 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: Cass Tech
Date: 2008-03-12 16:54
Just finished Oliver Sacks' latest, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, and it was one of the most wonderful books on music I've ever read. I first encountered Sacks' work many years before in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (another extraordinary book). But his current one focuses on the power of music in our lives, and demonstrates the author's unusual combination of intelligence, culture and compassion. It also expands the limits of what we know of what is it to be human, the powers of the human brain and the courage of people with problems (mostly due to brain damage or heredity) we can hardly imagine. Just a few excerpts:
"George and Cordelia are both incurably deficient in their musicality, though in different ways. George has the drive, energy, dedication, a passionate feeling for music, but he lacks some basic neurological competence -- his 'ear' is deficient. Cordelia, on the other hand, has a perfect ear, but one has the feeling that she will never 'get' musical phrasing, ...never be able to tell good music from bad, because she is profoundly deficient (although she does not realize this) in musical sensibility and taste..."
"...Anatomists...could recognize the brain of a professional musician without a moment's hesitation...anatomical changes they observed in musician's brains were strongly correlated with the age at which musical training began and with the intensity of practice and rehearsal...Using five-finger piano exercises as a training test, he has demonstrated that the motor cortex can show changes within minutes of practicing such sequences..."
The chapters on musical savants (people who are severely retarded but have phenomenal musical or other talents) and synesthesia (the weird ability to experience "fused" sensations like music suggesting colors) are expecially fascinating. I'll end with a last quotation by a blind boy who suddenly discovered music:
"The first concert hall I ever entered, when I was eight years old, meant more to me in the space of a minute than all the fabled kingdoms...Going into the hall was the first step of a love story. The tuning of the instruments was my engagement...I wept with gratitude every time the orchestra began to sing. A world of sounds for a blind man, what sudden grace!...For a blind person music is nourishment...He needs to receive it, to have it administered at intervals like food...Music was made for blind people..."
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