The World in Six Songs, Part Three

By Daniel Levitin
August 26th, 2008

Part Three

The six types of songs that shaped human nature — friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion, and love songs — I’ve come to think are obvious, but I accept you may take some persuading. The people of a given time or place may not have used all six. The use of some has ebbed while others flowed.

In modern times with computers, PDAs, even since the beginning of written language, we haven’t needed to rely so much on knowledge songs to encapsulate collective memory for us, although most English- speaking schoolchildren still learn the alphabet through song and the number line through counting songs, such as the politically incorrect “One Little Two Little Three Little Indians.” For many of the world’s still preliterate cultures, memory and counting songs remain essential to everyday life. As the early Greeks knew, music was a powerful way of preserving information, more effective and more efficient than simple memorizing, and we are now learning the neurobiological basis for this.

By definition, a “song” is a musical composition intended or adapted for singing. One thing the definition leaves unclear is who does the adapting. Does the adaptation have to be constructed by a professional composer or orchestrator, as when Jon Hendricks took Charlie Parker solos and added scat lyrics (nonsense syllables) to them, or when John Denver took Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony and added lyrics to the melody? I don’t think so. If I sing the intro guitar riff to “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones (as my friends and I used to do frequently when we were eleven years old), I am the one who has done the adapting, and even if separated from the vocal parts of that song, this melodic line then stands alone and becomes a “song” by virtue of my friends and I singing it.

More to the point, you can sing “As Time Goes By” with the syllable “la” and never sing the words—you may have never seen Casablanca and you may not even know that the composition has words—and it becomes a song by virtue of you singing it. For that matter, suppose that only one person in the world knew the words to “As Time Goes By,” and that all of us went on blissfully humming, whistling, and la- la- la- ing the melody. My intuition here is that just because we didn’t sing words wouldn’t mean that it wasn’t a song.

Most of us share an intuition that “song” is a broad category that includes anything we might sing or any collection of sounds that resembles such a thing. Again, The World in Six Songs is not, I hope, culturally narrow- minded. African drum music has an important role in the daily lives of millions of people and might not strike some as being songs, but to ignore such purely rhythmic (and difficult to sing, unless you’re Mel Tormé or Ray Stevens) forms of expression would betray a bias toward melody. The rock, pop, jazz, and hip- hop that are the most popular forms of music today would not exist without the African drumming that they evolved from. As I will show, drumming, among its many qualities, can produce powerful songs of friendship.

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