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"There should be a single Art Exchange in the world, to which the artist would simply send his works and be given in return as much as he needs. As it is, one has to be half a merchant on top of everything else, and how badly one goes about it!" --Ludwig van Beethoven

Sometimes the things that are closest to us, the things we're most intimately involved with, are precisely the things we take for granted. Air pressure, for instance. Unless you're an astronaut or a deep sea diver, you may spend your entire life never noticing, much less contemplating, the fact that every instant your whole body is being subjected to 15 pounds per square inch of air pressure.

Fish probably don't think much about water, either. Specific kinds of water -- turbulent, dirty, too cold -- they undoubtedly think about, at least to the extent that fish can be said to think. But water as such, they surely take for granted. Water is the ground of their being. All of their experience of the world (such as it is) takes place within the context of water.

In the same way, I suspect, musicians tend to take music for granted. They may think a great deal about specific kinds or instances of music -- it's challenging, or too loud, or boring, or badly rehearsed, or an extraordinary, transcendent experience. But music itself? That's water. We swim in it.

What is this peculiar stuff? Once you start thinking about it, it isn't even obvious why there should be such a thing as music. But there it is, all around us every day. You can hardly go into a shopping mall without being assaulted by it.

Flashback: Around 200,000 years ago, give or take 100,000 years, your ancestors and mine -- and the ancestors of everybody else on Earth today -- lived in sub-Saharan Africa. Our ancestors knew how to keep a fire burning, and how to chip simple stone tools (though recent research suggests that the term "tools" may be both less and more than the truth). Over the course of tens of thousands of years, they had very gradually been developing more and more complex forms of spoken language. But as far as we can tell from the archeological evidence, fire and stone tools were pretty much the whole show when it came to the distinctly human activities that later gave rise to what we call civilization.

And then -- rather suddenly, at least in geological terms -- wagons ho! They spread out from Africa across Eurasia. About 40,000 years ago, one group reached Australia. Somewhat later, maybe 20,000 years ago, another group crossed the Bering Strait and entered the Americas.

Actually, I was kidding about the wagons. The wheel hadn't been invented yet. Nor were there any domesticated animals that could have been used to draw wagons. As our ancestors spread out across the world, they developed some very distinct cultures and traditions. But beneath the differences that proliferated lies a surprisingly strong layer of common human traits. We all share them, as an unalterable genetic inheritance from those African tribes. For instance....

A smile is a smile from one end of the world to the other.

All of the peoples in the world today speak and understand complex languages. No other animal has the mental equipment to do it, but you can't stop a human child from learning language, if it's exposed to language during the first five years of life.

We all make and use tools.

Here's another common thread you may never have considered as such: Until the rise of scientific rationalism in Europe a couple of hundred years ago, most people all over the world worshipped invisible entities of one sort or another. Oh, skeptics had deep doubts, even in ancient Rome, but skeptics were always in the minority. The religious impulse is not as strong as the language impulse, but it's just as much a part of our instinctive equipment. (Don't let anybody tell you that humans don't have instincts. We have lots of them, though we're capable of exercising them with more flexibility than most other animals do.)

People of faith may feel convinced that religion is somehow a reflection of some underlying spiritual reality. They may even be right. But as far as I can see, human religions are as utterly distinct from one another as human languages. The only thing religious people have in common, the world over, is the fervent desire to believe that invisible entities take an active role in our lives, dictate moral codes, and so on. At some point in our evolution, the desire or ability to believe in such entities (benevolent or otherwise) must have helped our ancestors propagate their genes more successfully.

But forgive me; I digress. Here's the point I've been meandering toward:

In every part of the world, people make music.

This is utterly astonishing, if you think about it. Music-making is a pretty useless activity, or so it seems. It doesn't put any antelope in the stewpot, that's for sure. Yet, as our ancestors migrated far and wide, they carried with them a powerful urge to make pitched and rhythmic noises. To sing, to clap, to stamp their feet, to blow into reeds and pound on hollow logs.

That's the first mystery: Why we all make, and enjoy, music.

Maybe our ancestors began by celebrating the sheer joy of being alive, of walking around on a living planet. (The planet was alive in those days. Watching a PBS special on African wildlife will give you only the most tenuous impression of the richness of the herds and flocks they walked among.) Or maybe they used singing as a form of mnemonic aid. Songs, with their simple repetitive structure, might have been easier to memorize than speech. They may have sung to one another about which plants were edible, and how to chip a piece of stone so it would stay sharp, and which paths to follow from the winter hunting grounds to the summer hunting grounds.

Maybe they sang when they were afraid, to keep the dark from pressing in around the campfire. Or maybe the songs were spoken legends, at first, and then people started intoning the most exciting bits of the legends, repeating them over and over. "Og speared the antelope, hey-hey! Og speared the antelope, hey-hey! It tasted good, hey-hey! Filled many bellies, hey-hey! It tasted good!"

Why repeat phrases over and over? You say something the first time to impart information. You say it again because it feels good. It felt good to make music. (It still does.)

A mother sings to her baby, and the baby stops crying, calms down, smiles. Mother and child both feel better. The child grows up, and when she hears the sound of singing she's reminded of her mother, of milk and warmth. Grown to a woman, she sings, alone on the path, to feel her mother near (though her mother is now long dead). Her friend is grieving, or frightened, or sick, and she sings to her friend the way their mothers sang to them. Her friend feels better.

Singing is powerful medicine. But why should it be? Where does the power come from?

Birds sing. On a scientific level, we understand pretty well why they do it: They're trying to attract mates. A male bird advertises his fitness (that is, the fitness of his genes) with vigorous song and shining plumage. By choosing a male who is fit, the female bird gives her offspring (that is, her own genes) the best chance of survival. If you're curious, you can read a lot more about the process, as it articulates itself in both humans and animals, in Geoffrey Miller's insightful book The Mating Mind.

While Miller has a lot to say about the evolution of the human brain, he touches on music only very briefly. But it's not hard to extrapolate from his arguments: For our ancestors, the ability of young males to make music -- probably by dancing and singing for hours beside the campfire -- was a dandy fitness indicator. (Can't you just see Mick Jagger prancing around, his chest painted with red and yellow ochre?) If you were too stupid to learn the steps, or too clumsy to execute them, or got tired too quickly, the ladies would find someone else to share their genes with. While dancing, you could chant complex patterns of words with rhythmic accents that had to be memorized and practiced. There were lots of ways to strut your stuff.

We'll never know whether this is the correct explanation for the origins of music. There's a lot to like about it, as a theory. The trouble is, it doesn't do a very good job of explaining why music affects us the way it does. That's the second mystery: What is it about these patterns of tone and rhythm that has the power to make us feel?

Before we can even try to get a handle on that rather dizzying question, we need to take a brief detour, because there's another mystery that comes before the mystery of feeling: How, when complex patterns of sound present themselves at our eardrums, can we possibly decode them? How is it that we're able to experience music in such startling detail, rather than hearing a constant dull roar?

Music is a time-based art. Look at a painting and your eyes can take in the whole of its shape, texture, and color all at once. The process of seeing does take time: In a good painting there's no end of subtleties you can focus on. But you can move back and forth among them at your leisure, lingering over the lines and shadings that speak most deeply to you.

Not so with music. Music flies past you at the dizzying speed of 1,000 feet per second. At a tempo of 100 beats per minute, by the time you get to the end of a single bar of 4/4, the beginning of the bar is literally half a mile away. How can a mere human listener, not aided by a bank of mainframe computers, ever make sense of it?

We make sense of music the way we make sense of the world: in memory. The world presents itself to us one "moment" at a time. I don't know about your moments, but mine are about half a second long. Everything that happens within that half-second frame feels more or less simultaneous. Yes, I can focus -- in memory -- on the events that happened during a single "moment" and tell youwhich ones happened before or after which others. But everything that happens during a moment is experienced, and filed in memory, as an undivided whole. Any events that fall further apart are in the "then" category: This happened, then that happened.

So we file the moments of music in short-term memory, and then we riffle through the memories very quickly, comparing this one to that one. Ah, I recognize this theme; Beethoven used it just a moment ago, and here it is again. The brain has no trouble recalling old moments while taking in new ones. Unlike a computer, which does one thing at a time, the brain processes information in a massively parallel way. And listening to music attentively does tax the processor: There's a lot going on in your head. You're comparing what you're hearing now to what you were hearing a moment ago, and simultaneously making educated guesses about what you're going to hear next.

One of the differences between a musically knowledgeable listener and a musical illiterate is that a trained listener has a better filing and retrieval system for the masses of data packed into those musical moments. Events get categorized almost instantly by melodic shape, tone color, rhythm, loudness, and other criteria -- all at the same time. You can recall the whole gestalt by pulling on a single string attached to any of its parts.

Even so, the musically knowledgeable listener isn't doing anything radically different from what the musical illiterate does; the trained listener is only doing it more efficiently, and with more knowledge in the database. There may be a few folks around who truly are tone-deaf, but they're surely less numerous than atheists. The musical instinct is deeply rooted.

The time-bound nature of music is not the only obstacle to understanding it. Music is also, as it presents itself at the eardrums, a disorganized mess. (Speaking of organization, did it ever occur to you that the largest and most magnificent musical instrument ever invented is called by the same name as the vital parts of your own body? There may be a connection there that goes beyond the vicissitudes of etymology.) The performance of a decent symphony orchestra is a highly organized event: The sounds of seventy or eighty individual instruments weave in and out among one another, yet make a harmonious whole. There's the oboe solo rising above the muted strings and harp glissandi. Now the flute is answering the phrase. And here come the soft timpani taps.

Now sample that audio stream and display it as a waveform in a computer. When two sounds overlap, as far as the computer is concerned they're mush. The computer can't tell them apart, any more than your eye can tell them apart by staring at the waveform on the screen.

Okay, maybe you can see the timpani taps. I'll give you that. And a good FFT analysis may be able to pick out the oboe's overtones. Yet your ear effortlessly -- effortlessly -- separates the soundstream into discrete components that can be hummed, whistled, or written down. Not only can you hear the oboe, you can notice, without even needing to think about it, if it's a little late, or a little flat.

Where did this ability come from?

Geoffrey Miller makes a pretty convincing case that our vast assortment of mental gymnastics is another fitness indicator. Smart is sexy, in other words. (Hey, makes sense to me....) If you're mentally dull, there's a good chance you're poorly nourished, or ill, or have a significant genetic abnormality. Potential mates would be wise to avoid you.

The very first stage in the evolution of mental ability as a fitness indicator -- far antedating the origins of language -- may have been all those stone hand-axes that were so painstakingly chipped into shape. Most of them were never used as axes, you see: Our ancestors chipped them by the millions, and then tossed them aside. The whole point, most likely, was that the males were showing off their ability to chip stone without mashing their fingers. Or possibly, lacking antlers, they were using the axes to club one another. But I like the theory that the axes were objets d'art a lot better.

Singing and dancing were invented much later, but the point of the activity seems to have been much the same. When I call the ability to listen to and understand music a mystery, I don't necessarily mean that its evolutionary origins are a mystery. What I mean is that, like many of the complicated tasks our minds perform, the perception of music just about can't be made conscious. At a conscious level, music is something that happens to us. Call it a mystery, or call it a gift. It isn't just raw sound anymore, battering our eardrums. Music is something that happens in the listener's mind. We're an audience, every moment, for an inner spectacle.

So the brain perceives musical patterns -- and then the real mystery happens: Those patterns have the power to make us feel. What could it possibly be about the arrangement of tones and rhythms that could trigger an emotional response in us?

We can say a few basic things about our responses: Fast, high-pitched music tends to be stimulating (in either a pleasant or an unpleasant way), while slow, low-pitched music is soothing or sad. Technically, pitch is only a type of rhythm that happens too fast for us to count the beats consciously. What we call high pitch is simply a fast rhythm of sound waves. A low pitch is rhythmically slow. So maybe our responses to pitch and rhythm are related.

At bottom, much of our response to music is probably physiological. It's our bodies that respond, as much as our minds. Or at least, the physiological part of the brain is involved. Fast rhythms are active. They remind us of running and leaping. Slow rhythms remind us of stalking, waiting, caressing, lying down. Loud, sudden sounds remind us of hitting, while soft sounds that flow on and on remind us of a river.

Which is all very nice, but what does it say about our response to, say, Beethoven's Third Symphony? Not very much. Measured by our crude kinesthetic yardstick, most pieces of music are incredibly complex, with vectors of activity flying in every direction. Yet we experience the music in clear, concrete ways.

To some extent, our ways of feeling music are probably learned. They're defined by our separate cultures, not universal. When we in the West hear any type of percussion that's not a straight trap set or orchestral percussion of the timpani-and-triangle variety, we tend to think "ethnic." The sound conjures images of jungle or desert. That's certainly a learned response. Conversely, dulcet electronic tones over a simple repeating drum pattern say "home organ," and we think of smiling salesmen in cheap suits. Beethoven's Third says "concert hall," with all the associations of hushed respect and profound seriousness attendant thereto. Play the Third to an Australian aborigine just in from the Outback and (unless he's been to the Sydney Opera House, or looked at pictures of it while listening to the radio) he won't perceive the "meanings" of Serious Culture as part of the music.

So did Beethoven intend those cultural experiences to be part of the meaning of the symphony, or have they attached themselves to the work after the fact? Does it make any difference? On one hand, we could say that separating the cultural baggage from the music helps us hear the latter in a fresher, purer way. On the other hand, Beethoven is dead. We're entitled to feel whatever we like when we listen to his music. If we hear Beethoven's Third played on a home organ with a tinny beatbox beat, we may laugh. Nothing wrong with that. Hearing it sliced and diced in a sampler would probably amaze some listeners and outrage others.

What's going on here? Where do all these musical meanings come from?

We build these awesomely intricate cognitive structures, we humans. Music is as phantasmagorically flimsy as a tower made of toothpicks. But somehow, as much as the tower sways, it never falls. We're continually searching for ways to build ever-higher teetering towers. Not just in music but in painting, poetry, architecture, card games, you name it.

Why do we do it? Too-easy answer: Because it feels good. Okay -- what is it about it that feels good? Where does the feeling-good reside? That's a mystery.

Maybe this continual restless urge to create, to surpass, to discover, to express is no more than the expression of an instinct. Maybe it's all a form of ritualized competition for mates. But if you squint your eyes just a little, the picture changes profoundly. If you squint your eyes, the whole evolutionary engine becomes, if you will, the water that the fish swims in. It fades from view.

Even if music (or, for that matter, religion) is built entirely on an instinctual foundation, you don't live in a foundation: You build a house on it. And music is a castle with thousands of richly appointed rooms. Whatever its origins, in the end it's a celebration of life in a universe that overflows with limitless possibilities.

If you could ask a bird, the bird would probably tell you the same thing.