The speech of angels
Being a self-admitted geek, I can admit that Oliver Sacks, M.D. is one of my favorite non-fiction authors. I’ve read Awakenings, An Anthropologist on Mars. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and his latest, Musicophilia. (The first was also a very good film with Robin Williams playing Dr. Sacks and Robert De Niro as the patient who goes to sleep as a child and awakes a middle-aged man.) Dr. Sacks is a neurologist who is also a gifted writer about the mysteries of the human brain.
Music threads through all of Dr. Sacks’ books, since he comes from a multi-talented family and is a musician himself. Musicophilia deals with the power of music on the hidden chambers of our brains. Music occupies more areas of our brain than language does–humans are a musical species is Dr. Sacks’ contention. His case studies of brain-damaged adults who suddenly have an uncontrollable urge to learn music and of people who don’t “get” music because their brains perceive the sweetest notes as jarring dissonance are fascinating.
If music claims more of our brains’ real estate than language, as Dr. Sacks explains, then it follows that it speaks to us more persuasively. Reading Musicophilia, I felt sorry for those who can’t enjoy music. Not knowing the joy of scatting with Ella Fitzgerald, rocking to Aerosmith with the windows down in the car, crooning with Frank Sinatra while housecleaning or belting Dusty Springfield in the shower makes one poor indeed.
I can listen to music from my past and immediately be taken back to a moment or a feeling. Discovering new music is a pleasure unlike any other. My brother sent me Raising Sand, a gorgeous collaboration between soprano fiddler Alison Krauss and Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant some weeks ago and I still haven’t tired of it. While their pairing may seem odd, they are superb singers whose voices mesh like strands of silk and pearls. Their CD is an exquisite surprise.
Driving home today, I popped in an ancient CD by El Trio Matamoros, an influential trio of guitars and maracas that epitomized Cuban music when my grandparents were young marrieds in the 1920s and 1930s. As a little girl in Havana, I remember sunny afternoons when their LPs played on a suitcase record player in my grandparents’ house. Many decades after, I found a collection of the group’s best known songs on Amazon.com and the first listen took me back to memories recessed deep in my brain and unlocked by music. Lyrics, guitar rhythms and entire choruses came back to me despite not having heard the songs since I was about eight years old. As Oscar Wilde said, “Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memory.”
There’s very little music I can’t enjoy on some level. Flamenco guitars, Indian ragas, salsa, blues, Western swing, cowboy ballads, heavy metal. Broadway show tunes can all take me somewhere special. I don’t mind listening to Michael Buble, AC/DC, Beny More, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, The Doors, Joe Strummer and Doris Day in the same mp3 mix; in fact, I enjoy those eclectic mixes more than listening to the same CD.
My friend Amy left me a voice mail this month saying that, if I didn’t call her back, she would start singing Barry Manilow tunes to me. She knows there are actually a few sounds I can’t stand listening to. There aren’t many, however, and I can avoid them most of the time. Having a friend who’s a Fanilow just means that my friends don’t necessarily have to share my musical tastes (but it helps).
Music soothes, elevates, saddens, enervates and gladdens the heart and mind. Thomas Carlyle expressed its power perfectly: it is the speech of angels and the beating of our hearts. It’s the cheapest pleasure on earth.
