The power of music.

What an odd thing it is to see an entire species—billions of people—playing with listening to meaningless tonal patterns, occupied and preoccupied for much of their time by what they call 'music.' This, at least, was one of the things about human beings that puzzled the highly cerebral alien beings, the Overlords, in Arthur C. Clarke's novel Childhood's End. Curiosity brings them down to the Earth's surface to attend a concert; they listen politely and patiently, and at the end, congratulate the composer on his 'great ingenuity'—while still finding the entire business unin-telligible. They cannot think what goes on in human beings when they make or listen to music, because nothing goes on within them. They, themselves, as a species, lack music. Clarke likes to embody questions in fables, and the Overlords' bewilderment makes one wonder, indeed, what it is about music that gives it such peculiar power over us, a power delectable and beneficent for the most part, but also capable of uncontrollable and sometimes destructive force. We may imagine the Overlords ruminating further, back in their spaceships. This so-called 'music,' they would have to concede, is in some way efficacious to humans. Yet it has no concepts, and makes no propositions; it lacks images, symbols, the stuff of language. It has no power of representation. It has no relation to the world. These, indeed, are the very issues Schopenhauer raises in The World as Will and Representation—and Schopenhauer himself was passionately musical. Music, for him, was an embodiment of pure 'will'—but this is not a notion that goes down well in a neuroscientific age. Another passionately musical philosopher, Nietzsche, said, 'We listen to music with our muscles.' This, at least, is something we can see. It is evident in all of us—we tap our feet, we 'keep time', hum, sing along or 'conduct' music, our facial expressions mirroring the rises and falls, the melodic contours and feelings of what we are hearing. Yet all this may occur without our knowledge or volition. All this is normal, and may be seen as a half-conscious resonance to music, a sort of involuntary personal expression as the music works on us. But these effects, the overflow of music into the motor system, can easily go too far, becoming irresistible and perhaps even coercive. Anthony Storr, in his excellent book Music and the Mind, stresses that in all societies, a primary function …