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A few years ago, I went back to piano lessons and found myself a teacher in a different league to the perfectly adequate one I’d had as a school-girl. To my surprise, we spent the whole hour of the first lesson on the first four bars, sometimes playing just one note over and over, listening intently, eyes shut, altering the angle of the wrist or the weight of a finger, miniscule changes, but potential changes that might convey a world of difference to the listener. It reminded me of an early supervision session I’d had as a trainee where we spent an hour exploring the first 5 minutes of my encounter with a new patient.
Roger Kennedy’s book helps us understand why music has such power to move us, to hook into our emotions and express, reveal and connect to deep experience that cannot be put into words. He draws on research from infant development, neuroscience, evolutionary theory and musicology and quotes widely from psychoanalysts, philosophers, composers and musicians. It is a comprehensive review of a wide-ranging literature and will interest anyone who loves music and enjoys approaching a subject from diverse perspectives. It is difficult to put myself in the shoes of the 2.5% of us who are not programmed to respond to music (p. 57) but I imagine it would at least give them a theoretical understanding of the power music holds over the rest of us. At the other extreme, I have already ordered it as a Christmas present for a musical friend who sometimes accompanies me to concerts and almost without fail finds that tears flood down his cheeks a few bars after the music begins.
Such a book, comprehensive as it is, cannot, of course, cover everything. The chapter on evolution mentions interesting anthropological examples of the close links between music, ritual, dance and religion – interestingly, in some languages, there is no overall word for music, separate from that for dance and ritual (p. 59). But the examples through most of the book are from western classical mu