Product Description

What makes a distant oboe's wail beautiful? Why do some kinds of music lift us to ecstasy, but not others? How can music make sense to an ear and brain evolved for detecting the approaching lion or tracking the unsuspecting gazelle? Lyrically interweaving discoveries from science, psychology, music theory, paleontology, and philosophy, Robert Jourdian brilliantly examines why music speaks to us in ways that words cannot, and why we form such powerful connections to it. In clear, understandable language, Jourdian expertly guides the reader through a continuum of musical experience: sound, tone, melody, harmony, rhythm, composition, performance, listening, understanding--and finally to ecstasy. Along the way, a fascinating cast of characters brings Jourdian's narrative to vivid life: "idiots savants" who absorb whole pieces on a single hearing, composers who hallucinate entire compositions, a psychic who claims to take dictation from long-dead composers, and victims of brain damage who can move only when they hear music. Here is a book that will entertain, inform, and stimulate everyone who loves music--and make them think about their favorite song in startling new ways.What makes a distant oboes wail beautiful? Why do some kinds of music lift us to ecstasy, but not others? How can music make sense to an ear and brain evolved for detecting the approaching lion or tracking the unsuspecting gazelle? Lyrically interweaving discoveries from science, psychology, music theory, paleontology, and philosophy, Robert Jourdian brilliantly examines why music speaks to us in ways that words cannot, and why we form such powerful connections to it.

In clear, understandable language, Jourdian expertly guides the reader through a continuum of musical experience: sound, tone, melody, harmony, rhythm, composition, performance, listening, understanding--and finally to ecstasy. Along the way, a fascinating cast of characters brings Jourdians narrative to vivid life: idiots savants who absorb whole pieces on a single hearing, composers who hallucinate entire compositions, a psychic who claims to take dictation from long-dead composers, and victims of brain damage who can move only when they hear music. Here is a book that will entertain, inform, and stimulate everyone who loves music--and make them think about their favorite song in startling new ways.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #51050 in Books
• Published on: 1998-03-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Amazon.com
What is music? How and why does it affect us? What is the nature of musical genius? Author/composer Robert Jourdain explores these and other questions, from the essential nature of sound through composition, performance, and, finally, the nature of ecstasy. His prose is eminently readable, offering a very accessible account of a difficult subject to the general reader as well as to the musical sophisticate. This is a fascinating and intriguing book, written by someone who clearly knows his subject.

From Publishers Weekly
Synthesizing recent research from the burgeoning science of musical psychoacoustics, Jourdain, a California musician, provides a richly informative, exuberant, wonderfully accessible introduction to how we perceive and experience music. Choosing examples eclectically, from Henry Mancini's "The Pink Panther" to Mozart, Stravinsky and Duke Ellington, he explores how, when we compose, perform or listen to music, the brain assembles musical devices, patterns and harmonies into vast, meaningful hierarchies of sound. He also offers tantalizing if inevitably unsatisfying answers to such age-old enigmas as what makes a great melody or how music elicits emotions and gives pleasure. Requiring no prior musical or scientific knowledge, this survey is sprinkled with interesting historical anecdotes (Beethoven was an early victim of metronome mania; Aaron Copland hit upon the title Appalachian Spring only after he had finished composing his tone poem) as well as seldom-appreciated facts. We learn, for instance, that musical dissonance and consonance have a neurological basis, in the inner ear's structure. Jourdain writes with verve, infectious enthusiasm and rare insight into music's emotive power.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Jourdain, a pianist, composer, and researcher on artificial intelligence, investigates music from its most fundamental biological basis to the psychology of composing and performing, ending with speculation on music's future possibilities. While trained musicians will be especially fascinated with the chapters on musical education, the virtuoso, and the amateur, Jourdain succeeds in making this work understandable for those without specialized knowledge. Though written music surfaces in the form of Henry Mancini's sprightly theme from The Pink Panther as an illustration of various concepts, readers who don't read music will probably still follow the examples without difficulty. The author's presentation combines the thoughts of many previous writers in a wide variety of fields with the results of recent research, enriched with his own insights on popular, classical, and non-Western music. A thought-provoking work for music teachers, serious music students, and others with an interest in what music is and where it might be going.?James E. Ross, WLN, Seattle
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Positively Shaken
This is a good book! An informative page-turner. I recommend it to anyone who needs to research this topic. I am a composer, performer, theorist, multi-approach science and religion enthusiast. Several times I was positively shaken by some of the music/brain knowledge revealed. And despite the high level of detail (for a "layperson"), essentials of the topic are stressed clearly. This book seems to be influenced in part by two of my favorite works, COSMOS by Carl Sagan, and WHAT TO LISTEN FOR IN MUSIC by Aaron Copland.

Go buy it, then come back to read the following criticisms:)

It is difficult to write so fluidly about such a complicated subject, and this book carries some such difficulties. Even though the author is adept in considering and distinguishing the validities of multiple possibilities, several times after reading a passage, I said to myself, "well, maybe..." thinking of alternative explanations.

Two more criticisms:

Yes, like Copland in his earlier work, while respecting other cultures this author is very Euro-Ameri-centric in his perspective.

The author really likes to use examples, perhaps too extensively. He generally picks a very specific one out of very multiple possibilities. Nearly every time he makes a point, he follows it with a "far-out" example. Not to knock the importance of examples, but I'll bet if you took all of them out of this book, it would be about half its original weight.

Here's an example demonstrating a combination of the two above criticisms:

"Nor does the right brain show any particular talent for melody when it encounters an unfamiliar harmonic system, such as Indian sitar music" (p. 282).

Keep these comments in mind, and read this book!

Jeremy Jarvis
www.myspace.com/jwjarvislisten

For the technically inquisitive
This work is older than the presently popular Musicophilia, and from a different venue. Sacks' book is basically a compendium of anecdotes from a very observant guy with an opportune position and a great memory. Jordain's is more objective, looking for the physics of the responses to frequencies, resonances and meter. Its kind of a look at the brain as a "machine". In my view, it has less sizzle and more steak. Jordain's work is much more influential in how I think about my own pleasure from and addiction to music, and explains part of my joy in the symmetries and patterns of ballet and in the visual arts, even suggesting what makes me like modern sculpture. The insights from this book increased my wonderment at the magic in our bodies and the great, great beauty in nature. Its on my list of important books: I bought it for my library.

Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy
Music, as an experience of the human mind, is a complex sequence of sound first sensed by the auditory and somatic systems of the human body and then processed and interpreted by the human brain. Music, as a human construct involving both the experience of music and its creation, is a configuration and arrangement of sound towards aesthetic or pragmatic goals. This book [Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy] looks at music as a phenomenon of the human brain in its relation to the physical world. The author proceeds analytically from sound to tone to melody to harmony to rhythm to composition to performance to listening to understanding to ecstasy, devoting a chapter to each.

Sound: sound, ears, the inner ear, hearing loss, localizing sound, primitive hearing.

Tone: tones, resonance, loudness, the evolution of instruments, concert halls, how a brain hears tones.

Melody: how children hear music, categorizing tones, cutting up pitch space, building scales, non-western scales, what makes melodies work?, melody and the brain, the ideal melody.

Harmony: the birth of harmony, dissonance, tonality, relative pitch and absolute pitch, what more can harmony be?

Rhythm: chunking, meter, phrasing, the perceptual present, temporal resolution, tempo, origins of rhythm, left brain dominance for rhythm, rhythm wars.

Composition: child prodigies, auditory imagery, musical memory, inspiration, improvisation, composing at the piano, working methods, sketches, the score, musical creativity, composers' brains, composer IQ, the composer's personality.

Performance: musical savants, musicianship, hands, making hands move, planning movements, sensation, reading music, virtuosity, memorization, talent.

Listening: concerts, changing technology, hearing and listening, attending to music, cognitive preference, musical preference, expert listening.

Understanding: meaning, parallels between music and language, mapping music in the brain, watching music in the brain, amusia, musical meaning.

Ecstasy: the origins of music, emotion, pleasure, music and the body, ecstasy, what might music yet become?