By John Corbett
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But that hasn’t kept a stampede of educators, music snobs, and New Age music healers from touting–and hawking–the miraculous powers of Mozart and, by extension, other classical composers. This is the Mozart-effect effect. For instance, you can now purchase pianist Valery Lloyd-Watts’s Music for a Better Brain, a CD that features “selections by the great masters of pattern and structure,” including not only Mozart but also Bach, Haydn, Beethoven, Scarlatti, and Telemann, and promises to “stimulate your ability to think abstractly.” Or you can visit the on-line Mozart Effect Resource Center (www.mozarteffect.com), where you’ll encounter Svengali Don Campbell, sometime student of famed music educator Nadia Boulanger, founder of the Boulder-based Institute for Music, Health and Education, and author of The Mozart Effect (Avon Books, 1997). Campbell has compiled six CDs (three explicitly for children), including Strengthen the Brain: Music for Intelligence & Learning, which, he assures the consumer, can help listeners achieve “the kind of measurable IQ boost [Campbell’s emphasis] documented in the famed University of California at Irvine study.” It doesn’t include the sonata used in the study. Incidentally, in case you were thinking about adopting it for your own line of products, “The Mozart Effect” is already a registered trademark held by Campbell.
Last week the dailies reported that one of the scientists who made the original discovery, Frances Rauscher (now at the University of Wisconsin), has found that young rats given a nightly dose of the same Mozart piano sonata learned to run mazes more quickly and efficiently than rats subjected to music by Philip Glass or white noise. In ’94, the UC-Irvine newsletter MuSICA Research Notes explained that the authors of the original study “selected Mozart because they believe that its musical structure facilitates cognitive processing in the brain and predict that music which lacks sufficient complexity or is too repetitive would interfere with abstract reasoning.” The insufficiently complex, repetitive minimalist Glass would seem to have confirmed their suspicions. Rauscher and her colleagues cheerily report that the rats’ reactions to Glass and Mozart have “strong implications for education and enrichment programs.”
So what’s really being tested here is the music. As Donna Haraway showed in her groundbreaking 1989 critique of primatology, Primate Visions, the behavioral sciences are frequently used to justify social norms and mores, and to sanction the perpetuation of the status quo. The way primatologists’ findings are refracted in popular culture sites, such as the film Gorillas in the Mist, she says, wrongfully turns them into commentary on human behavior. Rauscher’s rats have been presented not as rats but as stripped-down human beings, little black-box test subjects that reveal what we, wrapped up in layers of culture, cannot. But what this process truly reveals is the desire to see white European classical culture sanctioned by a higher authority–if not God, then at least nature. “Insufficiently complex” is a code not only for Glass but also for pop music, which, it’s implied, is a threat to mental health. The Mozart-effect effect is about rationalizing cultural piety.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration by Mike Werner.
