it comes to investigating how music brings on ecstasy, Jourdain's the wrong man for the job. For one thing, he has an extremely narrow view of what music is. A science writer as well as a pianist and composer, he has a maddening habit of pumping up so-called "art" music while dissing all things pop. Discussing the acceptance of the Western rules of harmony, he coos, "That Bach, Beethoven and Brahms favored these chord progressions is deemed evidence enough of their inherent musicality." It's as if you were reading a scholarly tract on why romance languages strike Anglophones as sonorous, and the author backed up every single point by praising French and defaming Spanish. You'd find that a little vichy, no? Every time the author sang the praises of Marseilles but put down Madrid, you'd start to wonder if there wasn't some señorita in his past who broke his corazon, because otherwise, for him to write off a gigantic area of his subject matter unprovoked would seem creepy and trite. Not to mention that it would completely undermine every last one of his arguments. In imagining a familial situation in which a young, classically trained performer plays something nice for "Auntie Gertrude," Jourdain has the aunt politely ask the rising star how many songs she knows. "Songs? Songs? Fugues, yes. Nocturnes or waltzes or sonatas, yes. But songs?" I think I speak for Auntie Gertrude when I say, "WhatEVER." Then there's the part where advanced space aliens of the future come across a 20th century American shuttle and, upon finding some "simple" pop songs in the craft, feel sorry for us. We only gain their respect when they hit on Glenn Gould performing an "extraordinarily well-organized composition." Well, sure, who doesn't like Glenn Gould? What's not to like? Still, must Jourdain plop down such sweeping platitudes as, "Rock is also profoundly anti-intellectual"? Just because "Rock Around The Clock" is dumb doesn't mean Elvis Costello's "Eisenhower Blues" is. "Its images reflect the concerns of youth," Jourdain condescends. Does that mean you can't understand Otis Redding's "Try A Little Tenderness" if you're over 30? Do they check ID's down at the "Heartbreak Hotel"? Like all good liberal intellectuals, Jourdain is kind to Indian and African music because of their complicated microtones and polyrhythms. But he treats rock 'n' roll as the white trash of music, writing that "devotees of classical music complain that (rock's) obsession with beat trivializes everything it touches, appealing to our lower instincts, like greasy food." ("Devotees of classical music," if you hadn't guessed already, means Jourdain.) Lower instincts? Every time Neil Young and Crazy Horse fall into one of those shattering grooves, how can it bring on anything other than the ecstasy Jourdain seeks to define? Does it really matter whether it's a string quartet or the Fab Four who get you to the plain? Jourdain attempts to map the path from sound production to elation, equating ecstasy with "immediacy." But aurally inspired euphoria transcends style -- it's precisely those petty allegiances to styles and form that are trivial, not a feel for beats. As Simon Frith asks in his infinitely more interesting examination of listening, "Performing Rites," "Can I really distinguish between the pleasure that I take in Bartók and the pleasure that I take in Hüsker Dü? Am I describing something quite different when I say that I'm moved by Fauré's 'Requiem' and by Sharon Redd?" "It is the largest structures that matter," Jourdain writes. What he doesn't understand is that it's large moments, not long scores, that fuel musical obsessions -- that sometimes, a simple rendering of "Amazing Grace" can touch you as deeply as Beethoven's Ninth. One would hope that even a semi-scientific investigation into the process of ecstasy would offer case studies or anecdotes about ecstatic experiences. Strangely, Jourdain prints no shoulda-been-at-Carnegie-Hall-when tales -- not his own, nor anyone else's. I'd at least like to think that he began his search after bursting into tears at "Don Giovanni" or something, but we'll never know. He traces the roots of the word "ecstasy" to mean "sound that leaves you standing outside yourself." But a writer should know how to let you back in. April 11, 1997

BOOKMARK: http://www.salonmagazine.com/columnists/vowell.html

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