cover image Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy: How Music Captures Our Imagination

Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy: How Music Captures Our Imagination

Robert Jourdain. William Morrow & Company, $25 (320pp) ISBN 978-0-688-14236-0

Synthesizing recent research from the burgeoning science of musical psychoacoustics, Jourdain, a California musician, provides a richly informative, exuberant, wonderfully accessible introduction to how we perceive and experience music. Choosing examples eclectically, from Henry Mancini's ""The Pink Panther"" to Mozart, Stravinsky and Duke Ellington, he explores how, when we compose, perform or listen to music, the brain assembles musical devices, patterns and harmonies into vast, meaningful hierarchies of sound. He also offers tantalizing if inevitably unsatisfying answers to such age-old enigmas as what makes a great melody or how music elicits emotions and gives pleasure. Requiring no prior musical or scientific knowledge, this survey is sprinkled with interesting historical anecdotes (Beethoven was an early victim of metronome mania; Aaron Copland hit upon the title Appalachian Spring only after he had finished composing his tone poem) as well as seldom-appreciated facts. We learn, for instance, that musical dissonance and consonance have a neurological basis, in the inner ear's structure. Jourdain writes with verve, infectious enthusiasm and rare insight into music's emotive power. (Mar.)