Pianist Mitsuko Uchida with Jessica, Ken and Cora Lee (not pictured Ken Lee).

This fall marks the opening of one of the great events in Cleveland history, the anniversary of one of our community’s greatest world-wide championships:  the 100th Season of The Cleveland Orchestra.  So it seems very timely to talk about why we humans are so crazy about music, and what it does for our minds.

But first, an appreciation.

The Cleveland Orchestra

The Cleveland Orchestra is one of my favorite organizations in the world.

Let’s start with the music.

It’s not just me, one of the very top music periodicals in the world, Gramophone, recently listed the world’s top orchestras, and Cleveland came in #7, the only American orchestra rated above it was the Chicago at #5.  Cleveland did better than LA, Boston, and NY!

And what they said was so true.

What makes The Cleveland Orchestra stand out is the totally extraordinary excellence of each musician’s craft and how each are woven into the most amazing whole, it’s a very rare fabric, an ensemble unlike any in the world.

This is heard in moments like the slow movement of a Mozart symphony or piano concerto, when the whispers of the instruments transport all who hear them directly to the heavens.

The great pianist Mitsuko Uchida, admired as one of the finest pianists alive today, has played in every major symphony hall in Europe, America, Asia, the world, and she has chosen to play all 27 of Mozart’s piano concerti in Severance Hall with The Cleveland Orchestra, as the best place and the best orchestra to do this with.   I highly recommend that everyone come to any concert she has with The Cleveland Orchestra, it will be an unforgettable experience.

My wife Diane and I were fortunate enough to attend the announcement party for the 100th Season the spring of 2017, and after hearing various musicians of the Orchestra, the Executive Director, the Chair of the Board, and Maestro Welser-Most speak, it became apparent that The Cleveland Orchestra is also exceptional in being an organization where every person in every capacity is united towards one end: excellent work product, in this case music.   The Board and Administration is clearly devoted to making sure every resource is made available for the music to be extraordinary.  The musicians spoke passionately about the rarity of opportunity that awaits any master musical artist that gets to play in The Cleveland Orchestra.  And Maestro Welser-Most was poetic in his humility and passionate in his reach towards musical greatness, emphasizing that only happens if each person involved is supported to reaching for those heights.

In an era in which so many of our institutions- schools, hospitals, and many others- have lost their way, looking for profits or PR points, it is beyond refreshing, it is inspiring, to see a major organization, like The Cleveland Orchestra, keep its sights on the great prize, and in so doing creating an integrity that allows all who participate to reach for the ultimate excellence.  It is this that keeps them ranked as truly a great orchestra of the world.

You know, so many times I hear us Clevelanders long for a championship, and I certainly celebrated the NBA Championship and MLB American League Championship in 2016.   But we should all tip our hat to The Cleveland Orchestra, a true champion that creates a bright light around the word Cleveland, around the world, for years.

The Connection Between Music and Mind

Music is a universal language.

But a language different from any spoken language.  The method of communication by words and by music could not be more different.

The part of the mind that manages words is usually one side of the brain, for right handed people, the left side near the middle.  And the words people use vary quite a bit from place to place.  Humanity has crafted thousands upon thousands of distinct languages.  If you only know one language, other languages tend to be completely meaningless.

Any communication using one of these languages uses the language, word-based, part of the brain.   These communications tend to be very conscious since you have to think consciously to come up with the right word.

Music is a language, too, but a language in a realm devoid of all words.  The language of music is universal to all humanity.  There are many genres of music, but an octave is an octave the world over, and so are other intervals such as the perfect fifth, and minor G chord.

This language predates word language, probably by a species or two.  Flutes have been found that have holes in intervals allowing modern humans to play modern tunes on them.  And these flutes are 1 million years old, far older than Homo sapiens!

And here is a very big feature of music.  The production of and pleasure from music takes the whole cerebral cortex, the whole mind is engaged, only two other activities engage the whole mind, eating and mating.

Eating and mating clearly are central to living, it stands to reason that the only other activity that excites the whole mind, music, is too.

The Power of Music

There are no human cultures that are without music, not one.  There are many, many that have no written language.

There are no people who have not been moved very deeply by some form of music.

Music has the ability to tap into depths of the mind we cannot comprehend or reach.

Music excites a range of emotions in every person.

People may vary in which type of music they like or which piece or song moves them, but every person who has lived has some form of music that they love and some pieces that are intimate parts of their life.

What is it about music that moves our hearts and minds to profoundly?

It turns out serious neuroscientists are studying this question, hoping that if we can see how music moves the mind, we may learn something about our minds.

David Levitan at McGill and many other neuroscientists have done studies for years on  this subject, and some of their findings are quite compelling.

Perhaps the main finding is that music is a sort of information that is very familiar to our brains.  What music is turns out to be very closely related to what our mind is.

My thinking on this focuses on the concept of pattern recognition.  One of the very central functions of our minds is to recognize information as new or old, important or not.  There is a staggering flood of information hitting our brains at every moment.  The brain, being so adept at noticing information that matters, is always responding to all the information that hits the mind at any moment.  The  vast, vast majority of this information is rejected as unimportant and ignored.

But now and then we notice something our mind deems relevant, and we all do the same thing in every  such instance, our brain determines if it is familiar or not.   If it is familiar, the information is compared to what we already know.  If not, we learn a new thing.  Typically, information of interest is comparable or related in some way to something we already know.  That makes the work of our brain far easier to manage what we have noticed.

How is something we notice that is connected to something familiar, connected to the familiar?  It appears this happens mainly by finding some patterns in common.  We hear a person saying something about a friend, it can easily be related to other experiences we have with that friend.  The patterns of knowledge have much in common.  And for the few ways  they differ, that is the new information gained.

Here is where music comes in.   Music is of course always sound.  Sound is physically vibrating air.  We have organs in our ears that can detect exquisitely small amounts of vibration.  The vibrations in air are turned into nerve signals in our inner ear, in the spiral shaped organ called the cochlea.  Inside the winding spirals of the cochlea are cells that have tiny hairs protruding from them.  If a hair is pushed back and forth, it opens up the cell membrane enough to trigger an electrical event.  Vibrating sound turns into electrical nerve signal, which is then sent off to our brain so we hear.  The hairs can detect amazingly little air vibration, even if the hair jiggles only the diameter of an atom, our brain will hear that!

Music is sound, but a special type of sound, it is sound that comes in recognizable, repeatable patterns.  No matter if you are from China, Bali, Germany, Chile, Ohio, or Texas, if the air is vibrating at twice the rate of another sound, that is a difference loved, it’s called an octave.

Babies have been found to develop a love of hearing an octave during early infancy.  Other patterns of sound create profound joy, including one called the perfect fifth, a difference in vibrations where one sound is vibrating at 1.5 times the rate of the other (remember the octave difference is 2.0 times the other).  All of us develop a deep joy at hearing a perfect fifth by 6 months of age!

Our mind thrills at these relationships between sounds, far more than the actual note itself, it’s the relationship between the sounds that thrills.  Sound familiar, it’s just like how all information is experienced by our minds, when we hear or see or touch or smell anything, it’s the relationship of that experience to others that thrills.

Of course, our mind gets excited at far more than those two wonderful intervals, the experience of music, any music, is the playful flow of all sorts of intervals, of the relationship of one interval to another (melody) and of one string of intervals with another string (harmony).

One of my favorite observations is that you can take any piece of music, and shift its key, and the tune will still be completely unchanged.  Think of what that means.  You change every note in the song, but there is no change in the relationship between the notes, the tune is unchanged even though every note changes.  That is the power of relationship!

Music is the Mind at Play

Those who have studied the interplay of music and the mind, and have found such a tight parallel between how we think about everything, and how we enjoy music lead me to this astounding conclusion:

We like music because that is when and where our mind is at play.  If our mind is a pattern recognition machine, then music is when our mind can play with infinite patterns at no risk to anyone.

If dreams are when our thoughts are free to play with experiences, music is when our mind is free to play any and all patterns.

I believe this is why music neuroscientists are finding that exposure to music, playing music, living with music helps the mind develop, and certainly adds so much joy to life.

BOTTOM LINES:

1. Music is a fundamental part of human life.  It clearly evolved in our minds long before words, and continues to exert an astounding powerful influence on how we think, feel, and live.
2. Infants all show strong evidence of developing musical skills early in life.  In early infancy all healthy babies can detect and greatly enjoy the octave and by 6 months old the perfect fifth (Think of the first two notes in “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”)
3. Much neuroscience work has established just how tuned all brains are to music, and to a great extent music reveals how the mind works, it is really the mind at play.
4. Listening to music, any music, helps the mind develop and work.
5. We in Cleveland are beyond lucky to have one of the truly best musical ensembles on the planet right down the street from many of us.  The Cleveland Orchestra works hard to make sure every child in Cleveland can have access to their amazing music. We encourage all families to bring their babies and children to their programs.

To your health,
Dr. Arthur Lavin