This book was a birthday present but one that immediately grabbed my interest as it told as the story of an academic who decided to learn to play the guitar after enjoying the Rock Band and Guitar Hero rhythm games. Along the way he does a lot to explain the psychology and neurology of music as well as some basic music theory (although that thread tails off too quickly in my view). There isn't enough discussion of how folk, blues, jazz and pop songs are structured for example or the basic chords structures.
There are pen portraits of various ways children are taught music and comparisons to adult teaching as well as discussions as to why so many musicians are self-taught or at least wait a long time before undergoing formal training. As part of that discussion Gladwell's 10,000 hours theory is discussed with a few simple counter examples that show that famous musicians started getting paid session work at different intervals indicating that something other than time invested is at play. For Marcus talent is the multiplier, all musicians benefit from practice but innate musical ability makes the practice more valuable. Marcus is also careful to differentiate between mastery of formal recital from the practice of creating new popular music. Creation does not seem to be subject to the experience limit in a meaningful way.
One of the interesting themes that runs through the book is the question as to how difficult adult learning is and the extent to which adults can achieve expertise in things like music or language if they start post-adolescence. This is a very optimistic book from that perspective, stating that it is possible for adults to learn very complicated new skills like playing the guitar or learning a new language. However as the learning experience is more difficult motivation, support and structured learning are much more important to adults than children. It also makes the simple observation that children have more time to invest intensely in things, whether they be computer games, instruments or the statistics of sports teams.
There is a lot of interesting stuff about the neuroscience of music, apparently there are no specific areas of the brain identified with music and instead creating and listening to music is one of the general brain activities that requires many parts of the brain. However a lot of music matches and uses the language capabilities of the mind. Things like meter, rhyme and structure are common and there are some interesting examples of how children care about the words of a song than dissonance in the music.
It also ventures an explanation as to why everyone likes the music of their youth, saying that when it comes to music and songs familiarity breeds satisfaction. The more you listen to a song the more you like it. Human memory makes it hard to hold a piece of music completely in the mind, we use an overall impression of a piece of music to store the high-level details and the short term memory only really accurately remembers the latest minute or so of music. So we value harmony in proximity but fail to notice shifts in key or subtle alterations in phrasing. It also means that we are forever discovering new things in music that we like. Subtleties in harmony, rhythm or the lyrics.
The music of our youth really represents the time that we can invest in listening a great deal to music and therefore it is always pleasing to us in future, more so than more recent unfamiliar music.