Every now and then I tune in to my head to see
what’s playing there: sometimes nothing, sometimes a childhood song,
sometimes an annoying advertising ditty, sometimes a symphonic bit I can
identify, or can’t. When my sister called this noon I asked,
“What’s playing in your head?” “Just bills.”
“What’s this?” I sang her the few measures that had been
circling through mine all morning. “Oh, that’s a Mozart piano
concerto,” she said, and hung up. When was the last time I heard that
concerto? No clue. My nephew Josh continually hears music. When he was 8 he
woke up screaming. They finally figured out he was hearing the cannons of
the “1812 Overture.” There are a lot of people whose heads play
all the time, not with those ever-present earphones and iPods (though
perhaps influenced by these) but, like Josh’s, on their own. The
music might be pleasant, dull, but it’s increasingly maddening if you
can’t switch channels.
Last Christmas we visited friends whose mother had
Alzheimer’s. Mary could only recognize one of her children,
didn’t speak, was in constant agitation — but when my
granddaughter sang “Angels We Have Heard on High,” we noticed
Mary’s lips moving on the “glorias.” We were amazed,
repeated the chorus as a group, and Mary sang along. We started another
carol; Mary sang, words and music. She sang happily with us for an hour.
That brings me to the neurologist Oliver Sacks’ book. The last
chapter deals with music and dementia, principally Alzheimer’s: The
brain’s special musical area is the last to fade. We’d had a
confirmation.
Musicophilia
needn’t be read like a novel or even an informational book. I
recommend the preface and the first few chapters, to orient yourself, the
guy struck by lightning, and on through seizures and brain worms, sticky
music, and catchy tunes — even music hallucination — and then,
if you’re like me, skimming the neurological stuff — yes, a
terrific lot has been learned about the brain in the last two decades, but
can I comprehend every detail? — then graze here and there, zeroing
in on what interests you, especially the stories. Sacks is a compelling
storyteller, and this book is loaded — some stories long, some
anecdotal, with a generous spill-over into footnotes, for he can’t
resist peripheral stories. He describes musical savants. Synesthetes who
literally see music in color (and smell and taste it sometimes, too.) Those
with absolute pitch, or perfect pitch, or, alas, are tone-deaf. Amnesiacs
with no remembrance of past or sense of future, and only a few second of
the present moment, who live “on a tiny platform above the
abyss.” Musicians such as Beethoven who go deaf or, like Schumann, go
mad or, like one pianist described in the book, lose an arm.
You don’t have to know much about music to find
this book fascinating — it merely requires being human. The regret
I’ve had for some time now, and that has grown deeper, is that I
never queried my grandfather about what his deafness was like. I assumed
total silence. Nor did I ask my mother, blind for the last 10 years of her
life, whether there was heightening of her other senses, especially music,
which she loved. This book has made me more aware, and I find myself asking
others besides my sister what’s playing in their heads — a
conversation-starter or stopper, by the way — and also warning kids,
including my grandkids, that if they don’t tone it down they’ll
continue to lose enough of their cochlea’s irreplaceable 3,500 hair
cells—
their auditory receptors — that they’ll join the currently
estimated 15 percent (and growing) of young people with significant hearing
loss. And that a delicate ear is something to prize, something passionately
worth saving.
Jacqueline Jackson, books and poetry editor of Illinois Times,
is a professor emerita of English at the University
of Illinois at Springfield.
This article appears in Jul 17-23, 2008.
