I enjoyed this article by Christine Kenneally, linked to today by the indispensable Arts & Letters Daily.

The concluding paragraphs tickled me especially:

No matter how the connection between language and music is parsed, what is apparent is that our sense of music, even our love for it, is as deeply rooted in our biology and in our brains as language is. This is most obvious with babies, says Sandra Trehub at the University of Toronto, who also published a paper in the Nature Neuroscience special issue.

For babies, music and speech are on a continuum. Mothers use musical speech to "regulate infants' emotional states," Trehub says. Regardless of what language they speak, the voice all mothers use with babies is the same: "something between speech and song." This kind of communication "puts the baby in a trance-like state, which may proceed to sleep or extended periods of rapture." So if the babies of the world could understand the latest research on language and music, they probably wouldn't be very surprised. The upshot, says Trehub, is that music may be even more of a necessity than we realize.

That being only the checkmate, so to speak, of a quite extended argument, involving the ways in which animals might appreciate music (the point being that it would have to be their music rather than ours), and much else besides. What I found persuasive was that several times while reading the piece, I found myself asking: but what about …?, only for that exact point to be answered in the next paragraph.

Worth reading all of it, in other words.

Of course, the piece doesn't explain music in its entirety. In particular it doesn't explain how music has changed and developed – and sometimes, I suppose, retreated and regressed – over the centuries. But it does sketch out the biological, species-specific expressive language within the limits of which the human effort to make music has necessarily expressed itself.

In particular, it explains with great finality that music will always be with us.