The Music in Your Head

The British-born neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks has been newly appointed by Columbia University as a “Columbia artist,” as well as professor of clinical neurology and clinical psychiatry at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. Mr. Sacks, 74, has written 10 books, including “Awakenings,” about sleeping sickness patients who were animated by new drugs decades after fell ill. Mr. Sacks’s 1985 essay collection, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” looked at various neurological conditions, warmed by his unusually close identification with patients, what he calls his ability to “imagine and enter their experiences.” Part of the reason for his sympathy, as interviews and profiles have revealed, is that Mr. Sacks is a mass of symptoms himself, ranging from migraines (the subject of his first book) to musical hallucinations. The latter problem is treated among many other related ailments in his latest book, “Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain” (Knopf, 367 pages, $26).In Mr. Sacks’s account of his youth in San Francisco during the flower power generation, he resembles another New Age doctor with whom he shares a physical likeness, the bearded, jolly Dr. Andrew Weil, who hawks vitamin supplements on “Larry King Live” and other press and broadcast outlets, puzzling over individual patients’ problems based on a lifetime of clinical experience. Despite “Musicophilia’s” bibliography of scientific research articles, Mr. Sacks implies that he, like most physicians, is not a scientist at all, but rather what the French call a bricoleur, a tinkerer who tries a little of this or that to see if matters improve. Among the sufferers described in “Musicophilia” include a boy with musical hallucinations and a disabled man who memorized 2,000 operas.Alongside such case histories, each described with the eager interest and warmth that constitute Mr. Sacks’s charm as a writer, are many allusions to his own illnesses, such as those about which he wrote in his half-wry, half-harrowing 1984 memoir, “A Leg To Stand On.” Mr. Sacks also shares anecdotal experiences, confided by friends, with the gossipy urgency of early biographical tale-tellers such as John Aubrey or Saint-Simon. Some readers, like the young British geneticist Sir Thomas Shakespeare, a disability rights advocate, scorn Mr. Sacks as the “man who mistook his patients for a writing career.” Yet the arts world has clearly been inspired by Mr. Sacks. For example, Judi Dench’s spectacular performance as a suddenly awakened sleeping sickness patient in Harold Pinter’s 1982 “A Kind of Alaska,” which was inspired by “Awakenings.” I vividly recall the Japanese actor Yoshi Oida as a tragically baffled neurology patient in the 1993 Paris premiere of “L’homme qui,” Peter Brook’s otherwise pretentious and trendy staging of an adaptation of “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.” There have also been crass adaptations of Mr. Sacks, such as the 1990 Hollywood flick “Awakenings,” featuring wild overacting by Robert De Niro and Robin Williams, who made Mr. Sacks into a hirsute prototype of his Patch Adams.If Hollywood has misprized Mr. Sacks, the good doctor is himself partly to blame. “Musicophilia” cites as gospel truth some false or misleading statements from Mr. Sack’s friends, acquaintances, and other sources. Mr. Sacks quotes the prolific but trite composer and catty memoirist Ned Rorem reporting that Henry James never mentioned music in any of his novels, and that no mention of music appears in biographies of James. James’s “The American,” “The Beast in the Jungle,” “The Golden Bowl,” and “The Portrait of a Lady” all include visits to the opera. For a purportedly serious book on music, Mr. Sacks’s book includes a number of dubious assertions, such as that Tchaikovsky knew his “great fertility in melody was not matched by a comparable grasp of musical structure.” Anyone who studies the score of Tchaikovsky’s “Serenade for Strings” — not to mention his other works — would not demean the composer’s sense of “musical structure.” We are also informed that Richard Wagner’s late works lack “rhythmic organization,” with Nietzsche cited to suggest that this music displayed a “degeneration of the sense of rhythm.” Recordings of late Wagner works conducted by maestros with highly developed rhythmic acumen, such as Arturo Toscanini or Guido Cantelli, makes nonsense of these assertions.Mr. Sacks also falls prey to unfortunate errors regarding musical history. The one-armed pianist Paul Wittgenstein, described here as “dazzlingly gifted,” was in fact an arrogant brute who commissioned a series of concertos for the left hand, then rejected them by sending unfriendly letters to composers like Benjamin Britten and Sergei Prokofiev. Wittgenstein did deign to play Maurice Ravel’s Left Hand concerto, but only after inserting his own “improvements” which naturally infuriated the composer. The Wittgenstein family, which included his brother the philosopher Ludwig, considered Paul to be the least musically gifted among them, and surviving recordings and a film suggest that they were right; Paul was a violent, insensitive pianist, one arm or not.Mr. Sacks even wonders whether Ravel was “on the cusp of a dementia” when he wrote “Boléro.” This supposedly because in “Boléro,” “there is the reiterative pattern and nothing else.” Anyone who has heard “Boléro” recalls the dramatic modulation near the end of the piece where the roof is blown off; indeed one of Ravel’s friends, arriving late for a concert performance of “Boléro,” joked that he had come “just for the modulation.” Ravel had a neighbor who repeatedly played only the first side of a 78 rpm recording of “Boléro,” explaining to the composer, “It’s all the same, isn’t it?”Mr. Sacks and Ravel’s neighbour seem to share the same limited view of “Boléro.” Mr. Sacks’ heavy reliance on more contemporary, personal anecdotes provides both the virtue and major faults of this otherwise welcome new book.Mr. Ivry last wrote for these pages on opera.

The Music in Your Head

The Music in Your Head

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