Tripping the World Fantastic

A Journey Through the Music of Our Planet

Glenn Dixon

• Publisher: Dundurn Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781459706569
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Musica

A fascinating journey through the world's musical cultures.

Every culture on Earth has music. Every culture that's ever existed has had it, but we don't exactly know why. Music is not like food, shelter, or having opposable thumbs. We don't need it to live, and yet we can't seem to live without it. Glenn Dixon travels the globe exploring how and why people make music.From a tour of Bob Marley's house to sitar lessons in India, he experiences music around the world and infuses the stories with the latest in brain research, genetics, and evolutionary psychology. Why does music give us chills down the backs of our necks? What exactly are the whales singing about and why does some music stick in our minds like chewing gum?

Through his adventures, Dixon uncovers the real reasons why music has such a powerful hold on us – and the answers just might surprise you.

PART ONE

Music and Evolutionary Psychology

1

Egypt

The Trumpets of King Tut

Crossing the streets in Cairo is like walking into a cavalry charge. Lanes and lines mean nothing to Egyptian drivers. Dented Mercedes and trucks filled with tomatoes careened past me almost out of control. Sometimes there were five vehicles abreast, sometimes two, whatever it would take to push and swerve ahead of the next driver. Stop signs were ignored and sidewalks were only provisionally for pedestrians so that venturing out on foot was as foolhardy as a winter advance on Russia.

We had just crossed a bridge over the Nile. I thought it was going to be a wide, lazy river, reed-rimmed, with square-sailed felucca boats gliding across the water like Time itself. Instead, I got honking and angry car engines. I bounded after my guide, Yassar, who seemed to take no notice of the chaos. He wore a suit, even in the crippling heat. Yassar was an expert in Egyptian hieroglyphics and he had a great bushy moustache that he stroked when he lectured.

He only stopped and turned to speak when we came up into Tahrir Square. This square, of course, was at the centre of the mass protests that brought down Hosni Mubarak. Yassar pointed out strategic positions and a place where a tank or something had crunched up the curb. He hurried through it all, barely touching his moustache. This wasn’t his thing. The history of anything more recent than two or three thousand years ago just didn’t seem to interest him and he strode off, after only the briefest of explanations, to a large building, distinctly colonial and more than a little run down, that sat at the edge of the square. This was the Egyptian Museum.

They’ve been talking about building a new museum for decades but it never seems to happen. The old crumbling building is packed to the rafters with Egyptian treasures — many of them just sort of haphazardly piled around the place. The funny thing is, even the third-rate stuff here would be a centrepiece of almost any other museum in the world.

Inside, the air was stifling and I wilted and stumbled from exhibit to exhibit, trailing after Yassar, trying to keep up with his explanations. Yellow and peeling labels — some a hundred years old — told us that this piece was a carving of an ancient funerary boat and that that one was a plaque commemorating the union of the upper and lower kingdoms in the reign of some pharaoh or other.

Upstairs, we went into the rooms containing the treasures of King Tut, and Yassar strode directly to a glass case containing two fragile trumpets. “Please examine these,” he said in impeccable English. “The one on top is silver, is it not?” It was. Only the tip of the horn was clearly silver, and the rest was inlaid with what was either bronze or maybe gold. “It is broken,” Yassar began. He took a step back. “A radio reporter tried to play it in 1939, for the BBC.” He stroked his moustache. “It broke into three pieces after they tried to play it. But the other one …”

I leaned into the glass case again. There was a second trumpet there. Not quite as pretty as the first.

“This one is copper. And this one was stolen.”

“Stolen?”

“In the troubles, out there on Tahrir Square. There was looting.” Yassar paused, clearly pained. “They broke into the museum and stole many things. They stole this trumpet.”

“It was returned, then?”

“Yes.” Yassar fixed me with a stare. “The thief, all the world would find him. He knew it, and the trumpet was eventually found in a shopping bag on the Cairo Metro.”

The trumpets of King Tut in Cairo. (Courtesy of Raquel Rodriquez/Northern Kentucky University)

“On the subway?”

“All the world would find him. This thief.”

Yassar moved on to the next case but I lingered at the trumpets. Both of them, as he said, had been played in a 1939 BBC broadcast. We don’t know exactly what the music of ancient Egypt sounded like — they left no hieroglyphics of actual musical notation — but we do know what these two trumpets sounded like. For the first time in three thousand years, they were played and we have that recording.

Listen 1.1

Elsewhere in the museum and up the Valley of Kings, there are plenty of wall murals showing people playing rattles and trumpets. There’s a complete harp and various lutes in the Louvre in Paris. The ancient pharaohs would have been completely surrounded by music in the royal processions and religious ceremonies, and even the common people lived in a very musical world. The work crews hauling up the blocks for the pyramids, for example, likely would have had some sort of beat to keep them pulling and pushing in sync.

Music, in some form or another, exists in every culture on Earth — through every time period of history. We play music. It’s a universal of human existence.

Yassar plodded on and came at last to what turned out to be my favourite room: the room with the royal mummies. It cost extra money, so Yassar didn’t follow me in, but he’d told me before what to expect. The mummies are not what you see in Hollywood movies. They may have been wrapped up at one point, swathed in miles and miles of long, thin bandages, but they’re not any more. They’re desiccated-looking human beings — all their fingernails intact with strands of hair still cobwebbing off their scalps. They stare up at you through glass cases like butterflies pinned to a board.

In the main mummy room there are nine mummies, all pharaohs except one. Beside a mummy that’s now known to be Queen Hatshepsut lies a much smaller figure which at first I took to be a child. It’s not. It’s a mummified baboon. It had been the favourite pet of this queen and so there it was amongst the pharoahs. Three thousand years from its jungle home.

I was especially drawn to one of the mummies near the door. This, the sign read, was Ramses II. You’ve probably heard of him. He’s the pharaoh who appears in the Old Testament, the one who Moses stood up to, invoking the words “Let my People Go,” and whether or not it actually happened like that, here was Ramses II, perhaps the most powerful man on the planet at the time, staring up at me from his glass case. I have the most profound memory of hovering over the glass case, my nose maybe six inches from his, thinking here’s me literally face to face with a man who would have been the Napoleon of his time, or something like the pope and the king and maybe Bill Gates all rolled into one.

He was a little dried up and shrivelled but it was a distinctly human face I was looking at, a face still a little contorted by pain. He’d been crippled by arthritis but he lived well into his nineties — almost unheard of in that time period. His hook nose and sharp chin, if you can look beyond his sort of brownish colour, wasn’t far off any elderly person you might see on the street. Some cantankerous old goat swearing at traffic.

Downstairs again, Yassar showed us the urns that contained the mummy’s internal organs. There were usually four containers — canopic jars, they’re called — one for their lungs, one for the stomach, one for the liver, and one for the intestines. They left the heart and the kidneys inside the body and most surprisingly for all the advances of the ancient Egyptians, they removed the brain and simply — like so much snot — tossed it away. It was pulled out in pieces through the nose and thrown away as useless and unimportant gunk.

The ancient Egyptians thought our minds, our consciousness, resided in the heart — which, actually, is why they left that in the body. Even today we have the vestiges of this sort of thinking, imagining love and other emotions to be seated in that most unlikely organ.

They’re not, of course. The entire architecture of our being is in our brains although we’ve yet to fully understand how a lot of it works. We’re still at a loss to explain consciousness. No one has found a soul in the hippocampus, or a dream in the corpus callosum. We’ve yet to find our favourite songs, or even the memory of the lyrics anywhere in the grey matter of our cortex. But it’s there all right. It’s there. All of it embedded in the grey goo that the ancient Egyptians simply threw out with the garbage.

This is the first thing you have to understand about music and why it’s so important to us. Music exists entirely in the brain. It’s not really there in our ears at all. What I mean by this is that the eardrum and the cochlea behind it are entirely mechanical — simply a collection bowl for auditory information. Our ears really do nothing to process music. The complexities of melodies and rhythms are completely constructed in our brains. Dogs, I have been told, don’t really “get” music, though they hear exactly the same auditory landscape that we do. To dogs, even a Beethoven symphony is just a mush of clanking and droning sounds. Oh yeah, they may bark and croon at certain frequencies, but the music really doesn’t come together in any of the ways that we perceive it.

The sense of hearing in all higher order organisms is there for a very specific reason. It helps us survive. This much is true in dogs as well as humans, and it’s worth looking at in depth.

Most of the sounds in nature are a sort of white noise. The wind in the trees, the patter of rain, and even the repetitive crash of the surf. It was the sudden changes in sound that made our ancestors’ ears perk up. Like schools of fish darting away from the subtle vacillations predators might make, animal and human brains were alerted to danger through sound.

This is the reasoning behind police sirens (or ambulances and fire trucks for that matter). It’s not that they’re louder than everything else. Sirens are deliberately designed to be unnatural. They waver back and forth, screeching up and down frequencies in a way that specifically triggers the perception that something unusual is happening.

In fact, all our sensory systems are, at root, “difference engines,” alert to changes in temperature and movement and odours in the air. In hearing, we have been hard-wired to pay attention to things like sudden loud noises or unusual timbres or even the speed at which a sound is coming towards us. Sound direction and speed is encoded in something called the Doppler Effect. We can hear this effect in things like a race car going by on a track or a train receding into the distance. As a sound source moves towards us, its pitch rises (as does its volume) and as it moves away from us, the pitch descends. It’s a natural phenomenon we have learned to use. One that probably lies at the roots of melody.

Changes in the sound environment were often warnings of danger but they were also subtle aural clues about where we could find water or food. One theory in evolutionary psychology, for example, holds that humans all around the world are pleasantly relaxed by the sound of gurgling water. And it’s true, we love the splash of fountains and the gurgle of gentle brooks. It only stands to reason that our primeval ancestors would have been drawn to aural landscapes where running water was clearly in abundance. It is necessary for our survival and, to this day then, it is a sound that soothes us and reassures us, a sound that tells us we are in a place where we can flourish.

All this, of course, is elementary sound perception and something that was clearly in place long before we developed music. And, certainly, it doesn’t tell us very much about why music has such a supreme power over us.

I trundled out to the western outskirts of Cairo one day in a bus. Along one road, I was looking out the window at apartment buildings and the Egyptian equivalent of a strip mall when there behind the buildings I saw the tip of something strange. I looked again. That’s not… I thought. That’s not the pyramids, is it?

But yes it was. The curious sight of the Pyramids of Giza, sticking out above the buildings on the outskirts of Cairo, stays with me. The city ends quite suddenly and there’s a sort of sand shelf, high enough I guess that the floods of the Nile couldn’t quite make it up, and up on the plateau there are the three great pyramids. There are hundreds of smaller structures too, many still buried in the sifting sand and, of course, off to the left, the enigmatic Sphinx.

I’ve seen all this a million times in pictures and people had told me their own stories of being a little underwhelmed, so I had actually prepared myself to be disappointed. It’s true that hawkers all around the pyramids gather to descend on the tourists, selling everything from bottles of water to dubious camel rides. They’re quite insistent and tend to make a big dent in the magic of the place. The tourist police ...