Музыкофилия

Music  is part of being human, and there is no human culture in which it is not highly  developed and esteemed. Its very ubiquity may cause it to be trivialized in daily  life: we switch on a radio, switch it off, hum a tune, tap our feet, find the words  of an old song going through our minds, and think nothing of it. But to those  who are lost in dementia, the situation is different. Music is no luxury to them,  but a necessity, and can have a power beyond anything else to restore them to themselves, and to others, at least for a while.

... стереофония позволяет посетителям концертов наслаждаться всей сложностью и акустическим великолепием оркестра или хора, выступающего в концертном зале, специально сконструированном для прослушивания – богатого, детального и трехмерного, – насколько это возможно. Именно эту радость восприятия мы пытаемся воспроизвести с помощью пары наушников, стереодинамиков и сложных полифонических стереосистем. Мы считаем наш стереофонический мир чем-то само собой разумеющимся, и подчас лишь несчастье [...] заставляет понять, насколько важны для нас оба наши уха.

В самой музыке, без сомнения, существует внутренняя тенденция к повторениям. Наша поэзия, наши баллады, наши песни полны повторений. Каждая пьеса классической музыки имеет свои повторяющиеся элементы или вариации одной и той же темы, а все наши великие композиторы – мастера повторов. Колыбельные песни, напевы и песенки, которыми мы облегчаем малышам обучение, содержат хоровые повторения. Нас влечет к повторениям даже после того, как мы становимся взрослыми; мы снова и снова хотим стимулов и вознаграждений – и получаем их в музыке.

Музыка - это часть человеческого существа, и нет ни одной человеческой культуры, в которой музыка не была бы развита и не ценилась бы людьми. Вездесущность музыки иногда приводит к сознанию ее тривиальности: мы включаем и выключаем радио, мурлычем мелодии, отбиваем ногой такт, внезапно вспоминаем слова давно забытой песни и не придаем этому никакого значения. Но у тех, кто потерялся в деменции, положение совсем иное. Для них музыка не роскошь, а необходимость. Именно она, и только она, обладает силой, способной помочь больным вернуться к себе и к близким, пусть даже и на короткое время.

Desperate to hold on to something, to gain some purchase, Clive started to keep a journal, first on scraps of paper, then in a notebook. But his journal entries consisted, essentially, of the statements “I am awake” or “I am conscious,” entered again and again every few minutes. He would write: “2.10 pm: this time properly awake…. 2.14 pm: this time finally awake…. 2.35 pm: this time completely awake,” along with negations of these statements: “At 9.40 pm I awoke for the first time, despite my previous claims.” This in turn was crossed out, followed by “I was fully conscious at 10.35 pm, and awake for the first time in many, many weeks.” This in turn was canceled out by the next entry.

This striking discrepancy led Deutsch et al. to conjecture that “if given the opportunity, infants can acquire AP as a feature of speech, which can then carry over to music.” For speakers of a nontonal language such as English, they felt, “the acquisition of AP during music training is analogous to learning the tones of a second language.” They observed that there was a critical period for the development of absolute pitch, before the age of eight or so— roughly the same age at which children find it much more difficult to learn the phonemes of another language (and thus to speak a second language with a native accent)

We are a linguistic species - we turn to language to express whatever we are thinking, and it is usually there for us instantly. But for those with aphasia, the inability to comminicate verbally may be almost unbearably frustrating and isolating; to make matters worse, they are often treated by others as idiots, almost as nonpersons, because the cannot speak. Much of this can change with the discovery that such patients can sing - sing not only tunes, but the words of operas, hymns, or songs. Suddenly their disability, their cut-offness, seems much less - and though singing is not propositional communication, it is a very basic existential comunication.

I see my room, my furniture every day, but they do not represent themseves as "pictures in the mind". Nor do i hear imaginary dog barks or traffic noises in the background of my mind, or smell aromas of imaginary meals cooking, even though i am exposed to such perceptions every day. I do have fragments of poetry and sudden phrases darting into my mind, but with nothing like the richness and range of my spontaneous musical imagery. Perhaps it is not just the nervous system, but music itself that has something very peculiar about it - its beat, its melodic contours, so different from those of speech, and its peculiarly direct connection to the emotions.