Daniel Levitin's new book sounds like it could
form the basis of a great party game: If music—Levitin uses the word
"song" to stand in for all forms of it—can be sorted into just six
categories, what should those distinctions be? More importantly, who can make
the best playlist for each category? Unfortunately, The World In Six Songs: How The
Musical Brain Created Human Nature never goes so far as to set up this game, and its
theories crack wide open when Levitin loses sight of his original premise.
For Levitin, a cognitive
psychologist, former music producer, and author of This Is Your Brain On
Music,
the categories denoted by intangibles like "comfort" represent purposes which
music has held—and to some degree, still holds—in the development
of human society. The song a clique of teenagers name as "theirs" and the
midnight singing ritual of a Brazilian tribe are both songs of friendship,
while a discussion of religious music links the repetitive actions of praying
or clapping to secular iterations of group movement like the Hokey Pokey. In
each chapter, he incorporates interviews with musicians like Joni Mitchell or
David Byrne, or stories from his research and his life. (One episode about a
squabble among restaurant workers over what to play in the kitchen is
especially poignant.)
It's a neat concept whose
speculative fun is then drained chapter by chapter, as Levitin's idea of
relevant research comes into question. He attempts to squeeze a semester's
worth of neurological factoids into an under-300-page book that's also tasked
with delivering Neil Diamond lyrics. Though he does get Sting to philosophize
about his vowel abuse, Levitin shoehorns theories of familial evolution into a
section about love, and an analysis of the power of psychics into a discussion
of joy. When his interdisciplinary approach does succeed—the chapter on knowledge
songs is the best—he slights the most fascinating material, giving short
shrift even to his own stories about playing in a country band as a college
dropout. The biggest disappointment of The World In Six Songs isn't Levitin's lack of
love for the material he studies; it's the profound discord between that love
and his ability to express it without digging so far into his expertise that no
one can follow.