The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature
By Daniel Levitin
Aurum £14.99, 368 pages
FT Bookshop price: £11.99

In Arthur C. Clarke’s novel Childhood’s End (as recalled by Oliver Sacks) cerebral aliens come down to Earth to attend a concert and are completely baffled by it. They cannot comprehend the human race’s love of music. Musicophilia, as Sacks called it in his haunting 2007 collection of case studies about the strange and persistent power of music, is ubiquitous across human cultures, even or especially for those with damaged brains. No culture lacks music or fails to accord it importance.

Now Daniel Levitin, a neuroscientist and former record producer, has tried to go beyond Sacks and the countless writers from Plato and Aristotle onwards who have reflected on the power of music. His aim is to prove that music is not just a part of who we are but has shaped how the brain and human societies have evolved.

Wittgenstein once wrote that “one reason why the attempt to find an explanation [for religious and magical practices] is wrong is that we have only to put together in the right way what we already know without adding anything, and the satisfaction we are trying to get from the explanation comes of itself.”

In other words, he argued, one way to test an explanatory theory is whether it adds to the subject under consideration or illuminates it in any new way. I am not convinced that Levitin’s theory, for all its ambition, sheds any light on music or human nature.

What Levitin “already knows” includes an impressive amount about the brain, especially in relation to music: this is territory he covered in This is Your Brain on Music (2007). It also includes the apparatus of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory, as popularised by Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins, among others.

Levitin discusses a broad spread of music, ranging across the world but with special emphasis on 1960s and 1970s America. His over-enthusiastic theory involves taking all the music in the world and dividing it into six categories, or six kinds of “songs” – songs of friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion and love.

Just as it grates when programming my iPod to store, say, Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony as four “songs”, so Levitin’s categorisation of all music as “songs” quickly becomes annoying and handicapping.

His organisational strategy biases his whole approach to shorter and simpler kinds of music, usually with lyrics. There is just one reference in the entire book to Bach; two to Beethoven. The pop musician Sting, on the other hand, appears 10 times, often at great length, and is treated with a reverence verging on sycophancy. Strangely for a writer so concerned with evolutionary theory, Levitin ignores the evolution of music itself.

The blurred lines between the categories, and what those categories really mean, also pose problems. Many songs, as Levitin is aware, straddle more than one category – Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line” straddles three, for example. A work such as Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, about which he writes perceptively, ranges over all of them. And where would you place such 20th-century masterpieces as Mahler’s The Song of the Earth or Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit?

Under his categorisation, songs of friendship turn out to refer first of all to the kinds of music which bond teenagers (and friendship does not seem quite the right word for this bonding) and then anti-war protest music.

But the most unsatisfactory aspect of this book is the way it wheels in a doctrinaire version of evolutionary theory to give reductive explanations about human behaviour, including musicophilia. We are told repeatedly that we like music not because it is intrinsically beautiful or beneficial, but because we are descended from ancestors who may have used music to facilitate social bonds. That seems unprovable. But it also fails to account for why we might prefer Beethoven to Sting.

Harry Eyres writes the Slow Lane column in Life & Arts