Singing Praises

From Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain:

"Deutsch and her collegues.... see absolute pitch, what ever its subsequent vicissitudes, as having been crucial to the origins of both speech and music. In his book The Sining Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body, Steven Mithen takes this idea further, suggesting that music and language have a common origin, and that a sort of combined protomusic-cum-protolanguage was characteristic of the Neanderthal mind. This sort of singing language of meanings, without individual words as we understand them, he calls Hmmm (for holistic-mimetic-musical-multimodal)-- and it depended, he speculates, on a conglomeration of isolated skills, including mimetic abilities and absolute pitch....

I was once told of an isolated valley somewhere in the Pacific where all the inhabitants have absolute pitch. I like to imagine that such a place is populated by an ancient tribe that has remained in the state of Mithen's Neanderthals, with a host of exquisite mimetic abilities and communicating in a proto-language as musical as it is lexical. But I suspect that the Valley of Absolute Pitch does not exist, except as a lovely, Edenic metaphor, or perhaps some sort of collective memory of a more musical past." 129-130

I suppose I do not really wish to journey back to the days of Neanderthal man, but to be able to experience absolute pitch and to converse as easily and emotively with music as with language... what a beautiful thing this must be!