musicophilia / 3:34 pm

About two months ago, I bought Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia. I've been wanting to read it, but haven't started until three minutes ago, due to a shortage of pleasurable and truly educational reading time. Already, I am underlining whole paragraphs and feeling excitement bubble up from Sacks' excellent research and writing on the effects of music on the body and the brain--on life. As a future music therapist, I feel it is extremely important for more people to understand how music affects us, even though there are still many unknowns. Music is something most people use every day, whether or not they are "musical," yet never stop to think about. Here is a long excerpt I just read:

"We humans are a musical species no less than a linguistic one. This takes many different forms. All of us (with very few exceptions) can perceive music, perceive tones, timbre, pitch intervals, melodic contours, harmony, and (perhaps most elementally) rhythm. We integrate all of these and 'construct' music in our minds using many different parts of the brain. And to this largely unconscious structural appreciation of music is added an often intense and profound emotional reaction to music. 'The inexpressible depth of music,' Schopenhauer wrote, 'so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain.... Music expresses only the quintessence of life and of its events, never these themselves.'

Listening to music is not just auditory and emotional, it is motoric as well: 'We listen to music with our muscles,' as Nietzsche wrote. We keep time to music, involuntarily, even if we are not consciously attending to it, and our faces and postures mirror the 'narrative' of the melody, and the thoughts and feelings it provokes.

Much that occurs during the perception of music can also occur when music is 'played in the mind.' The imagining of music, even in relatively nonmusical people, tends to be remarkably faithful not only to the tune and feeling of the original but to its pitch and temp. Underlying this is the extraordinary tenacity of musical memory, so that much of what is heard during one's early years may be 'engraved' on the brain for the rest of one's life. Our auditory systems, our nervous systems, are indeed exquisitely tuned for music. How much of this is due to the intrinsic characteristics of music itself--its complex sonic patterns woven in time, its logic, its momentum, its unbreakable sequences, its insistent rhythms and repetitions, the mysterious way in which it embodies emotion and 'will'--and how much to special resonances, synchronizations, oscillations ,mutual excitations, or feedbacks in the immensely complex, multilevel neural circuitry that underlies musical perception and replay, we do not yet know."