The thing is, I find works like Music for 18 Musicians transcendently beautiful--not aesthetically appealing, not radical or thought-provoking or even evocative--but beautiful. But why the chamber pieces, and not his other work?

Reich himself provides the clue. In 18 Musicians as with the other chamber pieces, he builds his minimalist exercise around something he calls a pulse (check it out with these audio links from Amazon: WMA or Real Audio formats). The notion of using human rhythm is integral to the chamber works; in works such as Octet, it's not a pulse, but breath that matters; each musical phrase is timed to last about as long as a relaxed human breath.

People have been arguing over what constitutes beauty for thousands of years. 20th century art is premised on the idea that beauty is a social construction, and therefore anything can be art; the task of the artist is to open the eyes of the public to the boundless possibilities of beauty in the world. A noble goal, to be sure, and it inspired atonality, the "flat" soundscapes of Edgard Varese, and the aleatoric experiments of John Cage, to name only a few. The thing is, we're now in a position to scientifically examine music (for an introduction, check out the Ernest Bloch lectures), and the one thing that's becoming clear is that it may be socially filtered, but it's not socially constructed. Our standards of musical beauty are largely hardwired.

Actually, it goes deeper than that: our sense of hearing is highly customized for the human body and environment. Our feet transmit low frequency sounds better than high frequencies, possibly an evolved trait allowing us to sense oncoming stampedes; the shape of our skulls affects how sound is transmitted into the inner ear and ultimately how we hear. And sound is ultimately translated by the brain into a short-hand form that it can use. An empirical proof of this is MP3--the audio compression that makes MP3 possible is based on the way the human brain "fills in the gaps" in incomplete tones.

We don't have to know the precise characteristics of musical beauty to exploit it. In fact, there's now a software package available to tell you whether you've written a hit song. It's called Hit Song Science, and it uses sophisticated signal filters to determine where your song lies on a sort of "sound landscape". Hit songs tend to cluster in certain areas of this landscape; if your song is among them, it's likely to be a hit.

The thing is, Hit Song Science works. It successfully predicted the success of Norah Jones, for instance.

In no way does this mean that a software package can now declare your compositions to be crap. That's not what's going on here. The software is predicting hits, not judging quality, and it's doing so according to a law of averages. It certainly can't tell whether a particular song will appeal to you--and one of the traits of 21st century music is that we all have much more choice in what we listen to than we used to.

This is the modernist's ultimate nightmare, the idea that art should be codified, systematized, and production of it turned over to white-coated lab workers. Reaction against this nightmare motivated all of twentieth century art, from sculpture to architecture to music. But that nightmare is not what's happening here.

Studies of the brain clearly show that music stimulates the whole organ, right down to primitive components of the brainstem. Music, in fact, stimulates specific regions of the brain responsible for memory, motor control, timing and language, and emotion. Without specifying a particular musical scale or mode, rhythm structure etc. it's still possible to say that one piece of music that stimulates these centers, eg. motor and language, more than another piece, is more musical. But is it better music? Worse? That's up to you decide. And there's no limit to the ways we can use sound to provide this sort of stimulation.

More fundamentally, my take on science is heavily influenced by Niels Bohr's idea of complementarity: that science makes statements not about what things are, in some fundamental metaphysical sense, but about what they look like from particular angles or in particular circumstances. Looked at in brainscans, music may reduce to patterns of neural stimulation; examined mathematically, it has specific, predictable characteristics. That's what music looks like from these points of view, but none of these descriptions tells us what music is in essence. The discoveries of complementarity and uncertainty in quantum mechanics showed that science doesn't work that way. So science's statements can never claim to hijack the subjective nature of the musical experience.

In its zeal to preserve culture as sacred, 20th century art lost touch with reality. In the name of freedom and experimentation, it abandoned thousands of years worth of technique and experience in favor of ideology and guerilla actions. Ironically, though, it lacked any objective standard for measuring its own success. And in rejecting everything from the past, it threw out the baby with the bathwater.

That human nature (including the human musical faculty) is biologically determined is not the same as saying that human expression (including musical expression) is limited. There is room for endless variety and invention within humanly accessible music, and what's beautiful to you may not be beautiful to me (I hate jazz, for instance). Science's understanding of musical taste will always deal in averages, not individual cases. Creativity and surprise are still possible and always will be.

What embodied music might look like

All of which brings us back to Steve Reich: I don't know for sure, but I strongly suspect that his principle of the pulse or breath as the core of his chamber pieces is what makes them appealing to me. They are a great example of embodied music--music that is engineered for the human sensorimotor system. And this is the principle that I suggest could inform music after Modernism. Rock, blues, Inuit throat-singing and hip hop are already built around human rhythms. (Maybe I hate jazz because I can't figure out how to attach it to my body.) Beethoven's 7th is my favorite of his symphonies, and the fact that it's often called "the apotheosis of dance" may be a clue as to why.

In contrast, I could never really get those compositions of John Cage's where he fired a shotgun at a piece of score paper and then declared the holes notes to make a piece of piano music. (Though I do enjoy an occasional burning piano.) And while I have a soft spot for Cabaret Voltaire's The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord, I don't tune my radio off-station and listen to the white noise.

The sky is not falling, but I believe we are leaving the period of grand (and mostly failed) experimentation that was 20th century music. The future looks a lot like the past, but that's not because of some sort of postmodern exhaustion; it's because the rhythm of a drum is as appealing now as it was thirty thousand years ago--and always will be.

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