This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

by Daniel J. Levitin

What most of us turn to music for is an emotional experience. We aren’t studying the performance for wrong notes, and so long as they don’t jar us out of our reverie, most of us don’t notice them. So much of the research on musical expertise has looked for accomplishment in the wrong place, in the facility of fingers rather than the expressiveness of emotion. I recently asked the dean of one of the top music schools in North America about this paradox: At what point in the curriculum is emotion and expressivity taught? Her answer was that they aren’t taught. “There is so much to cover in the approved curriculum,” she explained, “repertoire, ensemble, and solo training, sight singing, sight reading, music theory—that there simply isn’t time to teach expressivity.” So how do we get expressive musicians? “Some of them come in already knowing how to move a listener. Usually they’ve figured it out themselves somewhere along the line.” The surprise and disappointment in my face must have been obvious. “Occasionally,” she added, almost in a whisper, “if there’s an exceptional student, there’s time during the last part of their last semester here to coach them on emotion . . . . Usually this is for people who are already performing as soloists in our orchestra, and we help them to coax out more expressivity from their performance.” So, at one of the best music schools we have, the raison d’ětre for music is taught to a select few, and then, only in the last few weeks of a four- or...