Music Really Is the Food of Love

Count Orsino in Twelfth Night was one of the most pompous lovers ever. What did the plucky Viola see in him?

But he knew the importance of music:

If music be the food of love, play on;

Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,

The appetite may sicken, and so die.

There you have the two themes of sex. Music and death.

Being holiday season and all, the London Economist has a long and learned disquisition on the question of music. Is it related to sex or survival, they wonder?

No contest. It’s sex. The research proves it.

One reason for believing this is that musical productivity... seems to match the course of an individual’s reproductive life. In particular, Dr Miller studied jazz musicians. He found that their output rises rapidly after puberty, reaches its peak during young-adulthood, and then declines with age and the demands of parenthood.

Interesting isn’t it, how music has degenerated in the last half century from the romantic ballad into the drumbeat pulse of sex.

Music tracks the sexually active years. But cooking does not.

But uniquely human activities associated with survival—cooking, say—do not show this pattern. People continue to cook at about the same rate from the moment that they have mastered the art until the moment they die or are too decrepit to continue.

The question is: are singers the sexiest people alive, more so even than ath-e-letes? You’d think so. Think Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix. And that goes for the more sedate world of opera, with Maria Callas, Luciano Pavarotti (sexy despite his size), and Plácido Domingo.

The other thing that makes you sexy is dancing ability. That’s why they call Tango “vertical sex.”