Music, like language, is inborn. Everyone can do it.
This doesn't mean everyone's great. Bachs and Churchills are rare. Still, even at your most tongue-tied, your verbal skills are better than every other animal's. A Down's child's language is a thing of wonder for a dog or a dolphin. Blind and deaf, Helen Keller learned language.
Ditto, music.
We take complex human traits too much for granted. In one of his Pulitzer-Prize winners, On Human Nature, E. O. Wilson lists a pile of social behaviors we wouldn't have if we'd come from ants instead of apes. Some are quite complex. I've read that only one human tribe was ever found that lacked weaving, and that it may simply have lost it, an exception that proves the rule. Is weaving innate? Bet it is.
I'll wager that if you ask an anthropologist, no human culture lacks music.
If you start listing everything involved in language and how long it would take you to learn each of these tasks, it's overwhelming. I used to hear, "People in Holland are all geniuses. Even little children there speak Dutch." Did you realize that in Russian, there's a word for everything?
Music's like that, too. You're not born knowing tunes, but you're born able to learn them. Reading music? Hard. That's like reading English or Chinese. Hearing and imitating? Surprisingly easy once you stop scaring yourself into not trying.
I've done nearly a hundred "Beginning Old Timey" workshops. I always teach a tune or two. If he walked into one, Paul Pimsleur would feel right at home. (If you've never listened to a Pimsleur-method lesson, go down to your local library and check one out to hear what I mean.) I pick a simple tune and play it all the way through. Next I pick an easy, two-bar phrase from it. If it's Spanish Ladies, it's the last two bars. Yankee Doodle? The first two.
I play it, and ask folks to imitate it. At first, I may have to show some of them where to put their fingers, but then we play it over and over, continuously and in time, until everyone's mostly getting it.
We do the same thing with the two bars next to it. Then we put them together. Four bars. Half-way through a part. The second half of the part often either starts or ends the same way, which only leaves four more bars. Almost effortlessly, and before they know it, they have half the tune. Which repeats, right?
Teaching the B part is even less work, because it often has echoes of the A, and everyone in the room now knows it's do-able. After we've played through the B part five or ten times together, we go back and do the A part again. Twice. Then right into two B's. Then two A's. Then two B's. Then .... They're playing the tune. I just drop out and listen. If I see a dance partner sitting in a corner, I'll get up and dance to them.
They've become a dance band without a scrap of sheet music. No "dots," as the old-timers would say.
If you met someone who insisted that all your conversations be written out and read from paper, like so many script-readings, you'd think it odd. Reading music at jams is like that. You don't need written music. Doing without marks you as human.
They're already finding the genes involved in language. Sure enough, we have 'em, chimps don't. I can hardly wait for the first announcement of genes involved in music.
