Lately We've Read & Heard

Reviews by Deana Vassar

Lately We’ve Read

The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature
Daniel J. Levitin
Dutton/Penguin 2008

Why can a song make you cry like a baby? Or take you back to a place that you had long forgotten? And why can music elevate you and move you to do what you might just fear doing? Dr. Daniel J. Levitin’s newest book, The World in Six Songs is the only book that scientifically and poetically seeks to answer those mysterious questions.

Levitin’s newest work has produced another startlingly refreshing exploration of music. The message of this latest colorfully and joyfully written epic is that music has a supreme purpose: music unites the human race. Levitin, a neuroscientist/cognitive psychologist/ record producer and musician looks at music as not just a form of language that has evolved, but as a sacred and necessary part of humanity’s emotional heritage.

The neuroscientist is in deep disagreement actually with many of his scientific contemporaries who propose that music is curiously engaging but ultimately trivial with regards to human development. Levitin proposes that our race has been vitally influenced by music and that all music from all cultures past and present has been about six songs: friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion and love.

If you read Levitin’s mammoth New York Times bestseller, This Is Your Brain on Music, this is certainly a book that you will not want to miss. And if you’re new to the author’s way of seeing the world through every sort of music imaginable, Six Songs will fascinate, entertain and enlighten you.

By the time you finish the book, you may even be like me: a believer that we’re all, every single one of us, dancing and singing and laughing and crying to a common soundtrack. And every single song is about friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion and love.

Lately We’ve Heard

Chant: Music for the Soul
The Cistercian Monks of Stift Heiligenkreuz
Decca

No one expected that Cistercian Monks of Stift Heiligenkreuz of Vienna would become 2008’s international chart-topping sensation. Those robed pop stars topped number one on the Austrian pop charts and you have to love the fact that in the early summer of 2008 the chanting Cistertian monks actually vaulted over inveterate Queen of Pop, Madonna, on the British charts!

The story begins when one of the brothers at the Heiligenkreuz monastery saw that Universal Records had an advertisement in a Catholic journal seeking Gregorian chanters. On a whim, the monk posted a video of the brothers chanting on YouTube and emailed the link to Universal. By year’s end the monk’s idea will have sold the Decca label over a million discs. Father Karl of Stift Heiligenkreuz says that they will use the money raised from the recording for good works and that it is a gift that “our singing is able to give so many people peace and strength.”

The recording is permeated with a sense of reverence that beckons the listener to stop and listen and breathe deeply. The 17 voices of the band of brothers astonishingly become a single supple and haunting voice and one need not know a bit of Latin to be moved by the performances.

Chant: Music for the Soul is an equally perfect recording for the spiritually-minded pilgrim who wants to hear the ancient scriptures chanted or for the harried soul who just needs a little music medicine. A highly therapeutic collection that you might want to put on your holiday wish list!