Customer Reviews

The Music Instinct: How Music Works and Why We Can't Do Without It

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I'm a music prof. looking for a good text to use for a new course open to the general student that does not place music in any of its old boxes like culture, identity, "art", and so on...something that treats music as the kaleidoscope it is. That includes of course culture and art, but also math, biology, cognition, imagination, and more. I found what I'm looking for here: Ball's "Music Instinct" is comprehensible, thorough, and wide ranging. It was not perfect, sometimes elliptical and hung up on details, laced with venom for old-time musicologist Deryck Cooke (for some reason--must be some kind of vendetta) and I wished some of the later chapters had come earlier and vice versa. But there is so much wonderful information and it is brilliantly conveyed most of the time. There is an extremely refreshing love and unprejudiced openness to all music of the world, ample examples from diverse places and times, and still with a sophisticated appreciation for the Western art tradition. Ball embodies the 21st century musical omnivore that so many of us have become, and he has found a way to explain music holistically that I personally believe models the kind of undergraduate music education we should be striving to offer.

This book was fascinating, thought-provoking, and well-written. I bought it after having taken it out of my wonderful public library, because it's worth re-reading.

The Music Instinct is a substantial work but quite imperfect. It is simply not accessible to lay readers without music notation and terminology knowledge. It is not substantial enough for advanced theorists. It is a book for the few people somewhere in the middle who are trained in music somewhat but have questions about its inherent nature. Ball does a remarkable job of bringing together a lot of the most current research, but he fails to quite make it work as a complete unit.

I agree largely with the other reviews here by George Erdosh and by Michael Tenzer (though I think Ball's attacks on Deryck Cooke are justified and seem not driven by any vendetta but rather by Ball's disagreement with Cooke's approach; Cooke is used as an example of an outdated and misguided attitude which Ball contrasts with the newer attitudes today).

On my blog, I've written a thorough review of this book. See my comment below.

Philippe Ball is one of those modern writers who is an instant expert on almost everything. I actually liked his book on Chartres cathedral, but this one on music has been a disappointment. It is not well organized, keeps going around in circles, and is often superficial. take as an example his treatment of violins, old and new. He kind of thinks that the Guarneri and Stradivarius are no better than any modern violin, and cites in support the famous remark of Jascha Heifetz, which simply said that a violin has to be played to hear its sound. The origins of music have also been treated superficially. How did music start? Rhythm? like funerals? or nenia like a ninna-nanna? written instrumental music is a rather recent thing and it clearly started from dances. Bach's suites are still full of gavottes, minuettes, gigues, sarabandes etc. These things must be taken into considerations if we wish to understand why music causes emotions in most of us. It is true that many musicians are also good mathematicians, but music and math are not the same thing, otherwise people would be listening to the Fibonacci series as much as to Mozart.