Music from the Inside Out

Rob Kapilow is a genius. His book All You Have To Do Is Listen is the best I've found for explaining classical music to the likes of me.

Lots of people avoid classical music entirely, saying it's boring and has no plot. Others are more like me, listening contentedly (in the words of composer Aaron Copland) "on the sensuous plane ... for the sheer pleasure of the musical sound itself ... the plane on which we hear music without thinking, without considering it in any way."

Kapilow says we can learn to listen to music for its "plot," if we want, and not just because it sounds good to us. (Of course, a lot of classical music doesn't sound that good, on purpose, because the composer had other ideas.) Yes, Kapilow says, classical music does have a storyline, just as a movie or soap opera does. Though it's a musical storyline, not a verbal one, it uses sonic equivalents to words, phrases, sentences, and larger verbal structures.

The secret is to be told how to listen for the "vocabulary" the composer is using: how the composer constructs a narrative arc, as it were, out of such building blocks as musical motives, phrases, and periods.

Here's an example from the book, which can also be found as Chapter 3, Example 15 here:






In Carnival of the Animals, Camille Saint-Saëns uses the first five notes in the top staff of the score as a pattern (a "motive") which gets repeated two more times in quick succession, first with its notes lowered (transposed) in pitch; then moved even lower, and with the intervals between the pitches somewhat enlarged. Then near the conclusion of this musical "phrase" there are four "repeated notes" and then one slightly lower note. At the very end is a single concluding chord in the lower three instruments.

The ear hears the two repetitions of the opening motive as such — as repetitions, that is — even if they go by too fast for the mind to say as much, and even if they are not precisely identical to the opening motive itself.

But, says Kapilow, the mind can train itself to say, very quickly, "Aha! The multiple repetitions of the opening few notes, albeit transposed and varied somewhat, mean something: that that pattern of notes is a musical idea which Saint-Saëns intends to impress upon his audience. Having done that through repetition, he can then contrast the opening motive with the tail end of his musical phrase. The tail end sounds like a way to end the musical phrase because of how Saint-Saëns began the phrase. Another beginning would not have worked with that ending."

In much the same way, a TV show's plot has an ending that necessarily goes with the story's beginning ... it is potentiated by the beginning. We are all experts, are we not?, at having some idea of how a TV show can be expected to end, even before we have seen the ending.

With music, most of us today can't predict much of the musical "plot" beyond, say, the next four to eight measures. Given that the average symphony lasts longer than the average soap opera episode, we feel hopelessly lost when we listen to classical music. We feel it has no plot, and we get bored.

Kapilow shows how we can listen, instead, to classical music "from the inside out," allowing ourselves to become fully aware of what the composer is trying to say, musically — of what he expects his audience to be able to decipher and understand ... and even anticipate happening half an hour later, at the end of the symphony.

Yes, it takes work to learn. But Kapilow has been delivering his advice to receptive audiences for some twenty years now, first with his What Makes It Great? programs on National Public Radio and more recently with talks at such places as Lincoln Center and via CDs and podcasts. Many thousands of people have come to understand classical music at his hands. Now I'm one of them ...

Why Doesn't America Love Soccer?

Why isn't soccer as big in America as in the rest of the world?

After all, the game can be 90+ minutes of sheer cardiac arrest! In the 2010 World Cup opening round, that's what happened to Team USA's rooters.

Team USA — I call them the Glorious Yanks — scored the only goal scored by either team in its game against Algeria — it was both teams' third and final first-round match — and, instead of being sent home, the Yanks went through into the next round as outright winners in Group C!

One single goal, coming in the first of four minutes of extra time, tacked on to make up for clock stoppages during the ordinary run of play, made all the difference.

Only in a game where anything can happen can the outcome turn on a dime that way. Soccer is a low-scoring game; anything can happen.

Do Americans hate that it's so low-scoring? Yes, I think that's a big part of our resistance to soccer.

But it's low-scoring because of the laws of the game. Take the offside rule. It says that when the attacking team has the ball in the defenders' half of the field and plays the ball forward toward the defenders' goal line, no member of the attacking team shall gain an advantage by being closer to the goal line than anyone on the defending team, other than its goalkeeper. When the ball is played forward, even if you're not the player it's directed toward, you'd better have at least one defender closer to the goal than you ... and the opposing keeper doesn't count.

The offside rule makes it hard to score in soccer. That's what it's there for.

Earlier in the Algeria game, the referee called USA's Clint Dempsey offside when Dempsey scored the apparent first goal of the game. The goal was wiped out.

TV replays showed conclusively that Dempsey was in fact onside at the moment when the ball was played forward in his direction, and the goal should have counted. But it didn't. So, much later, with the score knotted 0-0 in the 91st minute of the game, when the USA goalkeeper thwarted a shot by the Algerians and heaved the ball upfield to star midfielder Landon Donovan, and then twelve seconds later Donovan had put the ball in the opposing net after three other players had touched the ball — including the Algerian goalkeeper — it was pure ecstasy.

It wouldn't have been pure ecstasy if the Dempsey goal had stood.

But for the fact that the game was tied at the time of Donovan's tally, and draws are permitted in the World Cup's first round, it would have been ho hum. If the game had wound up being drawn, though, Slovenia, from Team USA's Group C, would have advanced alongside England, and our men would have been packing their bags for home.

So, yes, had the Dempsey goal stood — as it would have stood if there had been no offside rule — chances are USA would have advanced in a cakewalk of a high-scoring game. USA were clearly the better of the two teams on the pitch that day. What's more, the Algerians were obviously out of gas toward the end, while the superbly conditioned Yanks were still crisp. In the sense that the offside rule puts a damper on scoring by both teams, it helps the lesser team keep from getting blown out by the greater on any given day.

Still, the better team on paper won the USA-Algeria game. Moreover, the team that played better on that given day won the match. Justice was served. Yet the result might so easily have been different, which is why soccer-loving Americans, tiny in numbers, let out a yell that could be heard on the moon when Landon Donovan managed to score that decisive goal.

Americans should love soccer. The game is exquisitely balanced between being too low in scoring and too high. The inferior team sometimes wins — or draws, in games that can be drawn. Justice is not always served.

But that's a good thing! It's why heart-stopping emotion rides on every shot in the most popular sport in the the world, the one that the rest of the world calls "football."

Music: Magical Healer of Divine Origin?

Oliver Sacks' book of essays Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain is exhibit one in the case for music as the magical healer of the human mind, body, and soul.

Dr. Sacks is a practicing neurologist who has written a number of books about how the brain works — and how it sometimes fails to work — in making us who and what we are. A lifelong music lover and devoted amateur pianist, Sacks is fascinated by how victims of stroke, Alzheimer's, Parkinsonism, Tourette's syndrome, and epilepsy find that listening to music, or actively playing or singing it, can quell or eliminate symptoms.

True, many professional musicians find the long hours of practicing, over many years, can damage them neurologically. The classical pianist Leon Fleisher was crushed as a young man approaching the height of an acclaimed career to note that the fourth and fifth fingers of his right hand were starting to curl uncontrollably when he played. This was in 1963; at 36, he could no longer play or practice his instrument. When he tried to force himself to uncurl his fingers at the piano keyboard, his condition only worsened, and nothing the doctors offered helped. He had to stop performing entirely.

After overcoming a deep depression, he started to teach other pianists, and to conduct. Some years later he happened across a rich repertory of classical music for one-handed pianists and made it his own. Years rolled by. Finally, it was discovered that botox injections might alleviate a musician's dystonia — we now know that musician's dystonia can happen when the parts of the brain that are supposed to keep track of (say) what the individual fingers are sensing stop accomplishing that feat properly — but Fleisher found he, personally, had to combine botox with rolfing therapy in order that the small muscles of his hand and forearm could be loosened up enough to allow the botox to work.

In 1996, a semi-restored Fleisher was able to give his first two-handed performance in three decades, and by 2003 he was giving a solo recital at Carnegie Hall. The following year he issued his first major recording in forty years, Two Hands (cover at right).

The real story here is not the magic of botox. It is the way in which Fleisher had, during his years of not being able to play with both hands, come to realize "the most important thing in my life was not playing with two hands, it was music ... The instrumentation [became] unimportant, and ... the substance and content [took] over."

The substance and content of music can be a near-panacea for those devastated by brain-based disorders, Sacks reports. For instance, people who can't normally control the tics, jerks, and involuntary vocalizations of Tourette's syndrome can be helped simply by playing music together:

The attractions, the joys, and the therapeutic powers of drumming and drum circles are widely known in the Tourette's community. In New York City recently, I [Sacks] took part in a drum circle organized by Matt Giordano, a gifted drummer with severe Tourette's. When he is not focused or engaged, Matt is in constant Tourette motion — and, indeed, everyone in the room that day seemed to be ticcing, ticcing in their own time. I could see eruptions of tics, contagions of tics, rippling around the thirty-odd Touretters there — but once the drum circle started, with Matt leading them, all the ticcing disappeared within seconds. Suddenly there was synchronization, and they came together as a group ... . Music here had a double power: first, to reconfigure brain activity, and bring calm and focus to people who were sometimes distracted or preoccupied by incessant tics and impulses; and second, to promote a musical and social bonding with others, so that what began as a miscellany of isolated, often distressed or self-conscious individuals almost instantly became a cohesive group with a single aim — a veritable drum orchestra under Matt's baton.

There are also "musical savants": people of otherwise low intelligence, stemming from abnormal brain development or function, who nevertheless might resemble a particular mentally and physically impaired adult man Sacks discusses, Martin. As Sacks describes him, Martin had a "phonographic memory" for music. This — yes, gifted — man:

... knew more than two thousand operas, as well as the Messiah, the Christmas Oratorio, and all of Bach's cantatas. I brought along scores of some of these, and tested him as best I could; I found I was unable to fault him. And it was not just the melodies that he remembered. He had learned, from listening to performances, what every instrument played, what every voice sang. When I played him a piece by Debussy that he had never heard, he was able to repeat it, almost flawlessly, on the piano. He then transposed it into different keys and extemporized on it a little, in a Debussyan way. He could grasp the rules and conventions of any music he heard, even if it was unfamiliar or not to his taste. This was musicianship of the highest order, in a man who was otherwise so mentally impoverished.

Many stroke victims, too, retain exquisite sensitivity to music. Sacks says many stroke patients he has seen have lost the ability to speak, but when exposed to familiar hymns, they can sing along with the best of them. And many whom strokes have robbed of the ability to initiate ordinary movements such as walking can walk quite normally in time to music!

Music is like a second soul to some. For example, a certain percentage of adults have "absolute pitch," the ability to tell accurately the pitch of any note played at random on the piano keyboard. For these individuals, every key — "key" in music has to do with which note is the anchor of the scale in which the music is played — is as distinct as, say, a palette of blues is from a palette of reds. For people who lack absolute or "perfect" pitch, transposing a song from, let's say, the key of B to that of F-sharp leaves the basic shape of the music unchanged, but to those with perfect pitch, key transposition can seem wrong, wrong, wrong!

On the other hand, music has especially deep resonances for those blessed with perfect pitch. Each piece, rendered in its own proper key, conveys a sort of "meaning" to those with absolute pitch that is lost on the rest of us. Sacks says there is evidence that we all may be born with perfect pitch, but most of us lose it as we learn to speak our first childhood language. However, people whose native language uses tones to convey meaning — Chinese, say — tend more often to keep perfect pitch beyond early childhood. Hence, possibly the right sort of musical or tonal training in infancy, whether or not it comes from learning our first language, might save the majority of us from losing our inborn perfect pitch.

When a person is in deep depression, often he or she can feel no resonances whatever. Inwardly, the person is dead. Some, as did British philosopher John Stuart Mill, can stave off chronic depression by exposure to music in general, says Sacks.

The problem is a tougher one for music to solve, for those already in depression. For many of them, it may only be one particular piece of music that will pierce their depressive "cocoon." And it may have to come to their ears by sheer accident, rather than by design or intent. Sacks tells the story that his own mother's death put him in a zombie state for weeks following the traditional Jewish period of sitting shivah for her — "sitting shivah" is a ritual in which family and loved ones for seven days formally mourn the loss of a beloved:

For weeks I would get up, dress, drive to work, see my patients, try to present a normal appearance. But inside I was dead, as lifeless as a zombie. Then one day as I was walking down Bronx Park East, I felt a sudden lightening, a quickening of mood, a sudden whisper or intimation of life, of joy. Only then did I realize that I was hearing music, though so faintly that it might have been no more than an image or a memory. As I continued to walk, the music grew louder, until finally I came to its source, a radio pouring schubert out of an open basement window. The music pierced me, releasing a cascade of images and feelings — memories of childhood, of summer holidays together, and of my mother's fondness for Schubert ... . I found myself not only smiling for the first time in weeks, but laughing aloud — and alive once again.

Sacks was in a rush to catch a train, so he kept walking ... right back into an obdurate depression. Intentional re-exposure to Schubert failed to lift it. So did attending a performance by his favorite baritone, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau:

I was demanding that the music work [Sacks writes], where experience had shown me that demanding never succeeds. The power of music, whether joyous or cathartic, must steal on one unawares, come spontaneously as a blessing or a grace — as it did when the music stole from the basement window, or when [on an earlier occasion] I was prized open, helplessly, by the brokenhearted eloquence of Zelenka's Lamentations. ("The Arts are not drugs," E.M. Forster once wrote. "They are not guaranteed to act when taken. Something as mysterious and capricious as the creative impulse has to be released before they can act.")

Sacks tells his readers that he pretty much lacks religious belief. But here, in the guise of music, would seem to me to be a God who answers prayers as long as they are not couched as demands. Does not the magic of music, then, come to us from the mind of God?