They're Playing Ur-Song

By LANCE MORROW

The crowd at the Grammy Awards last week looked as if it had just flown in from one of the moons of Saturn: glittering, snorting the intergalactic dust. Touches of the high crass mingled with a sort of metaphysical flash. Stevie Wonder, for example, wore a cumulously quilted white satin tuxedo whose upswept lapels formed great angel wings. The costume had the curious effect of making him look like a Puritan headstone.

The American popular-music industry was having its annual pageant. The program was about to end. Joan Baez walked onstage unannounced. As if she were lost in time, Baez driftingly began to sing Bob Dylan's anthem: "How many roads must a man walk down,/ Before you call him a man .../ The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind,/ The answer is blowin' in the wind."

At that instant, a television audience of millions, including much of the baby boom that is now losing its hair, went time-traveling with Baez. Some felt 20 again. Some felt a thousand years old. They swooped back, daydreaming. Tears shot to their eyes. She was playing their song.

It is a fascinating, if familiar, process. When songs have that magic in them, they take on strange powers of recall. Commenting on a Noel Coward song, a character in Coward's Private Lives remarks: "Extraordinary how potent cheap music is." Songs eerily consolidate the memory, making obscure chemical connections in the brain. They conjure up moments out of time. They reconstitute things long gone, to the point that smells and images and a precise forgotten ache of the heart return hauntingly for a moment. The dramatization that occurs in the mind is intimate and utterly private. One has only to hear a snatch of Simon and Garfunkel's Mrs. Robinson ("Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?/ A nation turns its lonely eyes to you,/ Woo woo woo") to be again in a rental car chasing Robert Kennedy's whistle-stop primary campaign across northern Indiana in May of 1968. And other memories cascade down on that.

The conjuring song, in turn, becomes a signature, an act of self-definition. Blowin' in the Wind, of course, was only one of a thousand defining anthems of the '60s.

Traditionally, it is couples, not generations, that have their songs. Rick and Ilsa would put themselves in a trance by getting Sam to sing As Time Goes By in Casablanca. Sometimes we have more than one special song, or a different song for a different mate or a different archaeological layer of our lives.

Among the Tuvinian people of the Soviet Union, an individual can sing two melodies simultaneously. That has wonderful possibilities. Might one cross in the Tuvinian mind two simultaneous numbers, like, say, Bing Crosby's Mississippi Mud ("It's a treat to beat your feet.. .") with Rock the Casbah by the Clash? Would the Tuvinian stay sane if that happened?

A couple's "our song" presupposes an enduring and developing relationship of which the melody will be the theme. Every year on their anniversary, House Speaker Tip O'Neill sings I'll Be with You in Apple Blossom Time to his wife of 41 years, Mildred Anne. It is more difficult to develop a privately meaningful song if you plan to part company in the morning.

There may be an "our song" for a cause (We Shall Overcome), for a college ("Bulldog, bulldog, bow wow wow, Eli Yale!"), for a specific event, like the release of the hostages (Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree), and even for an era (Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?). Nations have them. But The Star-Spangled Banner has never quite become "our song" in the way that the Marseillaise utterly and unquestionably belongs to the French. Politicians have their "our songs." John Kennedy may have thought of his Administration in terms of the words and music of Camelot. But it is said that once, during a reception at the White House, he heard Hail to the Chief and muttered to Jackie, "They're playing our song."

The choice may sometimes be perverse. Abraham Lincoln rather liked Dixie. Someone decided that poor Franklin Roosevelt loved Home on the Range, so he was condemned to sit through the tune scores of times.

Music is a form of spiritual carbon dating. If one came of age in 1938, then Artie Shaw's version of Begin the Beguine might be the signature he went by, the sound that would date his soul like the exact ring on a redwood. A few years earlier, it might have been Hoagy Carmichael doing Stardust.

One can never quite imagine people younger than oneself having a plausibly magical song of their own. It is a trick of age and generational perspective. Parents believe that the songs their children cherish, far from amassing rich emotional associations, are merely destroying brain cells. The workings of special songs are necessarily subjective, and they promote a kind of hubris. Still, even allowing for that effect, it is sometimes hard to imagine what private anthems will arise from, say, punk or new wave music. Are there couples now that will for years grow mistily tender when they hear a ditty by Meat Loaf?

But a romantic fallacy may be hidden in such prejudices. What the music stirs in the mind need not be mere sentimentality. The evocative magic worked by songs is essentially mysterious. It doubtless has some thing to do with the organization of the brain. The musical faculty resides chiefly in the right hemisphere, along with the emotions, the nonlogical, intuitive powers of the mind. Music cohabits in the brain with myth. Says Howard Gardner, a research psychologist at Harvard: "Music mirrors the structure and the range of our emotions. It has the same kind of flow as our emotional life." What is the sound of the right brain singing?

We organize time and myth with music; we mark our lives by it. The death by assassination of John Lennon was an event that mingled music and myth and completed the relationship between the two. Music, as the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss once said, "unites the contrary attributes of being both intelligible and untranslatable."

Music is the way that our memories sing to us across time. The loveliest quality of music involves its modulation upon the theme of time. Songs, playing in the mind, become the subtlest shuttles across years.

But sometimes the music is a weapon, and sometimes it is a trap. For centuries, Celts have given themselves battlefield noise and nerve with bagpipes, making the "our song" of the regiment, the tribe, stirring up the blood. The pipes have their wild rhetoric. It may both stiffen and imprison the spirit. Sometimes people cannot escape from their songs. The Irish gift for the instant ballad that glorifies this afternoon's martyr will ruin a human heart and turn children into killers, the heroes of tomorrow's pub songs.

In the past, some scholars have pursued the idea that there is a universal "our song": the Ur-song that is said to run through the imagination of every child in the world, an eerie universal croon. Actually, it need not be eerie. For all we know, the Ur-song may turn out to sound like the opening bars of Perry Como doing Hot Diggity. -- By Lance Morrow This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.