This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel J. Levitin
Dutton Publishers 2006

A fascinating study of the cognitive, emotional and developmental aspects of music, this book is not for the scientifically faint of heart, but gives, in clear and direct language, an excellent explanation of why music is such an obsession for so many people. Author Levitin also offers theories about why many people consider music irrelevant to their lives, and why many scientists argue that music has no evolutionary adaptive value, but clearly, his heart is in delving into the mystery of music's appeal.

The author was not always a neuroscientist, but worked as a musician, engineer and producer for many years before returning to school. Those experiences listening to pop, jazz, rock and other music in many different settings serve him well here. He has a lot of recognizable songs to draw on, and knows that the higher study of music is not all about trying to learn to love complex classical works. Popular music is an experience that fills up the waking hours of many people and he gives it the study it deserves.

One of Levitin's key points is how universal music is in human experience. Even when people protest they "can't carry a tune in a bucket," in fact, all people in all periods of time have been musical. In one interesting study, he researched people who say they are unmusical by asking them to sing their favorite song. What he found was that the "singers" almost always sang the song in tune and at the right tempo from the recording! That is, humans are much more musical than they admit and remember music rather exactly. Levitin also outlines what it takes to be a professional musician, but finds that it is about the same as other areas of expertise—time spent!

Other fascinating insights from this accessible scientific study abound. Each page has some rare insight, in particular in the ways he connects the physics of music to the way the mind works. Explaining complex terms that we think we know, such as rhythm, loudness, harmony, pitch and tone, makes one want to listen again to music in new ways. His explanation of the brain functioning may be a bit tough for non-specialists, but the explanations reveal clearly how the brain works on music. Music, in fact, may lead to broader scientific understanding of the brain. There remain vast unknowns in how the mind categorizes music, processes its sounds and anticipates what we will hear.

Particularly interesting are the sections on emotion in music. The reasons why music causes us to feel things is not yet completely explainable, but Levitin goes a long way to accounting for how music, language and experience all use similar parts of the brain and similar processing channels. The somewhat cautious scientific conclusions that all of these brain functions evolved in parallel in human history does not entirely account for the mystery of why a particular love song makes us shiver with delight and desire, but it gets closer than people have been before.

This delightful book offers a tremendous compilation of the current state of research and theory about music. That may not explain why we tap our foot or get a song stuck in our head (though Levitin does address those two issues also!), but the book reconfirms the commonsense awareness of music's power and intensity. These rational, scientific writings will turn people back to their own stack of CDs with greater awareness and understanding of just what is going on when the magic of music overtakes and transforms us.

Blowin' Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics by John Gennari
University Of Chicago Press 2006

Criticism of criticism of art often goes astray, but John Gennari gets right to the heart of the problems in this study of jazz critics. Covering over a hundred years of unreasonable attacks, flagrantly defensive support and fascinating analyses, this study offers scads of lessons for writers on jazz, and indeed on any cultural expression or artistic phenomenon. In the history of jazz, the number of misunderstandings,  biased reports, reverse prejudices and jaundiced views could easily fill another book, but Gennari finds the importance of all of these not so much with the beauty of hindsight, but with his own sensibilities and balanced views. Writers on jazz ignore this study at their peril.

What is most striking about the early critics of jazz was how supportive they were of a music associated with the world of vice and the culture of urban black Americans. The impulse to step across economic, social and cultural boundaries was not uncommon, many upper class whites went "slumming" in the early part of the 20th century, but to become passionate enough, and knowledgeable enough, to stake one's writing career on defending a music already tarred with the worst stereotypes took guts. Many American, British and French critics, though, took the challenge and made of jazz something of a reflection of their own views, but something respectable at the same time.

In large part, these many critics, most of them upper class and educated, established plenty of reasons to take jazz seriously, and further arguments about why jazz was such a pleasure. Their arguments still echo today, though their various stances towards jazz have become more sophisticated, and in the 60s and 90s more vitriolic. One realizes that jazz writers have egos as big as musicians, and yet lack confidence, too, in the face of brilliant artists. Their effects extend beyond making jazz into "America's classical music," though. The critics often exerted critical forces in their writings that musicians had to respond to, and often did, though the stereotype is of musicians who never read reviews.

They did not change the music, but added to the general cultural environment in which it thrived. According to Gennari, musicians and critics had many different types of relationships with each other and with the music. This love-hate interaction, though, seems ultimately to have been full of friction, but it produced a fair amount of heat and light. Jazz did not suffer from explanation or analysis, but rather survived a little better because of it. Gennari's work focuses almost completely on the critics' writing, and it is a substantial body of work. Only in the past decade perhaps, could a work of this sort been imagined, as jazz becomes part of educational systems and different journalistic venues.

Certainly, this study confirms the possibility that responding to music in words can offer insight and creativity of a different sort. The power of critics for much of the last century was absurdly out of proportion to that of the musicians themselves. Perhaps, things have changed, but the impact of the press, when the press offers serious and professional criticism, does have value, one can conclude after looking at the many critics. Nowadays, the voice of musicians is heard much more transparently through the press, and the effect of critics may be reduced. But knowledgeable guides to jazz can offer plenty of insight.

Blowin' Hot and Cool also stands as a history of the reception of jazz. Traditionalist versus the progressive is a tension that has not changed amongst listeners, especially in this day and age when jazz from the 50s still outsells new contemporary works. A fascinating history to read, this book forces the reader to take a position, too, in the ongoing debates about what jazz is or isn't, and what music can be understood as high quality or not. That is a difficult decision for anyone to make, but Gennari does not suggest that values are all relative. Instead, he exposes the dependence of all criticism on other values, social, cultural and personal. This exposition reveals, too, that cultural criticism of any sort may not be so much parasitical on the art as it is a voicing of deeper, underlying values. Jazz critics may be loved or hated, but their failures at least have always had passion for the music.