If you've ever wondered how music works its magic on us, an expert on the subject undertakes to explain why most everybody loves the Beatles

"Today the Beatles catalogue is cross-culturally loved--the product of a six-year burst of creativity unparalleled in modern music. . . .

"On the bus to my office, the radio played 'And I Love Her' and a Portuguese immigrant my grandmother's age sang along. . . .

"One hundred years from now Beatles songs may be so well known that every child will learn them as nursery rhymes, and most people will have forgotten who wrote them. They will have become sufficiently entrenched in popular culture that it will seem as if they've always existed, like 'Oh Susannah', 'This Land Is Your Land', and 'Frere Jacques'."
--Daniel J. Levitin (author of This Is Your Brain on Music), in "Beatles on your brain," in The Guardian (June 2)

I can tell you to the year how long I've known Howie: since 1961, the year my family moved to Brooklyn and the year he and I entered James Madison High School. One of the curious features of our relationship is that, while music has been at the center of both our lives, our musical tastes couldn't be more different--he's all rock and I'm all classical. Even so, though, it's been a bond of sorts, and it was only natural that when he was in New York awhile back, he mentioned a book by a McGill University colleague-friend of his (one thing you learn about Howie is that he knows everybody) which has--apparently to the surprise of the author and publisher--turned into something of a runaway hit.

The book is called This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, and as Howie told me what he knew about it, I began to suspect that his friend Dan Levitin--who rather uniquely is trained as both a musician and a neuroscientist--has been researching a subject I've grown more and more curious about over the decades: how music works on us. Dan has actually figured out how to research the subject scientifically in his lab at McGill, drawing on his dual background in music and psychology. (Before he drifted into scientific research, he did some serious pop record producing.)

Howie even wangled me a precious author's copy from the author (moral: knowing people who know people can be lucky), and I've fiddled with it a bit, but I haven't had a chance to attack it with the attention it deserves, which I look forward to doing as soon as I can get my head clear enough. Alas, the daily assault of the real world leaves me fantasizing about reading a book purely for stimulation and pleasure the way God meant for us to fantasize about having lurid sex.

Now I've gotten a foretaste from a piece Dan has written for The Guardian on the occasion of the Sgt Pepper 40th anniversary, and I suppose with a view to the forthcoming British publication of This Is Your Brain on Music. In the piece, he backs up his love for the Beatles' music with some of what he's learned in his research.

He has no doubt about the quality or longevity of that music:

The Beatles incorporated classical elements into rock music so seamlessly that it is easy to forget that string quartets and Bach-like countermelodies and bass lines (not to mention plagal cadences) did not always populate pop music. Music changed more between 1963 and 1969 than it has in the 37 years since, with the Beatles among the architects of that change. Paul McCartney may be the closest thing our generation has produced to Schubert--a master of melody, writing songs that seem to have been there all along.

If you too have ever wondered about how music--of all kinds--operates on us, let Dan explain.

Why can we listen to certain songs across a lifetime and still find pleasure in them? Great songs activate deep-rooted neural networks in our brains that encode the rules and syntax of our culture's music. Through a lifetime of listening, we have learned what is essentially a complex calculation of statistical probabilities of what chord is likely to follow what, and how melodies are formed. Skilful composers play with these expectations, meeting and violating them in interesting ways. In my laboratory we've found that listening to a familiar song that you like activates the same parts of the brain as sex or opiates do. But there is no one song that does this for everyone; musical taste is both variable and subjective.

From the dual vantage point of the brain researcher and the musician-slash-music professor, Dan concludes:

To a neuroscientist, the Beatles' longevity can be explained by the fact that their music creates subtle and rewarding schematic violations of popular musical forms, causing a symphony of neural firings from the cerebellum to the prefrontal cortex. To a musician, each listening showcases subtle nuances not heard before, details of arrangement and intricacy that slowly reveal themselves across hundreds or thousands of listenings. I have to admit, they're getting better all the time.

UPDATE: STERLING

Actually, I meant Stirling, Stirling Newberry of The Agonist. He's written a fascinating, totally killer review of Dan's book.