Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (11 page)

After six months, however, he feared they were becoming permanent. During the day, he could often push the music aside when otherwise absorbed, but at night, the musical hallucinations kept him awake (“I feel quite ragged from lack of sleep,” he wrote).

Dr. Rangell did have a significant hearing loss. “I have had nerve deafness for many years now, familial. The musical hallucinosis is related, I feel, to the hyperacusis that goes with the hypo-hearing. The internal, central auditory pathways must overwork and enhance sounds.” He speculated that this over-activity of auditory brain pathways might at first be based on external rhythms of wind, traffic, or humming motors or on internal rhythms of breath or heartbeat— and that “the mind then converts these to music or song, establishing control over it. Passivity is overcome by activity.”

Dr. Rangell felt that his internal music reflected his moods and circumstances. At first, in the hospital, the songs varied; they were sometimes funereal, elegiac, rabbinical, sometimes lilting and happy (“Oo la la, oo la la” alternating with “oy vey, oy vey, oy vey, vey, vey”— later he realized these were to the same tune). When he was due to come home from the hospital, he began to hear “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again,” and then “jaunty, jolly ones” like “Alouette, gentille alouette.”

“When there is no official song that comes on by itself,” he continued, “my brain-mind makes one up— the rhythmic sounds are put to music, often with nonsense words— maybe the last words someone said, or I read or heard or thought.” This phenomenon, he felt, was related to creativity, like dreams.

I continued to correspond with Dr. Rangell, and in 2003 he wrote:

Rangell has lived with his musical hallucinations for more than ten years now, and increasingly, they seem less meaningless, less random to him. The songs are all from his younger years, and “they can be categorized,” he wrote:

Summarizing his experiences in a long article published online in the
Huffington Post,
Rangell wrote:

W
e often speak of people as having or not having “a good ear.” A good ear means, as a start, having an accurate perception of pitch and rhythm. We know that Mozart had a wonderful “ear” and, of course, he was a sublime artist. We take it that all good musicians must have a decent “ear,” even if not one of Mozartian caliber— but is a good ear sufficient?

This comes up in Rebecca West’s partly autobiographical novel
The Fountain Overflows,
a story of life in a musical family, with a mother who is a professional musician (like West’s own mother), an intellectually brilliant but unmusical father, and three children— two of whom, like their mother, are deeply musical. The best ear, however, belongs to the “unmusical” child, Cordelia. She, in her sister’s words,

An opposite situation is described in Somerset Maugham’s story “The Alien Corn.” Here the elegant young son of a newly ennobled family, being groomed for a gentleman’s life of hunting and shooting, develops, to his family’s dismay, a passionate desire to be a pianist. A compromise is reached, in which the young man goes to Germany to study music, with the understanding that he will return to England after two years and submit himself to the opinion of a professional pianist.

When the time comes, George, newly returned from Munich, takes his place at the piano. Lea Makart, a famous pianist, has come down for the day, and all the family is gathered around. George throws himself into the music, playing Chopin “with a great deal of brio.” But something is amiss, as the narrator observes:

Finally, Makart delivered her judgment:

But George had neither the hands nor the ear, she continued, to become a first-rate pianist, “not in a thousand years.”

George and Cordelia are both incurably deficient in their musicality, though in quite different ways. George has drive, energy, dedication, a passionate feeling for music, but he lacks some basic neurological competence— his “ear” is deficient. Cordelia, on the other hand, has a perfect ear, but one has the feeling that she will never “get” musical phrasing, will never improve her “greasy” tone, never be able to tell good music from bad, because she is profoundly deficient (although she does not realize it) in musical sensibility and taste.

Does musical sensibility— “musicality” in the most general sense— also demand a specific neurological potential? Most of us can hope that there may be some harmony, some alignment, between our desires and our powers and our opportunities, but there will always be those like George whose abilities do not match their desires, and those like Cordelia who seem to have every talent except the most important one: judgment or taste. No one has all the talents, cognitively or emotionally. Even Tchaikovsky was keenly aware that his great fertility in melody was not matched by a comparable grasp of musical structure— but he had no desire to be a great architectonic composer like Beethoven; he was perfectly happy to be a great melodic one.
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Many of the patients or correspondents I describe in this book are conscious of musical misalignments of one sort or another. The “musical” parts of their brains are not entirely at their service, and may indeed seem to have a will of their own. This is the case, for example, with musical hallucinations, which are imposed upon, and not sought by, those who have them— and are thus quite different from the musical imagery or imagination one feels to be one’s own. On the performance side, this is what happens with musician’s dystonia, when the fingers refuse to obey one’s will and curl up or show a “will” of their own. In such circumstances, a part of the brain is at odds with one’s intentionality, one’s self.

Even if there is no misalignment of a gross sort, where mind and brain are in conflict with one another, musicality, like other gifts, can create its own problems. I think here of the eminent composer Tobias Picker, who also, as it happens, has Tourette’s syndrome. Soon after I met him he told me that he had “a congenital disorder” that had “bullied” him all his life. I assumed that he was talking about his Tourette’s, but he said no— the congenital disorder was his great musicality. He had, it seemed, been born with this; he had recognized and tapped out tunes in the first years of life and had started to play the piano and compose at four. By the age of seven, he could reproduce long and elaborate pieces of music after a single hearing and constantly found himself “overwhelmed” by musical emotion. He said that it was understood, practically from the start, that he would be a musician, and that he had little chance of doing anything else, because his musicality was all consuming. He would not, I think, have had it any other way, but he sometimes felt that his musicality controlled him, rather than the other way around. Many artists and performers, no doubt, have the same feeling at times— but with music (as with mathematics) such abilities can be especially precocious and may determine one’s life from a very early age.

Listening to Picker’s music, watching him play or compose, I have the feeling that he has a special brain, a musician’s brain, very different from my own. It is a brain that works differently and has connections, whole fields of activity that mine lacks. It is difficult to know how much such differences may be “congenital,” as Picker puts it, and how much they are the result of training— a tricky question, since Picker, like many musicians, began intensive musical training in early childhood.

With the development of brain imaging in the 1990s, it became possible to actually visualize the brains of musicians and to compare them with those of nonmusicians. Using MRI morphometry, Gottfried Schlaug at Harvard and his colleagues made careful comparisons of the sizes of various brain structures. In 1995, they published a paper showing that the corpus callosum, the great commissure that connects the two hemispheres of the brain, is enlarged in professional musicians and that a part of the auditory cortex, the planum temporale, has an asymmetric enlargement in musicians with absolute pitch. Schlaug et al. went on to show increased volumes of gray matter in motor, auditory, and visuospatial areas of the cortex, as well as in the cerebellum.
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Anatomists today 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.

How much, Schlaug wondered, are these differences a reflection of innate predisposition and how much an effect of early musical training? One does not, of course, know what distinguishes the brains of musically gifted four-year-olds before they start musical training, but the effects of such training, Schlaug and his colleagues showed, are very great: the anatomical changes they observed with musicians’ brains were strongly correlated with the age at which musical training began and with the intensity of practice and rehearsal.

Alvaro Pascual-Leone at Harvard has shown how rapidly the brain responds to musical training. Using five-finger piano exercises as a training test, he has demonstrated that the motor cortex can show changes within minutes of practicing such sequences. Measurements of regional blood flow in different parts of the brain, moreover, have shown increased activity in the basal ganglia and the cerebellum, as well as various areas of the cerebral cortex— not only with physical practice, but with mental practice alone.

There is clearly a wide range of musical talent, but there is much to suggest there is an innate musicality in virtually everyone. This has been shown most clearly by the use of the Suzuki method to train young children, entirely by ear and by imitation, to play the violin. Virtually all hearing children respond to such training.
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