A work of note

Oliver Sacks looks at the sometimes-strange connections between music and the mind

October 27, 2007|By Jack Fuller

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain

By Oliver Sacks

Knopf, 381 pages, $26

I had a roommate in law school who suddenly became smitten with classical music. He seemed to abandon everything else, listening intently for hour after hour, taking trips to Sam Goody's in New York City to buy albums (as recordings were called in those days of yesteryear). So far as I could tell he gave up all effort to go to class or read the assignments. It was as if music had seized his brain.

The first story in "Musicophilia," neurologist-storyteller Oliver Sacks' new collection of essays, reminded me of him. Titled "A Bolt from the Blue: Sudden Musicophilia," it tells of an orthopedic surgeon who was struck by lightning. Until then his taste had run to rock music, but in the aftermath of the trauma he found himself drawn overwhelmingly to classical piano. It ruined his marriage, though it spared his career. Over time he took up piano himself, then composing. In the end he considered the lightning a stroke of incredible good luck.

Our brains, Sacks writes, "are indeed exquisitely tuned to music." Some are such well-tempered claviers that they can tell the name of a note as soon as it sounds. There's an old story about a jazz musician entertaining friends in his apartment in New York City. A foghorn sounds on the river outside his window. "What's that?" one of the friends asks. "B-flat," the musician replies.

Perfect pitch is not the only musical gift that some have and some do not. The great sadness of my high school experience was discovering that though I had enough musical ability to hold my own in state music competitions and select bands, some of the truly gifted musicians I played jazz with were wired so differently from me that no amount of practice would get me to where they already were at age 17.

I kept playing for pleasure but gave up on my musical dreams and turned to writing instead. "Anatomists today," Sacks writes, "would be hard put to identify the brain of a visual artist, a writer, or a mathematician -- but they could recognize the brain of a professional musician without a moment's hesitation." I guess I made the right choice; at least no anatomist can prove I don't have a literary brain.

I consider myself lucky; I am drawn passionately to music despite my mental limitations. I felt luckier still when Sacks stunned me by reporting that an unfortunate few cannot make sense of music at all.

A deep musicophile, Sacks twice experienced for himself what this is like -- once while listening to a Chopin ballade on a car radio, the other time while playing a Chopin mazurka on a piano. The music, he writes, "seemed to decompose into a disconcerting racket." It is one of the most frightening descriptions in a book full of the cruel tricks the brain plays.

There are tales of people haunted by uncontrollable musical hallucinations. Peter Tchaikovsky seems to have suffered them. Sacks repeats a story in which the great composer, as a child, lay in bed crying: "This music! It is here in my head. Save me from it!" Happily, nobody did. Rumor has it that Dmitri Shostakovich was struck by shrapnel during the Siege of Leningrad in World War II and refused to have it removed because after his injury every time he tilted his head to one side he heard music, which he often incorporated into his compositions.

There are stories of musicians who find that their brains distort pitches in certain ranges so that a perfectly tuned instrument playing in that particular range seems painfully sharp or flat, stories of people who suddenly find music disconnected from emotion and therefore lifeless. There are patients for whom music can set off epileptic seizures.

One essay was particularly chilling to me as I pound away hour after hour, still trying to learn to play the piano properly. It concerned a condition that disorganizes a part of the brain and makes a musician's fingers become useless. This happened to pianist Leon Fleisher, who in the prime of his career at 36 found his right fourth and fifth fingers uncontrollably curling in on themselves.

Thankfully, Sacks balances the horror with exhilaration. We learn of people sunk in Alzheimer's disease whose lifeline to their old identity is their undiminished memory of music. He tells of music's salutary effects on some Parkinson's disease patients and people with expressive aphasia (an inability to speak). And he discusses the more familiar musical compensation for blindness and the connection between music and Tourette's syndrome explored in the wonderful film starring the late Gregory Hines, "The Tic Code."

Sacks introduces us to composers who dream the solution to the musical challenges they have set for themselves, and people for whom music comes in colors. For them music is not just sound, it is a rainbow. Then there are those with phonographic memories.