PBS "The Music Instinct: Science and Song": very strong documentary film

"The Music Instinct: Science & Song", a film by Elena Mannes, aired Wed. June 24, 2009 on PBS stations. The website is here. I don’t know if there will be special theatrical showings (I didn’t see it come up at AFI Silverdocs, but it certainly would fit.)

The title tells us what this film, beginning at the outset with Rachmaninoff’s 18th Variation, looks at why music is so much a part of human culture. How does it relate to the human brain? Do humans have a music instinct?

Where doe the goosebumps of the climax of a Rachmaninoff Second Concerto (that was my own first experience) come from?

Daniel Barenboim says “every note is a lifetime for itself.” But music is something that is in the mind, animated from the sounds fed to it. Music is relativistic: it takes time and really makes it into a real dimension: we enjoy the individual sounds of a composition only in relation to the sounds before and after each sound. Music may be our way to transcend our normal world of three visible dimensions, and giving us access to past and future time.

There are comparisons of music to language, and whether “French” music sounds different from “English” music or German (or Viennese) because of the differences among the underlying languages.

There is discussion of the role of music in defining “culture” – and perhaps the collective, common experience of things that, even if through individual effort – allows man to build on the experiences of its ancestors, unlike the case of the closest of apes (as shown in another PBS Nova show “Ape Genius”). But some birds actually show response to music.

Music is shown as based on “vibrations” – the basic element of consciousness in New Age philosophy (Rosicrucianism). All objects in the universe vibrate – even black holes, which have very low frequencies.

Update: June 30
PBS Nova broadcast a supplement, "Musical Minds," narrated by Oliver Sacks. The show explored musical gifts, and ungifts -- "amusia", inability to perceive melody or rhythm (from a woman from an Irish musical family who finds the piano to have an annoying sound). The show also showed patients with Tourette's syndrome who have gifts for music and drum playing. And it showed, with MRI's, how the brain responds differently to Bach compared to Beethoven. The link is here.