The Science of Discworld II

after a minute or so. The Beatles, Stravinsky, sacred chants, or New Orleans jazz, make them pause for much longer, ten minutes or so.
    Playing the same pieces months later reveals that the baby has some memory of the style as well as of the instruments. Apparently, a quartet by Mozart triggers recognition of the ‘Mozart’ style just as effectively as a Mozart symphony. Our brains have sophisticated music-recognition modules, and we can use them before we speak, indeed before we are born. Why?
    We’re looking for the essence of music – as if we knew what the essence of sex was for the Naked Ape, or the essence of obedience for Eichmann – or come to that, what it means to be the most intelligent/extelligent creature on Roundworld. What we want is a story that puts the arts, and music, into an explanation of How We Got Here, and why we waste all that money on the arts faculties of universities. Why is Rincewind so keen to bring art and music to our ancestors?
    It was very common in the early years of the twentieth century to copy the music of ‘primitive’ tribes. Examples include Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and Manuel de Falla’s Fire Dance , where the musical style was thought to give a primitive authenticity. People thought that Bronislaw Malinowski’s tales of the Trobriand Islanders, with their amazing lack of the civilised sexual repressions so publicised by Freud in Viennese society, showed that Natural Humans were happier and less corrupt, and that their music – for flutes and drums – conveyed their state of innocence more effectively than classical symphonies. Jazz, invented by supposedly ‘primitive’ black musicians down in New Orleans, had resonances that seemed natural, animal (and, for certain Christians, evil). It was almost as if music were a language, parallel to the words, developed in different societies with different emphases, and more revealing of the nature of the people than other aspects of their culture.
    This is the way the media have played it, and like the Flintstones and Stone Age society, we have an overlay of this outlook that it’s very difficult to get away from. Margaret Mead, who was taken for a ride by her native girl friend and told the resulting story in Coming of Age in Samoa A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization , romanticised their music and dances in exactly this way.When Hollywood needs to show the primitive-but-spiritual nature of Indian braves, cannibal tribes in Borneo, or Hawaiian indigenes, it shows us the rain dance, the marriage music, and the hula girls. When we go to these places, the locals put on these dances for us because it brings in tourist money. The complicity between muzak, hula dances, opera and background music in Hollywood films has completely buried our abilities to sort out what constitutes ‘natural’ art or music.
    However, that’s not what we want anyway. ‘Natural’ is an illusion. Desmond Morris made a lot of money selling paintings done by apes. The apes clearly enjoyed the whole business, and so did Morris, and presumably so did the people who bought them and looked at them in art galleries. There is also an elephant that paints, and signs its paintings. Sort of. There’s a segment of modern painting whose philosophy seems to relate to this quest for the genuinely primitive. One side is the tackiest, painting by children, which clearly demonstrates the stepwise effects of the culture – the extelligence – on their burgeoning intelligence. To our inexpert eyes, though, these paintings demonstrate only the enormous gratification achieved by some parents in response to minimal effort by their children.
    Another aspect, more intellectual, is the move towards apparently real-world constraints, like cubism, or attempts to develop styles that force us to re-evaluate how we see, like Picasso’s profile faces but with the two eyes on one side. There is a very common modern form that arranges rectangles of paper with different textures, or sprays sparse paint droplets according to some minimal rule, or scatters charcoal dust on a bold swirly bright oil-paint background and then combs it into the texture and pattern of the whole canvas. All of these can give pleasure to the eye. Why? How do they differ from natural objects, some of which also give considerable pleasure?
    Now we want to make a giant leap and bring Mozart, jazz,