The beauty of the evidence is that it's based on 371 patients, and the musicians were members of the Windsor Symphony Orchestra. The article on the study was written by Sandi Curtis of Concordia University, and is published in Music and Medicine.
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This made me wonder about what I would like to hear on my deathbed.
Most of us have thought about music for a particular fastive occasion, like an anniversary or birthday or wedding. Some of us have thought about music for a funeral -- in some cases, our own.
But how many of us have thought about what we would like to hear in our final hour or two?
My guess is that it would have to be something very familiar and very dear. It would also, as the article describes, need to be able to reconnect us with a better time and place somewhere earlier in our lives.
It may sound like a bit of a depressing thing to do, but I put on one of Schubert's Op. 90 Impromptus, with which I have a long connection, and it felt really nice.
So, here is Alfred Brendel, playing the Op. 90 Impromptu in G-flat Major, D. 899. I've also added Marie-Nicole Lemieux singing A Chloris, by Reynaldo Hahn (the poem, by Théophide di Viau, dates back to the 17th century).
Let me know what your candidates would be, either here or via email: jterauds@thestar.ca
After looking at the state of brain science three years ago, I wrote an article in the Star where I suggested that we effectively use music as a form of emotional self-medication. Here are the opening paragraphs:
Look down any bus, subway car or sidewalk and you'll see many a pair of slim wires dangling from earlobes, the telltale signs of our obsession with music
We pipe it directly to our eardrums. We surround ourselves with it at home, in the car and while shopping.
We instinctively know our favourite song or the perfect piece to fit or change a mood. We pump up volume and tempo to get our adrenaline flowing. We look for slow melodies and easy harmonies to unwind after a stressful day.
Could it be that this is the ultimate in psychological self-medication?
Although most of us don't know why we choose to listen to a particular kind of music at any given time, we know it affects how we feel. And we know how and when to administer the right dose.
Filmmakers have worked the art of emotional manipulation through music from the days when the soundtrack came from a live piano or organ player in the theatre.
Consumer marketers know how to push these buttons as well. Next time you walk through Ikea, stop to listen how the music is different in each department.
But this is nothing new.
Three hundred years ago, William Congreve wrote the now-immortal words in his play The Mourning Bride: "Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast/To soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak."
Two thousand years before that, Socrates sat down with his pupils Glaucon and Adeimantus to discuss how to create a good and noble human being. As recorded in Plato's Republic, Socrates stated that, "rhythm and harmony find their way to the inmost soul and take strongest hold upon it, bringing with them and imparting grace..."
A recent study by a group of researchers at McGill University, as reported in the Montreal Gazette on Monday, points to exactly that conclusion.
Hooking up the brains of 10 study participants while they listened to instrumental-only music (just in case the lyrics might be involved in triggering an emotional response), the reseachers listened, watched and analysed. As the article reports:
As the volunteers listened to music that "really turned them on," the sensors and scanners picked up clear signs of pleasure. Chills ran up their spines and their heart rates climbed as dopamine was released deep inside the brain. The volunteers also underwent scans listening to music they are indifferent to, which produced no pleasure effect.
So, it's another day -- and another opportunity to get high on music.
My contribution to the pill of the day may be a bit bitter, initially, but promises plenty of chills. I find the fugue's constant, slow alternation between darkness and light before building up to a huge climax absolutely irresistible.
Here is Canadian David Jalbert at the Chapelle Historique du Bon Pasteur in Montreal last February, playing the D-minor Prelude and Fugue that conclude Dmitri Shostakovich's fabulously rich Op. 87 set of 24:
There's an excellent article in the current issue of Seed magazine on what makes it possible for musicians to improvise. It's in two parts: the first focuses on pianist and Mozart expect Robert Levin, and how he mastered the art of improvisation; the second looks at how all of this takes place in the brain, based on research by cognitive ethnomusicologist Aaron Berkowitz and University of Western Ontario neuroscientist Daniel Ansari.
I can't speak to the science, but everything on the musician's side makes perfect sense.
Essentially, the musician needs to assimilate all the elements needed to fluently make up music through thousands of hours of practice. Then, the musician can switch off the omigod, what an I going to do next? part of their mind, and let the neurons and brain cells do a little dance through to the fingers.
As much as I was hoping for a pushbutton answer (something like a diet pill or Prozak), the truth is that the miracle of improvisation is not possible without some sort of punishing bootcamp. Fortunately, the reward is worth it.
Here is improviser extraordinaire Gabriela Montero, doing her things with "Je ne regrette rien," in concert, followed by my favourite organ improviser Daniel Roth, the titular organist at Saint-Sulpice church in Paris, teasing out a little something tweety on a Beethoven theme earlier this year:
Nancy McMaster, a Vancouver music therapist, says "music organizes us." That appears to be one of the keys to why and how music therapy is able to bring autistic children out of their sensory-overload shell. The organization of sound, of community and tangible result coming out of an effort that involves receiving (listening) and giving (making music) improves the lives of people of all ages with other cognitive or emotional challenges.
When I was researching an article on music therapy a few years ago, I saw, in every visit and interview, how music therapy works. It was powerfully inspirational to see that the tool to reach the minds of people who don't fall into our accepted patterns of cognition and socialization is one that is accessible to all -- and that there are no adverse side-effects.
The Canadian Music Therapy Trust is offering a series of glimpses into this wonderful world this evening, in the screening of The Gift of Music: Stories of Music Therapy, at the Royal cinema, 608 College St., at 7 p.m. Tickets are $10, and there will be a Q&A session afterward.
Filmmaker Scott Rondeau travelled across the country to interview a variety of therapists, academics and researchers. Most powerfully, he was able to catch children and adults in actual music therapy sessions, and the proof is in the viewing.
The gift of music is one that keeps on giving.
To give you an idea, here is a snippet of Paul Lauzon, head of the music therapy programme at Acadia University, working with music therapy group participants at the Wolfville, NS branch of L'Arche (an organization servicing developmentally disabled people):
Out of professional politeness, I try to avoid commenting on the Star, but I can't help myself this morning, in the cause of illustrating prejudice.
In citing a new study published in University of Chicago's Journal of Consumer Research, an editor has chosen to illustrate possible genetic personality traits with music, in the headline: Prefer jazz to opera? Blame DNA, study says.
The study appears to be about adventurous versus cautious people. Fair enough, but the headline implies that each genre of music has a particular quality. We all know this is wrong, but I think most of us carry around preconceptions anyway.
It made me think of a friend, Kelly, who is an accomplished decorative painter. The first time I painted my own place, he volunteered to help me choose colours. More than two decades later, I still can't forget how he started the exercise.
"When I say 'green,' what colour do you see in your mind?" he asked.
I confessed that I was thinking something chartreuse-y.
For yellow, it was a bright-banana shade. For orange, it was something that belonged on a crossing guard's vest.
Kelly then explained that whenever people are asked to imagine a colour out of the blue, so to speak, they inevitably imagine the ugliest, most garish shade in the spectrum. Pale lichen inevitably loses out to irradiated pond scum in our brain's imaginary colour wheel.
Today's newspaper headline suggests there's a similar unconscious reduction happening in people's minds when they're asked to characterise a genre of music out of the blue -- i.e. opera: screeching; jazz: cool; rock: head-bangers, and so on.
As with my colour sense, these reactions to music ignore the full, rich spectrum of possibility within each genre of music.
Is this the way our brains always work, or is there something we can do to demolish stereotypes?
In case you're a doubter, here are two examples from the world of classical music, brought to you today by the letter O:
1. Organ music. What do you hear in your head?
Here is Daniel Roth, titular organist at the church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris, playing "Pastorale" from Louis Vierne's 24 Pieces in Free Style at the Cvaillé-Coll organ at the church of Saint-Louis-des-Quinze-Vingts:
2. Opera. What's the first thing that comes to mind?
Here is a fun take on Samuel Barber's A Hand of Bridge, presented by University of Nevada students Nicole Dzadek, Therese Curatolo, Adam Machart and Kyle Rea:
When we say we like a piece of music, or a concert, or a particular performer, what does that really mean?
As a critic, that question is central to my life every single day. And, inevitably, I realise that the answer is never straightforward. My judgement and perceptions are the products of complex interrelationships that involve the thing in itself as well as history and personal experience and mood.
Putting these thoughts into clear prose is not easy, so I take my figurative hat off to an American academic.
Paul Bloom, a Psychology professor at Yale University, argues that our perception of someone or something is influenced by feelings as much as by objective measures. Put so simply, it comes across as the most banal of observations. But, in greater detail, Bloom's work appears to be one of those projects that manages to clearly articulate something that many people instinctively know to be true, but would not be able to articulate without prompting.
The book, How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like (W.W. Norton) is also remarkably inclusive -- allowing us to cast our sexual desires as well as shopping habits in a new light. (Details about the book are available if you click on the image.)
In a current review, scientifically-minded Seed magazine looks at the link between pleasure and understanding. The Globe and Mail has an article that focuses on the sexual implications of Bloom's arguments.
The subject of music doesn't come up as a specific focus, but there is something to be said here, too. As Robin Henig wrote in a New York Timesreview last Sunday,
Then there are the (sometimes) more G-rated pleasures of the imagination: the joys of fiction, movies, television, daydreaming. “Surely we would be better off pursuing more adaptive activities — eating and drinking and fornicating, establishing relationships, building shelter and teaching our children,” Bloom writes. But when we retreat into an imagined world, it’s almost like experiencing the pleasure for real. Bloom calls it “Reality Lite — a useful substitute when the real pleasure is inaccessible, too risky or too much work.”
Bloom’s ideas go against the traditional view of pleasure as purely sensory: that is, that we get pleasure from food because of how it tastes, from music because of how it sounds, from art because of how it looks. The sensory explanation is only partially true, he writes. “Pleasure is affected by deeper factors, including what the person thinks about the true essence of what he or she is getting pleasure from.” When we pay good money for tape measures that famous people have touched, or treasure our children’s clumsy kindergarten art, it is because we believe that something about the person’s essence exists in the object itself.
If I begin to think about my favourite pieces of music, I realise that the circumstances when I first heard or played or sang it are part of the package. Was I in love? Was I depressed? Was I scared stupid?
What I know of the composer and performer also enters the equation. For example, I can't separate my appreciation of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7 without thinking of its history and how many chairs in the orchestra were empty on the night of its premiere -- because the musicians had died from starvation or illness or shelling during the siege of that city.
To further illustrate this, I tried to find a commentary on one of the best-known works in the classical canon, and came up with this 25-minute section of a lecture by pianist Andras Schiff on Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata. I can't listen to the first movement without thinking of E.F. Benson's Miss Mapp and Lucia novels -- so much so that I haven't played it for years.
Schiff tries to take an objective course with a clearly and thoughtfully argued attempt at demistyfication (there YouTube clip is audio only) -- "it's like taking a painting with a lot of dust and dirt on it and having it restored," Schiff says at one point.
Does a lecture such as this one add or detract from the pleasure we experience in the listening?
A British professor's Eureka! moment in reading Plato shines light on two characteristics of Western behavior that often make me scratch my head: how we routinely discount the sophistication of our ancestors; and how fragmented the Western intellectual universe has become.
If the idea of reading about the arcanae of Ancient Greek philosophy makes your eyes glaze over, here is the gist: Plato's original manuscripts are ordered according to a mathematical formula that determines how an idea or argument will unfold within the time's equivalent of a successive paragraphs. That formula follows rules similar to Western music, where certain intervals are consonant and others are dissonant.
Professor Andrew Barker, a leading authority on ancient Greek music, said that "the results he's come up with look too neat to be accidental" and that if scholars confirm them, "he will have shown something quite startling about Plato's methods of composition."
What the article fails to mention is that we read ancient texts with a Modern sensibility, which separates science and the arts into two distinct camps. But you can't really appreciate anything that predates Romanticism without looking at both structure and surface as an organic, mutually dependent whole.
A Renaissance painting has one meaning on the surface, and dozens more represented in little clues embedded like little Waldos in the image. A strawberry can be far more than a strawberry, if you know the code.
In Baroque music, the choice of key, metre and harmonic progression tell you everything you need to know about the mood and purpose of the music -- before you've played or heard a note.
Why wouldn't the Ancient Greeks treat the composition of text the same way as they would music? Why do we Moderns treat speech and song as different things? (Read a Psalm in the King James Bible out loud, and savour the music in the words; read the same Psalm out loud in the Good News Bible, and see if you can find any sort of cadence at all.)
There is a growing number of people out there (including the Royal Conservatory of Music, through its Learning Through the Arts programmes) advocating a more inclusive view of the universe - one which allows music and particle physics to sit side by side. The magical and the rational do not have to be enemies.
A Pythagorean-mathematical analysis of Plato's texts won't change the gist or significance of the philosophical musings of Socrates and his groupies. But allowing the arts and sciences to intermingle a bit more in our here-and-now could help bring together a very fractured culture.
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The key figure in Kennedy's analysis is Pythagoras (who died in 450 BCE), a pre-Socratic philosopher who, like Socrates, never wrote anything down. So we have to leave it up to faith that his disciples recorded his theories more or less accurately.
One of Pythagoras's contributions to Western thought was in establishing a distinction between form and void (peiron and apeiron, in Ancient Greek). It allows us to separate sound and silence, matter and nothingness, the finite and the infinite.
There's more. Here's a nicely done, remarkably concise summary of Pythagoras's link to music -- which helps us understand better how Plato might have used this in his writings.
This has nothing to do with music -- and everything to do with the sort of nonsense that can keep a missing corkscrew from spoiling an otherwise fine moment.
For those of you who do not speak French, bear with the video, because the language is immaterial. Thanks, Iby!
Three University of Vienna researchers have sifted through all the studies they could find on the brain-boosting effects of listening to the music of Mozart and have concluded that, essentially, it's a placebo.
What a surprise. You can read more in a news article from Science Daily.
Because it's outside the scope of the study, the babble over the Mozart effect doesn't mention how participating (learning and making) in music -- of any kind -- has been acknowledged as beneficial by any and every researcher who has ever looked into the matter.
From toddlers to kids with Down syndrome to elderly people ravaged by Alzheimer's, there's even a beneficial effect for people not able to connect with an instrument or their voice in a traditional way.
Here's Oliver Sacks, offering one of thousands of compelling tales:
Two issues that keep intriguing me are addressed in an article in the current edition of Miller-McCune: the mindset of the improvising musician, and the effect of peer opinion on one's own perceptions and judgements on the quality of music.
Improvising
I had a chance to ask pianist Gabriella Montero -- who has made her career on fabulous improvising skills -- how she was able to produce sophisticated improvisations at a speed faster than conscious thought. She said that she can only do it by going into a sort of trance, where her conscious mind is switched off, and she can begin to channel a creative surge.
She also pointed out that an essential ingredient is good technique. If her fingers can't move at the speed of her brain's instructions, the effort wouldn't work.
As a church organist in a liturgical setting, I'm called on to improvise musical "bridges" as the priest and accolytes move around during mass, or while the greets finish up and bring forward the collection, and I find that, the more I try to think about whatever improvisation I'm trying to make, the more muddled the final result. I also have to admit that my technique leaves a lot to be desired. I can "hear" all kinds of gorgeous musical figures in my head that my fingers and feet simply can't respond to quickly enough.
The article in Miller-McCune draws on a recent scientific study that confirms that improvisers switch off the conscious side of the brain.
For the improvisation study, researchers Aaron Berkowitz and Daniel Ansaris studied the brains of 28 people as they improvised five-note melodies on a tiny keyboard. Thirteen were classically trained undergraduate pianists from the Dartmouth College music department. The other 15 were nonmusicians (though some had played instruments for up to three years in the past).
"The two groups showed significant differences in functional brain activity during improvisation," the researchers report. "Specifically, musicians deactivated the right temporoparietal junction during melodic improvisation, while nonmusicians showed no change in activity in this region."
This suggests trained musicians "are entering a different state of attentional focus than nonmusicians as soon as they engage in even the simple act of playing, and that this effect is particularly heightened during melodic improvisation," Berkowitz and Ansari write.
In other words, they effectively blocked out mental distractions, "allowing for a more goal-directed performance state that aids in creative thought."
That ability to intensely focus has a variety of obvious benefits. Indeed, this study could be used as further evidence of the value of maintaining music education in the schools.
Peer pressure on music perception
In short, some recent research confirms that, if teenagers see that their peers like a piece of music, they will be more inclined to like it, too.
Why would knowing other people's opinions influence their own? "fMRI results showed a strong correlation between the participants' rating and activity in the caudate nucleus, a region [of the brain] previously implicated in reward-driven actions," according to the paper. "The tendency to change one's evaluation of a song was positively correlated with activation in the anterior insula and anterior cingulate, two regions that are associated with psychological arousal and negative affective states."
The researchers' conclusion: "Our results suggest that a principal mechanism whereby popularity ratings affect consumer choice is through the anxiety generated by the mismatch between one's own preferences and the others'. This mismatch anxiety motivates people to switch their choices in the direction of the consensus."
As a full-time critic, it's something I've suspected for a long time -- except that I think it's true of all ages, not just teens.
In case you're not familiar with Gabriella Montero's keyboard magic, here she is at a recital in Cologne in 2007, taking on the Aria from J.S. Bach's Goldberg Variations:
John Terauds started at the Toronto Star as a freelance writer in 1988, and has been on staff since 1997. He began writing on classical music in 2001, and has been the full-time classical music critic since 2005.
He is also the organist and choir director at St. Peter's Anglican Church, a parish founded in 1863 in downtown Toronto.
If he's not listening to, writing about or playing music, it means he's either asleep, unconscious, walking his dog -- or all of the above.
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