More On Mirror Neurons

I'm betting that of all the new information we're getting about how our brains respond to music, what we find out about mirror neurons will be the most helpful in explaining how music can affect us so deeply. It's beginning to look like the ability of music to trigger mirror neurons will be the key to understanding how it can encode emotional content. 

Music is a language, but it's much more non-verbal than verbal. For me, when we talk about musicality, we're talking about how music and music makers can suggest to us everything from a marching army to a flirtatious wink, from the movements and gestures of someone deeply sad to the movements and gestures of someone exuberantly joyous. Sometimes emotionally evocative gestures are partly embedded in the physical playing of an instrument, like the harp. More often the gestural communication is in the music itself and is brought out by how it's played. Years ago I came up with the notion that, at least in part, music is gesture made audible, and the neuroscience seems to be suggesting that's the case.

Here are two excerpts from the article mentioned in a previous post. The first talks about mirror neurons and the second alludes to what I've mentioned before, how in the brain it seems almost every function is mediated by others, and nothing is particularly straight forward.

As they expected, the areas of the brain that manage emotions, like the amygdala, lit up for all subjects when the researchers played the expressive version. But, contrary to their expectations, those areas, instead of continuously fluctuating in response to changes in the music, remained relatively constant.

What surprised the scientists was the part of the brain that actually did vary: the mirror neuron system.

Large explained that when we see someone doing something, our mirror neuron system attempts to replicate the same condition in our own mind. This enables us to empathize with someone else on a very fundamental level.

The discovery that mirror neurons are involved in hearing music shows that when we listen to music, the same cells that are active in motor actions are part of the response to the music. . . 

. . . Heather Chapin, a doctoral student at the time the study was done who ran the experiments, commented on the difficulty of trying to understand the workings of the brain from the outside: "I'm a black and white kind of girl, and human neuroimaging was much more gray than I was prepared to handle.". . .

Another Testimonial

This article talks about how music therapy, specifically "neurologic music therapy" (a term I've not seen before) has been part of the wonderful recovery Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords seems to be having.

. . . When Miss Giffords mouthed the words of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star as her music therapist Maegan Morrow sang the ditty and strummed a guitar, it brought tears to those gathered at her bedside. She has now progressed to sing-alongs of jazz and rock classics such as I Can't Give You Anything But Love and American Pie. . .

. . . Miss Gifford's mother, Gloria, has told friends that her daughter's transformation from a "limp noodle" after the attack owes much to music sessions where family and friends "clap and hoot" as back-up chorus and band. The neurologic music therapy - an integral part of her packed daily routine of physical, occupational and speech therapy - "really flipped the switch" for the congresswoman, Mrs Giffords said. . . 

Music Dynamics Lab at FAU

My Google news aggregation page just pointed me to this article on the "Meaning of Music". It raises a point I want to address in a future post. For now, though, want to post a link to this wonderful Quicktime depiction of the effect of a piece of music on the brain that I found following the link in the article to the Music Dynamics Lab at Florida Atlantic University. Here's a link to their publications. 

Oboe Sashay

This is the audio of my friend Craig Matovich playing Louisiana Sashay. As discussed in this previous post, besides playing the flute part on oboe with a midi version of the harp part, he's added hand percussion and bass. 

I knew Craig at Shenandoah Conservatory back from '77 to '80. He, I and Susan were among the handful of students who weren't fresh out of high school and tended to hang together. His oboe sound was amazing and I thought about getting one to try until he took me aside and showed me his reed making room and talked about spending as much time making reeds as practicing. Then and there I decided double reeds were not for me.

Craig went on to teach for a while at Shenandoah. He was also a founding member of Oxymora, a group that was/is sort of over in the Paul Winter Consort neighborhood. 

As Craig says, I'm giving away the music to this piece, just asking for, if it gets worked up, an mp3 and maybe some photos of the performers to make a video like this one to have the audio here on the blog to compare and contrast with other versions. Even better would be the performers doing the YouTube themselves as Craig has done so that all I have to do is embed it. (I'm on rural dial-up and uploads take a while.) I can be reached at MusicMakersMusic at aol dot com.

Craig has used the "Louisiana Sashay" title that was on the score I sent him. Carol, the harpist for whom it was written used just "The Sashay" once when referring to it and I liked that. Dr. Andy, a musical companion of over 15 years prefers the working title "Vermont Song". I blogged the composition of this piece in an effort to demystify the composition process, and that was what it was first called. I think all of those titles work and can't settle on one being better than the others.

Narratives and Enactments

Here a couple of weeks ago Craig, an oboe playing friend from conservatory days, commented on Facebook how much he was enjoying a piece with a 5/4 time signature. I sent him a email talking about how much I enjoy irregular rhythms and included links to The Sashay and Timepiece. He asked for the music to The Sashay (and a midi file, which I had to figure out how to do). He's liking The Sashay enough to work on it and send me mp3 files of each version he's recorded with his oboe, adding some hand percussion, a bass, and tweaking the midi harp playback.

For one thing, he's a wonderful oboeist and I'm having a similar response to the one I had hearing The St Clements Wind Ensemble play Timepiece. Really good players take notes I've written and bring out depths of musicality I simply was unable to even imagine before hearing them.

Another thing that strikes me is that the piece is really holding up with the different instrumentation. I can't wait to compare it to what Susan and Carol do with it, but I'm pretty sure the evoked feelings will be different, though with some overlap. I'm enough of a chauvinist to think two Louisiana ladies with flute and harp are going to excel at evoking the flirtatious movements and banter that was in the back of my mind when I wrote it for them and that I hope is gesturally embedded in the music. 

They have also been steered in that direction because of my having long conversations with Susan detailing what I was thinking at various measures along the way. She suggested I do a post of all those mental visuals that helped me compose the music, but I didn't, and Craig's work is helping me understand my reluctance.

Sometime back I linked to a post of Kyle Gann's where he said he thought of his music scores as lines for a play, that different players and groups of players would perform them differently, just as plays are performed/produced differently. I agree with that wholeheartedly. My feeling is that if when composing music I make it coherent enough for me to feel a musical narrative run from measure to measure, then players will be able to sense that narrative in their own way and enact it convincingly, even if their sense of the narrative is different from mine.

And that's what Craig has done. His take on The Sashay is exceptionally dance-like, and I think because of his amazingly textured oboe sound combining with the unusual rhythms there's an Armenian, near Eastern, Scheherazade feel to what he's doing. He keeps sending updated mp3s that clean up various things, but here soon I hope to do one of those simple YouTube embed posts with the audio as it stands now. Then blog readers can decide for themselves whether there's a convincing narrative and what a particular enactment does with it.

One of the things I most enjoyed back when I had the private practice in San Antonio was the yearly recitals with various clients playing various instruments. There were always a few piano players and I always had all of them play one piece in common with the others, along with the things only they were doing. Hearing different players present their individual enactments of  the same piece was always a wonderful illustration of just how expressive of our personalities making music can be.

Memory Aids

Here are two articles having to do with memory. The first concerns a study on older people.

A new study shows that one year of moderate physical exercise can increase the size of the brain's hippocampus in older adults, leading to an improvement in spatial memory. . . .The right hippocampus expanded in the older folks who exercised and shrank in the older folks who did not exercise. If you sit idly your capacity to form memories will decay.

For me, this study's results strengthens my feeling that there are a number of things people can do in their everyday lives that will benefit their music making (for which better memory is an asset). As a music therapist, I feel the reverse is also true, that going about music making in a non-stressed way can be of overall benefit to people in various ways. 

In an earlier post I made the point that a basic finding of the new neuroscience research is that within the brain all sorts of functions mediate all sorts of other functions. It's more an ecosystem than a machine. This study suggests that on a much more general level our non-musical behaviors can mediate our musical behaviors.

The second article is about a study indicating taking a test, i.e. working with retrieving information from memory, is better than other study methods.

Why retrieval testing helps is still unknown. Perhaps it is because by remembering information we are organizing it and creating cues and connections that our brains later recognize.

This study reminded me of a back and forth I had with Jeffrey Agrell some time ago about the benefits of practicing with the eyes closed. This study suggests that part of the benefit of doing that is that when not looking at the music on the page, you're amping up your retrieval process in the brain, which would be helping you remember how to play that particular passage.

In Praise of Technique

As a music therapist I tend to let working with clients' musicality lead the work on technique. The idea is that as they become more engaged in music making, the more they'll appreciate how empowering technique can be, and the more motivated they'll be to do the work involved to improve it. Too much technique too soon and you're going to lose a client.

For educators, technique is much more central, and in the last generation or two there's been a huge payoff. In this post Kyle Gann talks about a piece of very difficult music written by John Halle that can only be played these days because the, "rhythmic complexity standards have risen miraculously among the younger generation".

As Kyle always offers audio examples of music he's talking about, there's a link in the post to an mp3 of the first movement of the piece. It's astonishingly beautiful, takes me to places I've never been before, and I can't even begin to get my mind around the technique needed to achieve it. 

Antonio Demasio

This article in the WSJ is a profile of Antonio Demasio, whose 2003 book Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain was one of several I read back then, trying to understand all the neuroscience that was coming out. It was obvious something really big was beginning to happen to our understanding of ourselves, but it wasn't particularly clear, to me at least, what the new information meant. The main thing that book and others like it left me with was a much deeper understanding of just how complex and interconnected brain function(s) is/are. So many things are mediated by so many other things. 

Here are a few snips from the article (the bolding for emphasis is mine):

. . . He is famous for overturning the notion that emotions have no role in rational thought. Through clinical studies of brain-damaged patients, he discovered that the neural circuits responsible for our feelings also are critical to healthy decision-making and moral reasoning. . . 

. . . Gradually, Dr. Damasio and other scientists are identifying some of the brain circuits underlying creative thought. Generally, brain-wave measures show that a sudden insight is the climax of intense brain states below the level of our awareness. It appears to involve more neural cells than methodical reasoning. Our brain may be working hardest when it seems most unfocused. Moreover, studies of neural signals suggest that our brain appears to make up its mind 10 seconds before we become conscious of a decision. Our most creative thoughts may be beyond our conscious control. . . 

. . . Moods powerfully bias what people think, remember and perceive. When critical brain regions are injured, the damage can sever links between emotions, memory and reason, crippling our ability to make decisions just as a stroke can rob a patient of sight or the use of an arm. . . 

It's my feeling that the points in bold have to be considered in helping people make music, especially those with no experience and for whom it doesn't come easily. Purely rational analysis in the conscious mode is absolutely part of the picture, but there are a lot of other factors that need consideration. 

A point that keeps being made by the researchers is that music involves more parts of the brain than anything else we do. When teaching music, we need to involve as much of the brain as we can, not just the conscious rational part that's most amenable to "do this" verbal instructions.

Music Educators' Gated Community

Over the weekend I came across a post of Dave Wilken's from back last March which is a lacerating review of Jeff Smiley's The Balanced Embouchure. Before getting to the specifics of the disagreements, I want to do this post laying out what I think are the divergent world views which underlie them.

I think of music educators as a privileged elite living in a gated community. As children they were blessed by nature and/or nurture to have what it takes to pass the audition to get into their school's music program, which serves a minority of students and is often callous in its rejection of those viewed as unworthy. They benefited from a lot of money and attention spent on them the other students miss out on. 

As time went on, they excelled in the very Darwinian advancement process, which tends to favor technique (which is somewhat quantifiable) over musicality (which is much more subjective). By the time they reach the top of the heap, they've spent their entire career with folks just like themselves. They've never had to work with "regular" people. And sort of like the Harry Potter wizards, there's often an us versus them view of the "muggles."

For those admitted into the system it works very well, but I think it sets the members of that gated community up for not appreciating the issues associated with helping those outside it learn how to make music. Because they never think about those issues, my feeling is that certain biases creep into their framing of those issues.

I'm often reminded of the Victorians of the Industrial Revolution when reading music education materials. They're often based on Cartesian dualism, where the body is like a factory full of machines waiting for the brain to be the captain of industry laying out what has to be done. Apply industriousness and force of character to a correct understanding of the mechanisms involved and all can be achieved. 

The problem with that view is that it presumes the conscious mind is 100% in charge, but the new neuroscience suggests that's not the case at all, the work of Benjamin Libet being some of the earliest work on this subject.

As a side note I'd add that the "force of character" angle also helps those living outside the gated community understand the verbal abuse that educators veer into from time to time and that students (at least those not offended and quit) seem completely OK with. My guess is that students accept the verbal abuse as par for the course due to the combination of their agreeing with the notion that simply trying harder is often the answer to musical problems (they are an elite, after all), and the (perhaps unconscious) knowledge they can be expelled from the elite as easily as they were admitted.

As a therapist, the population I most want to serve are all those of us outside the gated community. As for Jeff Smiley, my sense is that years of mindfulness while teaching has led him to an approach very much at odds with that of most educators, and one that I find to be a great way to approach music making in general for "the rest of us". It really works for me, but I can see how someone who's spent a lifetime with another world view that has worked for them isn't going to appreciate how valuable it can be for someone with "beginners mind" when it comes to making music.

2/8/11 - When I put this post up I sent a note to Dave saying I'd be happy to put any response he had to it down at the bottom of it. Here's what he said down in the comment section (with slight editing):

Hi, Lyle. Interesting read and I look forward to reading more details. Thanks also for the link. I think Jonathan's summary of my opinions in his comment above is spot on.

The broad strokes you paint with in this post make it difficult for me to step back and objectively see how my teaching philosophy or review of BE mirror a "gated community." On the one hand, I do feel that the "ivory tower" culture of academia sometimes makes us miss where the metal meets the mouth. On the other, some people outside that culture could benefit from poking their head inside the tower and looking around once in a while. I think the idea of a lone genius with a personal lab of students revolutionizing brass pedagogy is largely a myth. Real progress is a collaborative effort, opposite a "gated community."

In the comment below Dave's I try to be more clear about what's meant by "gated community".

Dave has also done a second post on Jeff's work here. 

And as an example of what Jung would call synchronicity (and a skeptic mere coincidence), here is the latest post over on Scott (Mr. Dilbert) Adams' blog where he turns his "thinking out of the box" mind loose on education as we know it.

A few moments later - Here's a link that just popped up suggesting an effect of diet on education which I want to save for a future post on Dave's reservations about Jeff's talking about general health matters in his embouchure book.

2/9/11 - Here's another synchronous/coincidental link, this time from Pliable (another outside the box thinker). A snip from near the end of his post:

I looked in vain at last night's performance for any of the mainstream music journalists who repeatedly pronounce on the future of music education from nearby London.

Horn Weirdness

James Boldin, a player and teacher of the horn, is recording a series of études and embedding the videos on his blog. In the first of these posts he mentioned playing around with his recording apparatus to get a better sound, and in the comments I encouraged him to keep writing about the audio aspects of the project. I find the sound of the horn to be the most difficult to adequately capture in recordings.

In the second post of the series he says in passing:

My initial setup for recording was flipped 180 degrees from last week, with my bell facing directly towards the door and front wall of my office. After trying a few takes with this setup, I wasn’t very happy with my sound, and I also was having more trouble than usual with fracking notes. The notes seemed to be splitting in an unusual way, and I think this was in part because of “slap echo,” a type of harsh echo effect which Derek Wright discusses in this excellent post on making an audition tape. Make of this what you will, but after slightly turning so that my bell wasn’t directly pointed at bare surfaces, the recording went much more smoothly.

In the comments I asked:

Are you saying the angle of the bell had an indirect effect on your playing? I can believe it, just want to be sure I’m understanding you. Is it that the bad acoustics interfered with your auditory feedback? Or is it possible the sound waves in the room actually interfered with what was happening in the horn?

He replied:

In this case, I think it was the latter of the two. I believe the actual reflection of the sound from the back wall was causing some additional accuracy problems for me. The sound wasn’t great either, and so I’d be willing to bet that both the inaccuracy and weird sound were caused by playing too close to the wall.

If I didn't play the horn I'd have a difficult time believing this. I think he's right, though. No other instrument I've ever played is so greatly affected by the environment in which it's played. In this specific case, I can't imagine the actual mechanics of sound production of any other instrument being as affected by standing waves in a small environment (which is my guess as to what's happening).

Jonathan West's comment is so on point, want to bring it up to post level:

I'm not in the least bit surprised by this. One orchestra I play in, for the concerts we are tightly squeezed into a narrow area at the front of the church. The area is made narrow by the lady chapel on the left and the organ on the right. So the person on the end of the horn line has his bell right up against the wooden panel of the organ casing. It's horrible to play there! But even one seat over is usually OK. It makes life hard for the 2nd & 4th horns 

On the other hand, sometimes I practice in my bedroom. There is too much soft furnishing in there and it absorbs the sound to an extent that I just don't feel I am producing any tone at all.

And then there is the traditional problem of the timps being placed just behind the horns. The vibrations coming up the bell and hitting your lips make it it near impossible to play during a loud timpani roll. Often, relatively small adjustments to position can make all the difference, they cause the phase and/or amplitude of the reflected sound to change to the extent that the problem goes away. 

In the circumstance described by James Boldin, I'm not in the least bit surprised that turning the seat a little was all the change that was needed to eliminate the bad effect.

Transmission

Over at On An Overgrown Path, Pliable has been doing a series of posts on his notion of "transmission". His idea is that for classical music to survive and thrive there has to be something going on between performers and audience more than the merely auditory, and that a lot of the new fangled attempts to bring in audiences actually interfere with "transmission".

He talks about that more in this post, mentioning music therapy, and then at the end giving a link to the CD over on the right I did with Lama Tashi. While that CD can be simply listened to, the main point was the insert which has all the chants notated for voice, guitar and keyboard so that practitioners might learn to do them themselves. Full transmission(?)

Anyway, here's the comment I just submitted:

As you might imagine, this post really struck a chord with me, even before the very pleasant surprise there at the end(!). Synchronicity being what it is, just got off the phone with Lama Tashi in Arunachal and he's doing well.

Another Jungian term you hint at with your title being so close to his "collective unconscious" is archetype. My feeling is that great music which is widely appreciated must somehow evoke something archetypal in most listeners.

I'm convinced of that in the non-classical folk realm in the case of minor blues tunes like "House of the Rising Sun", and "St. James Infirmary Blues", because performing those songs nearly always elicits a noticeably deep response from some listeners.

Your link to that old BBC story on the benefits of live music reminds me there hasn't been any follow up on that so far as I know.

One music therapy principle connected with your idea of transmission is that the first step is to play music which engages the client, which matches his/her mood as precisely as possible. Then once the connection (empathetic transmission?) is made, the therapist can use that connection to help the client get to different places.

My sense is that a lot of classical musicians present their work as take it or leave it. For them the canon trumps all, whereas for the therapist, connection/transmission trumps all.

Thanks so very much for putting music therapy in such a fine light for your very high level readership.

Anecdotal Testimonial

Here's a brief story with nothing new in it,  just a nice summation of how music can benefit someone recovering from brain surgery. In this case the patient was a critical care surgeon who is also an amateur musician. (In my experience there are a lot more medical people who are amateur musicians than you'd find in other professions.)

"The surgery had discombobulated my brain, and you can't have that and be a surgeon in a critical-care unit. I was trying to recover, but things weren't working right. I didn't think I'd have the mental skills again that I needed to return to my profession." 

"And gradually, sitting at the piano, I started getting some of that feeling back in my brain. What I recognize now . . . was that music involves every part of the human brain. To play music requires rhythm, melody, timing, timbre, harmonics, physical manipulation and responses."

What was happening, Fratianne said, was that he "was being forced to integrate all parts of brain function. As it came back, I regained my ability to do other things that the rehab therapists were asking me to do." Fratianne's mental and physical skills came back, and three months after his brain surgery he was able to operate again (the first time, he did so with a backup surgeon next to him, ready to take over.) "For a surgeon, that's an incredibly short amount of time to come back, and I can't help but think that it was music therapy that turned the corner for me".

Live Music for Parkinson's Patients

Here's a brief item about a regional orchestra looking to see if being in the presence of live music can benefit Parkinson's patients. They're taking a first step towards evaluating anecdotes such as this one:

"One of the Phil's chorus member's tremors stop when he goes to the concerts. They start at intermission and stop again in the second half,". . . 

This reminds me of both how singing can help some people overcome a stutter and how music can still get through to people with late stage Alzheimer's. 

It may also tie in to this quote from a post over on Horn Matters by a professional horn player talking about what he thinks was a bout of focal dystonia:

I realized that my attention, especially when warming up, had shrunk down to that tiny area of my face involved in making a buzz. I widened my focus, specifically to include my air column and posture and on maintaining what I call a “supported” setting AND a relaxed, non-stressed mental state.

The speaker is Mark Taylor, identified as a "jazz hornist". His phrase "widen my focus" is the most succinct statement I've seen of how involving more of the brain and body can help clear what seem to be localized problems. It's also a very good way of putting how I think Jeff Smiley's The Balanced Embouchure (BE) helped me with my embouchure. It's that change of focus I also like to bring to my therapist's approach to helping people make music.

Plus, I'm delighted to hear that there is such a thing as a "jazz hornist".

The other thing that struck me about the music organization playing to the Parkinson's patients was that there's a whole new way they could serve the community. 

V.S. Computer Playback

Here is a completely untweaked computer playback of A Louisiana Sashay, a.k.a. Vermont Song, as it now stands. There's some kind of glitch at one point where it briefly sounds as though there are two flutes, and the final chord for the harp isn't arpeggiated as it is in the score. Real people will probably play it a bit slower, with pauses and/or ritards here and there.

This playback, though, is good enough to get an idea of the piece, and it seems to work. I finished the writing of it Sunday morning and have listened to it a number of times since, and nothing calls attention to itself as needing fixing. I'm very pleased with a number of things that happen in the piece and look forward to seeing how it will come off in actual performance.

I've sent PDF scores and parts to my friends up in Vermont for whom it was written, asking if there are any awkward or unplayable bits, especially in the case of the harp. If it passes that test, I think it's nearly done.

The only problem in writing the piece (other than trying to keep straight what the harp can and can't do) was finding the time to spend with it and then having the patience to keep working at it to get something that sounded "right", measure by measure. That Thomas Edison quote about invention being 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration is very apt in my case. There were any number of places where nothing seemed to work and it took an hour or more to find something that did work for just a measure or two. Somewhere along the line I thought of using a stopwatch to see just how many hours it took me to get less than five minutes worth of music, but decided not to, being afraid that seeing an actual number might make me slower in taking up the writing of the next piece. 

Music & Tickling

I've often used the phrase, "music tickles the brain", as a way of talking about how music can affect us. It turns out there is something of a similarity between the two. Back in this post on the new work coming out of McGill up in Canada, there were these two quotes:

. . . it turns out that the most important part of every song or symphony is when the patterns break down, when the sound becomes unpredictable. If the music is too obvious, it is annoyingly boring, like an alarm clock. (Numerous studies, after all, have demonstrated that dopamine neurons quickly adapt to predictable rewards. If we know what’s going to happen next, then we don’t get excited.). . .

. . .  The uncertainty makes the feeling – it is what triggers that surge of dopamine in the caudate, as we struggle to figure out what will happen next. . . .

In this article about why we can't tickle ourselves, there's this:

So why is it that we laugh when we’re tickled? Simply put, because of the unexpectedness of it. The cerebellum, the part of our brain that monitors our movements, can detect the difference between expected sensations (scratching an itch, for instance) and unexpected sensations (a bug landing on your ear). Because of this difference, we can’t predict where someone will tickle us or how we will feel when they do, so it makes us panic. That panic is manifested through uncontrollable laughter — sort of a more acceptable “nervous laugh,” if you will.

So the effects of both music and tickling rely on our being uncertain as to what's coming next. The results are different, though. In one case dopamine is released and in the other it sounds more like adrenalin is the active agent.

At any rate, it seems to me this is part of the puzzle of how musicians sometimes don't feel the music they're making the same way an audience might, especially a new and unfamiliar piece. The musicians know where the music is going, but the audience doesn't. And that thought reminded me of this quote Terry Teachout put up on his blog a couple of years ago.

"I very much disapprove of the adage that you have to feel the performance completely every night on the stage. This is technically an impossibility, and really is the negation of the art of acting. The art of acting, after all, is not actual feeling but simulation of feeling, and it is impossible to feel a strong emotional part eight performances a week, including two matinées."

Noël Coward, "The Art of Acting" (The Listener, Oct. 12, 1961)

Gann on Angst

In a recent post Kyle Gann says:

There is nothing I work so hard on as ridding my life of angst. And I do it first in my music, in hopes that that will teach me how to do it in my life….

I asked in the comments:

This makes me wonder if you like/appreciate angst in the music of others, and whether you have any thoughts on catharsis via music.

He responded with:

Interesting question. There is certainly music I like of which angst is a well-handled component, for instance Wozzeck. But I think in general, music that exudes a free-floating, unmotivated angst is music that I grow bored with easily. I can love sad, and angry, and especially depressive music, because there are always things at hand to be sad and angry and depressed about. But to express undifferentiated worry and apprehension is boring in people and I find it boring in music. Catharsis seems like a very different thing. I think about it mainly in terms of Mahler, especially his Sixth, one of my favorite works. Wouldn’t try it myself, though perhaps there’s a little of that in the finale to Custer.

My feeling is that since, "there are always things at hand to be sad and angry and depressed about", I don't need music to get me to those places. There was a time I "enjoyed" listening to music that mirrored various interior turbulences, but these days I want to play and listen to music that, on balance, evokes positive rather than negative emotions. Because of that, I find myself hesitant to give myself over to the negative emotions needed to precede and set up the catharsis mechanism.

I should add that one of the reasons I'm so taken with Gann's The Planets is that the music doesn't map to emotions in ways I'm used to. There are lots of places it just sounds new and different and very engaging, but where I'd be hard pressed to say what emotion it's expressing.

More on the McGill study

The first flurry of stories coming out on the recent study at McGill talked mostly about the direct connection between listening to music and the release of dopamine. A second wave of articles is now coming, giving more detail and expanding more on what the findings suggest. The best so far is this one from Wired. Besides talking more about the research, it ties it to the work of Leonard Meyer, whose book Emotion and Meaning in Music came out in 1956. Here are some snips from the Wired article:

. . . When listening to our favorite songs, our body betrays all the symptoms of emotional arousal. The pupils in our eyes dilate, our pulse and blood pressure rise, the electrical conductance of our skin is lowered, and the cerebellum, a brain region associated with bodily movement, becomes strangely active. Blood is even re-directed to the muscles in our legs. (Some speculate that this is why we begin tapping our feet.) In other words, sound stirs us at our biological roots. . . 

. . . The question, of course, is what all these dopamine neurons are up to. What aspects of music are they responding to? And why are they so active fifteen seconds before the acoustic climax?. . .

. . . it turns out that the most important part of every song or symphony is when the patterns break down, when the sound becomes unpredictable. If the music is too obvious, it is annoyingly boring, like an alarm clock. (Numerous studies, after all, have demonstrated that dopamine neurons quickly adapt to predictable rewards. If we know what’s going to happen next, then we don’t get excited.) This is why composers introduce the tonic note in the beginning of the song and then studiously avoid it until the end. The longer we are denied the pattern we expect, the greater the emotional release when the pattern returns, safe and sound. That is when we get the chills. . . 

. . . According to Meyer, it is the suspenseful tension of music (arising out of our unfulfilled expectations) that is the source of the music’s feeling. While earlier theories of music focused on the way a noise can refer to the real world of images and experiences (its “connotative” meaning), Meyer argued that the emotions we find in music come from the unfolding events of the music itself. This “embodied meaning” arises from the patterns the symphony invokes and then ignores, from the ambiguity it creates inside its own form. . . 

. . . The uncertainty makes the feeling – it is what triggers that surge of dopamine in the caudate, as we struggle to figure out what will happen next. And so our neurons search for the undulating order, trying to make sense of this flurry of pitches. We can predict some of the notes, but we can’t predict them all, and that is what keeps us listening, waiting expectantly for our reward, for the errant pattern to be completed. Music is a form whose meaning depends upon its violation.

Another article that makes the connection to Meyer is here. The quote in this article that jumped out at me was:

. . . Zatorre said he does not know what is happening in the brain of the composer who is writing the music. "My guess is that composing is such a complex act that you may not get that emotional touch until later when you are actually experiencing it for the first time." . . . 

Somewhere in the Vermont Song series of posts talking about writing a piece of music I mentioned the amazing feeling I get the first time I hear a piece of mine performed, even though I've listened to the computer play it back many, many times over the course of composition. I characterized it as feeling in a pseudo-dream state, though fully awake. One time it even happened when I played a piano piece (I'd practiced a lot) for someone else for the first time. 

Having all this new neuroscience coming out and confirming personal experience and giving such a solid basis of music therapy is really pretty amazing to me. I always thought it would come, but never thought we'd get this much so soon. 

Timepiece : Index

I'm delighted to say some people have requested parts and scores for Timepiece and that they've been sent out. Down the road there may be more recorded versions to put up here on the blog, so I'm putting one of those Blogger Gadgets over on the right to enable clicking straight through to this list of the relevant posts, which will be updated as needed.

Here's the audio of the St Clements Wind Ensemble performing it.

Here's the history of the piece.

Here are the performance notes.

Click here for all the posts mentioning the piece.

Against the Grain

Recently I've come across a couple of stated opinions that make my own off beat tastes in music seem pretty mild mannered, and want to bookmark them here on the blog.

Here's a review of a new music concert, apparently meant to be le denier cri in hipness. The concluding paragraph reads:

Please don’t get me wrong: I’m not suggesting that art music necessarily has to entertain, but it does need to engage its audience. The music presented in this concert would be unintelligible to all but the most select and die-hard audience, and by now isn’t it obvious that such complexity only obscures the intended meaning, and that the implied depth is only superficial? As a performer I also know how exhilarating performing technically challenging music can be, but as an audience member it was about as engaging as watching a seven-year-old shred on Guitar Hero.

Stuff like this has got to be part of the reason audiences are staying away from art music in droves. A couple of evenings like this could really put you off going to concerts, as there's the feeling the composers are out to baffle you more than engage you as a way of demonstrating their superior artiness, or whatever; and that the performers care more about showing off their technique than connecting with people in the audience.

And here's composer Arnold Rosner (discovered via Kyle Gann) talking about a big chunk of the canon:

Do I dislike them all - Boccherini, Gluck, Haydn, early Beethoven? Yes, I do, but Mozart deserves a special place. It is not true that he is the worst of all composers; his prodigious technical skills developed by age six. Sometimes it is not so great to be a prodigy, - I often feel his emotional and dramatic palette is set at the same age. Rather he is the most overrated composer of them all. The difference between the (mediocre) quality of his music and the (celestial) reverance he is accorded is a gulf simply beyond belief.

There's always been something about Mozart's music I can't put my finger on. It has amazing Apollonian clarity and tunefulness, but a lot of it, the way it's usually played, sort of bores me (Mitsuko Uchida being the major exception). That Mozart's emotional palette may have been set early in life is an interesting way to think about it.

Talent

As a music therapist, I often hear the word "talent" in a phrase such as "I don't have any musical talent". That can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, but my position is that it needn't be. For one thing, my view is that there is no unitary "musical talent". Some people have a great feel for rhythm, others for intonation, others for harmony and feeling chord changes, others for performing for audiences, and on and on. Truly gifted people have an abundance of a lot of those talents, but regular folks often have some measure of some of them as well.

Also, a crucial component of success at music making is the motivation to work at it enough to fully engage in the process and to experience the positive benefits it can bring, creating a virtuous circle of progress. I have from time to time encountered people with wonderful technique, but who have given up music because it no longer interests them because they feel no reward in pursuing music. They have various musical talents, but not the talent of connecting music making to their personal enjoyment and sense of fulfillment.

This article from the BBC seems to lend some support to this view. It's a discussion of how the new research into genetics indicates nurture has a lot to do with nature, i.e. just because you have a particular genes doesn't automatically mean you have that trait.

. . . genes interact with their surroundings, getting turned on and off all the time. In effect, the same genes have different effects depending on who they are talking to. . . 

. . .[A trait] emerges only from the interaction of gene and environment." This means that everything about us - our personalities, our intelligence, our abilities - are actually determined by the lives we lead. The very notion of "innate" no longer holds together. . . 

. . ."Like a jukebox, the individual has the potential to play a number of different developmental tunes. The particular developmental tune it does play is selected by [the environment] in which the individual is growing up.". . . 

. . ."High academic achievers are not necessarily born 'smarter' than others," they write in their book Talented Teenagers, "but work harder and develop more self-discipline.". . . 

. . .Most profoundly, Carol Dweck from Stanford University in the US, has demonstrated that students who understand intelligence is malleable rather than fixed are much more intellectually ambitious and successful. . . 

. . . Bit by bit, they're gathering a better and better understanding of how different attitudes, teaching styles and precise types of practice and exercise push people along very different pathways. . . .

All of this has great bearing on the discussion of "natural" in this post and those posts on other blogs that are linked. It also bears on the feelings discussed in this post on educators' often brusque elimination from their programs of people wishing to make music. 

I've seen in other discussions of the new genetics, though, that environment (nurture) can only affect genetic predisposition (nature) at the margins. It will take a while for all this to get sorted out, but in the meantime I hope to give regular folks some good tools for developing their music making abilities so as to enjoy all the benefits that can flow from successfully making music.

Performance Review

Back on the first Friday of December I performed at a benefit for the James Madison Museum here in Orange and wrote about it here. This week's Orange Review has a write up of the event. here's the bit about me:

The Jeanes family couldn't resist more fun and jumped right in, singing and playing along with Lyle Sanford. Sanford's superb musicianship on guitar made everyone hope the evening would never end. He played and sang a nostalgic remix of blues, folk songs and Bob Dylan. Angus Macdonald felt right at home adding his blues harp.

Here I thought I'd been essaying "cosmic American music" when I was just a geezer being nostalgic!  ;-)

In all seriousness, though, this was exactly the kind of event I wish would pop up more often in the community. There are a lot of musicians around here who can enhance small events with live music, and as a music therapist I think everyone can benefit when that happens.

Is Music A Quasi-Spiritual Practice?

This article in the Guardian, in a fairly non-specific way, suggests that regular music making might be a substitute for spiritual practice. While I think that there are similarities between music practice and spiritual practice, I don't feel one can stand in for the other.

Both behaviors employ combinations of the Jungian categories of thinking, feeling, intuition and sensation as a way of entering and expressing non-quotidian mental states that are beyond the grasp of words. Music, though, is more a tool that can be used in various ways, depending on one's motivation. The first non-spiritual use of music that comes to mind are the drums, bagpipes, and bugles of war. There are also various trance states that can be induced by music making, which are not necessarily spiritual in the positive sense we usually associate with the word.

As a tool to help deepen and broaden spiritual experiences, I think making music can be at the top of the list. As a therapist, there's nothing I enjoy more than helping people use music in their spiritual practice. Music making can be tremendously rewarding on it's own as well. Suffusing one's brain in dopamine is a positive experience, with or without a framework of spiritual practice.

On down the line the neuroscientists are going to be able to compare and contrast what's going on in the brains of those making music and those pursuing spiritual paths and we'll know better then how to talk about the two. For now it's what works best for an individual that matters. My sense is, though, the benefits of making music are amplified when combined with other behaviors and interests of the music maker, especially those where the music is shared with people in some sort of social context.

Thanks to Jonathan West for finding this article and posting about it here. This post of mine is a first approximation of a response to the deep issues raised in connection to spirituality and music making. I hope in a later post to comment on the emotional aspects of music making Jonathan talks about in his post.

Music & Dopamine

Here is one of many articles coming out on a new study (emanating from McGill University where a lot of the work behind This Is Your Brain On Music was done) showing that listening to music releases dopamine.

Whether it's the Beatles or Beethoven, people like music for the same reason they like eating or having sex: It makes the brain release a chemical that gives pleasure, a new study says. The brain substance is involved both in anticipating a particularly thrilling musical moment and in feeling the rush from it, researchers found. . . 

. . .The tie to dopamine helps explain why music is so widely popular across cultures. . . .

. . .The study used only instrumental music, showing that voices aren't necessary to produce the dopamine response. . . 

. . . Dopamine surged in one part of the striatum during the 15 seconds leading up to a thrilling moment, and a different part when that musical highlight finally arrived. Zatorre said that makes sense: The area linked to anticipation connects with parts of the brain involved with making predictions and responding to the environment, while the area reacting to the peak moment itself is linked to the brain's limbic system, which is involved in emotion. . . 

. . .While experts had indirect indications that music taps into the dopamine system, he said, the new work "really nails it." . . . 

Update: for more on this McGill study see here and here and here.

Compressed Audio

Here are two articles talking about compressed sound, i.e. the sound of an mp3 being played by your computer or iPod.

The first is from one of those TED talks which are over the 'net, but which don't work on dial-up. For this one, though, there's a text synopsis. The title is Ten Things You Didn't Know About Sound. Here's #7 on his list:

Compressed music makes you tired. However clever the technology and the psychoacoustic algorithms applied, there are many issues with data compression of music, as discussed in this excellent article by Robert Harley back in 1991. My assertion that listening to highly compressed music makes people tired and irritable is based on personal and anecdotal experience - again it's one that I hope will be tested by researchers.

From personal experience, I agree that listening to compressed audio is tiring, and for me, annoying as well. One reason I gave up TV years ago is the very unpleasant sound they make. What I'm not sure of is how other people experience compressed sound. My hearing is very acute when it comes to the quality of audio (I could never listen to cassette tapes during their day), whereas I was totally at sea trying to hear the inner voices of four part harmony in ear training back in conservatory days. Your brain wiring may vary.

The second article deals with how new technology looks to make highly compressed sound a thing of the past. For one thing, there are newer digital to audio converters with which:

the conversion from a digital signal (0's and 1's) to analog sound waves (which your ears can hear) is handled by a device that's been manufactured to do only that, and to exacting standards. This alone should make a dramatic difference.

Another thing is that increasingly you'll be able to download mp3 files that are less compressed than the current standard.

But you can also adjust the settings on your computer so that it downloads iTunes songs (and other music files) at higher bit and sampling rates. Again, if you want to listen to this music only on your computer or iPod, this won't matter much; but if you want to stream it to your home stereo, this step alone will make a big difference. (If you're thinking of downloading music at higher bit and sampling rates, you may need to buy an external storage device to hold the extra data. They're cheap these days: about $100 for something that holds a terabyte of data.) A few companies out there are selling music-downloads at bit and sampling rates that exceed even those of CDs.

Horn Diary

In this post Jonathan West talks about different kinds of horn tone. Back the weekend before Christmas I played horn in the community concert band's Christmas program on Saturday night and then in a cantata Sunday morning. It was a wonderful experience of the difference between the first tone Jonathan talks about (wind quintet and small ensembles), and the last (concert band).

In the community band I'm the only horn, with five trumpets, two trombones and three baritones. I generally play at least shade higher than the given dynamic when against the other brass, just to get some balance. Over the years I've discovered that a brassy tone can help being heard, and have been encouraged to play that way. The problem is I didn't take up horn to be able to make that sort of sound. I understand its place in the band arranger's palette, but feel trumpets can do brassy much better. 

The sound that appeals to me is more what Jonathan talks about first, that of the horn in a small ensemble. Since September I've been listening to a recording an ensemble Jonathan is in playing a wind quintet I wrote sometime back. Without consciously realizing it at first, hearing that tone of Jonathan's changed the sound I'm getting from the horn, and the cantata was a perfect piece of music to explore that tone.

Dave Wilken often says we make a mistake when we assign the reason for musical growth to a particular cause, because when we practice we're doing lots of things, not just the one thing we might be focused on at the time. I agree with that, but also feel that listening to my friend Susan's flute tone this summer and hearing Jonathan's horn tone on that recording both had a catalytic effect, as those aural experiences made me more aware of what I wanted on each of those instruments and, on a proprioceptive level, how to get there.

During this past semester I started playing "off the leg" and am enthused with the results.

When I started horn I used a Farkas very deep cup mouthpiece because I liked the tone. When I had my embouchure crisis and began working with Jeff Smiley's BE method I also switched to a Farkas medium cup mouthpiece. I didn't like the tone as well, but it was lots easier to play.

During the brief hiatus from band I've been switching to a Farkas medium deep cup. I instantly felt better able to lip pitches into tune, which I think is due to there being more lip inside the wider diameter, so there's more to work with. My hope is this mouthpiece will be something of a compromise between ease of playing and the tone I prefer.

I've been spending nearly all my playing time on the F horn, and have been enjoying not having to play 1st horn parts. In the past when band was in session, just trying to keep up with simply being able to play all the parts took most of my energy. These days my endurance and range are much better, and having become familiar with concert band writing, my hope is I can learn those parts much more quickly and then still have time and lip each day for chamber style music.

V.S. Composing Motivation

I've gotten back to work on Louisiana Sashay and am thinking about not doing anymore measure by measure commentary, but waiting until it's finished and put up audio of the computer playing it and make a few comments then. This post is to expand on something that was more allusively present than clearly stated toward the end of this post.

Back in the 70's a college friend developed a real talent for black and white photography. One time I asked him what it was that gave his photos a particular feeling consistency. He thought what I might be referring to was his notion that when one looks at one of his photos, there should be no sense of the ego that took it. As evanescent as that idea is, I knew exactly what he was saying and it perfectly explained what I was seeing (or not seeing) in his work.

Back when I was younger, the music I wrote, mostly imitative of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, was full of ego. Dylan's line, "little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously," comes to mind. Now, though, what ego that's present (I hope!) is just a reflection of how I go about playing the musical game I've set myself with the initial parameters of a piece. I'm never consciously trying "to say" anything. I just want the music to flow from its own nature, be fun for the players to play, and fresh to the ears of the audience. 

Having come of age in the age of angst, with academic atonalists trying to broaden my bourgeois mind and poseurs being trivially transgressive, all I want from my music is that it's fun and engaging to play. Fulfilling that simple requirement, for me, provides a much more valuable experience than trying to carry all that ego luggage.

Here's the last paragraph of the performance notes I sent out with the score and parts of Timepiece:

The feeling tone of the piece is meant to be completely

positive. No angst, anger or depression. Playfulness and
joy, yearning and reverence, exhilaration and celebration
were more of what I had in mind. If you (and an audience)
feel uplifted after playing it, mission accomplished.

Music/Spiritual Practice

This post by Pliable gets at something I've tried to talk about here from time to time, i.e. the parallels between engagement in music and engagement in a spiritual path. He's talking about Zen Buddhism, but I think other paths would qualify for this discussion.

Accepting parallels between engaging new listeners and transmission as practiced in Zen Buddhism takes us down an interesting path. Transmission is totally dependant on physical interaction between teacher and student.

His use of the word "transmission" implies something of more value than mere entertainment to pass the time. "Physical interaction" allows for the deeper communication possible with embodied cognition and mirror neurons. It also allows for the connection between the performer and audience Hilary Hahn has spoken of.

All the dogmas that have developed around reaching new audiences involve adding insulating layers between performer and listener; these range from performance conventions to digital concert halls and virtual orchestras. Yet, if the analogy between classical music and transmission is valid, the process should be reversed. We do not need more intermediate layers. Instead we need high voltages to flow between superconductors (pun not intended) in close promiximity to one another. Which means more live music, physical interaction between audience and performers, music education, music therapy, amateur, youth and scratch orchestras and similar initiatives. And less of an awful lot of things we are getting more of.

It amazes me that more people don't see things this way. It delights me that one of the few happens to have one of the most widely read blogs on the planet. 

Another way of putting this is that there's a lot of attention paid to the very top of the music making pyramid, but not nearly so much to the rest of it down below. In schools, lots of money and time is expended upon the small minority of students in the band and chorus, while the majority are shut out, sometimes very rudely. Many people seem to view music making as something to be left to the elite, but the new research coming in is telling us it can benefit us all, not just the technically advanced. 

One of the main causes of this focus on the top of the pyramid is the ubiquity of recorded music with all its technical perfections. People tend to conflate the value of technical skill with the value of simply making music and listening to it. To my mind the main issue is that there be a match between the music being made and the audience's ability to appreciate it. It's that connection which is important, and technical wizardry can either be a help or a hinderance. A priest or lama helping someone along the path doesn't spout the arcane points of theology until the student is ready. Getting someone on a good path and helping them stay on it is more important than trying to impress them with your knowledge.

This all reminds me of why I write music. For me, the point is to create music the players will enjoy playing and the audience will enjoy listening to. If that happens, the connection is made and the benefits of music will flow from that connection to all concerned. The most heartening thing about the reception Timepiece is getting is the sense it's largely successful in those terms. (More on this compositional motivation here)

(Pliable continues down this path here and is kind enough to mention this post in the footnote)