Why do American writers smarm up to readers who are not going to read their book? The question is prompted by Daniel Levitin’s This is your Brain on Music (Plume Books, 2007) a thoroughly recommendable book by a cognitive scientist.
The pitch for readership begins at the autobiographical introduction called – hold your nose – ‘I Love Music and I Love Science – Why Would I Want to Mix the Two?’ Throughout the book, there are illustrations from both popular and classical music, with the balance heavily in favour of the popular. Even this is not enough to keep Demos happy.
Modern composers such as Schoenberg threw out the whole idea of expectation. The scales they used deprive us of a resolution . . . thus creating the illusion of no home, a music adrift, perhaps as a metaphor for a twentieth century existentialist existence (or just because they were trying to be contrary).
Compare:
The brain extracts basic, low-level features from the music, using specialized neural networks that decompose the signal into information about pitch, timbre, spatial location, loudness, reverberant environment, tone durations and the onset times for different notes (and for different combinations of notes).
There are lots of sentences like that – and a proper thing too, and a fascinating tale they tell. Is it likely that a reader who will persevere through the scientific explanations will swallow the rubbish about Schoenberg? Will need all the references to Sting and The Police? Now that I ask the question I see that the answer is yes.