Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, Revised and Expanded Edition | Oliver Sacks

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, Revised and Expanded Edition | Oliver Sacks | A phenomenology of musical disturbances

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Musicophilia: Tale...

	Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, Revised and Expanded Edition Oliver Sacks Vintage, 2008 - 448 pages average customer review:based on 83 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Revised and Expanded

With the same trademark compassion and erudition he brought to The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks explores the place music occupies in the brain and how it affects the human condition. In Musicophilia, he shows us a variety of what he calls ?musical misalignments.? Among them: a man struck by lightning who suddenly desires to become a pianist at the age of forty-two; an entire group of children with Williams syndrome, who are hypermusical from birth; people with ?amusia,? to whom a symphony sounds like the clattering of pots and pans; and a man whose memory spans only seven seconds-for everything but music.

Illuminating, inspiring, and utterly unforgettable, Musicophilia is Oliver Sacks' latest masterpiece.

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Very informative

As a musician and a teacher, I found this book to be a fascinating read. It's accessible without a lot of twenty-five dollar words found in some medical texts.

A phenomenology of musical disturbances

Ulysses Grant knew two songs: one was the Yankee Doodle, the other was not. That's my kind of pun. Sacks has plenty of them. I keep telling my Chinese friends that I do not believe in their tones, the tones are just a trick to fool dumb foreigners like me into thinking that Chinese is an unlearnable language. Nabokov, one of my primary literary heroes, said in his memoirs that music for him was just an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds. In other words, I am not entirely alone with my amusia. I am not even the first a-musical hermit: Sacks quotes a French neurologist called Francois Lhermitte as having confessed a total inability to recognize tunes.
I am happy that my affliction is not that bad. I do enjoy listening to music, and I love concerts. I just don't hear tones and I was the worse singer in living memory in my high school. Only the Bundeswehr appreciated my voice for marching 'songs'. Reading Sacks' book shows me what else could have happened.
The multitude of possible problems is huge. Sacks tells us dozens of cases, some studied intensively, some just based on correspondence. Music can be the cause of problems, like in epileptic attacks, or the consequence of problems, like in hallucinations. The disappearance of music can be a problem as much as the intrusion. Music can be used for therapies for many problems. The book covers them all, unless one or the other problem has been overlooked.
Herewith I have already implied my mild criticism: maybe it is not Sacks' fault, but after some time, the telling of case after case wears you out.
I developed the attitude of complaining that the explanation was not forthcoming. Of course the real issue is, that science has found a lot of pieces for the puzzle, put is still far away from a comprehensive understanding of our brain and mind.
One chapter with special fascination for me is the one on synesthesia. Again Nabokov comes up, who had synesthesia as a child; I learn from Sacks that not only Nab's mother had it too, which I knew, but his wife and his son as well, which I did not know. Of course Nab's synesthesia was not involving music, but his son's probably did or does.
One hint to Mr.Sacks: ETA Hoffman, a great German writer/composer, was not a man of the 18th century, but 19th; please correct that in the next edition.
Also: as far as I know, Beethoven wrote only one violin concert, hence the patient in one of the cases could hardly have heard notes of 'a Beethoven violin concert'.
Concluding on music: a very popular painter/poet/comedian in Germany is Wilhelm Busch, of the late 19th century. One of his hundreds of constantly quoted lines is: Music is often considered disturbing, because it is always connected to noise. Which rhymes in German.

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music's neural mechanisms

Whenever my daughter has a tune in her head that she can't shake, she has an interesting solution. "Turn on the radio," she says, "I gotta hear some different music." In effect, she tricks her brain and diverts it from one musical function to another. In this his tenth book, Oliver Sacks, Professor of Clinical Neurology and Psychiatry at Columbia University, explores how the brain processes music. As in his other books, Sacks compiles dozens of "clinical anecdotes." These are informal, inherently fascinating, and deeply human case histories of his patients. In addition, he shares at length from letters that he has received, scientific studies, the results of brain imaging techniques, and his own personal experiences.

Rooted in his own deep love for and skill in music, Sacks examines how music impacts "almost every aspect of brain function." If that sounds far-fetched, consider the range of his topics. There's musical imagery, whereby you "listen" to a tune in your mind even though there is no sound. As experience shows, this can be either voluntary or involuntary, sometimes an obsession or even something like a "possession" by the music. A long chapter explores "musical hallucinations." There are forays into amusia, dystimbria, dysharmonia, perfect pitch, and musical savants. He analyzes the relationship of music and blindness, music and color, music and speech, Parkinson's disease, Tourette's syndrome, dreams and dementia. Sometimes musicophilia results from a seizure; at other times music induces a seizure.

Sacks's book is an extended case study of the brain-mind relationship. And most mysterious of all is the question whether music even has any meaning. "While [music] is most closely tied to the emotions, music is wholly abstract; it has no formal power of representation whatever. We may go to a play to learn about jealousy, betrayal, vengeance, love -- but music, instrumental music, can tell us nothing about these. Music can have wonderful, formal, quasi-mathematical perfection, and it can have heartbreaking tenderness, poignancy, and beauty. . . But it does not have to have any 'meaning' whatever" (37). Such is the mystery of music, that although it conveys no inherent meaning, no one would question its power.

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Complex Treatment of a Complex Phenomenon

It's hard to rate this book, because it aims for both a scientific and a popular auidience. So, it depends into which audience you fall. I fall into the latter, so I found the book lacking. The book really is written for a more scientific audience and the casual reader soon finds himself bogged down in medical terminology, endless footnotes, etc. Reading the whole book was an arduous task for me. Like his other books, Sacks here describes individuals with various pathologies regarding the way their minds respond to music. But the case studies were less interesting than those in his other books. But, I guess there was no other way to write a book like this. So, in many ways, it was educational. In many other ways, boring.

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