Music has the capacity to unite and to divide. For example, a national anthem is used to summon collective pride, while simultaneously risking nationalistic pride - a sort of ‘über alles’ effect. This capacity is parodied by Sacha Baron Cohen in Borat (2006):
Kazakhstan, greatest country in the world
All other countries are run by little girls
Kazakhstan is number-one exporter of potassium
Other Central Asian countries have inferior potassium
My suspicions about this feature of music were somewhat validated by early surveying, where respondents were asked to react to number-one hits dating from 1957 to present. While the survey was intended to test the emotive qualities of popular songs, the responses revealed a strong sense of ownership; that is, songs ‘belong’ to people, or perhaps people feel they belong to the spirit of a song, in the respect that music captures the Zeitgeist. At the same time, the responses betrayed a strong sense of detachment: ‘I am too old for this,’ wrote one participant. ‘Corny, fake 1950’s that people have decided were the perfect era,’ wrote another. (Given that the variable in the survey samples was the year each reached the number-one spot, it is not surprising that age and time were rubrics for dismissing or embracing music.)
In Musicophilia, neurologist and author Oliver Sacks writes:
Anthony Storr, in his excellent book Music and the Mind, stresses that in all societies, a primary function of music is collective and communal, to bring and bind people together. People sing and dance together in every culture, and one can imagine them having done so around the first fires, a hundred thousand years ago. [...] In such a situation, music is a communal experience, and there seems to be, in some sense, an actual binding or “marriage” of nervous systems, a “neurogamy.”
My next round of surveying asked respondents to discuss community, music, and their respective roles. The results were fairly inconclusive, but there was a fluky recurrence of the word ‘iPod,’ which piqued my curiosity. How, for example, do we reconcile the citation of Oliver Sacks above with the reality of the iPod? What happens when singing becomes internalized and dancing a performance of the individual silhouetted by a bright field of nothingness?
Matisse 'La danse' (1909) | ubiquitous iPod ad
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