Chapter I
WHY DO WE LOVE MUSIC?
Why does a person love his sweetheart, his food, his safety, his social fellowship, his communion with nature, his God, approaches to the ultimate goals of truth, goodness, and beauty? The answer to each of these is a long story, involving not only common sense and scientific observation but a profound intuitive insight, a self-revelation. In all, it will be found that love is a favorable response, a reaching out for the satisfaction of a fundamental human need, an effort to secure possession, and a willingness to give an equivalent, indeed a more or less unconditional surrender.
In all efforts to describe and explain, we reach out for specific reasons or at least rationalizations. Modern science has made great strides in revealing and describing all sorts of reasons for such emotional experience and behavior. The theory of the evolution of man, the anthropological implementation of this in the history of the rise of mankind, the psychology of the mental development of the individual, the comparison of this with animal behavior, and the inspired interpretation of these motives in literature, especially biography, autobiography, and poetry, are sources to be drawn upon. We have the adage that the explanation of one blade of grass involves the explanation of all the forces of nature. This aphorism certainly applies in the attempt to explain any particular human love.
It is therefore evident that any attempt to account for a specific affection, such as the love of music, must be fractionated, placing responsibility in turn upon the scientist, the artist, and the self-revelation of the inspired music lover at each culture level. It has become the recognized function of the psychology of music to integrate the contributions from all scientific sources, such as anatomy, physiology, anthropology, acoustics, mental hygiene, and logic, in their bearings upon the hearing of music, the appreciation of music, musical skills, theories, and influences. To account for the emotional power of music, the psychologist must consider the taproots of the artistic nature of the individual in relation to the nature of the art object, music. He must trace the unfolding of the organism as a whole from inherited reflexes, instincts, urges, drives, and capacities in an integrated pattern; he must consider the function of the art in human economy and especially the goals attained by the pursuit of the art. In this task there is room for intricate specializations and division of labor. It is my purpose here to present merely a rough skeletal outline of some of the outstanding features which underlie the love of music from the psychological point of view.
Every impulse has two aspects: attraction and repulsion. All of us love music in some degree; all of us hate some music; and most of us in the economy of nature are comparatively indifferent and extravagantly wasteful to the role that music might play in our lives. Hatred and indifference to music are important realities in life worthy of serious consideration; but our topic restricts us to the positive side of musical response, the love of music.
THE MUSICAL MEDIUM
Organic response. Man is born with a psychophysical organism which registers sounds and responds to them somewhat like a resonator, which selects, amplifies and aids in the integration of auditory impressions. Our whole organism responds to sound involving the central and peripheral nervous system, all the muscles, all the internal organs, and especially the automatic nervous system with its endocrines, which furnish the triggers in the physical generation of emotion. Experiments from various sources have shown that sound acts physiologically on nervous control, circulation, digestion, metabolism, body temperature, posture and balance, hunger and thirst, and in general, the groundwork of pleasure and pain. The physical organism as a whole responds to sounds in specialized functions.
Thus, man comes into the world tuned to music. The organism responds to sounds from earliest infancy. Back of all conscious awareness, back of all musical feeling, even back of subconscious assimilations and elaborations is the purely physiological response which is a function and a condition of well-being. This physiologically beneficent response of the organism to sound underlies all musical experience; without it we could not love music.
Sounds in themselves. Like colors, sounds may be beautiful in themselves, quite apart from music. A single sound in nature or art is capable of appearing in endless variety in terms of pitch, dynamic value, duration, tone quality, and noise. It may be an object of beauty in itself in thousands of ways quite apart from its utility in music or musical perception. We find the tonal world in which we live full of beautiful and useful sounds which we love because we are capable of intellectual and emotional response to their beneficent influence. They play a large role in our feelings of attraction and adjustment. They may be beautiful to the untutored and intuitive mind as well as to the intellectually and esthetically cultured mind in the same way that flowers may seem beautiful to a child because they arouse an immediate pleasurable feeling; and yet they are not music but merely the raw material from which music is made. These raw materials from which the musical structure is raised are themselves beautiful, quite apart from musical experience or behavior. They play a large role in the love of nature.
Thus, before the beginnings of music, primitive man responded affectionately to the sounds of nature and was guided by them in his daily life. Even before language took form, single sounds carried meaning and gave satisfaction. Man took pleasure in his own vocal utterances or mechanically produced sounds which played a large role in his human economy and development.