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By Root 1039 0

possible for musical works—from ballads to Mahler symphonies—to have structural form, melodies, development, suspense, climax, and surprise, all of which generate plea The capacity to appreciate music requires that the listener be able plausibly predict at each moment what the next note, chord, transition, cadence is going to be. Music arrests attention and keeps it focused continuously positing possibilities for the next few seconds of a piece then either giving the listener the plea sure of having expectations confirmed or the (often pleasant) surprise of having expectations thwarted or subverted. Listening to music, the mind is instant by instant absorbing what has gone before and anticipating what is yet to come— with the greatest composers, like the greatest storytellers, usually playing a masterful game of setting up expectations that are then foiled with something even more interesting than you had imagined.

In music theory, aesthetic modernism has shown little interest in such musical psychology. It has instead placed its hopes in the malleability aesthetic taste, preferring a picture of genius composers ultimately overcoming resis tance from the closed-minded conservatism of audiences. not think the picture is justified, as the case of Arnold Schoenberg demonstrates. With his invention of the twelve-tone method to replace traditional melody, Schoenberg is said to have brought atonality to music. But as Huron points out, Schoenberg’s twelve-tone music is not much atonal as contratonal. If Schoenberg had set out with a randomizer create his tone rows, tonal relations would now and again occur simply by chance. His tone rows, however, are built on a principle of reverse musical psychology: he wrote them precisely to avoid even as much tonality as would occur probabilistically with a throw of a composer’s dice.

More than that, the intervals in the tone rows are, Huron shows, more than double the average for music from around the world.” The notes of most melodies—Mary Had a Little Lamb or the choral theme from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony—are either contiguous or for most part fairly close to each other. In creating tone rows with extraordinarily is the only music that routinely contains “wider melodic intervals than twelve-tone music.” No wonder audiences have tended to find Schoenberg’s twelve-tone compositions “senseless” or “excruciating.”

Schoenberg, in my opinion, wrote some extraordinary music— Transfigured Night and Moses and Aron are impressive creations. But general failure of his contratonality to catch on with the musical public evidence that it is not just another conventional musical schema blank slate that is the human mind. World music grows out of evolved interests, however puzzling their origins. The aesthetic of music universally depend on listeners being able to anticipate climaxes, resolutions, suspensions, or cadences—and then hear the fulfill or foil those anticipations. Completely unpredictable music— which is what Schoenberg’s atonality comes to, unless you memorize sequences—can no longer surprise the mind: if just anything can be nothing can enter experience as unexpected. It follows nothing can surprise, jar, fulfill, shock, or in other ways please the At their self-serving worst, modernist theorists have blamed failure of audiences to appreciate atonality on stupidity, laziness, or naïveté. But composers too can err in producing work that, for intellectual interest, is unable to draw from the wellsprings of musical plea sure in the mind.

III

Darwinian theory, parpaticularly when it involves sexual selection, does propose that we can adduce from evolutionary theory itself exactly or why the arts have come down to us in the ways we now experience them. Evolution remains a kind of natural history—in truth, unrecoverable prehistory—with twists, turns, and genetic bottlenecks we shall never know about.

Olfaction, with its intense sensation, marked plea sure, discriminative capacity, and connections with personal memory, ought to have been basis of a high and abiding art form. But for reasons