This month's session took a more academic turn, drawing on Gresham College's free lecture catalogue for Professor Milton Mermikides' talk "Why Music Moves Us." Reception was mixed — some members found parts of it heavy going, even a little pretentious, but most agreed it was fascinating and thought-provoking.
Mermikides drew on neuroscience, psychology and musicology to explore how "primal" and "conditioned" listening combine to produce emotional effect, using examples spanning pop, jazz, rock, film, folk and classical traditions. He traced music's presence throughout human history — from a 40,000 BCE mammoth-tusk flute to an isolated Solomon Islands lullaby passed down orally for generations yet analysable in standard European notation — arguing we can't understand music without understanding how our bodies and brains evolved to interpret soundwaves. He touched on early recording technology, including Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville's 1850s phonautograph, and used spectrograms to show how pitch, rhythm and timbre become visible, noting that what we hear is shaped as much by expectation and other senses as by the sound itself.
A central theme was music as language: phrasing and rhythm in speech (contrasting English and French, or Elgar and Debussy) echo into musical style, with question-and-answer phrase structures cropping up in jazz and elsewhere, and composers like Bartók and Stravinsky drawing on folk idioms. Simple motifs — Gershwin's "I Got Rhythm" was the example — remain recognisable through endless inversion, stretching and repetition.
On the emotional side, Mermikides described brain-imaging evidence that music activates regions well beyond the auditory cortex, and outlined mechanisms — memory association, evocation of imagery (Vaughan Williams' The Lark Ascending was cited here), emotional contagion, rhythmic entrainment, and predictive expectation — bundled under the acronym "EVERBEAM." He discussed the phenomenon of musical chills, felt by roughly half the general population but over 90% of professional musicians, linking this to theories from Huron and Panksepp. Deliberately unresolved or delayed resolution was illustrated by Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, which he described as almost endlessly withholding its final resolution.
Overall: a demanding but rewarding session, reinforcing that music's emotional power rests on a complex web of biology, culture and personal history.
In the second part we learnt about Hurdy Gurdy. Originally a two-person medieval instrument called the organistrum, it shrank to a one-person version known in French as the symphonia Widespread across Europe by the 17th century, it declined with the rise of the accordion in the 1880s, but has enjoyed a genuine folk-music revival since the late 20th century.
Our next meeting is at Startforth Community Centre on Friday 22 October at 10:00.
Report by Ian Royston