>> From the Library of Congress in Washington D.C ^M00:00:04 ^M00:00:27 >> Nicholas A. Brown: We're very pleased to have you this evening for a special talk which is well time for Valentine's Day this weekend and if you're skeptical about Valentine's Day, that's fine too, it's going to provide a very simulating intellectual experience to learn about the history of something that we've often put into a kitsch category. So we're very pleased to have with us today Musician and Scholar, Ted Gioia. Ted has published nine nonfiction books related to various topics in music and he's most known for his writing on jazz. His recently released book is called "Love songs, the Hidden History," published by Oxford University Press, the Dallas Morning News puts forth that Ted is one of the Outstanding Music Historians in America which is a very bold and fitting statement for his work. He has served on the faculty of Stanford University and written for many publications both digital and print including the New York Times, L.A. Times, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic and he's currently a columnist for The Daily Beast. His major work that has sold over a hundred thousand copies is called The History of Jazz and it is one of the foremost, if not the foremost survey of jazz that exist in print. Luckily enough this evening, Ted is going to sign some books for us all if we're interested. We have for sale over there Love Songs and the History of Jazz, History of Jazz is available for $18 discounted and Love Songs is available for $27. Ted has a wonderful and varied background as you can see in his extensive Bio. He's also accomplished as a performer and has several recordings and he also has a new book coming out soon called "How to listen to Jazz" which will be released this Spring, without further ado, Ted Gioia ^M00:02:11 [ Applause ] ^M00:02:19 >> Ted Gioia: Good evening, thank you for coming out on such a chilly night, as Nick said, I've done many things but my primary vocation is music historian. And as a music historian, my responsibility is to ask the big questions on music. So I'd like to start tonight by asking what I think might be the biggest of all. And it's a simple one. Can music change your life? Can songs change your life? Or let me raise it to a slightly higher level. Could music change the life of the community? Or let me raise it to a still higher level, could music change the life of a whole society? And if I put this question in the biggest, broadest terms, it's can music change the course of history? Now I think that's an important question, but it's not a question we're familiar with. We rarely hear people ask this kind of question, even music scholars. And I think there's a reason for that. In our society we tend to view music as mere entertainment. It's a diversion, it's a past time. It's something we do when we want to escape from life. We don't look at music to change our life. We more often look at music to get away from life. It's something we do after the responsibilities of the days are done. But if you push that view to an extreme, you get to some strange endpoints. For example, there's a professor at Harvard Steven Pinker, a very eminent professor and what he says is that the sole purpose of music is to stimulate the brain, brain stimulation. In fact, he calls music auditory cheese cake. That's his term, auditory cheese cake. And he says that listening to music is essentially no different than drinking a martini or playing a video game or to cite one of his specific examples choosing recreational drugs, recreational drugs. And I think a lot of us are uneasy about that kind of comparison. I think those of us who really care about music, those of us who have devoted our lifetime to music we're uneasy with the idea that there's no essential difference between a Beethoven Symphony and say a line of cocaine or LSV, and we just-- something about that doesn't feel right. And I disagree with Steven Pinker on this but I do believe he has captured the zeitgeist. I believe he has captured the way music is perceived nowadays in most cultures. Music is not something of transcendent importance, it's just entertainment, it's just diversion. But as soon as you walk away from contemporary culture, and you take a bigger view, if you take a larger view of music, you'll see something very different. You find a very different attitude towards music. I would like to quote an individual named James Chalmers [assumed spelling], he was a missionary that many years ago lived in New Guinea. And while he was there, he was trying to document the local culture. And he was talking to one of the musical performers, a drummer of the Motu tribe, asking about the music. And the drummer said something to him I like. He said, "The drums are never beaten uselessly. The drums are always played with a purpose. No dance is ever danced uselessly. Every dance has its purpose". Now this is a very different view from the auditory cheese cake view, no? And if you look at other traditional cultures, traditional societies, you see the same thing, no matter where you are, whether you walk to South America, Asia, Africa. You take for example Native American culture. I often turn to the works of three female ethnomusicologist, who wrote extensively about Native American music, Natalie Curtis, Alice Fletcher and a woman who is a particular hero of mine, Frances Densmore who devoted decades of her life to documenting Native American music. And at home, I've got a whole shelf of her books. And it's sad to say every one of these books is out of print. Every one of these books is out of print, just sad. But she went over period of years from community to community documenting songs that she saw were disappearing. And she wanted to document them before they disappear. And over the course of her life, she probably documented thousands of songs. And every one of them had its purpose. Some of these songs helped the crops grow. Some of the songs prepared warriors to go into battle. Some of the songs were involved in healing. Some of the songs preserved tribal war, or used to educate the next generation. Some of the songs were involved in courtship and marriage. But every song had its purpose. Every song had its meaning. And if you look at other traditional cultures in music in most times and places, you see the same thing. You see exactly the same thing. And I know that most of us nowadays, we feel that we're too sophisticated for this, we're too sophisticated to believe that music heals the sick or that music helps the crops grow. But speaking on the basis of a person who has looked at these issues for almost 25 years, I can tell you, you might be surprised at the scientific evidence. You might be surprised. You know, a couple of years ago, my son was is in 8th grade and he had to do a science project. And I don't know about what it's like here but where I am, science projects usually involve the parents, the parents are the ones that are doing a lot of these science projects. So I said to him, why don't you see if music helps a plant grow? So we set up two plants. We had plant A, plant B and one the plants got music. I think it was Glenn Gould playing the Goldberg Variations. The other plant got no music. And surprise, surprise, the plant that got music grew more. But it's not really surprising because there's been a huge amount of scientific evidence that has studied exactly this. Plants like music. They actually have musical preferences. Sometimes they will lean towards certain music or they'll lean, like heavy metal music, they will lean away against you know, but some songs they will lean towards. And if you move the speakers, the plant will change the direction it grows. So maybe, music does help the plants grow or does music heal the sick? I know we think we're above those superstations but once again, you might be surprised at the evidence, for example Dr. Barry Bittman did a study a few years ago and he found that just playing the drums in a drumming circle for 10 minutes changes your body chemistry, your immune system strengthened, the white blood cell count goes up, the body chemistry changes completely, just playing the drums for 10 minutes. Now, I'd like to say that music is technology for cultures that don't have semi-conductors and rocketships. Music is the first technology. And if I had time, I could give you hundreds of examples of music as technology, solving problems for cultures. ^M00:10:00 And even if we go back to the heart of Western Culture, if we go back to the origins of western culture, we see the same thing. Now let's go back to Aristotle, you can't get much more old school than Aristotle. Aristotle wrote a book called "The Politics". This is one of the two foundational books in political science. If you study ancient political science, you'll read "Plato's Republic" and Aristotle's "Politics". And in Aristotle's "Politics", he talks at length about music. Now that's surprising to begin with, isn't it? That in a book in politics, Aristotle will write about music. And you wouldn't see that nowadays. You wouldn't tune into these candidate debates, these interminable candidate debates. And hear them talking about music. You wouldn't tune in to CNN on election night and hear them talking about songs. But Aristotle thought that politics and music went together. And for a very good reason, he thought that music was one of the four planks of a good education to prepare people to participate in society. They were verbal skills in rhetoric, gymnastics and athletics, visual arts and music. Aristotle thought those were the four planks of education. And he writes at the link why music is so important. And it gives us reasons. So I think these are important to consider. He says first of all, that music instills virtue in people, he says music built our character. He says music makes work less toilsome with the worker. Music uplifts our spirits. He goes on and on and then at the very end, at the very end of his list, he says and yes it is entertaining. But this is at the end so you can see for Aristotle, this is almost the least important thing, the entertainment value. All these other things are more important. And if I had to describe my vocation as a music historian, I would say I have tried to take Aristotle seriously because I think in society today, we have flip-flopped Aristotle. All these other things we've forgotten about. We know that music is entertaining and there's a whole entertainment industry, multibillion-dollar entertainment industry that controls how we think about music. But it misses all these other factors. It misses them. Even the word Aristotle uses sounds strange to us now. When is the last time you're in a conversation with somebody and you used the word virtue. When is the last time you were in a conversation with somebody that uses the word character? Those words have disappeared from our discourse. But that's a-- that's a different talk. That's a subject for a different day, I'll just talk about music now. So I've tried to take Aristotle seriously and I've tried to focus on the way music has these ardor power, these transcending powers, because I believe music is a source of enchantment in our life. I believe music is a source of transformation. I believe music is a change agent. It changes things. And I can still remember when I first got this notion. I can still remember when I first got this notion. This was sort of a turning point for me as a music writer. And this happened many years ago. And it was due to a person who really changed my mind about music. It was a person I never met, a person I never met. His name Arthur Danto [assumed spelling]. And Arthur Danto was an interesting fellow. He had two careers, two separate careers. On the one hand, he was a philosopher, a very good philosopher. He taught philosophy at Columbia University. He was one of the great philosophers of this generation. But in his 60's, he embarked on a new career. He decided he wanted to be an art critic. So at the age of 63, Arthur Danto, a famous philosopher, started writing about painting sculpture. He visit art galleries, he'd write an art for the Nation and other periodicals. So very and he's a very good art critics then. And when he wrote about art, it was with a sophistication and a depth of understanding you rarely encounter in critics. And I think it's because he had this large amount of philosophical thinking in his head. And he wrote an essay at the end of the 1980s. So we're just going back some time here. That really shook me out. The essay was about the end of the history of art. And Danto was saying the history of art was coming to an end, which is a strange thing to say. And I'm reading this now, what does he mean that the history of art is coming to an end? Is he saying that people aren't going to paint pictures anymore? No, he's not saying that. Is he saying that all the good paintings have already been painted, that there are no more good paintings to paint? No, he's not saying that either. What he is saying is that art as a historical progression, is going away. We have this notion in our minds that art progresses almost like a science. If you look at the words we used when we talked about art, some art is avant garde, it's ahead of everything else. Some art is progressive. We have this idea on our head that art progress like a science. This idea has been around roughly 500 years. If you go back before that, people didn't believe art progresses. If you go into the medieval times, and you ask an expert about art, and there were not many experts on art but maybe some monk doing some illuminated manuscript or whatever. They would say art is not progressing. Art was better back in the old times. We're trying to preserve what happened in Ancient Rome and Ancient Greece. There was no idea that art progressed. But in the Renaissance, things started to change. And the person who changed our view on art is a fellow named Giorgio Vasari who was an art historian. He was writing about Renaissance art and he saw that things now were progressing, and he isolated on a painter named Cimabue, who we thought was the person who really broke away from the constrains of medieval art and started making painting more realistic. And then the next generation came, there was a painter name Giotto and Giotto took what Cimabue have done and added new techniques and passed these onto Posteres [assumed spelling], and then you get Massaggio [assumed spelling] who brings in new elements of perspective, new mathematical findings. And you see arts is progressing, and then Leonardo da Vinci comes with a golden triangle and step by step, every generation, the art progresses. And the same thing, you could say it was happening in music as well. It's no exaggeration to say that Mozart took what he learned from Haydn and added new techniques, almost like if sciences would have no findings and passed it on to the next generation, and then Beethoven took from Mozart and added to it and Moeller took from Beethoven an added to it. And art, it looked like for about 500 years progressed, but what Danto said is this all stopped in the 1950s and 1960s. Art stopped progressing. He was looking at Andy Warhol and you see Warhol was painting pictures of Campbell's Soup cans. So you can't say this is progressing over Jackson Pollock, you know Jackson Pollock a few years earlier was doing abstract expression. He was actually taking cans of paint and throwing it on canvasses. Well you can't say the soup can is progressing from that. You can't say that Jackson Pollock is progressing from Salvador Dali's surrealism. I mean, art is changing but it's changing the way the weather changes. There's no more progress in art. And the same thing is true in music he would claim. You can't say John Cage is building on the foundations if you're in Copeland. You can't say that Philip Glass is building on the foundations of John Cage. And so what Danto said is the history of art as a progression, stopped in the 1950s and 1960s. There's no more progress in art. It might fluctuate the way fashions out of Paris fluctuate. But there's no more progress. And then Danto said the thing that shook me up. He said, "What do you do now if you're an artist?" If you're an artist nowadays, what do you do? He said well art has to go back to what has always been its primary purpose. Art has to go back to what has always been its primary purpose. You're wondering what is, what is this? What has always-- What is art? He says, art has to go back to fulfilling human needs. Art has to meet human needs. Now I'm reading this back in 1989. I was a much younger man then. And I really have no idea what he is talking about. You know, I'm trying to learn to be a jazz pianist then, so I'm practicing how to play "I Got Rhythm" changes on all 12 keys. Now what human needs, am I needing doing that? I turn on the radio and there's a Beatles song, you know what, human needs being met. And I thought that Arthur Danto was a smart guy but I have no clue what he is talking about here. But you know over the next few years, as I researched music more deeply, as I researched the history of music more deeply, I understood that Danto in fact was correct, that Danto was right that in most times and places, musicians are not trying to be scientist, they're not trying to create progress. They're integrated in the life of their community. They are meeting human beings on a daily basis. ^M00:20:04 And then I began asking myself this question. What would the history of music look like if we wrote it from the perspective of human needs? What will the history of music look like if we wrote it from the perspective of everyday, people and how music entered their life and changes their life, you could just-- most music history just focuses on Superstars. Most music history is just about somebody who wrote a work of music for the king. I was hired by the Pope to write a work or it's about somebody who plays at Carnegie Hall, or maybe it's about a rock band that plays on a foot ball stadium in front of a hundred thousand screaming fans, but that's just a tiny slice of our musical lives. That's just a tiny slice of our musical lives. You know, if we write music history from that perspective, we miss most of what music is all about. And so I've started saying could I write music history in a different way that captures what really happens in people's lives? And so I can see the first glimmerings of this, I can see my own journal started in 1991, it was 25 years ago. I began studying and researching how music changed the lives of people in different societies, different historical periods. And it was difficult, it was complex. I was immersing myself into all sorts of research that normally musical historians don't look at from ancient history, anthropology, folklore, mythology, et cetera, et cetera. And gradually I began putting together specific studies, isolating specific strands of our musical lives. And this first came to fruition 10 years ago, I published two books on the same day. And also that is something I will never do again, try to publish two books on the same day. That is just too hard. But one was called work songs. It was the history of music as it relates to human labor throughout history. Then I wrote a second book called "Healing Songs" about the role of music in wellness and health. Once again throughout all of human history starting from pre-historic times to present day. And I published these and at that point I said to finish this project, I have to go after the biggest subject of them all, which is the love song. The love song, because if you take seriously the notion that music can change people's lives, you really have to look at the love song. You know at the very beginning of my talk, I asked you, can a song change your mind? And I bet a lot of you thought about love songs. I bet a lot of you thought about love songs because that's a song that has changed many people's lives. You know, my younger brother is a DJ. Actually he said many careers that he's pursued over the years, we have one thing in common, anything he does for job involves going to a party. So he's been like a bartender. He was a rapper. He would run casino nights, but for the most part, he was a DJ and he would play music at gatherings. And he would tell me when you provide music at a wedding reception, the most important thing is to go to the couple and say "What is your Song?" What is your song because every couple has a song. It's some song that brought them together and if you are going to be providing music at their wedding reception, where I went they never have live bands anymore, I don't know why no one hires live bands anymore, what's going on? And I got a teenaged son in high school. He has never been to a dance that had a live band performing, it's always a DJ playing. Well anyway, if you provide music at a wedding reception, you've got to play the couple's song. The song brought them together, and I think many of us have songs like that too, that brought us together. That I'll go further. I will say that many of us would not be here today if our parents have not heard at a certain point in time the right song that created the right mood. You know, I was saying music was technology for people who didn't have semi-conductors. Well before they had those little blue pills, and you needed to create the right mood, what did you rely on? It was music. It was music, and there's a lot of evidence to back this. You know, I just read this morning, just this morning I read a new study that showed that when people listen to music together, the hormone oxytocin is released in their brain and it creates a sense of trust and bonding between the two of them. So the idea that the love song brings people together, this is not just a wild idea, this is body chemistry. Once again, music is a technology. It makes things happen. So I decided I would write the history of love songs. And one of the first things I found that surprised me is that no one had written a book on the history of the love song. There was not a single book on the history of the love song. There were books about specific kinds of love songs, like troubadour songs or disco songs or whatever, but there was no book to cover the full servile, now this surprise me because the most popular kind of song for the last thousand years is been a love song, for a thousand years the love song has been the most popular kind of song and there's no book about it, and I found that there were reasons. First of all, it's a very difficult subject to encompass. That's why it took me so many years to write the book, in such a difficult subject because to tell the history of the love song you need to understand the history of marriage, courtship, romance, sexuality, you need to understand there were legal issues involved in these things. There was censorship, there were prohibitions. It's a very complex subject. But there was another reason why scholars do not write about love songs. It's a simple one. They are embarrassed by these songs. They are ashamed of these songs. When I would tell people, what I was writing about, I'd get an interesting response. You know, I mean, the other people that are music writers and there's some in the audience today. And they would call out to me Ted, what's your next book going to be about? And I would say, "I'm writing a book about love songs", and they would give me this look. And they wouldn't say anything but you could tell what they were thinking. That's a wimpy thing to write about. You're going to write about those sappy love songs. They would have more respect for me if I was writing about heavy metal, the 12 tone row, but love songs? Yet I know that if you saw their albums, if you saw their playlist, it's full of love songs, just like all of our play lists are filled with love songs. I know these love songs. You know these love songs. We all know these love songs. We all know the words, 200 of love songs. Don't we? And when we're in the car alone and no one can see us and it's on the radio, we will leave and sing along, just look in your rearview mirror, you can see people [inaudible] love songs. But were ashamed of them. It's interesting there's a music critic I like named Dave Hickey and he said something. He said 90% of music is about love but music critics want to write about the other10%. Ninety percent of the music out there is about love but music critics want to write about the other 10%. And I think that's true. Where did we get this shame? Now Darwin would have told us, there's nothing to be embarrassed here. Darwin thought that all music was a love song. He thought the sole purpose of music was courtship. If you read his book "The Descent of Man", he spends a lot of time talking about music. And he believes music is part of sexual selection, brings couples together. It's the sole biological evolutionary purpose of music in Darwin's mind. But you know, when I first read Darwin about this, I was unconvinced because if you read it, all he talks about is bird songs. That he spends more time writing about bird music than human music. And he doesn't even mention gorillas, chimps, monkeys, you know this hierarchy, all our closer relatives. He just skips them completely. And for a good reason because they don't have love songs. There are no gorilla love songs or something like that. There's a guy, Leonard Williams, a musician, he's father of the classical guitars, John Williams, not the film composer, not the Star Wars, not that John Williams but it was a classical guitarist John Williams. His dad Leonard Williams was a great musician and also lived with monkeys for many years, was an expert on monkeys. And he had the privilege of being able to hear monkeys on a regular basis fornicating. I perhaps should say he had a dubious privilege of hearing monkeys fornicating on a daily basis. And he said "they do not sing', there is no singing in monkey courtship. They might grumble or growl or roar or murmur but there is no singing. So I was very skeptical of Darwin. I was very skeptical with Darwin because I thought his reasoning didn't hold up. But you know in the last five, ten years, a lot of new evidences come out to support Darwin. And it's all about body chemistry, you know this study I just talked about the other-- at the beginning of my talk about the oxytocin release, you know, the hormones. We now know involved in sexual behavior and courtship are the same ones correlated with musical receptivity and musical talent. There's a growing body of evidences I write about in my book. I'm not going to go at length here but there's a growing body of evidences that to some extent, survival of the fittest is survival of the most musical. ^M00:30:05 So, I have come to accept that Darwin is right. I have come to accept that. But you know, I should've figured that out long ago. I should've figured out long ago that music was linked to sexual behavior. All you need to do is read the biographies of these rock musicians. You know, you read about Mick Jagger who had had what, 3000 sexual partners and Gene Simmons actually keeps a list, the singer of "Kiss". Who knows what he looks like behind that kind of make up but he's actually kept a list of the 5800 and whatever women that he slept with, whatever. So I should've figured this out long ago that there is some connection here. And there have been studies now to document this. This is an interesting study. This was done a few years ago. They had a guy go up to random women on the street in France and ask them for their phone number. He would ask them for their phone number. You look so lovely, which I don't do a good a French accent but would you give me your phone number? What he found was that 14% of the women would give a total stranger who approached them on the street a phone number. The next day, the same guy went to the same neighborhood, same question only now he's carrying a guitar case. Do you think that shames the results? >> Yes. >> Day one, 14%. Day two, 31%. ^M00:31:26 [ Laughter ] ^M00:31:28 I see some guy writing down back. This is useful information. You're glad you came out on a cold night to learn this. Here's the best part of this day. The third day they tested the same guy, same neighborhood, only this time he's carrying an athletic bag like he just worked out. Only 9% of the women gave him their phone number. So guys, if you think by working out, you'd become more attractive to women, forget it. Don't go to the gym, learn to play the guitar or actually just buy a guitar. Just hold the case, you don't even need to learn. There was another study done, a very similar one based on Facebook friend request. And in this study, a guy sent a woman who was a complete stranger a Facebook friend request. And what he found was that 9% of women would accept a Facebook friend request from a total stranger. But when the picture of him in his profile show him playing guitar, it went up to 28%. So once again, Darwin was probably right. There is some connection between music and sexual selection that we only, did we understand. We only do we understand now. But we're ashamed of it. Where do we get this shame? I think the shame came from the Romans. I think our embarrassment about long songs came from the ancient Romans. You know, C. S. Lewis wrote a book in the 1930s. Now, you probably know who C. S. Lewis from his Narnia stories which have been made into these blockbuster movies. We may know his writings on religion but C.S. Lewis was also a great scholar, taught at Oxford who was an expert in medieval literature. He wrote a book in the 30s called the "Allegory of Love". And in this book, he makes an amazing caima [phonetic]. He says, there was no romance in ancient times. He said, the Romans did not know about romantic love. That's extraordinary because the word romance come from the word Roman. So, if the Romans didn't know about romance, who did? But C.S. Lewis know the romantic love was not discovered until the troubadours did and it rounded up in the century. There was no romantic love in the world before that. And then he goes on to make other strange claims. He says even today, now you got to realize he's talking in 1936. He said even today, there is no romance in India, Japan, he lists these countries where according to him there's no romance. So these are extraordinary things to say. They're extraordinary things to say and I disagree with much of what C.S. Lewis says here, but there's a grain of truth. There's a grain of truth if you sift through the evidence. I've spent a lot of time studying ancient musical practices and ancient culture and I can tell you, the Romans did know about romantic love. They did know about it but they hated it. They feared it. They felt that falling in love was like an illness. They felt that falling in love was like insanity. No sane person would want to have that helpless feeling of falling in love. The Romans like to conquer and when you fall in love, you are conquered. Now they understood that were benefits to having a good marriage, particularly marrying into a powerful family. They understood the benefits of sexual union. They understood the advantages of having a soulmate and people that would be your partners for life. But this idea of falling in love, they feared, particularly for men. It was unmanly. You can read what Cicero and Seneca, and people talked about love. And they talked about love songs too. They were worried about these love songs. And the lover in these love songs is often held up as a figure of ridicule. Most of the love songs that have survived from ancient Rome come from the Roman comedies and the lover in these comedies is someone you will laugh at. Falling in love was shameful and I believe we even inherited that to some extent. And even when you get into the era of Christianity, it doesn't get any better for the love song. For the first 1000 years of Christianity, the church tried to eradicate the love song. The church tried to eradicate the love song. And the best way of proving this is like you go to Scotland and say show me love songs in Europe in the vernacular languages, not in Latin and Greek but the language of the common people in France, Italy, Spain, England. Show me the love songs in the vernacular language from the first 1000 years of Christianity. And they will not be able to find one. You can't find one that has survived in its entirety. Well we'll get a few lines. You know, someone will be doing an illuminated manuscript and they'll be writing the epistle of Paul and the book of revelation. And in the margin, you'll find a few lines of a dirty love song. I mean, you'll never get the whole song. You just get a couple of lines. So do we surmise that there were no love songs among the common people of Europe? It was the opposite. The experts on this believed there were tens of thousands of loves songs. They just haven't survived. How do we know they existed? The best evidence is from the-- how frequently the church attacked and criticized them? Priests were always giving sermons attacking love songs and usually they were singing-- singling out women. And so, we got to stop these women from singing these love songs. And church councils would issues proclamations, women have to stop singing love songs, nothing more dangerous than these love songs. In third century, the pope prohibited these love songs. In the eight century, Charlemagne passed a law making these love songs illegal even as late as Abelard, and when the late medieval stage then he was the most famous theologian to this date but he also sang these love songs. We are told that everybody knew his love songs and could sing them but not one of them had survived. So the church tried to get rid of all of these love songs. In fact, are these books, these are fascinating books. They're called penitentials. The penitential was a guide to a priest hearing confessions. So if someone came to you with a confession and said, "Father, I stole my neighbor's chicken" or I lusted after my neighbor's wife. The penitential would tell the priest what the pennant should be. OK. If you say, five "Our fathers" three "Hail Mary's" you're OK. And these penitentials are our best source of information. Actually, about the sex lives of people in medieval times, this is a side note. What sexual sin do you think is mentioned most frequently in these books? Sex with animals. That is the most frequently mentioned sex. It was [inaudible] but anyway, three of these penitentials mentioned love songs and say that singing love song is a sin that cannot be forgiven. It cannot be forgiven. Using that love song, you're going to burn in hellfire. Now, you go up with that sheep and the goat, we can handle that but you can't sing these love songs. It's extraordinary. So you get an idea for 1000 years, the church tried to eradicate the love song. But finally, the love song came out into the open. Came out into the open with the troubadours and why is that? It's because now, the king was singing love songs. The nobility was singing love songs. You know, the inventor of the troubadour love song we're told was a duke. So what do you do when the duke starts singing love song? So the church lost this battle. The love songs come out into the open and the nobility in the south of France is given credit for inventing the western love song but did they really? Did they really? What about all these women that were chastised by the church for 1000 years or even more interestingly, there's a whole chapter of this that's never been written before. And I got a whole stack of books at home when the troubadours, none of them mentioned the female slave singers in the Muslim world. Who 100, 200 years before the troubadours were singing love songs almost identical to the ones that were supposedly invented in the south of France in the 11th century. In the Muslim world, female slave singers would sing about love. The epicenter was Baghdad. These songs spread through North Africa and then after the Muslim conquest to Spain, they came into Spain. And then, finally just a few miles away in the south of France, the nobles start signing almost the exact same songs that these female slave singers in the Muslim world were doing. ^M00:40:06 And historians have not picked up on this. They've ignored this. They give the credit to the nobles but they forget this whole hidden history of the love song. And all of a sudden, when you see these things start making sense, the king is singing love songs, the nobility is singing love song and they're talking about being a slave to love. Well how can the king be a slave? But it starts to make sense when you realize that the people they took these songs from were actually slaves, were actually slaves. You would be surprised how much of the history of the love song was created by slaves. You go back to ancient Rome, you remember I talked about these Roman comedies, that music was all played by slaves. The music was written by slaves. Often, they would have performances and the slave would get on stage and sing the song. Because it was not respectable for a Roman citizen to sing. You remember that story about Nero fiddling while Rome burned? You know what a scandal it was? The scandal wasn't that Rome burned, because you can't stop a fire, the scandal was that the emperor was playing music. It was scandalous. So the innovations and love songs in ancient times came from slaves. The innovations in the middle ages came from slaves in the underclass. Now what about more recent times? What about more recent times? What about United States? I'll ask you a question, what was the most popular love song in America in 1850? By far, the most popular love song in America in 1850 was "Oh Susanna". [Singing] Oh Susanna, oh don't you cry for me. Because I come from Alabama with the banjo on my knee. That's right, written by Stephen Foster. White guy from the north. But he was imitating the slave songs of the south, and those slaves didn't have access to music publishers and copyright, but Stephen Foster did. And this was a great innovation in the love song. Came out of the slave community then fast forward to later times. And I would say the most important innovations in the love songs in the 20th century came from the descendants of slaves. In the year 1900, if you had gone experts on music, people who really knew music in the year 1900 and ask them what is going to be the future of popular music in the 20th century? Predict the future of popular music in the 20 century, what would they have said? What they would've said is the exciting popular music in 1900 is all coming from Europe. You got to go to the cabarets in Berlin, the cabarets in Paris. The music halls of London, people are saying these sexy songs and controversial songs and they're filled with satire and humor and they're daring. They're bold, they're gay. Meanwhile in the United States, the hit songs in 1900 were boring. You know, I've studied the love songs of 19th century America and no one ever kisses in those songs. No one ever hugs. It's just I feel a great sentiment for you my darling. I mean, they're the most boring songs you can imagine. There was all this exciting stuff happening in the Paris cabarets and anyone who was smart in the year 1900 would saying Europe is the future of popular music, but they would've been wrong. And why would they have been wrong? Because they didn't understand the contributions that would be made by the descendants of slaves by the African-American community in the 20th century. With jazz and the blues, all these new ways of singing about love birds that no one had seen before, and it was even more exciting that what was happening in France and Berlin and all those other places. And so the United States dominated popular music in the 20th century as we all know. And it was because the innovations in love songs again came from the underclass. What about more recently, in our own lifetimes, where have the innovations in love songs come from? The ruling class or the underclass? What about rock and roll? Let's talk about Elvis from the poorest state in the union. From Elvis Presley, he learned his music from the blues singers in Mississippi. What about the British innovation? The Beatles, the British innovation? The British innovation come from Buckingham palace. He was in the docks in Liverpool. Once again, it was the poor, the underclass, the outsider. What has been the most shocking change in love songs in the last 30 or 40 years? Got to be hip-hop, don't you think? That come from the ruling class? It's a pretty easy question to answer. This is the hidden history of the love song. This is the hidden history of the love song. Eventually, all this music is accepted by the upper class. Eventually all of this was controlled by the White House. Eventually rock and roll was mainstream, eventually hip-hop will be mainstream as well. But when the new innovations in love songs come out, they always come from the Bohemian, from slave, from the underclass, from the outsider. And I think as we peer to the future, we should expect the same. There will be more innovations in love songs in the future. It will continue to change. There will be new ways of singing about love. There will be revolutionary new ways of singing about love. And they will come from the place we least expected. It will come from the outsider, from the bohemian from the underclass. The songs will come and they will change our lives. Thank you very much, I'll now answer questions. ^M00:45:27 [ Applause ] ^M00:45:34 Anybody have a question? So microphone will be going around if you have a question. ^M00:45:39 ^M00:45:46 >> I'm just wondering if you could just give a very general definition of what you mean by love song? >> Ted Gioia: This is a very, again, it's a very complicated question. Let me give you an example. The oldest love songs in my opinion come from ancient Mesopotamia. And they were involved in these fertility rights. And there was this thing called the sacred marriage ritual. And the sacred marriage ritual every year, the king had to have sex with the Goddess so the crops would grow. The crops would grow, the kingdom would be prosperous. Now, this is difficult, you know, guys know how difficult it is to get a date on a Saturday night, but how do you get a date with the Goddess. You know, and this is not easy. So the high priestess had to step in and perform this ritual with the king and the scholars debate endlessly whether they-- do they actually have sex and this is the debate. They go off to the temple, the king and the high priestess and the sacred marriage ritual takes place and then the crops grow. And now these songs, their songs that are associated with the sacred marriage ritual which I call the first love songs, but a lot of people read these songs and say this isn't about love, it's just about sex. You can't call that a love song, it's just a sex song. But I will point out, people say the same things today about Miley Cyrus, Madonna, you know, Beyonce, whatever. So I'm going to-- in many ways, we just come full circle. We're back to ancient Mesopotamia. My view was I define the love song broadly. Songs that bring people together in various romantic ways and some ways, sometimes just sexual ways, it's very hard to distinguish the difference between a love and sex in a song, but it's hard in life, isn't it? I mean now, we've all had relationship with [inaudible]. Now what kind of relationship am I actually in, you know? So, you know. So I didn't try to, you know, slice hairs in half. I took a broad view and anything that brings people together, even if it's an ancient king and a high priestess in a sacred marriage ritual, I call it a love song. Yes? >> What is it about-- >> Ted Gioia: You know, speak to the microphone, here. >> What is it about music that is so evocative? I mean it's not just love songs. I mean, you can hear a song from 30 years ago and basically you are and know what you hear. So now it's serious [inaudible] and you can see that yes, it was in 1967. And it's not necessarily positive, you know, it might be something from a sad event. But I think there must be something actually between music and memory here, I mean I'm thinking that, so. >> Ted Gioia: No, you're absolutely right. I remember this song I heard on my first date. And it's an awful song. I hate this, but every time we hear on the radio, I know that song on my first date, you know. And so, you know, you're [inaudible] just really think in our memory. And we respond to this music and it is one of the grandest mysteries of physiology. I mean for example, just take something as simple as dancing to a beat. Every society does it. But you know, no animal does it, you cannot teach a dog to dance to the beat. You can't teach a horse, you know, it's just very interesting, for us it's instinctive. Now, neuroscientists are starting to unlock this. And they're finding all sorts of interesting things about brainwaves, body chemistry, parts of the mind that process music. And I think overtime, we will eventually learn more about this. But I do suspect there's going to be something that's always mysterious. But you're right, I do believe we respond in music in a way that is magical. That's one of the reasons why I hate to just think that a music is entertainment. You know, music is magical, it's transformative, it's change agent. It changes our lives. We're not just passive listeners. I'm just going to give you an example. Tia De Nora is a sociologist. She did a study a few years ago about what happens when you bring someone over to your home for a dinner date? You bring in someone over to your home, they've never been in your place before. You've invited them over for dinner. You're thinking romance, what do you do? Well, the first you do is you clean up your place, I know you're all slugs. So the first you're going to do is-- Then the second thing you worry about, what food am I going to cook? You know, for me this is a panic, you know, I have to do take out. It's going to be like Chinese, or pizza, you know. But then the third thing is music. The third thing is music and she documented this talking to people how they choose what music to play when someone is coming over for a dinner date? ^M00:50:39 So it shows you that the-- we're not just passive listeners, we believe in this magic of music. I feel sorry for these people that are really in the hip-hop, and then someone's coming over in, oh I got these-- I'll go about these bulgur lyrics. You know, you got to go, I got to buy a Frank Sinatra album, you know what I, you know. So we, in our hearts we believe in the magic of music. I believe scientists will unlock some of it, but some of it will always be in this strand of beautiful mystery, a beautiful mystery. Any other questions? >> Hi. Yes, I've always thought of the Beatles and much of the British innovation as an outgrowth of the great American songbook, does everyone agree or disagree? >> Ted Gioia: Well yeah, you know, the people at that time thought that the Beatles were such a radical break, but not really. If you go back when the Beatles run the Ed Sullivan Show, the Beatles run the Ed Sullivan Show, and I've actually done a count of the songs, they played 80 % of them were love songs. And it went really-- that outrage just say I want to hold your hand? Was that really such an outrageous thing to say? So you're right, and in many ways, a lot of those songs showed a lot of this craftsmanship that you've [inaudible]. So yeah, it wasn't as big a break as people think. ^M00:51:53 [ Inaudible Remark ] ^M00:51:59 There was some connection, but if you take Glen and McCartney try to figure out what influenced them is a wide range of things. I do think McCartney was listening to a lot of music hall songs in London. Here's a song like when I'm 64, it's almost ready for the music hall stage in London, but I believe, yeah. In fact, when you and I before-- we've got on tonight, we talked about Nat King Cole. There's a case to be made that McCartney song "Yesterday" is a restatement of a Nat King Cole song he heard that was in his dad's record collection when he was a kid. So I mean, the connections there went deeper the most people realize. Yes, any other question? There was someone back there and I'll get to you next. >> The history of the love song and I'm curious, in this country, Western tends to be about, as you took the [inaudible]. And we're not deemed-- I don't know if that's considered blues or if you've been able to track down that style of music or something like that came from. And if you see that in other cultures, you talked about male Americans or things in Europe, possibly Asia and there's a similar country western style of love song. >> Ted Gioia: You know, it's interesting. When I was in my 20s, I got a scholarship that allowed me to go study at Oxford for two years. So I'm an American-- Most of my life, I grew up in South Central L.A. So you bring me to Oxford, it's like culture shock. And I just-- People there-- I would say, why do you do this? This is-- Because we've always done it that way. Well that's not a reason. You can't say and, you know. But what I found, I was amazed how many people in Oxford were listening to country music. How many people, particularly the people that worked in the college that weren't students, but the people that sort of like served at the dining hall or whatever? And there was this message that country music spoke to them in a way that I had not expected. It was very surprising and you find-- if you take some sappy company song like "Achy Breaky Heart". That was like the number hit in Finland, Denmark. I mean, it's amazing how this music travels to places you don't think it would. And I believe there's a reason for this. How do I try-- let me articulate this. And I think it explains a lot of what's happening in music nowadays. I believe that music today and the love song today more than at any point in history is embedded in people's fantasy life. And it expresses not so much the life they have but the life they wish they had. And let me give you another example, there are all of these retro jazz albums now, like Lady Gaga is doing an album on with Tony Bennett and Queen Latifah is doing with [inaudible]. Everyone is doing this retro jazz stuff. And I know people like the old jazz songs. I don't think it's just that. I think they like the romance. They look at this old jazz and they associate it with people getting dressed up and going out on romantic evenings out. And here's something. I've got a son who is in college. And as far as I can tell, his friends in college do not go on dates. The younger generation does not go on dates. Now, how sad is that? Now, it's just interesting. They had a lot of sex as far as I can tell. And that's the exact opposite. When I was in college, you know, that getting the sex part was the hard part to get. But going on a date was easy, you know. It is flip flop now where there are a lot of people out there hungry for romance. A lot of people in the younger generation I believe are hungering for romance. And that's why they go into this country western music or these old jazz songs because the romantic ethos of that music expresses something they want to know like it's hard to find nowadays. That's a controversial view but that's what I believe. He's got a question here, so let's-- and then we'll take two more questions and then wrap up. Yup? >> I read about the history of jazz, what do you think of the future of jazz in terms form and its place in the larger seam of things in the music world. >> Ted Gioia: I've got a book coming out in May called how to listen to jazz. And I focus a lot on that issue. Because I hear people all the time say jazz is dead. I must have seen 20 articles in the media over the last five years, the headline is jazz is dead. And I don't believe that at all, I believe jazz is fine. And now jazz is hurting from an economic standpoint. Because they never put it on TV, they never put it on the radio. It's-- The coverage in all the media has disappeared. And so, it's not surprising to me that jazz musicians are struggling economically because this global mass entertainment industry that dominates everything has marginalized jazz. But, if you actually dig deeply into it and I listen to new jazz everyday. During the course of a typical year, I've listened to around a thousand newly-released albums. This is the first day-- This year I have listened to a new album. Before I got in a plane yesterday, I've listened to four albums during the course of the day. And then most of the albums have been released in the last two or three weeks. So I try to keep my hand on the pulse of music today. There are maybe music critics who listen to more new music than I do, but I haven't met them. I will say, if you dig deeply into the music, there are great things happening. There's actually more good music happening now than ever before, but it is hidden. It is hidden. I will-- Every week, I will hear some great album and almost every instance, it's something that's not going to get any radio [inaudible]. Because it doesn't fit into the format. And someone is not going to get on TV because they don't fit into the format. So I would say there's a lot of great jazz happening. Unfortunately, you have to dig it out because the media is hiding it from you. And I'll have a lot more about that on my next book. OK. This guy knows more about jazz than I do. So I can be-- >> Pull on me. Ted, thank you for our terrific talk and could you share some your thoughts about the role of Jewish-American composers in establishing the body of American love songs? >> Ted Gioia: Well, they had a huge role. They had I mean, because if you look at the people that really pioneered the American love song, it tended to be people like the Gershwin Brothers, George and Ira, Irving Berlin, you just go on and on. Harold Arnold was the-- it was the Jewish songwriters who tapped into the African-American jazz stuff. And I understood that they mixed it in with many of their own musical traditions and there's a huge amount of Jewish music that filtered into popular music or [inaudible] music, but you can hear that filtering in. And it's interesting even, take Cole Porter, he was one of the few songwriters there who wasn't Jewish. And he was having a conversation with someone once and he said, "I'm going to write Jewish songs". That's right, I'm going to write Jewish. That was his idea how to write a love song in America. So it was this extraordinary, but really, it was-- I'm going to go to this whole thing where I say the outsider has more freedom to sing about new ways of love than the inside. If you are a member of the ruling class, you have to be respectable. You're a member of the ruling class, you have to watch everything you do or say. And so the members of the ruling class are never good at tapping into new ways of singing about love. It's always someone on the fringes. So you get these children of Jewish immigrants hanging out with jazz musicians in Harlem, I'm not surprised at all that they came up with innovation. Because they didn't have this-- That's the sense of shame I'm talking about. They had this more-- a greater way to experiment. ^M01:00:05 So yeah, we wouldn't have the modern love song without the Jewish-American promoters. One last question? >> Hi Ted, great discussion. I had-- my question to you was regarding, you'd mentioned about how music, a love music came from slaves and primarily in the Muslim culture and how that kind of affected certain things. But I'm curious in your research, was there any-- did anything come up with regards to African, sort of music and-- because I grew up in Africa and a lot of the love songs when I was coming up, you'd never knew them as love songs. I didn't know what they meant. You know, adults are just singing and you just kind of sing along but you didn't know what-- I thinking about older, you're like, oh, that was what they were talking about. But, in any case, I'm curious to see, to hear from you in your research, was there any, you know, correlation with, you know, Africa and African-American slaves, you know, that kind of cycle? >> Ted Gioia: If you go back in the historical sources, first of all, the great tragedy is this-- the scarcity of historical sources. Because one of the great questions is if you had grown around Africa in the year 100, 1200, 1400 what music would you have heard? And the sources are not good ones, you can read what Herodotus, a Greek said there's a great book by a guy named Mungo Park. He was an African traveler and he went-- was exploring the interior Africa, this would have been 500 years ago, 400 to 500 years ago. And he was sold into slavery in Africa. And was traveling from community to community and eventually, two years later, he got back to the cost to a European settlement in tatters of clothing and with some paperwork he had written, everything he had seen in those two years. And it's called-- Travels with Mungo Park, and this book, he encounters music everywhere and all kinds of music. It's extraordinary. And he's just, wow. And there are other just these little snippets of information, we have for example if you go back in the late medieval period, there's a writing from a Christian source about an African musician who had traveled into Spain and was singing a love song that they found shocking and scandalous. There are paintings from Spain in the late medieval period that will show bands playing and there will be black musicians and white musicians in the painting and the black musician is sort of the center of prominence where the leader of the band would be. So you have these, you have all these little snippets of clues and you'd love to have a bigger picture where the preponderance of evidence suggest that there was an extraordinary musical culture in Africa throughout this whole period, and a lot of it was focused on love. A lot of them was focused on love. And when I say these Muslim slave singers, I have to say these slaves were not Muslims themselves for the more part. These were people from conquest. So a lot of them were from parts of Africa, Ethiopia or whatever, and they were the innovators in the love songs. So even though when I call them Muslim slaves singers, that's misleading, in many ways, a lot of them were Africans who were bringing their own musical traditions together and singing these songs. So that's the history but still that's not been adequately written. It still has not been adequately written, but there's a rich history there to be found. Any other questions? I'm happy to answer afterwards or sign books. Thank you for coming. You've been one [inaudible]. ^M01:03:40 [ Applause ] ^M01:03:42 >> This has been a presentation of the library of congress. Visit us at loc.gov.