Book completed
Jun. 17th, 2024 02:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eve_primeThe Musical Human: A History of Life on Earth, by Michael Spitzer. This very ambitious book is the last for the year for the Oregon Bach Festival book club. It was quite interesting, especially chapter 4, which was about the psychology of music. The author covered a whole lot of topics - basically the entire history of music, from earliest prehistory to speculations about what AI may have in store for us. He went into the science of how animals use music-like sounds for communication; the history of the differences in music between the West, much of the "East," and China; etc. The scope was dazzling.
Because he took on such a vast topic, and handled most of it so well, I found it jarring when he made mistakes. At one point, he made a sweeping generalization about Native American societies, telling us that they were all nomadic and non-hierarchical, which is simply not true. Well, okay, he's British, so maybe that excuses some ignorance. However, he later repeatedly referred to China, Japan, and Korea as "South East Asia," which is glaringly wrong. When he made mistakes like that, it made me a bit more skeptical about his other claims. (He was also big on dualities, though he later overcame most of them - human/animal, West/East, participatory/non-participatory music, etc.) Surely beta readers could have pointed out some of this? Oh well.
Because he took on such a vast topic, and handled most of it so well, I found it jarring when he made mistakes. At one point, he made a sweeping generalization about Native American societies, telling us that they were all nomadic and non-hierarchical, which is simply not true. Well, okay, he's British, so maybe that excuses some ignorance. However, he later repeatedly referred to China, Japan, and Korea as "South East Asia," which is glaringly wrong. When he made mistakes like that, it made me a bit more skeptical about his other claims. (He was also big on dualities, though he later overcame most of them - human/animal, West/East, participatory/non-participatory music, etc.) Surely beta readers could have pointed out some of this? Oh well.