In the preface to “Musicophilia,” his fascinating and deeply felt exploration of music and the brain, Oliver Sacks calls forth characters from Arthur C. Clarke’s novel “Childhood’s End” to make a point about music’s essential mystery:
“This, at least, was one of the things about human beings that puzzled the highly cerebral alien beings, the Overlords … Curiosity brings them down to the Earth’s surface to attend a concert, they listen politely, and at the end, congratulate the composer on his ’great ingenuity’ — while still finding the entire business unintelligible. They cannot think what goes on in human beings when they make or listen to music, because nothing goes on with them. They themselves, as a species, lack music.”
Dr. Sacks acknowledges that there are “rare humans, who like the Overlords, may lack the neural apparatus for appreciating tones or melodies. But for virtually all of us, music has great power, whether or not we seek it out or think of ourselves as particularly ’musical.’”
Moreover, anyone who loves music will be able to find much to enjoy in this book. In between the riveting individual experiences of music by patients and others he shares, Dr. Sacks generously seasons his narrative with examples from his own experience with music (playing a Chopin mazurka, remembering a haunting tune from a long-ago Passover Seder).
But at its core, the book is a scientifically girded, case study-driven exploration of music and the brain — the brain in virtually all cases under siege from neurological disease or anomaly. There are Parkinson’s patients whose symptoms improve at the sound of music, and there are children afflicted with Williams syndrome, who are hypermusical from birth. Dr. Sacks describes the case of a little boy so aware of music in all things that he can discern the make of a car from the sound of its engine.
Like the case studies that informed and appeared in his previous books, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” and “Awakenings” (which inspired the Oscar-nominated film by the same name), Dr. Sacks again guides readers along the fascinating, disturbing, inspiring stories of clinical dilemmas he encounters, and he deciphers with profound gentleness and warmth.
Readers meet a man who is struck by lightning and, at the age of 42, suddenly decides to take up the piano, which he is able to do with skill not available to him prior to the accident. Readers also meet a victim of amusia, a condition that makes music sound like pans clanging. The sufferer, who was born into a musical family, does not learn until she is in her 70s that her disability actually has a name. Had she known, she ruefully ponders, she might have bypassed some of the concerts she attended with friends and family members.
What keeps readers engaged with this book, however, goes beyond the case studies. For arguably, while science explains much what about is happening to the subjects Dr. Sacks presents, it does not explain all.
How are hallucinations sometimes provoked by a tune on an iPod? Why does one family member have perfect pitch while another is totally tone deaf? What caused Che Guevara’s “rhythm deafness”? Dr. Sacks avers that Che “might be seen dancing a mambo while the orchestra was playing a tango (he also had considerable tone deafness).”
Readers looking for absolute scientific answers may be somewhat disappointed by the air of inconclusiveness that hangs over much of what is presented here, but what readers will find as one of the treasures of this book is how Dr. Sacks puts the mysteries in context.
In a chapter entitled “Music on the Brain: Imagery and Imagination” he discusses the phenomenon of music that suddenly runs through our brains — repeatedly — music triggered by a sight or smell or a particular cue from the unconscious. To illustrate the phenomena, he writes:
“And, of course, the greatest literary analysis of a musical association is that given by Proust, in his deciphering of ’the little phrase’ of Vineuil’s that runs through the entire structure of Remembrance of Things Past.
“But why this incessant search for meaning or interpretation? It is not clear that any art cries out for this, and of all the arts, music surely the least — for while it is the 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. (Bach, of course, was a master at combining these.) But it does not have to have any ’meaning’ whatever. One may recall music, give it the life of imagination (or even hallucination) simply because one likes it — this is reason enough.”
But in the end, it is the role of music in the lives of the ailing that readers will remember best. Dr. Sacks concludes, “But to those who are lost in dementia, the situation is different. Music is no luxury to them, but a necessity, and can have a power beyond anything else to restore them to themselves, and to others, at least for a while.”
Evocative, thought-provoking and compassionate beyond measure, this is a book to cherish.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.