Abstract
This short volume offers an excellent and balanced introduction to the psychology of music. The eight chapters (more than in other volumes from the series) capture the many facets of this fascinating field. In the first chapter (The art and science of music psychology), Margulis argues that the tension between focusing on the internal relation of sound versus its sociocultural context is fundamental to understanding music. She depicts the history of this tension as a linear development, starting in Ancient Greece with a Pythagorean focus on the internal relation of sound and leading to a growing focus on its sociocultural context over the past two millennia (pp. 3–19). In her brief survey, she includes contemporary approaches to music and the mind such as computer modeling, digitally assisted corpus studies, behavioral research, and cognitive neuroscience methods, as well as clinical and qualitative approaches. This is followed by a section on “Music and big data” in her final chapter on the future of music psychology, which underlines the relevance of this introduction for research today (pp. 110–114). Music psychology complicates the field by focusing on the individual perception of music. This position hence marks a point of tension at the intersection of more radical perspectives on music that privilege either one or the other end. The attempt in this introduction to find a balanced middle position may be crucial for the further development of musicological research.
Margulis’s depiction of one-sided attempts to comprehend music highlights another promising perspective, namely, comparative research in the history of music and of musicology. Especially research done in physiology and neurology at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century merits close attention in relation to the development of musical modernism (pp. 5–6). Such research will have to be seen in the context, for example, of the rise of acoustic ecology and Raymond Murray Schafer’s soundscapes.
The second chapter on the biological origins of music raises the question concerning music as a universal human phenomenon; even its borders are less clear than one may think, since languages such as Thai and Sanskrit have a single word that denotes both music and dance. Margulis defines the divide between the perceived naturalness and actual cultural dependency of music as the central conundrum of this field and points to what Cambridge musicologist Ian Cross has termed its “floating intentionality,” as the sense that music is about something that continues to elude us (pp. 20–21). Ecstasy and ritual are common characteristics of music in all cultures (p. 21; cf. p. 62). The lullaby is a musical genre that transcends all cultures. Margulis observes that “what might be special about music is not so much that it is different from everything else, but that it draws everything else together” (p. 23). In this sense, the psychology of music offers ample room for an examination of the Romantic exaltation of music as the highest art form. Her suggestion that “music can affect a host of other abilities” could have been accompanied by a cautionary note concerning the functionalization of music as a mere educational tool (because it facilitates learning), which would actually undermine its cultural significance (pp. 26, 44–45). She concludes the chapter by surveying the fields of music and health, the musicality of nonhuman animals, and the evolutionary origins of music (pp. 26–33).
The third chapter on music as language points to the similarities between verbal language and music, using the example of musical and apparent grammatical errors and their relativity. After discussing the syntactic aspects and limitations of music, she focuses on music and language acquisition (with reference mainly to linguistic and developmental psychological studies), meaning, music–language interactions, and the border between speech and music. The difference in active musical capacity versus language capacity may result from the fact that while most babies are invited into active dialogue with conversation partners, relatively few are invited into regular musical interactions during daily life (pp. 40–41). Margulis points out that music triggers immediate concrete associations, which is a main reason it is so useful in marketing (p. 42). The remaining chapters include listening in time (Chapter 4), the psychology of music performance (Chapter 5), human musicality (Chapter 6), the appetite for music (Chapter 7), and the future (Chapter 8).
Like all volumes in the series, Margulis’s introduction contains a useful list of illustrations, a short bibliography (which in this case is unfortunately uncommented), and an index. It is a vivid account of a theoretically intricate field, rich in pertinent examples. Nonetheless, two critical remarks can be made. First, while she rightly points to the danger of examining high-level phenomena with little cultural awareness, it is not clear why she considers the examination of low-level phenomena with little musical relevance as a danger rather than as a productive perspective (p. 6). Much of contemporary so-called neuroscientific research is obviously reductive, but engaging with acoustic ecology and compositions based on this premise might have deepened her analysis. Second, given the detailed cautionary note against misconceptions of the psychology of music that believe it favors Western culture in its research and theory, it is disappointing to discover that ethnomusicology, which is referred to near the beginning and which is an important subdiscipline, is neglected in the bibliography and throughout the book (pp. 1, 117–118, 131–132).
This may point to a general tension in the relatively small field of research on music. In this sense, Margulis’s leitmotif of the tension between music as a sociocultural construct or as a hermetic mathematical system, which accounts for its prevailing universality, is well chosen. It points to the fact that musicological research is marginalized because it resists complete subjection to the prevailing cultural historical paradigm of the present. Music as such raises the question to what extent it may be both an acoustically expressed mathematic system and an image of human relations and society. Such a view will give historical musicology much to think about, and the psychology of music may be a useful discipline in this investigation. Margulis’s excellent survey may be read as an invitation to be more open to other fields of investigation and disciplines that approach the field of musicology. The issues at stake are far too complex to allow for such disciplinary warfare. But maybe the struggle between ethnomusicology and the psychology of music is precisely an indication of the insurmountable complexity of the field. May this rivalry be productive rather than limiting, and may the social sciences one day appreciate the field of musicology as a proper discipline in its own right.