Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver W. Sacks Page B

“When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again,” and then “jaunty, jolly ones” like “Alouette, gentille alouette.”
    “When there is no official song that comes on by itself,” he continued, “my brain-mind makes one up— the rhythmic sounds are put to music, often with nonsense words— maybe the last words someone said, or I read or heard or thought.” This phenomenon, he felt, was related to creativity, like dreams.
    I continued to correspond with Dr. Rangell, and in 2003 he wrote:

    I have lived with this thing now for almost eight years. The symptom is always there. One senses it is 24/7…[but] to say that it is always with me does not mean that I am always aware of it— that would indeed send me to a loony house. It is part of me in that it is there whenever I think about it. Or whenever my mind is not occupied, that is, attending to something.

    But I can bring the tunes on in the most effortless way. I have but to think about one bar of music or one word of a lyric and the total work rushes in and gets going. It is like the most sensitive remote control. It then stays as long as “it” wishes— or as long as I let it….

    It is like a radio with only a turn-on key.
    Rangell has lived with his musical hallucinations for more than ten years now, and increasingly, they seem less meaningless, less random to him. The songs are all from his younger years, and “they can be categorized,” he wrote:

    They are romantic, or poignant, or tragic, or celebratory, about love, or make me cry— everything. All bring memories…. Many are of my wife…she passed away seven years ago, a year and a half after this began….

    They are structurally like a dream. They have a precipitating stimulus, relate to affects, bring back thoughts automatically whether I want to or not, are cognitive as well, have a substructure if I want to pursue them….

    Sometimes when the music stopped, I would find myself humming the tune I had just wished would please stop. I found I missed it…. Every psychoanalyst knows that in every symptom (and this is a symptom), behind every defense is a wish…. The songs that come to the surface…carry urges, hopes, wishes. Romantic, sexual, moral, aggressive wishes, as well as urges for action and mastery. They are in fact what brought [my musical hallucinations] to their final shape, neutralizing and replacing the original interfering noise. Complain as I will, the song is welcome, at least partially so.
    Summarizing his experiences in a long article published online in the Huffington Post, Rangell wrote:

    I consider myself a kind of living laboratory, an experiment in nature through an auditory prism…. I have been living at the edge. But a very special edge, the border between the brain and the mind. From here the vistas are wide, in several directions. The fields over which these experiences roam cover neurologic, otologic, and psychoanalytic realms, converging into a unique symptomatic combination of them all, lived and experienced not on a controlled couch but on the stage of an ongoing life.

Part II

    A Range of Musicality

7

    Sense and Sensibility: A Range of Musicality
    W e often speak of people as having or not having “a good ear.” A good ear means, as a start, having an accurate perception of pitch and rhythm. We know that Mozart had a wonderful “ear” and, of course, he was a sublime artist. We take it that all good musicians must have a decent “ear,” even if not one of Mozartian caliber— but is a good ear sufficient?
    This comes up in Rebecca West’s partly autobiographical novel The Fountain Overflows, a story of life in a musical family, with a mother who is a professional musician (like West’s own mother), an intellectually brilliant but unmusical father, and three children— two of whom, like their mother, are deeply musical. The best ear, however, belongs to the “unmusical” child, Cordelia. She, in her sister’s words,

    had a true ear, indeed she had