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Why does the brain create music? What is it about certain abstract
patterns of sound that makes us want to dance? Why do songs that we think of as
simple, even trite, sometimes convey deep emotional power? We
tend to think of the arts as luxuries rather than necessities, and as inventions
of society rather than evolution. Yet the origin of musical ability was a turning
point in the evolution of modern humans. Every culture, without exception, has
some form of music. Is it really a luxury or does it answer some basic biological
need? If so, what? in Beethoven's Anvil, William Benzon takes up the fascinating
and unexplored link between music and the brain. Among early humans, he says,
there was no distinction between music, dance, ritual and religion -- they were
all part of the same activity, and this activity used every part of the conscious
brain. Language, movement, vision, emotion, hearing, touch and social interaction
were all involved. In fact, Benzon argues, music is necessary precisely because
it engages so many different parts of the brain. It literally keeps the brain
in tune with itself and with the brains of others. The ultimate form of musical
experience is that feeling of oneness with a larger entity that we identify as
transcendent religious experience. We feel this way because that's precisely what
the brain is doing: becoming one with a larger unit, the human tribe. Beethoven's
Anvil takes us inside modern and ancient performances and rituals to show
how the musical linking of brains explains things we commonly (and not-so-commonly)
experience. Benzon shows us a rehearsal where mysterious tones that no one is
playing seem to emerge from the ceiling, but only when the musicians feel they
are in a groove. Everyone present hears these tones -- but are they an acoustic
phenomenon or a mental note? He explores how Leonard Bernstein knew he'd given
a good performance when, after it was over, he felt he hadn't just performed a
piece but written it; and how performers as different as Earl "Fatha"
Hines and Vladimir Horowitz felt they stopped being human onstage but became something
like racehorses. Benzon uses remarkable insights from brain science and anthropology
to investigate musical styles ranging from Gregorian chant to hip-hop; discovers
a children's song in a Louis Armstrong solo and finds that it may date to before
the Crusades; explains rock music's merging of African and European musical forms
in evolutionary terms; and reveals the similarity between decision-making in a
baboon troop and the final movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Beethoven's
Anvil is an extraordinary book about a profound influence shaping human minds
and cultures. Both daring and impeccably scholarly, it offers a sweeping new vision
of a vital, familiar and yet poorly understood force in our lives. William
L. Benzon, Ph.D., a cognitive scientist, is an associate editor of The Journal
of Social and Evolutionary Systems and co-author of Visualizations: The
Second Computer Revolution. He is also co-founder of the musical ensemble AfroEurasian
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