Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (31 page)

Fleisher now performs once again around the world, and he speaks of this return as a rebirth, “a state of grace, of ecstasy.” But the situation is a delicate one. He still has regular Rolfing therapy and takes care to stretch each finger before playing. He is careful to avoid provocative (“scaley”) music, which may trigger his dystonia. Occasionally, too, he will “redistribute some of the material,” as he puts it, modifying the fingering, shifting what might be too taxing for the right hand to the left hand.

At the end of our visit, Fleisher agreed to play something on my piano, a beautiful old 1894 Bechstein concert grand that I had grown up with, my father’s piano. Fleisher sat at the piano and carefully, tenderly, stretched each finger in turn, and then, with arms and hands almost flat, he started to play. He played a piano transcription of Bach’s “Sheep May Safely Graze,” as arranged for piano by Egon Petri. Never in its 112 years, I thought, had this piano been played by such a master— I had the feeling that Fleisher had sized up the piano’s character and perhaps its idiosyncrasies within seconds, that he had matched his playing to the instrument, to bring out its greatest potential, its particularity. Fleisher seemed to distill the beauty, drop by drop, like an alchemist, into flowing notes of an almost unbearable beauty— and, after this, there was nothing more to be said.

L
ike most people, I dream of music occasionally. Sometimes I have panicked dreams that I have to perform in public music that I have never played before, but generally, in my dreams, I am listening to or playing music I know well. And though I may be deeply affected by the music while I am dreaming, when I awake I sometimes have only the recollection that I have dreamed of music or of the feelings that went with it, without being able to say what the music actually was.

But on two occasions in 1974 it was different. I was severely insomniac and had been taking chloral hydrate, an old-fashioned hypnotic, in rather large doses. This disposed me to excessively vivid dreams, which could sometimes continue as a sort of quasi-hallucination even after waking. On one such occasion, I dreamed of the Mozart horn quintet, and this continued, delightfully, when I got up. I heard (as I never do with my normal musical imagery) every instrument clearly. The piece unfolded, played itself unhurriedly, at its proper tempo, in my mind. And then suddenly, as I was drinking a cup of tea, it stopped, vanished like the bursting of a bubble.

During the same period, I had another musical dream, and this too continued into the waking state. Here, in contrast to the Mozart, I found something deeply disturbing and unpleasant about the music, and longed for it to stop. I had a shower, a cup of coffee, went for a walk, shook my head, played a mazurka on the piano— to no avail. The hateful hallucinatory music continued unabated. Finally I phoned a friend, Orlan Fox, and said that I was hearing songs that I could not stop, songs that seemed to me full of melancholy and a sort of horror. The worst thing, I added, was that the songs were in German, a language I did not know. Orlan asked me to sing or hum some of the songs. I did so, and there was a long pause.

“Have you abandoned some of your young patients?” he asked. “Or destroyed some of your literary children?”

“Both,” I answered. “Yesterday. I resigned from the children’s unit at the hospital where I have been working, and I burned a book of essays I had just written…. How did you guess?”

“Your mind is playing Mahler’s
Kindertotenlieder,
” he said, “his songs of mourning for the death of children.” I was amazed by this, for I rather dislike Mahler’s music and would normally find it quite difficult to remember in detail, let alone sing, any of his
Kindertotenlieder.
But here my dreaming mind, with infallible precision, had come up with an appropriate symbol of the previous day’s events. And in the moment that Orlan interpreted the dream, the music disappeared; it has never recurred in the thirty years since.

In the curious intermediate states between waking and sleep— the “hypnagogic” state that may precede sleep or the “hypnopompic” state that may follow awakening— free-floating reverie and dreamlike or hallucinatory apparitions are particularly common. These tend to be highly visual, kaleidoscopic, elusive, and difficult to remember— but on occasion they may take the form of coherent musical hallucination. Later in 1974, I had an accident requiring surgery to one leg and was hospitalized for several weeks in a tiny windowless room that did not allow any radio reception. A friend brought me a tape recorder, along with a single cassette— of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto.
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I played this constantly, dozens of times a day, and one morning, in that delicious hypnopompic state that follows waking, I heard the Mendelssohn playing. I was not dreaming but fully aware that I was lying in a hospital bed, and that my tape recorder was by my side. One of the nurses, I thought, must have put it on, as a novel way of waking me up. Gradually I surfaced, the music continuing all the while, until I was able to stretch out a sleepy hand to turn the recorder off. When I did this, I found that the machine
was
off. In the moment of realizing this, and being startled into full wakefulness, the hallucinatory Mendelssohn abruptly ceased.

I had never experienced coherent, continuous, perception-like music in hypnagogic or hypnopompic states before this, nor have I since. I suspect that it was a combination of events that tipped me into “hearing” music in this way: the almost nonstop exposure to Mendelssohn, which had supersaturated my brain,
plus
the hypnopompic state.

But after speaking to a number of professional musicians about this, I find that intensely vivid musical imagery or quasi-hallucination is not uncommon in such states. Melanie Challenger, a poet who writes libretti for operas, told me that when she wakes from her afternoon siesta and is in a “borderline” state, she may experience very loud, very vivid orchestral music— “it is like having an orchestra in the room.” She is perfectly aware at such times that she is lying in bed in her own room and that there is no orchestra, but she can hear all the individual instruments and their combinations with a richness and a realness that she does not have with her ordinary musical imagery. She says that it is never a single piece that she hears, but a patchwork of musical fragments and musical devices “stitched together,” a sort of kaleidoscopic playing with music. Nonetheless, some of these hypnopompic fragments may stick in her mind and play an important role in her subsequent compositions.
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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:

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:

T
here 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.
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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: