In his wonderful Musicophilia , Oliver Sacks describes a patient named Martin, who suffered meningitis at the age of three and was never mentally normal afterwards. He spent hours listening to operas and by the time Sacks met him in 1984, he claimed to have more than 2000 operates memorized, along with Messiah, the Christmas Oratorio, and all the Bach cantats. Sacks writes: “it was not just the melodies that he remembered. He had learned, by listening to performances, what... Read more

In many cultures, music and dance go naturally together. Music moves the body, and so bodies move to the music. Not ours, or at least not in “high culture.” Patrick Shove writes, “Many twentieth-century composers focus on sound qualities or abstract tonal patterns, and performers of their compositions often neglect whatever kinematic potential the music may have. The absence of natural motion information may be a significant factor limiting the appreciation of such music by audiences. While compositional techniques and... Read more

Pierre Boulez’s total serialism depended, in the words of Jeremy Begbie, “on the rigorous organization of music through the use of strict mathematical patterns.” The results were, Begbie says, “extremely dull, indeed, some of the most tedious ever written.” Around the same time, John Cage was composing “chance music,” made, for example, through “random acts such as tossing coins” (Begbie). Boulez was annoyed to find that Cage’s music sounded much like his own, a demonstration of Boulez’s own observation that... Read more