What a Responsibility!

Recently I read that babies in utero can hear after the first few months, and that music and other sounds they hear in the womb (the mother's or father's voice, or a particular lullaby, for example) can later be recalled. Reportedly, a crying child was calmed upon hearing the theme song of a soap opera that his mother had previously watched while pregnant with him. I guess the music reminded him of the safety and comfort of the womb, and he was lulled by the music's sentimental connection.

I can't remember the first piece of music I ever heard, but I was born in the fall of 1970, and I can bet my parents listened to the radio back then (and what a time to listen to music!), so perhaps the Jackson 5's "ABC" or "Mama Told Me Not to Come" by Three Dog Night, or maybe "Bridge Over Troubled Water" or "The Long and Winding Road" – those were all playing in the months leading up to my birth. What effect might these songs have had on my early love of music I can only begin to imagine. Music has had a strong presence in my life. I can't imagine my life without it, and it has made so many events in my life more memorable and/or more bearable. The thought that maybe my musical journey began prenatally is fascinating to me.

But what if it had been something else? I mean, what a responsibility! What if my father had decided to blast Charles Ives quarter-tone piano pieces into the womb? Would I have any appreciation for traditional tonal harmony? I shudder to think of the attention deficit issues I might have had if I had been subjected at that impressionable developmental age to Philip Glass!

So what should one play for a prenatal child? Mozart? Children's songs? Songs with logical and beautiful tonic harmonic progressions? Upbeat or contemplative? Aggressive or leisurely? Major or minor? Songs with words or instrumentals?

Musical philosophers throughout history have commented that music has great power on the mind and body. Harmony, mode and key all affect the mental state (see: http://www.wmich.edu/mus-theo/courses/keys.html) . Plato discussed in the book iii of The Republic that certain musical modes were dangerous and ill-fitting for warriors to hear -- the Lydian and mixo-Lydian modes were too dirge-like, that Ionian and Lydian promoted drunkenness and sloth. The Dorian mode, however, was best suited to "fittingly imitate the utterances and the accents of a brave man who is engaged in warfare or in any enforced business," and the Phrygian mode ideal for "a man engaged in works of peace, not enforced but voluntary...acting modestly and moderately and acquiescing in the outcome." Certain keys were considered appropriate for operatic dramatis personae not only because of vocal range, but because keys conveyed specific characteristics and therefore used to reinforce particular character traits.

If we accept that there is any truth to these assertions, imagine then the power that an initial piece of music would have on a brain when it first develops. Could this impact the synaptic geography? Would the ears, when first able to sense vibration, be skewed to accept certain aural presentations as the emotional and physical basis from which all other sound is judged? "Mozart's piano sonata in A is all well and good," the child would say, "but it pales in comparative beauty and logic to Billy Ray Cyrus's 'Achey, Breaky Heart.'" ...Yikes!