The Musical Human: A History of Life on Earth – A BBC Radio 4 'Book of the Week'

"The Musical Human" is the first book for general readers to comprehensively explore music's extraordinary diversity across world cultures. Exhaustively researched and beautifully written, Spitzer's text documents how music creates the soundtrack for human life in a multitude of ways. In a field with few ancient artifacts--it's hard to know what the music of the remote past sounded like--his speculations about music's biological and cultural roots are probing and informative. Daring, poetic, and mind-opening--a major achievement, enthusiastically recommended.

Amazing synthesis of ideas from lots of different places.

1. “Mimesis is what music does with one foot in biology and another in religion.” (p. 124) What does this mean? Does it mean anything? 2. “Reducing music to fractal self-similarity profiles a remainder, everything that is left out.” (p. 364) This seems to mean even less, though it seeks profundity via Mandelbrot sets. 3. “Ornament, taste and colour represent paths not taken by Western music.” (p. 211) If this means anything, it seems patently wrong. 4. “playing a very high note on a piano doesn’t require any more effort than playing a low one.” (p. 105) Actually, it requires less effort, something Spitzer, who is an accomplished pianist, certainly knows. 5. “Winterreise (A Winter’s Journey)” (p. 108) The original poems by Wilhelm Müller were published under the title Die Winterreise, The Winter Journey. Schubert removed the article to make his song cycle more general. If he wanted it to be about a single winter journey, he would have changed the article to Eine. He didn’t, he omitted it entirely, the correct translation being Winter Journey. This is not a bit of trivia, there is a significant literature about it, and it is surprising that a professor of music writing about Schubert seems unaware of it. 6. Then there is the ultimate howler: “The top A at the end of Nessun dorma.” (p. 111). This is the note which the author claims Pavarotti held longer than Puccini notated in order to thrill the audience. There are a couple of problems with this statement. For an operatic tenor, a “top A” is not a very high note and unlikely to thrill an audience out of its seats. In fact, the high note in Nessun dorma, the aria from Puccini’s Turandot with which Pavarotti, and other tenors, did and do indeed thrill their audiences, is a whole note higher; it’s a B. It must be the most famous note in all of opera, and Spitzer gets it wrong. So, here is my problem with this book. It contains a lot of material, in particular about obscure tribes and their music, with which I am unfamiliar. If the author gets things I know wrong, how can I be confident in the accuracy of what I know nothing about? As the king says in The King and I, is a puzzlement. So why 4 stars? Because there is an enormous amount of fascinating material in this book with copious notes for those who wish to explore topics further. Perhaps the real culprit is the copy editor, maybe he or she decided A was high enough and added the article to Winterreise. Surely the author deserves an A for effort.

Connecting rhythms and textures of bodily movement, vocal expression, and locations inhabited long enough for language and meaning to grow deep roots does stretch the reader's imagination. Lots of margin notes to make as the writer triggers thoughts in one's mind.