Sounds Like Titanic - Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman Page 0,26

enough. By putting a violin under your chin—or even carrying a violin case through the puke-green corridors of your high school—it is as if you’re telling the world that you have authority on something, and in having this authority, you are more complex, more consequential than your young female body suggests.

For the most enraging aspect of life in the body isn’t that you aren’t skinny or sexy enough, it’s that life in the body causes you to be dismissed as silly and shallow and stupid in a way that boys who are equally silly and shallow and stupid are not. Playing classical music on the violin provides a corrective: The violin is serious. Classical music is serious. An understanding of classical music—something adults say they wish they knew more about but don’t—gives a girl weight in a world that wants her to be weightless, gives her substance in a culture that asks her to be insubstantial.

And this, it turns out, is the reeyell gift: It is almost as if, by attaching a violin to your body, you can become a dude.

But Why Is Playing the Violin the Cultural Equivalent of Growing a Penis?

In late 1993, when you are twelve years old and just building the stamina to play full-length violin concertos, researchers at the University of California at Irvine have thirty-six college students do a series of geometric puzzles after ten minutes of listening to Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major. The students’ spatial reasoning IQ scores are eight points higher after listening to Mozart. In the report on this research—a mere three paragraphs published in Nature—the researchers warn that the IQ boost only lasts ten to fifteen minutes and that there is no reason to assume that Mozart’s music, in particular, has special qualities: “Because we used only one musical sample of one composer, various other compositions and musical styles should also be examined.” This caveat will be ignored. “The Mozart Effect” has been born.

The UC Irvine study goes viral in pre-Internet America. The New York Times exclaims: “Mozart Makes the Brain Hum.” Time magazine reports: “Listening to Mozart makes students smarter.” Music teachers across the country brandish the UC Irvine study like a shield, fending off budget slashes. The Mozart study is “scientific evidence” that music class improves standardized test scores. “Beethoven is no longer the world’s greatest composer,” declares Alex Ross in a 1994 New York Times article. “Mozart is the composer who gives you an edge on the SATs.” By 1997, when Don Campbell publishes his popular book The Mozart Effect, the actual results of the UC Irvine study have been left far behind. Campbell compares Mozart to Jesus and claims that listening to Mozart’s music not only increases intelligence but also cures everything from brain hemorrhages to autism to paralysis to cancer. Mozart can make cows produce more milk, reduce traffic accidents, and prevent premature birth. Mozart’s music can even make yeast rise faster, producing better sake at a brewery in Japan.

The Mozart Effect gains traction during the same era in which Tipper Gore wages war on rap music, the same era in which school dances in the whitest enclaves of Appalachia begin to blend Garth Brooks with Snoop Dogg, whose Doggystyle album debuts at number one on the Billboard charts just a few weeks after the Mozart study is published. At your middle school, the boys who hate you grind up against your body to the beat of “Snoop Doggy Doo-oww-ohhhoggg!” The sexual ministrations of inner-city lyricists become the lingua franca of your generation, fluently spoken by every thirteen-year-old kid regardless of race, class, or geographical location. Decades later, these songs will seem so tame that people will play them at wedding receptions, white grandmas shaking it to Biggie Smalls. But in the early 1990s, the Tipper Gore generation maligns rap and hip-hop as cultural poison. The Mozart Effect offers an antidote; it is “proof,” after all, that “good,” IQ-enhancing music is composed by old white men, not by young black ones.

But dozens of subsequent studies fail to replicate even the minor increases in IQ achieved in the original study. Most of these follow-up studies conclude that any music that puts the test taker in a better mood increases his test score. So if it is 1993 and you are a thirteen-year-old looking to increase your IQ, you should probably listen to ten minutes of Doggystyle.

While the actual effect of listening to Mozart while taking a test is minimal at best, the