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Musicophilia
a guidee for music lovers
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Research about musical experience can be found in various works written about the experience of joy felt from music listening or seeing visual art. Gabrielsson and Lindström gathered and analysed more than 1000 case descriptions over a period of ten years, in which participants were asked to describe in as much detail as possible the most powerful and most impressive musical experiences they had ever had. References to such musical experiences in literature are not rare, however they are related to a variety of results – involving demographics, geography, environment, etc. The author conducted a phenomenological analysis as a subjective psychological aspect’s research method of musical experience, where music listening and musical experience ‘goes together’ with musicking.
Hybrid, 2019
This book review evaluates Musicophilia (2008) by Oliver Sacks, a book which compassionately shares the stories of patients with neurological conditions that subsequently change the way they perceive music. The field of music psychology, in which this book sits, was historically overlooked by physicians as Sacks states in his preface that there was ‘scarcely any mention of the subject until 1977’ (Sacks, 2008: 9). Although fascinating presentday advances in technology have changed this, and is allowing for a deeper understanding of the underpinnings of musical perception, Sacks’ claims that such advances may mask ‘the simple art of observation [...], clinical description [...] and the richness of human context’ (Sacks, 2008: 9). This apparent over-reliance on modern technology in discovering the new characteristics of music psychology that Sacks has described here, may have influenced his choice in using personal testimonies (or anecdotal evidence) as the method to present the music...
Journal of Islamic Studies, 2024
This is a beautifully written and judiciously argued book on how Muslims have historically negotiated identity and difference (or in the author's words: 'a genealogy of Muslim difference-a narrative of how Muslims have defined the line between themselves and others' [p. 4]). Youshaa Patel traces the interpretive history of the hadith, 'Whoever imitates a people becomes one of them', across fourteen centuries of conversation among traditionists, Sufis, and jurists. His aim is to demonstrate that Muslims have understood and embodied identity in different styles that reflect a profound understanding of 'imitation' (tashabbuh), especially on the part of the learned elite (ulema). I highlight below some key aspects of this book: its astute argument, its creative use of sources, and its nimble attention to questions of materiality and historical context. I shall also discuss the epilogue wherein Patel departs from his descriptive-analytical voice to offer some constructive advice to contemporary Muslims, especially his coreligionists in the United States. Finally, I wish to register my 'small difference' from Patel's argument and approach, particularly concerning his deployment of a mixture of psychoanalysis and ego psychology. But before all this, a summary of this rich volume is in order.
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By Michiko Kakutani
- Nov. 20, 2007
In books like “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” and “An Anthropologist on Mars,” the physician Oliver Sacks has given us some compelling and deeply moving portraits of patients in predicaments so odd, so vexing, so metaphysically curious that they read like something out of a tale by Borges or Calvino.
In his latest book, “Musicophilia,” Dr. Sacks focuses on people afflicted with strange musical disorders or powers — “musical misalignments” that affect their professional and daily lives. A composer of atonal music starts having musical hallucinations that are “tonal” and “corny”: irritating Christmas songs and lullabies that play endlessly in his head. A musical savant with a “phonographic” memory learns the melodies to hundreds of operas, as well as what every instrument plays and what every voice sings. A composer with synesthesia sees specific colors when he hears music in different musical keys: G minor, for instance, is not just “yellow” but “ocher”; D minor is “like flint, graphite”; and F minor is “earthy, ashy.” A virtuosic pianist who for many years bizarrely lost the use of his right hand, finds at the age of 36 that the fourth and fifth fingers of his right hand have started to curl uncontrollably under his palm when he plays.
Dr. Sacks writes not just as a doctor and a scientist but also as a humanist with a philosophical and literary bent, and he’s able in these pages to convey both the fathomless mysteries of the human brain and the equally profound mysteries of music: an art that is “completely abstract and profoundly emotional,” devoid of the power to “represent anything particular or external,” but endowed with the capacity to express powerful, inchoate moods and feelings.
He muses upon the unequal distribution of musical gifts among the human population: Che Guevara, he tells us, was “rhythm deaf,” capable of dancing a mambo while an orchestra was playing a tango, whereas Freud and Nabokov seemed incapable of receiving any pleasure from music at all. He writes about the “narrative or mnemonic power of music,” its ability to help a person follow intricate sequences or retain great volumes of information — a power that explains why music can help someone with autism perform procedures he or she might otherwise be incapable of.
And he writes about the power of rhythm to help coordinate and energize basic locomotive movement, a power that explains why music can help push athletes to new levels and why the right sort of music (generally, legato with a well-defined rhythm) can help liberate some parkinsonian patients from “their frozenness.”
Indeed, this volume makes a powerful case for the benefits of music therapy. In Dr. Sacks’ view, music can aid aphasics and patients with parkinsonism, and it can help orient and anchor patients with advanced dementia because “musical perception, musical sensibility, musical emotion and musical memory can survive long after other forms of memory have disappeared.”
Music, he says, can act as a “Proustian mnemonic, eliciting emotions and associations that had been long forgotten, giving the patient access once again to mood and memories, thoughts and worlds that had seemingly been completely lost.”
As he’s done in his earlier books, Dr. Sacks underscores the resilience of the human mind, the capacity of some people to find art in affliction, and to adapt to loss and deprivation. Among the people who appear in this book are children with Williams syndrome, who have low I.Q.’s and extraordinary musical and narrative gifts (one young woman learns to sing operatic arias in more than 30 languages), and elderly dementia patients who develop unexpected musical talents.
Dr. Sacks notes that there are stories in medical literature about people who develop artistic gifts after left-hemisphere strokes, and he suggests that “there may be a variety of inhibitions — psychological, neurological and social — which may, for one reason or another, relax in one’s later years and allow a creativity as surprising to oneself as to others.”
The composer Tobias Picker, who has Tourette’s, tells Dr. Sacks that the syndrome has shaped his imagination: “I live my life controlled by Tourette’s but use music to control it. I have harnessed its energy — I play with it, manipulate it, trick it, mimic it, taunt it, explore it, exploit it, in every possible way.”
Dr. Sacks notes that while the composer’s newest piano concerto “is full of turbulent, agitated whirls and twirls” in sections, Mr. Picker is able to write in every mode — “the dreamy and tranquil no less than the violent and stormy” — and can move “from one mood to another with consummate ease.”
Although this book could have benefited from some heavy-duty editing that would have removed repetitions and occasional patches of technical jargon, these lapses are easily overlooked by the reader, so powerful and compassionate are Dr. Sacks’ accounts of his patients’ dilemmas. He has written a book that not only contributes to our understanding of the elusive magic of music but also illuminates the strange workings, and misfirings, of the human mind.
MUSICOPHILIA
Tales of music and the brain.
By Oliver Sacks
381 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.
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