Musicophilia

I very much enjoyed Oliver Sacks' book Musicophilia (I've enjoyed everything he's written). It's a fascinating look at music and the brain.

From Sacks' Salon interview:

Music doesn't represent any tangible, earthly reality. It represents things of the heart, feelings which are beyond description, beyond any experience one has had. The non-representational but indescribably vivid emotional quality is such as to make one think of an immaterial or spiritual world. I dislike both of those words, because for me, the so-called immaterial and spiritual is always vested in the fleshly — in "the holy and glorious flesh," as Dante said.

So if music is not directly representative of the world around us, then what's inspiring it? One has the feeling of the muse, and the muses are heavenly beings. This feeling is very, very strong with Cicoria, the surgeon in my book who was hit by a bolt of lightning. He felt that he was actually tuning in to the music of heaven — that he had God's phone number. I can't avoid that feeling myself when I listen to Mozart. I feel differently about Beethoven. I think of Beethoven as a sweating Prometheus, a terrestrial figure.

I intensely dislike any reference to supernaturalism, but I think there can be profound mystical feelings which do not have to call on fictitious agencies like angels and demons and deities. The whole natural world is bathed in wonder and beauty and mystery. The feeling of the holy, the sacred, the wonderful, the mystical, can be divorced from anything theological, and is conveyed very powerfully in music.

What would be one form of Dante's Inferno for me? Amusia - the inability to distinguish and enjoy music.

Music, more than anything, is something I must have. OK, there's oxygen and food too, but music is there on the list of essentials. It can totally consume me, and out of no where too!

I am thinking of a few weeks ago when I was channel surfing and happened upon the American Music Awards as Alicia Keys took stage to sing "No One". I stopped, my jaw dropped, and I listened - I was owned! - transfixed by the infectious marching beat, the soulful singing, the adrenaline shots of the guest artists, the total awesomicity of the performance!

"Holy shit that's good! What a song!"

I knew who Alicia Keys was but had never had much interest in her music. Now I had to have that album, and I bought it the very next day. "As I Am" is fantastic and sure-fire album-of-the-year in the next music awards.

I get lost in albums that are that good.

The last one was Green Day's "American Idiot". The political commentary is spot-on, but the music... the music just blasts the mind into a higher realm. In Alicia Keys' case it's the singing. It grabs the attention and warms the various cockles and sub-cockles.

Music is food. When it tastes good, you savor it. Yet, you always crave more.

My iPod will never be complete.









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