Musicophilia

by Oliver Sacks

  With some musicians, however, especially if there has been long and intensive incubation of a new composition, such experiences may be coherent and full of meaning, even providing the long-sought-after parts of a major composition. Such an experience was described by Wagner, who wrote of how the orchestral introduction to Das Rheingold came to him, after long waiting, when he was in a strange, quasi-hallucinatory twilight state:

  After a night spent in fever and sleeplessness, I forced myself to take a long tramp the next day through the hilly country, which was covered with pinewoods. It all looked dreary and desolate, and I could not think what I should do there. Returning in the afternoon, I stretched myself, dead tired, on a hard couch, awaiting the long-desired hour of sleep. It did not come; but I fell into a kind of somnolent state, in which I suddenly felt as though I were sinking in swiftly flowing water. The rushing sound formed itself in my brain into a musical sound, the chord of E-flat major, which continued re-echoed in broken forms; these broken forms seemed to be melodic passages of increasing motion, yet the pure triad of E-flat major never changed, but seemed by its continuance to impart infinite significance to the element in which I was sinking. I awoke in sudden terror from my doze, feeling as though the waves were rushing high above my head. I at once recognized that the orchestral overture to the Rheingold, which must have long lain latent within me, though it had been unable to find definite form, had at last been revealed to me. I then quickly realized my own nature; the stream of life was not to flow to me from without, but from within.

  Ravel noted that the most delightful melodies came to him in dreams, and Stravinsky said much the same. But there is no more poignant example of this than the one Berlioz provided in his Memoirs:

  Two years ago, at a time when my wife’s state of health was involving me in a lot of expense, but there was still some hope of its improving, I dreamed one night that I was composing a symphony, and heard it in my dream. On waking next morning I could recall nearly the whole of the first movement, which was an allegro in A minor in two-four time…. I was going to my desk to begin writing it down, when I suddenly thought: “If I do, I shall be led on to compose the rest. My ideas always tend to expand nowadays, this symphony could well be on an enormous scale. I shall spend perhaps three or four months on the work (I took seven to write Romeo and Juliet), during which time I shall do no articles, or very few, and my income will diminish accordingly. When the symphony is written I shall be weak enough to let myself be persuaded by my copyist to have it copied, which will immediately put me a thousand or twelve hundred francs in debt. Once the parts exist, I shall be plagued by the temptation to have the work performed. I shall give a concert, the receipts of which will barely cover one half of the costs— that is inevitable these days. I shall lose what I haven’t got and be short of money to provide for the poor invalid, and no longer able to meet my personal expenses or pay my son’s board on the ship he will shortly be joining.” These thoughts made me shudder, and I threw down my pen, thinking: “What of it? I shall have forgotten it by tomorrow!” That night the symphony again appeared and obstinately resounded in my head. I heard the allegro in A minor quite distinctly. More, I seemed to see it written. I woke in a state of feverish excitement. I sang the theme to myself; its form and character pleased me exceedingly. I was on the point of getting up. Then my previous thoughts recurred and held me fast. I lay still, steeling myself against temptation, clinging to the hope I would forget. At last I fell asleep; and when I next awoke all recollection of it had vanished for ever.

  24

  Seduction and Indifference

  There is a tendency in philosophy to separate the mind, the intellectual operations, from the passions, the emotions. This tendency moves into psychology, and thence into neuroscience. The neuroscience of music, in particular, has concentrated almost exclusively on the neural mechanisms by which we perceive pitch, tonal intervals, melody, rhythm, and so on, and, until very recently, has paid little attention to the affective aspects of appreciating music. Yet music calls to both parts of our nature— it is essentially emotional, as it is essentially intellectual. Often when we listen to music, we are conscious of both: we may be moved to the depths even as we appreciate the formal structure of a composition.

  We may, of course, lean to one side or the other, depending on the music, our mood, our circumstances. “Dido’s Lament” from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas is heartbreaking, tender emotion incarnate; The Art of Fugue, on the other hand, demands extreme intellectual attention— its beauty is of a sterner, perhaps more impersonal kind. Professional musicians, or anyone practicing a piece of music, may sometimes have to listen with a detached, critical ear to ensure that all the minutiae of a performance are technically correct. But technical correctness alone is not enough; once this is achieved, emotion must return, or one may be left with nothing beyond an arid virtuosity. It is always a balance, a coming together, that is needed.

  That we have separate and distinct mechanisms for appreciating the structural and the emotional aspects of music is brought home by the wide variety of responses (and even “dissociations”) that people have to music.1 There are many of us who lack some of the perceptual or cognitive abilities to appreciate music but nonetheless enjoy it hugely, and enthusiastically bawl out tunes, sometimes shockingly off-key, in a way that gives us great happiness (though it may make others squirm). There are others with an opposite balance: they may have a good ear, be finely sensitive to the formal nuances of music, but nevertheless do not care for it greatly or consider it a significant part of their lives. That one may be quite “musical” and yet almost indifferent to music, or almost tone-deaf yet passionately sensitive to music, is quite striking.

  While musicality, in the sense of one’s perceptual abilities, is probably hard-wired to a considerable extent, emotional susceptibility to music is more complex, for it may be powerfully influenced by personal factors as well as neurological ones. When one is depressed, music may “go dead” on one— but this is usually part of an overall flattening or withdrawal of emotion. What is clear and dramatic, though fortunately rare, is the sudden and isolated loss of the ability to respond to music emotionally, while responding normally to everything else, including the formal structure of music.

  Such a temporary extinction of emotional response to music can occur after a concussion. Lawrence R. Freedman, a physician, told me of how he was confused and disoriented for six days following a bicycle accident, and then experienced a specific indifference to music. In a subsequent article about this, he observed:

  There was one thing I noticed in the early days at home that disturbed me greatly. I was no longer interested in listening to music. I heard the music. I knew it was music, and I also knew how much I used to enjoy listening to music. It had always been the primary unfailing source that nourished my spirit. Now it just didn’t mean anything. I was indifferent to it. I knew something was very wrong.

  This loss of emotional reaction to music was very specific. Dr. Freedman noted that he felt no diminution of his passion for visual art after his concussion. He added that since writing about his experience, he had spoken to two other people, both musicians, who had had the same experience after a head injury.

  Those who experience this peculiar indifference to music are not in a state of depression or fatigue. They do not have a generalized anhedonia. They respond normally to everything except music, and their musical sensibility usually returns in days or weeks. It is difficult to know exactly what is being affected in such postconcussion syndromes, for there may be widespread, if temporary, changes in brain function, affecting many different parts of the brain.

  There have been a number of anecdotal reports of people who, following strokes, have lost interest in music, finding it emotionally flat, while apparently retaining all of their musical perceptions and skills. (It has been suggested that such losses or distortions of musical emotion are more common with damage to the right hemisphere of the brain.) Occas
ionally there is not so much a complete loss of musical emotion as a change in its valence or direction, so that music which previously delighted one may now arouse an unpleasant feeling, sometimes so intense as to produce anger, disgust, or simply aversion. One correspondent, Maria Ralescu, described this to me in a letter:

  My mother recovered from a six-day coma after a head injury to the right side of the brain and started the process of relearning with enthusiasm…. When she was moved from the ICU to a hospital room, I brought her a small radio, because she had always listened to music with a passion…. But after the accident, while in hospital, she adamantly refused to have any kind of music on. It seemed to annoy her…. It took a couple of months for her to finally appreciate and enjoy music again.

  There have been very few detailed studies of such patients, but Timothy Griffiths, Jason Warren, et al. have described how one man, a fifty-two-year-old radio announcer who suffered a dominant-hemisphere stroke (with a transient aphasia and hemiplegia), was left with “a persistent alteration in auditory experience.”

  He was in the habit of listening to classical music…and had derived particular pleasure from listening to Rachmaninov preludes. He experienced an intense, altered state of “transformation” when he did this…. This emotional response to the music was lost following the [stroke], and remained absent during the period of testing between 12 and 18 months after the stroke. During this period he was able to enjoy other aspects of life, and reported no (biological) features of depression. He had noticed no change in his hearing and was still able to identify speech, music and environmental sounds correctly.

  Isabelle Peretz and her colleagues have been especially concerned with amusia— the loss (or congenital lack) of ability to make structural judgments about music. They were astounded to find, in the early 1990s, that some of their subjects rendered virtually amusic by brain injuries were nonetheless still able to enjoy music and to make emotional judgments about it. One such patient, listening to Albinoni’s Adagio (from her own record collection), first said that she had never heard the piece before, then commented that “it makes me feel sad and the feeling makes me think of Albinoni’s Adagio.” Another patient of Peretz’s was I.R., a forty-year-old woman who had “mirror” aneurysms of both middle cerebral arteries; when these were clipped the surgery caused extensive infarctions in both temporal lobes. After this, she lost the ability to recognize previously familiar melodies, and even to discriminate musical sequences. “Despite these gross deficits,” Peretz and Gagnon wrote in 1999, “I.R. claimed that she could still enjoy music.” Detailed testing supported her claim.

  These and other cases led Peretz to think that there must be “a particular functional architecture underlying the emotional interpretation of music,” an architecture which could be spared even if amusia was present. The details of this functional architecture are being slowly worked out, partly through the study of patients who have had strokes, brain injuries, or surgical removal of parts of the temporal lobes, and partly through functional brain imaging of subjects as they experience intense emotional arousal while listening to music— this has been a focus of work by Robert Zatorre and his lab (see, for example, Blood and Zatorre’s 2001 paper). Both lines of research have implicated a very extensive network involving both cortical and subcortical regions as the basis for emotional responses to music. And the fact that one may have not only a selective loss of musical emotion but an equally selective sudden musicophilia (as described in chapters 1 and 27) implies that the emotional response to music may have a very specific physiological basis of its own, one which is distinct from that of emotional responsiveness in general.

  * * *

  INDIFFERENCE TO music’s emotional power may occur in people with Asperger’s syndrome. Temple Grandin, the brilliant autistic scientist I described in An Anthropologist on Mars, is fascinated by musical form and is particularly attracted to music by Bach. She told me once that she had been to a concert of Bach’s Two-and Three-Part Inventions. I asked if she had enjoyed them. “They were very ingenious,” she replied, adding that she wondered whether Bach would have been up to four-or five-part inventions. “But did you enjoy them?” I asked again, and she gave me the same answer, saying that she got intellectual pleasure from Bach, but nothing more. Music, she said, did not “move” her, move her to the depths, as it apparently could (she had observed) with other people. There is some evidence, indeed, that those medial parts of the brain involved with experiencing deep emotions— the amygdala, in particular— may be poorly developed in people with Asperger’s. (It was not only music that failed to move Temple deeply; she seemed to experience a certain flattening of emotion generally. Once when we were driving together in the mountains and I remarked on them with awe and wonder, Temple said she did not know what I meant. “The mountains are pretty,” she said, “but they don’t give me a special feeling.”)

  And yet though Temple seemed indifferent to music, this is not true of all people with autism. Indeed, I formed an opposite impression during the 1970s, when I worked with a group of young people with severe autism. It was only through music that I could establish any contact with the most inaccessible among them, and I felt this so strongly that I brought my own piano (an old, secondhand upright at the time) into the hospital ward where I worked. It seemed to act as a sort of magnet for some of these nonverbal youngsters.2

  * * *

  WE MOVE ONTO more uncertain ground with regard to certain historical figures who have been, by their own and others’ description, indifferent (or sometimes averse) to music. It is possible that they were profoundly amusic— we have no evidence to either support or refute this possibility. It is difficult, for example, to know what to make of the peculiar omission of any reference to music in the work of the James brothers. There is only a single sentence devoted to music in the fourteen hundred pages of William James’s Principles of Psychology, which treats virtually every other aspect of human perception and thought; and looking through biographies of him, I can find no reference to music. Ned Rorem, in his diary Facing the Night, observes the same striking absence in Henry James— that in none of his novels, and in none of the biographies, is there any mention of music. Perhaps the brothers grew up in a music-less household. Could lack of exposure to music in one’s earliest years cause a sort of emotional amusia, as lack of language in the critical period may undermine linguistic competence for the rest of one’s life?

  A different and rather sad phenomenon, a loss of feeling for music and much else, is expressed by Darwin in his autobiography:

  In one respect my mind had changed during the last twenty or thirty years…. Formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very intense delight. But now…I have almost lost my taste for pictures or music…. My mind seems to have become a sort of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of fact…. The loss of these tastes, this curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes, is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

  And we are on much more complex ground when it comes to Freud, who (as far as one can judge from accounts) never listened to music voluntarily or for pleasure and never wrote about music, though he lived in intensely musical Vienna. He would rarely and reluctantly let himself be dragged to an opera (and then only a Mozart one), and when he did, would use such occasions to think about his patients or his theories. Freud’s nephew Harry (in a not-entirely-reliable memoir, My Uncle Sigmund) wrote that Freud “despised” music and that the whole Freud family was “very unmusical”— but neither of these assertions seems to be true. A much more delicate and nuanced comment was made by Freud himself, on the only occasion on which he wrote about the subject, in the introduction of “The Moses of Michelangelo”:

  I am no connoisseur in art…nevertheless, works of art do exercise a powerful effect on me, especially those of literature and sculpture, less often o
f painting…. [I] spend a longtime before them trying to apprehend them in my own way, i.e. to explain to myself what their effect is due to. Wherever I cannot do this, as for instance with music, I am almost incapable of obtaining any pleasure. Some rationalistic, or perhaps analytic, turn of mind in me rebels against being moved by a thing without knowing why I am thus affected and what it is that affects me.

  I find this comment at once puzzling and rather poignant. One wishes that Freud might have been able, on occasion, to abandon himself to something as mysterious, as delightful, and (one would think) as unthreatening as music. Did he enjoy and respond to music as a boy, when he was not committed to explaining and theorizing? We know only that he was denied the pleasure of music as an adult.

  Perhaps “indifference” is not quite the word here and the Freudian term “resistance” would be nearer the mark— resistance to the seductive and enigmatic power of music. And it may be that a similar resistance underlay Nabokov’s disdainful comment that music affected him “merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds.”

  For many of us, the emotions induced by music may be overwhelming. A number of my friends who are intensely sensitive to music cannot have it on as background when they work; they must attend to music completely or turn it off, for it is too powerful to allow them to focus on other mental activities. States of ecstasy and rapture may lie in wait for us if we give ourselves totally to music; a common scene during the 1950s was to see entire audiences swooning in response to Frank Sinatra or Elvis Presley— seized by an emotional and perhaps erotic excitement so intense as to induce fainting. Wagner, too, was a master of the musical manipulation of emotions, and this, perhaps, is a reason why his music is so intoxicating to some and so hateful to others.