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Summary
Summary
A FINANCIAL TIMES SUMMER BOOK OF 2021 PICK A RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK 'Full of delightful nuggets' Guardian online 'Entertaining, informative and philosphical ... An essential read' All About History 'Extraordinary range ... All the world and more is here' Evening Standard _______________________ 165 million years ago saw the birth of rhythm. 66 million years ago came the first melody. 40 thousand years ago Homo sapiens created the first musical instrument. Today music fills our lives. How we have created, performed and listened to this music throughout history has defined what our species is and how we understand who we are. Yet music is an overlooked part of our origin story. The Musical Human takes us on an exhilarating journey across the ages - from Bach to BTS and back - to explore the vibrant relationship between music and the human species. With insights from a wealth of disciplines, world-leading musicologist Michael Spitzer renders a global history of music on the widest possible canvas, looking at music in our everyday lives; music in world history; and music in evolution, from insects to apes, humans to AI. ' Michael Spitzer has pulled off the impossible: a Guns, Germs and Steel for music' Daniel Levitin 'A thrilling exploration of what music has meant and means to humankind' Ian Bostridge
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Musicologist Spitzer (A History of Emotion in Western Music) explores music as a consistent presence in the human experience in this meticulously researched work. He argues that, over time, man has become less an active participant in vocal sound, instrumentation, and body expression and more a passive listener. To bolster his position, he surveys the biblical era, tribal cultures, and the history of European empires, noting, for instance, that ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras "lectured to his disciples behind a screen so that they could hear his voice without being able to see his face." (His disciples were called the akousmatikoi, translating to " 'those who hear', and the term 'acousmatic' came to define the condition of musical listening in the West.") Ancient civilizations in Africa and Australia, meanwhile, relied on vocalization, rhythm, and movement to preserve the past. As Spitzer weaves through musical developments, he points out how Beethoven's compositions were about "life, emotion and the spirit," and examines how cultural attitudes of the 11th century prompted a moving away from primitive sounds in Western classic music. It's a noble if muddled effort to explain millions of years in sound and the components of it that shaped human lives then and now. This one's for specialists only. Agent: Jonathan Gregory, Antony Harwood. (Apr.)
Guardian Review
Music has been a lifeline during this year of Covid, but we haven't all dabbled in drumming or taken up the trombone. Instead we've sparked up Spotify, soundtracking our constricted lives with a mood-changing playlist of uplifting beats or chill-out classical. This surge in listening has been little comfort to professional musicians, struggling while live venues are shuttered. Lockdown has boosted streaming by 22%, but with digital distributors keeping the lion's share of the proceeds, some artists have found themselves delivering takeaways and stacking shelves. As Michael Spitzer points out, this shift towards isolated listening is only the latest stage in a transition from active participation in music to our passive consumption of it that has been going on for thousands of years. Spitzer splits his global history of music into three movements, spinning the story of a turn away from nature across a single human life, world history and hominid evolution. He starts with the individual, charting how music begins for most of us in intricate duets of cooing and peek-a-boo on our parents' knees. Nursery rhymes, recorder groups and school choirs keep us making music during our primary years, but before reaching adulthood most westerners choose not to pursue it - a development Spitzer blames on the cult of genius, the church and Guido d'Arezzo, the Italian monk who invented staff notation in the 11th century. The same story plays out again over the course of world history. Spitzer rewinds 40,000 years to a bone flute discovered in a cave in south-west Germany, drawing on the musical practice of contemporary hunter-gatherers to suggest that it was used to play "atoms of music", which were repeated alongside other independent voices to the accompaniment of handclaps, body slaps and rattles. For Spitzer, music has always played a role in religion, so he finds it in the standing stones of Göbekli Tepe, a religious site in Turkey around which the first settlements were established 12,000 years ago, and in the poetry of the Sumerian priestess Enheduanna - "the first recorded name of a composer in the history of the world". The lyre and the double oboe arrive with Ancient Egypt, the idea of progress and tradition with the Old Testament, and the resolution of dissonance with Greek tragedies, which Spitzer says were "closer to operas than to what we call 'plays'". The stage is now set for western music's flight into abstraction. When Guido strung the notes of plainchant across four parallel lines, it allowed the church to standardise music across a continent and composers to preserve their work for future generations. Armed with the ability to capture music on the page, they pushed its logic ever further, launching successive waves of revolution that took us from Renaissance polyphony to Arvo Pärt. Enshrining these sounds in scores broke the "great chain of master-apprentice relationships", leading to the canonisation of genius composers, the professionalisation of performance and a gradual decline in audience numbers. Spitzer widens his lens to explore how we share rhythm with insects, melody with birds and a sense of musical tradition with whales. Combine these capacities with the social intelligence of apes, he suggests, and all the ingredients for a musical primate are there. The book traces a line from the rhythm of walking on two legs, through the repeated impacts of making stone tools and the percussive banging used to drive animals away, so that music carves out a place to live safely. It marks "the boundary between civilisation and nature, the village and the forest". With such a broad canvas, there are inevitable gaps. The musical score not only allowed composers to preserve and broadcast their work, it also meant they could write works they couldn't play themselves. In his brief coda on future directions, Spitzer doesn't explore how electronic music makes it possible to create music unplayable by any human being. He also says he's more interested in our "universal predisposition to music" than "elite accomplishments", and that he's wary of pitting classical music against pop, but popular music mostly plays second fiddle in this account. He can discuss Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You" with the same acuity as Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, but his heart is clearly in the concert hall. Spitzer isn't afraid of using a sweeping statement or a corny line, and his fractal compositional technique means he has to make do without the narrative thrust of a conventional, linear argument. But The Musical Human is full of delightful nuggets and sends the reader back to a world of musical examples time and time again. After following the evolution of music over 165m years, he greets the contemporary split between professional performers and passive consumers with little more than a shrug: "We are where we are, and it is where it is." If music is as central to human existence as he suggests, we can't leave musicians dancing to the tune of Deliveroo.
Kirkus Review
An ambitious text that attempts to illuminate the history of music through the millennia and across world cultures. In this follow-up to A History of Emotion in Western Music (2020), music professor Spitzer presents a history of humans and music that is dense in dates and facts but accessible. Readers need not understand music theory to follow the argument, although musical appreciation and some grounding in ancient history will be useful. The author's sly humor ("Happiness is a warm lyre") and knack for piquant observation ("Homer's sirens are as likely to have been whales as birds") help leaven the in-depth lessons, which Spitzer charts across three parts: life, history, and evolution. After a fine history of the development of musical ability in Home sapiens, the author turns to the three "killer apps" of Western music--notes, staff notation, and polyphony--which detached music from muscle memory, place and community, and the natural rhythms of speech. These three elements are much less prominent in the music of the Islamic world, concerned with ornament and the fluidity of the speaking voice; India, centered on underlying spiritual unity; and China, organized by timbre rather than pitch. Spitzer then investigates what made "Western classical music…so viral" (the score: music written down and disseminated beyond oral transmission) and where much of its future audience lives: Southeast Asia. Ultimately, the author regards the musical human as the "great synthesizer" of species, combining the rhythm of insects, melody of birds, musical tradition of whales, and social intelligence of apes. His interests range widely enough to include a discussion of musicians' "late style," featuring examples as disparate as "the fruits of the ageing composer" and David Bowie's final album, Blackstar. Spitzer laments the widening "gap between listening and doing" in musical life, but he looks to the future with discussions of musical crowdsourcing, interactive composition, and audio implants. A thorough survey showing how "there very well might be something irreducibly human about all the music of the Earth." (Notes[395-451], Picture Credits[453], Acknowledgements[455-458], Index[459-470], A Note on the Author[471], A Note on the Type[473]) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Music is "irreducibly human," writes Spitzer. But where did music come from, and why is it such an integral part of human history? Because, he argues, it's about "life, emotion and the spirit." It is as old as the species, though the earliest Greek music notation dates back to 500 BC, and there was no recorded music prior to 1877. Using, as he wryly admits, a nonlinear time line in the style of film director Christopher Nolan, he covers several thousand years of human history as he explores the evolution of music and its indisputable links with human life. Spitzer emphasizes the universality of music; everyone, for example, can associate an emotional experience with music. Touching on culture, history, science, anthropology, and philosophy, Spitzer discusses music from ancient times to the courts of medieval and Renaissance Europe to the modern era and everything in between, employing voluminous examples. Some have a cinematic source, from the haunting Japanese flute at the conclusion of Kurosawa's Ran and the "Dawn of Man" sequence in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, but Spitzer also cites David Bowie's Blackstar, work songs, love songs, the Beatles' Abbey Road, the Silk Road Ensemble, and African and African American music. An exhaustive but not exhausting study, sublimely readable.
Library Journal Review
Whether Spitzer (Metaphor and Musical Thought) is meditating on the utility of metaphor in capturing music's intrinsic abstraction or discussing emotion theory across a sweep of genres, his writing is broad, deep, and layered. Here, he braids together metaphor and emotion into a sprawling, philosophical musing on the development of Homo musicus, or how music began. The book opens with a provocative premise: We are all born with musical skill but culture has turned us against our nature and valued passive listening over the act of creation. Spitzer supports this argument in reverse chronological order, moving from the 21st century back to a speculative musical prehistory. Weaving through history, philosophy, archaeology, and biology, he demonstrates how music was not serendipitously invented by human beings but rather is innate to this world. VERDICT With humorous and concise prose, Spitzer makes a convincing case for the irreducible musical properties of human beings.--Joshua Finnell, Colgate Univ., Hamilton, NY