Klarinet Archive - Posting 000678.txt from 2002/05

From: LeliaLoban@-----.com
Subj: [kl] A Colour Symphony op. 24
Date: Wed, 29 May 2002 18:50:27 -0400

Bill Wright wrote,
>Music is more than just an aural sensation. You do not
>(can not) experience or analyze music with your 'hearing
>hardware' alone. Above all else, I object to
>over-intellectualizing music and to partitioning it from
>everything else that transpires in our nervous systems as we
>listen.

I strongly agree. For me, the idea that music and language are processed in
completely different parts of the brain just doesn't pass the giggle test.
It seems obvious, from examples you cite and many others, that there's
interaction going on. That doesn't make popular opinion correct, of course.
Often what's most obvious is most wrong. Still, scientists have been known
to make mistakes once in a while, too ("The earth is flat," for instance).
The science of the human brain is still young.

Readers interested in synaesthesia and other brain conditions specially
relevant to music might want to take a look at some of the following. This
is not a comprehensive or scholarly bibliography. It's just a list of some
books I own, by writers who disagree with each other in interesting ways.
They're in alphabetical order, but I especially recommend the books by
Cytowic and Sacks.

Alper, Matthew. The "God" Part of the Brain: A Scientific Interpretation of
Human Spirituality and God. New York: Rogue Press, 2001 tpb (5th ed.).

Bateson, Gregory. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. New York: Dutton,
1979.

Cytowic, Richard E. The Man Who Tasted Shapes. New York: Putnam, 1993.

Jamison, Kay Redfield. Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the
Artistic Temperament. New York: Macmillan, 1993.

McClain, Earnest G. The Myth of Invariance: The Origin of the Gods,
Mathematics and Music From the Rg Veda to Plato. York Beach, Maine:
Nicholas-Hays, Inc., 1976 tpb.

Park, David. The Image of Eternity: Roots of Time in the Physical World.
New York: NAL Meridian, 1981. (Orig. Boston, MA: University of Massachusetts
Press, 1980.)

Pelikan, Jaroslav. Bach Among the Theologians. Philadelphia: Fortress
Press, 1986.

Poundstone, William. Labyrinths of Reason: Paradox, Puzzles and the Frailty
of Knowledge. New York: Penguin, 1988.

Sacks, Oliver. An Anthropologist on Mars. New York: Vintage tpb, 1996 (1st
Random House, 1995).

Sacks, Oliver. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical
Tales. New York: Harper Perennial, 1985 tpb (orig. 1970).

Siegel, Ronald K. Fire in the Brain: Clinical Tales of Hallucination. New
York: Penguin tpb, 1993.

Storr, Anthony. Music and the Mind. New York: Macmillan Free Press, 1992.

Tame, David. The Secret Power of Music: The Transformation of Self and
Society through Musical Energy. Rochester, VT: Destiny, 1984 tpb. [I
haven't read this one yet and found it in the "Occult" section of the book
store, so buyer beware!]

Winckel, Fritz (tr. Thomas Binkley). Music, Sound and Sensation: A Modern
Exposition. New York: Dover, 1967 (translation of Berlin: Max Hesses Verlag,
1960).

Lelia

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