Music and Speech

Since I got back from Bolivia, one of the major changes I have seen in Helena is that she loves to sing.  Now, I don't want to over-state her musical capacity here: she has only one note and one volume level, and we probably wouldn't even know that it was music were it not for the fact that she only does it when Rita and I sing to her.  There is also an important difference between this vocal activity and the "conversations" that Rita has with her: when she sings, she doesn't wait for us to stop talking so that she can respond.  She sings in a chorus with us.

With this in mind, yesterday morning, after I sang several of her favorite songs to (or with) Helena Iara, I shared with her some of the traditional myths about the origin of music.  In Plato's Phaedrus, for instance, Socrates shares the idea (without really endorsing it) that men got the idea of speech from the singing of birds.  The myth of Marsyas goes into much more detail: Marsyas was a satyr in Asia Minor (now Turkey) who, depending on the story, either found a musical instrument that Athena had cast down from Olympus, or invented the two-barreled pipe by himself, using reeds from a lake near his home.  Regardless, he came to be known as the greatest musician of his day.

Being the best was not necessarily a good thing in the Greek world: myths always have the most competent humans either challenging the gods in an act of hubris, or the gods challenge them to bring them down to size.  In this case, Apollo was the problem: he and Marsyas faced off in a contest between the god's lyre and Marsyas's flute, which has also been interpreted as a dispute between the pentatonic and diatonic scales, Eastern and Western harmonies, reason and genius, Apollo and Dionysus...  And as always happens in Greek myths, the mortal loses.  In this case, Apollo tied Marsyas to a tree and flayed his skin while he still lived, which apologists throughout history have excused as a proper punishment for someone with the arrogance to challenge the gods.

In my last semester at Harvard, when I was taking a course on Greek archeology, I spent a lot of time researching Marsyas and Niobe, pre-Roman nature spirits from Asia Minor who get extreme punishments for daring to place themselves on a level with the gods.  I had been studying a series of beautiful bass-reliefs in the theater Hieropolis, and tried to show how the artist had used these myths to think about politics, with Marsyas and Niobe standing in for the oppressed locals and Apollo and Artemis for the unjust Romans, a rather tendentious argument but a very fun one to make in the stuffy religion department at Harvard.  (There is a decent connection, by the way: Marsyas imagery was associated with the right of free speech in Rome, both by liberty's partisans and its opponents.)

Strangely, Helena continued to listen to this whole story, especially since I broke it up from time to time so we could sing together.  And those songs make, I think, the same argument as the myth of Marsyas and the story of language and birdsong related by Plato.  We often think that song is a kind or ornament, an art that depends upon speech.  Speech proceeds song: speech is involved in the serious business of communication, while song is just play or decoration.  Plato himself, in the Republic, said he would banish singers and poets, because they messed with the real business of speech, which was the communication of profound ideas.

A young refugee with whom I worked in Colombia made the same argument as Socrates in the Phaedrus: he told me of the terrors of life in the northern jungles, where he had seen his uncle murdered by paramilitaries as they rode together on a motorcycle, then of his forced flight to Bogotá when his father was accused of participating in a massacre committed by the guerrillas.  When he came to the city, he refused to speak.  Words were too heavy.  People might kill him for what he knew.  Even so, he found a group of rappers in his neighborhood and began to sing with them, and found his voice through music.  "I had to sing to learn how to speak," he told me.

As I told Helena his final story, I thought about her singing.  She too is learning to sing before she learns to speak.  And I hope with that, she will learn the intonations and poetry of elegant speech: not mere communication of ideas, but beauty expressed through sound.