If you’ve been in rehearsal with me, you know that I’m always trying to pass along to you the cool stuff I’m learning. These might be things about vocal technique that I’m learning from my voice teacher. I might be sharing with you some things about style and interpretation that I’ve come across recently, which hope will be useful to you in your own learning and performing. (There will be much of that when we talk about swing music this spring.)

Today, I’m writing to start to share with you some things I’ve learned from the book This is Your Brain on Music. Written by Daniel J. Levitin, an American rocker-turned-cognitive psychologist/neuroscientist who teaches at McGill University in Montreal, it’s a remarkable synthesis of the cutting edge in neuroscience and cognitive music-perception. I loved the book and devoured it a few weeks ago while on vacation. I told Sandy right away, “I have to write a blogpost about this.” So here you go.

Levitin writes vividly about what we’ve learned about the ways that we take in music and make sense of its many features and qualities. As a music lover, I have had so many magical experiences with music that I can’t count them all; maybe you are in the same boat. Still, I do try, as a choral-music nerd, to make sense of my experiences and to try to understand why certain music affects me the way that it does. For much of my adult life, actually, I have wanted to try to understand my own musical-emotional processes—to have at least a little insight on the things that happen in my brain and body when I’m getting wrapped up in a piece of music.

I dipped my toe in the waters of this field with I was in graduate school 30 years ago. While preparing one of my three areas of specialization (the musical analysis of medieval and Renaissance music), I read up on what was, at that time, the state of the art. One of the pioneering books in the field of music perception is Emotion and Meaning in Music, written by the great Leonard Meyer, who was the teacher of my own theory teacher, Ingrid Arauco. Meyer started to point to the ways in which composers play with our sense of expectation and then throw us curve balls, such as in the opening movement of Haydn’s Surprise Symphony. I loved the way Professor Ingrid Arauco always asked our class the question, “What is going on in this piece? What compositional issues is this composer trying to work out right now?” There are the related questions of how a piece of music affects us, which raises the essential question of how we hear what we hear.

The opening chapters of This Is Your Brain on Music cover the various elements of music. I taught several of these as a graduate teaching assistant when I was a budding musicologist: rhythm, meter, pitch, and harmony. These we might call music’s building blocks. Meter is different from rhythm; the word “rhythm” mostly describes the surface level of what’s happening in a piece of music, while “meter” connotes the way rhythmic pulses are grouped. For people who study music cognition, meter is more interesting, because it tries to look at how our brains make sense of what we’re hearing in the moment.

My own sense of meter mostly comes from my composer’s brain, as I imagine writing down music I’m hearing in my head during the composing process. Sometimes I ask, “What’s the best way of writing down what I’m trying to articulate here?” The follow-up question usually becomes, “Well, then, how do I notate this with a time signature on the page?” And the follow-up question to that is, “If there are a few options for notating this meter, what choice is going to be the most helpful to other conductors and singers?” One example is my song “Clip, Clop” from our fall 2017 session. Although the rhythm drove many of you nuts, you might go back to the sheet music and notice that it was all in 4/4 – there are no weird meter changes, just a lot of crazy rhythmic stuff happening within a 4/4 framework.

Levitin looks at meter from a different angle, almost the other side of the coin. He is asking instead, “How is the brain making sense of what it is hearing?” In particular, the question about meter can be phrased as, “How is the brain organizing the stimuli of musical pulses and grouping them on the fly?” It’s the grouping function that has received much scholarly attention recently. Your brain does this all the time, sometimes without your being aware of it. I remember the first time I heard Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, especially that crazy pulsing music in the opening section. My sense of recalling it right now is virtually as vivid as when I first heard it (more on that phenomenon in a later blogpost). My brain was on fire, scrambling to organize the pulses. I was listening without the printed sheet music in front of me. Was it 2/4, 4/4, something else, something regular? I couldn’t figure it out right then, but I was fascinated and totally turned on. I remember wondering “This is nuts! How on earth did he notate that?”

Let’s look at a more familiar example. If you’re singing with us this spring, you’ll notice something right away in Moon River, which Ed Lojeski (the arranger) has done on the opening few pages. Many of you likely have Audrey Hepburn’s movie version etched permanently on the hard drives of your personal auditory memory. Therefore, you may notice that, when you “replay” the original version of this song in your head, it’s in 3/4-time, or a waltz meter. Most cover versions of Moon River do follow this pattern. Our choral arranger, however, stretches the rhythm, so that the first minute or so is not in 3/4 time but instead is in 4/4! This may feel a little weird to you, and you may have the sense that you don’t know quite where the floor is. You might feel frustrated, or fascinated, or annoyed, or curious, or all of the above. Stay with it; you’ll feel more comfortable as we work with the song over the next several months.

This way of playing with meter is just one way that an arranger (or a great singer) can take something very familiar and move it just enough so that it feels very new and different while still retaining enough of the original feel that you perceive it is as both timeless and fresh. I’ll write in future blogposts about some other things that the brain does “on music,” all of which are strange and wonderful. Watch this space.

Musically yours,

Jon

Jonathan Miller is Artistic Director and CEO of Sounds Good! Choir, the Chicago area’s largest and fastest-growing choral music organization for adults. Jonathan co-founded Sounds Good in 2016 with his wife, Sandy Siegel Miller. Together, they manage the Sounds Good organization, which has served more than 600 older adults with choral music education and performance since inception. The Sounds Good Choir serves the community with 7 daytime choirs as well as the Good Memories Choir for people with early-stage memory loss and their partners. For more information about upcoming choral-music sessions and registration opportunities, visit www.soundsgoodchoir.org. Jonathan is also founding artistic director of Chicago a cappella, the virtuoso professional ensemble, and a former board member of Chorus America.