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Elijah Wald is a good writer. And like most good writers, he knows a good title when he sees one; a good title will grab you and make you eager to open the book and start finding out where that title came from. So when he titled his new book How The Beatles Destroyed Rock’n'Roll, he knew just what he was doing.

Elijah is not bashing the Beatles - at least, not in the way you’d think. Instead, his thesis is that rock’n'roll was a simple, communal form of dance music - like big band jazz and ragtime before it - but that the Beatles turned it into “art,” thereby creating a divorce between a new kind of rock aimed at the head, and produced exclusively in a studio environment, and the good old fashioned party-time rock’n'roll of Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley, which was still driven by live performances (TV included).

If the Beatles really did destroy rock’n'roll, though, they didn’t do a good enought job, because they left the music industry standing, stronger and stupider than ever. And that industry has continued its lifelong distrust of and fight against any new advancements in technology. As Elijah points out, musicians and the evolving music biz were opposed to every step: radio, records, jukeboxes, etc., and that has continued with the industry’s decade-long battle with digital media.

And if the Beatles destroyed rock’n'roll, it appears to have been unintentional. Compare that to their musical stepchildren, Radiohead. Like the Beatles, Radiohead also moved from popular rock hits (”Creep”) to more arty, studio-based stuff (”Idioteque,” among many others). But while the Beatles’ response to the record industry was to form Apple Records, and thus become part of the industry, Radiohead took at least one swing of the sledgehammer at the music business by releasing In Rainbows, their 2007 album released digitally by the band itself at a pay-what-you-wish price. I’m not saying that Radiohead is more important to music history than the Beatles, but they seem more intent on destroying at least a little of the rock machine.

Tell us: Do you believe the Beatles fundamentally changed rock? If so, was that a bad thing?
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I guess you can find someone to argue about virtually anything. On the face of it, who would have any problem with opera houses and orchestras trying to lure in young listeners, or with parents taking their kids to the opera or the concert hall? Worst case scenario, the kids hate it, fidget, whine that they’re bored, and complain bitterly if you ever try to do that again. Best case scenario, you find kids who really respond to great music, beautifully played, and who will be the next generation of classical music players and listeners.

So what’s not to like? Well, forcing a kid to do something can certainly backfire. George H. W. Bush famously said he hated broccoli because his mom made him eat it. (”I’m the President of the United States and I’m not gonna eat any more broccoli,” he said, proving what a big, grown-up boy he was.) And it is certainly possible that pushing reluctant kids towards classical music on the grounds that it’s “good for them” can be the kiss of death for any future plans of Carnegie Hall glory. But it’s exactly that “good for you” stuff that’s the problem - if you turn classical music into the aural equivalent of broccoli, you’ll find your kids growing up to be completely closed to the possibility of ever liking it. (Or maybe becoming an ineffectual President of the United States. The point is, it won’t be pretty.)

On the other hand, recent neuroscience has shown that the brain wires itself to accept and understand music as we grow, using connections required by the music we hear and losing those that are not. If kids grow up without at least some knowledge of what a cello sounds like, or an orchestra, or a soprano, they’ll have no point of reference when they do encounter those things. They may still fall in love with them, but the odds are slimmer - not much better than if they’d heard Mongolian overtone chant or Polynesian drumming.

So the question is, how do you give kids the opportunity to fall in love with classical music without shoving it down their throats? As with all things kid-related, there is, unfortunately, no one answer. Even siblings may have completely different reactions - I tried sending my two daughters to piano lessons; one couldn’t stand it and eventually refused to go; the other sort of liked it, and has picked up a taste for Bartok through playing one of his very simple, beginning pieces. But they’ve both heard orchestral music and bits of operatic-style singing, even if only in the background - a useful way to get kids conditioned to classical music, by the way, because there’s no sense of forcing the issue. Dragging them to a concert might not be the way to do it right now, so I’m willing to do a bit of background stuff, laying the foundation so to speak, and hope they’ll eventually discover the music for themselves.

Tell us: what do you think the best way to introduce kids to the concert hall is?
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“Baby baby don’t get hooked on me/’cause I’ll just use you then I’ll set you free…” Doesn’t exactly sound the right romantic note for a newly-married couple, does it? And yet that was the first dance at a wedding I went to some years ago. I remember wondering, who thought that was a good idea? It was probably the strangest choice for a first dance I’ve ever heard, both because of its inappropriate lyrical imagery and the incontrovertible fact that the song, by any objective measure, sucks.

Yeah, but I guess it meant something to the bride and groom. So that was their first dance (and they’re still married, 20+ years later, so I guess it didn’t jinx anything). With the rise of wedding DJs instead of wedding bands, “Your Song” can now be anything. Wanna do that first dance to a Coldplay song? Or the hot favorite, “At Last” (the Etta James version; Beyonce learned the hard way that Ms James protects her turf)? No problem, just cue up the iPod.

I really wanted a live band - not a wedding band, but a real jazz combo - when my wife and I got married. So we checked out a bunch of bands and settled on the now-deceased tenor sax player Percy France, who had a minor hit in the 50s and had remained an active player on the scene. Like most couples, we had “our song” - but it was “Heroes” by David Bowie, and neither of us felt like its imagery of love during wartime, with guns and walls and being heroes, “just for one day,” really set the mood we were hoping for. Plus what jazz quartet would ever be able to play it? So we decided we wanted something classic, timeless, and settled pretty quickly on Benny Goodman’s “Moonglow.” It suited the band, and both our friends and our older relatives seemed to enjoy it. And there were no lyrics to parse - and thus no one sitting around going “I’ll just use you then I’ll set you free? Who thought that was a good idea?”

Watch the Benny Goodman Quartet play “Moonglow”

Tell us: what unusual wedding songs have you heard, or used? Did they work or not?
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Far from being the Province of the Eggheads, neuroscience has turned into a wild frontier of discovery - and music plays a surprisingly large role in the neuroscientific discussion. Prior to around 1980, the field was still in its infancy. Monty Python, as far back as their Matching Tie And Handkerchief album in the mid 70s, explained that “the human brain is like an enormous fish: it’s fat and slimy, and has gills through which it can see.” Recent advances in neuroscience show that at least parts of that statement are inaccurate, and as our knowledge of the brain increases, so do the questions about music, and how it might come to have its undeniable, demonstrable, but still inexplicable effect on our minds.

A number of neuroscientists have studied how the human brain can decode the “message” in music. We all know what the sliding, dissonant strings mean when the bad guy is stalking the innocent babysitter in the darkened house; we understand the significance of the brass fanfares that peal out joyfully when Rocky, the boxer, finally makes it up that long, long run of stairs. We know these things because there are visual cues that go with them - but we’d get the overall message of menace or triumph even if we weren’t watching the films, because we have cultural “markers” of a sort encoded into the music.

The question is, how much of this are we born with and how much do we learn? I grew up in NY and have never set foot on the Solomon Islands, so I wouldn’t expect to be able to tell whether a piece of music from those islands is expressing happiness, sadness, fear, etc. because I don’t know their cultural markers. And yet, the first time I listened to an album of field recordings made on those islands, without understanding a single word, I could immediately sense a message of contentedness and peacefulness in one of the songs. Sure enough, it was titled “Lullaby.”

This by the way was no great feat on my part. A year or two later, a pair of French producers also heard that track, sampled it, and turned it into one of the first World Music hits: Sweet Lullaby by Deep Forest. The lead vocal is simply this old track from a Solomon Islands recording (uncredited, of course) set to a modern-back-in-1992 dance beat. So without us understanding a word, this simple song from a culture almost literally a world away from our own was able to suggest a mood or an emotion. How that happens is one of the fascinating questions neuroscience is currently grappling with.

Tell us: have you found music from other cultures incomprehensible, or have there been pieces that you “understood” on some level?
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/soundcheck/episodes/2009/06/12/segments/133793.