Stephen Mithen: Our conception of music in the West can be rather narrow. I think in the West it got tied up with expertise, Who does music? It’s somebody who stands on a stage and performs to others. It’s something that is done on special occasions. If you look at traditional societies they remind us that music is something that just pervades everyday of every person’s life. You know, kids just singing and dancing right from scratch. It’s just what you do. It’s not something you do on a special occasion, it’s not even something that you have to be trained for. You do it when you work, you do it when you play. Now that doesn’t mean they don’t have expertise, they don’t have special performers and people who got particular talents, but it’s something that pervades everything they do. And that reminds us that music isn’t a special elite form of activity.

Bobby McFerrin: My friend Yo-Yo Ma, when we first met, we were very, very interested in each other’s music. I was starting to work on conducting, and he was very interested in improvisation. So we had many, many conversations about this. And he knew that he had to do something for his music-making, that had something that would take him to a deeper place in himself. And so after a few years of talking about this, he went to Africa and he went to Botswana, he went to not a town but sort of out in a village somewhere. Lots and lots and lots of music-making and what have you. But in the beginning, there’s two stories that defined and shaped my musical life ever since I had heard them. “Well,” I thought “I have to make music like that.”

The first story is where when he arrived in this village, there was an interpreter who was trying to explain to the villagers that Yo-Yo Ma was going to play a concert at 7:30 at this place somewhere. And they had a hard time comprehending this for two reasons. One, they didn’t understand why they had to wait to hear music. Why did we have to wait to hear him play? And why do we have to leave where we are to go somewhere else to hear it. Because music was so integrated in their life. They had no concept of performance because music was so much a part of their lives, that there was no such thing as it. People were simply getting together and playing and they were celebrating everything. They were celebrating life, birth, harvest, hunting, you know, everything. So this I thought, “Okay I want to be the kind of musician where music is with me whether I’m on stage or not.” And when I’m on stage there’s nothing different except maybe the space. But what I’ve taken on stage with me is the same, it’s not different, it’s just being myself, the same self that I am just when I’m just getting out of bed in the morning, It’s the same musical self that I take with me on stage.

The second story is this: when Yo-Yo wanted to leave, when it was time to go—he’d been there for a couple of weeks, I think—he wanted to take some music with him to remind him about the experience. And the village shaman shared one of the village songs, and Yo Yo took out his manuscript so he could write it down. And the shaman is saying (singing notes) and Yo-Yo said, “Stop, I need to write this down.” So he writes it down. And he says, “Play it again, I want to make sure I got this right.” And the shaman sings (sings notes). And Yo Yo is saying But that’s not the piece you sang before. The shaman laughed and said “The first time I sang it there was a herd of antelope in the distance and a cloud was passing over the sun.” So this is the part that we lost. Every time a piece of music is played, one time there is a herd of antelope, and one time there’s not. And we turn in these cookie-cutter performances. Everything is so laid down and regimented and locked-in and so rehearsed, that they squeeze the life out of it. It no longer has any life in it because no one is open to surprise, no one is open to any spontaneous event that can happen. Everything is just dictated, and this is the way it’s gonna be. I think that’s the part that we’ve lost.

Yo Yo Ma: So this is the sarabande of Bach’s 5th Cello Suite. Now, we can look at this very simple sounding piece, only about 80 or 90 notes. I’d say “Okay, well these are the notes. That’s the piece, that’s it.” That would be the material viewpoint. Now, but who is Bach? Where did this music come from? Did he invent all of it? Well, let’s think about it. Bach, we know Bach as a German composer but except he—Germany didn’t exist when Bach wrote this piece. So we think of him as a religious composer, lots of cantatas. But he wasn’t working for—this is not a religious piece, this is a dance. A sarabande is a dance. He probably knew it from when he was writing it as a French dance. But actually, what we know of the sarabande, that this was a dance from North Africa, and the sarabande was danced by Bedouins. And it arrived in Spain, and when it arrived in Spain hundreds of years ago, it was banned because people thought it was an erotic dance. It was lewd and lascivious. So it was just banned. So then it went from Spain and you actually have it in Latin America, the same dance exists, and the dance is in three with an emphasis on the second beat.

So it’s in three, so Bach didn’t invent the structure of the dance, he didn’t invent the dance, but he composed around it. So basically he thought okay he knew the key because this is part of a [baroque?] movement, and so he said okay he chose where that dance was gonna be in that whole composition. So he knew why he wanted it to be there. He had an emotional reason for it to be there, but the dance he didn’t invent.

Did he know that it came from Spain? Possibly. The guy was pretty interested in lots of things. Did he know it was from North Africa?  No. So who owns the dance? Well, the North Africans do, the Spanish do. By the time it went to France, it was a dance.  So the French say “This is ours”. Is it a German piece of music? Well is it? Now we sort of agree more or less So for a longtime this music was used as exercises until Pablo Casals came along and said “This is incredible music. I got to get all of this music together to make it one piece. Is it exercise music? Is it great music? It’s all of those things!

Grade level: 5-8

Topic/Subject Matter: Music, Science

Time Allotment: Three 45-minute class periods, and additional in-class or out-of-class time to collect data for experiments in the Culminating Activity.

Overview: THE MUSIC INSTINCT showcases the research and discovery process of scientists whose work focuses on the interrelationship between music and science. Music is a topic that is very accessible and familiar to young people, and can be used as a medium for simple student-led experiments. In this lesson, students will learn about the elements of music and will design and conduct their own scientific experiments on how people respond to music, using examples from THE MUSIC INSTINCT as a guide. They will learn to determine a research question that can be tested in an experiment, will write a hypothesis, and will collect data using classmates, peers, or the community as their subjects.

In the Introductory Activity, students will begin by associating different chords with descriptive terms evoking the sounds’ feeling or mood. Then, they will view segments from the MUSIC INSTINCT program to explore the elements of music, learning how differences in the basic building blocks of music (pitch, rhythm, tempo, timbre, melody, and harmony) can lead to the differences in expression and feeling that we come to associate with different musical styles through experience. These elements are also the simple variables that can form the basis of scientific experiments to test how people respond to music and sound. In the Learning Activity, the students will be led through a model experiment in the classroom, testing the class’ response to different chords and learning about the process of the scientific method as they do.

As a Culminating Activity, groups of students will design and conduct their own experiments testing people’s responses to music. After collecting their data, students will report their findings to the class.

While this lesson can be used to deepen student understanding of the scientific method on the one hand, and the elements of music on the other, students should have a basic understanding of these concepts prior to embarking on this lesson.

KEY MUSIC VOCABULARY:
Pitch = high/low
Tempo = fast/slow
Timbre = characteristic quality of an instrument or voice
Interval = distance between two notes
Chord = combination of three or more notes
Melody = tune
Harmony = chords, like major/minor
Rhythm = pattern of beats

2) Expression in music
The way people respond to music depends on acoustics and culture:

3) Music in Cameroon
A scientist organized a musical experiment in Cameroon:

To find information on identifying the clips on the DVD, dowload the PDF of the lesson plan.