Music of the heart

A couple of days ago I was in my car, listening to Sirius XM Satellite Radio's station Symphony Hall, and was delighted when one of my favorite pieces of music came on -- Beethoven's Seventh Symphony.

What has always struck me as marvelous about this symphony is the contrast between the first and second movements.  The first movement is one of the most joyous pieces of music I know, a galloping romp that never fails to make me smile.  Then... the second movement begins.  It's quiet, dark, deeply melancholic, achingly beautiful.  It brings home what a genius Beethoven was, able to take us from one emotional extreme to the other in a heartbeat.

I've always reacted to music emotionally, ever since I was four years old and begged to be allowed to put my parents' vinyl records on the turntable and play them.  My mom, not trusting my capacity to handle them carefully, at first refused, but when it became clear that I would keep asking till I got my way, she finally caved and taught me how to operate it.

To my credit, I never so much as scratched a single record.  Even at that age, I recognized that they were far too precious to me to mishandle.  I did, however, play certain records over and over and over, undoubtedly making my mother question her decision to teach me how to use the record player.  Interestingly, I never had any interest in children's music -- not that my parents had much of that in any case -- the pieces I fell in love with as a child were Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade and Dvorak's Symphony #9: From the New World.  I remember being blown away when I was about twelve, and had a little portable AM/FM radio my grandmother gave me, and stumbled on the one radio station near where I lived that had a classical music program once a week.  I was idly flipping channels, and -- all of a sudden -- the opening chords of the first chorus of J. S. Bach's Magnificat in D came pouring out of the little speakers.

Three minutes later, when the piece ended, I was sitting on the floor in my bedroom with tears streaming down my face.  It was, truly, a transformative experience -- so much so that I worked it, very nearly verbatim, into my novel The Hand of the Hunter.

But I didn't know then, and still don't know, why some music resonates so strongly with me, and other pieces don't generate any emotional response at all.  I was spellbound when I discovered Stravinsky's Firebird when I was seventeen; it's still my very favorite piece of music.  On the other hand, I've heard music-loving friends rave about the symphonies of Brahms, and I can say unequivocally that I've never heard anything by Brahms that has ever generated more than a "meh" reaction from me.

Why?  I don't think anyone could answer that.

What is certain is that music is, for most of us, a deeply emotional experience.  And two studies that just came out this week support the conclusion that this response is very likely to be innate.

The first, which appeared in the Journal of Complementary and Alternative Medicine, is perhaps not that surprising.  It studied the stress levels and mood of over seven hundred volunteers, and found that listening to music improved mood and reduced stress, pretty much across the board.  Most hearteningly, the stress reduction was greatest in those who registered the highest stress levels before the study.

Like I said, nothing too earthshattering.  But the second is absolutely astonishing.  A paper in Psychological Studies showed that newborns, when played music judged by listeners as "happy" or "sad," responded differently -- and that it seems to be independent of tempo ("happy" music generally having a faster rhythm than "sad" music).  Newborns listening to the tunes judged as "happy" showed greater focus, calmer facial expressions, reduced heartbeat, and less movement of the hands and feet; "sad" music produced no such effect.

So the hallmarks of a happy piece of music -- things like being in a major key, less harmonic dissonance, and wide pitch contours -- are markers we either learn prenatally, or else are (amazing as it may seem) hard-wired into our neural network.

I said earlier that this was "astonishing," but honestly, it shouldn't be.  Like I said, I've responded emotionally to music for as long as I can recall, and although my parents had a decent collection of records, neither of them played an instrument (nor made any real efforts to expose me to music).  Whatever capacity I had for music appreciation was already there somewhere.  And the fact that the link between emotion and music is so innate is pretty incredible.  I have to wonder what evolutionary purpose it serves.  We certainly get a lot of information about others' emotional states through the pitch contours of their speech; think about what it sounds like when an actor portrays a "robotic voice," for example.  The contours flatten out, leaving behind a monotonous, mechanical stream of words.

But is this really what drives our emotional response to music?  It's only a guess.  What's certain is that the current research explains why for so many of us, music is a critical piece of our lives -- something we return to again and again for solace, comfort, and emotional release.

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Stories in music

I was driving to work a couple of days ago, listening to classical music on satellite radio, and I heard Ferde Grofé's Grand Canyon Suite.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Lennart Sikkema, Canyon River Tree (165872763), CC BY 3.0]

Pretty cool piece of music, but to me the fifth and final movement is something really special.  It's called "Cloudburst" and is a musical depiction of a thunderstorm in the desert.

And the thought occurred to me that you don't need words to tell a story, which I thought would be an interesting topic for this week's Fiction Friday.  Grofé gives us a picture in sounds -- the approach of the storm, lightning, thunder, wind -- then its subsidence (and just like in a real storm, afterward you can still hear the thunder in the distance as it recedes).

This is a pretty well-known piece of music, and is far from the only one that tells a story using music.  Another famous one is Saint-Saëns's Danse Macabre, depicting the devil playing the fiddle and summoning the dead to dance in the cemetery (xylophones for the bones knocking together!).  Listen at the end for the church bells ringing in the distance to signal the sunrise, and the little musical shiver the devil gives when he knows the day is coming -- followed by a sad, mournful violin solo.  But then, the last few notes seem to promise that he'll be back once night falls again.

Beethoven drew his inspiration from stories as well, and I'm not only thinking of pieces like the Pastoral Symphony.  Check out this amazing performance of his piano solo Rondo a Capriccio: Rage Over a Lost Penny.  (All I can say is that if losing a penny made me come up with tunes like this, I'd be flinging coins all over the place.)

One of my favorite musical depictions is from the incredibly prolific American composer Alan Hovhaness.  His Symphony #50 (he wrote 67 of them, and about 450 other sorts of pieces) is subtitled Mount Saint Helens.  Listen to it -- if that's not a musical version of a volcanic eruption, I don't know what is.

Jean Sibelius wrote a lot of music based upon Finnish folk tales, myths, and legends, but to me none gives as vivid a picture as "Lemminkainen's Return" from the Kalevala Suite.  Lemminkainen is a folk hero, and the piece depicts his triumphant return to his home after a long adventure.  It gallops along, and you can almost see the hero with his long hair flying in the wind, riding his horse through a snowstorm.

One of the funniest pieces in classical music -- once you know the story it's telling -- is Sergei Prokofiev's brilliant Lieutenant Kije Suite.  The story behind it is that during an inspection of a military regiment by the Tsar, he was reviewing the roster and saw that someone had scribbled in the word "Kije" (Russian for "thingamajig"), and mistakenly thought it was the name of a soldier.  No one wanted to correct the Tsar, so they invented a Lieutenant Kije, and waxed rhapsodic about his exploits and bravery, along with romantic vignettes of his courtship of, and eventual marriage to, a beautiful young lady.  But they overdid it -- so much that the Tsar decided that he needed to meet this exemplary military man and paragon of virtue.  Cornered, the leaders of the regiment had to invent a heroic death in battle for Kije so the Tsar wouldn't uncover the deception.

I'll end with one of my favorite pieces, the stunning suite Firebird by Igor Stravinsky.  It tells of the magical Firebird, half bird and half human, who is captured by the heroic Prince Ivan.  She gives him one of her feathers, and tells him he can use it to defeat the evil sorcerer King Katschei.  Katschei keeps his soul hidden in an egg in a casket and thinks he's immortal because of it (shades of J. K. Rowling's horcruxes).  But using the magic of the feather, Ivan forces Katschei and his minions to dance themselves to exhaustion.  He then finds the egg and destroys it, killing Katschei and freeing all of the people he'd magically enslaved -- including the young woman Ivan is in love with.  The end is one of the most joyful, stirring, triumphant pieces of music ever written.

So that's a few of my favorite stories in music.  I hope you enjoyed listening.  What are your favorites?

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Like graphic novels?  Like bizarre and mind-blowing ideas from subatomic physics?

Have I got a book for you.

Described as "Tintin meets Brian Cox," Mysteries of the Quantum Universe is a graphic novel about the explorations of a researcher, Bob, and his dog Rick, as they investigate some of the weirdest corners of quantum physics -- and present it at a level that is accessible (and extremely entertaining) to the layperson.  The author Thibault Damour is a theoretical physicist, so his expertise in the cutting edge of physics, coupled with delightful illustrations by artist Mathieu Burniat, make for delightful reading.  This one should be in every science aficionado's to-read stack!

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Misery loves creativity

I have bad news for those of you who enjoy being creative: a new study has suggested that a key ingredient in crafting timeless masterpieces is unhappiness.

As a fiction writer, I've been fascinated for years with the question of where creativity comes from.  While some of the ideas that have inspired my writing come from readily identifiable sources, a lot of my stories had their genesis in the mysterious "it just popped into my head" phenomenon.  I've talked to a lot of writers about this, and many of them have had the experience of feeling as if their inspiration came, literally, from outside of their own minds.

And like many writers (and artists and musicians) I have had serious dry spells, when the inspiration simply didn't want to come.  I keep writing through those -- I've found that the best way to push through writer's block is to throw some discipline at it -- but I won't say that what I produce during those times has much of the spark I look for when I critique my own work.  The best writing comes during times when the ideas leap into my mind unannounced, from heaven-only-knows-where.

But take a look at this study, which indicates that what I may be missing in my life is a good dose of plain, old-fashioned misery.

Entitled "How Are You, My Dearest Mozart?  Well-being and Creativity of Three Famous Composers Based on their Letters," this paper in the Review of Economics and Statistics by economist and statistician Karol Jan Borowiecki of the University of Southern Denmark analyzes the letters and diaries of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Franz Liszt, and attempts to correlate the use of words indicating level of well-being with their productivity.

Not only their productivity in quantity, but in quality.  He looked at the timing of composition of works that "made a significant contribution to the classical canon," not just how many compositions they'd been able to churn out per month.  And the highest productivity, both in quality and quantity, came during the times these composers were most likely to use words like "sadness," "hurt," "grief," and "nervous."

"An increase in negative emotions by about 36.7 percent inspires one additional important composition the following year," Borowiecki writes.  "Since depression is strongly related to sadness, and is sometimes even defined as a state of chronic sadness, this result comes very close to previous claims made by psychologists that depression leads to increased creativity."

Factors that tended to decrease creative output were being in a happy marriage and finding a permanent position with its attendant job security.

Don't tell him to cheer up -- maybe he's working on a masterpiece.  [Image is in the Public Domain]

As an aside, I recall hearing a while back on my favorite classical music radio station that there was an inquiry done into which of the famous composers had the most happy, well-balanced lives.  Some were clearly pretty awful -- Robert Schumann, who ended his life in an insane asylum, comes to mind -- but it was interesting that the winner of the happiest life contest was Franz Josef Haydn.

He of the 104 full-length symphonies. 

So Borowiecki's result is certainly not the whole story.  On the other hand, it's made me wonder if the reason I've had the attention span of a hyperactive fruit fly recently every time I sit down to get some writing done on my current work-in-progress is because I'm enjoying the beautiful spring weather too much.  Should I tell my wife that I'm sick of her being nice to me and bringing me glasses of wine and giving me shoulder rubs, that it'd be better for my muse if she gave me the silent treatment, or just smacked me in the head every so often?  Maybe even the companionship of my ever-cheerful dog is dampening my creativity.  Maybe I should get a pet that is perfectly content viewing me with sneering disdain, or even ignoring my existence completely.

Like a cat, or something.

As interesting as this study is, I'm not sure that's the approach, frankly.  All of us creative types see ebbs and flows of our output, and the fact that I've had some unproductive moments in the last few months shouldn't concern me.  Nor, I think, should it make me seek out ways to be more miserable.  It might be that the dark side of human existence can generate beautiful works of art, writing, or music -- listen to the second movement of Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata for a wonderful example of heart-wringing pathos -- but without joy as an inspiration, we'd never have had the "Bergamasca" from Ottorino Respighi's Ancient Airs and Dances, my vote for one of the most purely exuberant moments in all of classical music.

So it's a mixed bag, as you might expect.  The most creative minds weave the entirety of human experience into their works, and draw on all aspects of emotion to color what they create.  We may be no closer to understanding where creativity itself comes from, but if we can take our pain and sometimes distill it into something beautiful, at least it gives us something to carry us forward when we're at our lowest points.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is pure fun: Arik Kershenbaum's The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal About Aliens and Ourselves.  Kershenbaum tackles a question that has fascinated me for quite some time; is evolution constrained?  By which I mean, are the patterns you see in most animals on Earth -- aerobic cellular respiration, bilateral symmetry, a central information processing system/brain, sensory organs sensitive to light, sound, and chemicals, and sexual reproduction -- such strong evolutionary drivers that they are likely to be found in alien organisms?

Kershenbaum, who is a zoologist at the University of Cambridge, looks at how our environment (and the changes thereof over geological history) shaped our physiology, and which of those features would likely appear in species on different alien worlds.  In this fantastically entertaining book, he considers what we know about animals on Earth -- including some extremely odd ones -- and uses that to speculate about what we might find when we finally do make contact (or, at the very least, detect signs of life on an exoplanet using our earthbound telescopes).

It's a wonderfully fun read, and if you're fascinated with the idea that we might not be alone in the universe but still think of aliens as the Star Trek-style humans with body paint, rubber noses, and funny accents, this book is for you.  You'll never look at the night sky the same way again.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The ghost of Robert Schumann

Yesterday, I was driving home from work, and was listening to Symphony Hall, the classical music station on Sirius-XM Satellite Radio, and the announcer said that we'd be hearing the Violin Concerto in D Minor of the brilliant and tragic composer Robert Schumann.

"And there's quite a story to go with it," he said, and proceeded to tell us how the composer had written the piece in 1853, three years before his death, for his friend and fellow musician Joseph Joachim.  Joachim, however, thought the piece too dark to have any chance at popularity, and after Schumann attempted suicide in 1854 the sheet music was deposited at the Prussian State Library in Berlin, and everyone forgot about it.

In 1933, eighty years later, two women conducting a séance in London were alarmed to hear a "spirit voice" that claimed to be Schumann, and that said they were to go to the Prussian State Library to recover an "unpublished work" and see to it that it got performed.  So the women went over to Berlin, and found the music -- right where the "spirit" said it would be.

Four years later, in 1937, a copy was sent anonymously to the great conductor Yehudi Menuhin.  Impressed, and delighted to have the opportunity to stage a first performance of a piece from a composer who had been dead for 84 years, he premiered it in San Francisco in October of that year.  But the performance was interrupted by one of the two women who had "talked to Schumann," who claimed that she had a right to first performance, since she'd been in touch with the spirit world about the piece and had received that right from the dead composer himself!

We then got to hear the piece, which is indeed dark and haunting and beautiful, and you should all give it a listen.

Having been an aficionado of stories of the paranormal since I was a teen -- which is, not to put too fine a point on it, a long time ago -- it's not often that I get to hear one that I didn't know about before.  Especially, given my love for music, one involving a famous composer.  So I thought this was an intriguing tale, and when I got home I decided to look into it, and see if there was more known about the mysterious piece and its scary connection to séances and ghosts.

And -- sorry to disappoint you if you bought the whole spirit-voice thing -- there is, indeed, a lot more to the story.

Turns out that the announcer was correct that violinist Joachim, when he received the concerto, didn't like it much.  He commented in a letter that the piece showed "a certain exhaustion, which attempts to wring out the last resources of spiritual energy, though certain individual passages bear witness to the deep feelings of the creative artist."  And he not only tucked it away at the Prussian State Library, he included a provision in his will (1907) that the piece should not be performed until 1956, a hundred years after Schumann's death.  So while it was forgotten, it wasn't perhaps as unknown as the radio announcer wanted us to think.

Which brings us up to the séance, and the spirit voice, and the finding of the manuscript -- conveniently leaving out the fact that the two woman who were at the séance, Jelly d'Arányi and Adila Fachiri, were sisters -- who were the grand-nieces of none other than Joseph Joachim himself!

Funny how leaving out one little detail like that makes a story seem like it admits of no other explanation than the supernatural, isn't it?  Then you find out that detail, and... well, not so much, any more.

It's hard to imagine that d'Arányi and Fachiri, who were fourteen and nineteen years old, respectively, when their great-uncle died, wouldn't have known about his will and its mysterious clause forbidding the performance of Schumann's last major work.  d'Arányi and Fachiri themselves were both violinists of some repute, so this adds to their motivation for revealing the piece, with the séance adding an extra frisson to the story, especially in the superstitious and spirit-happy 1930s.  And the forwarding of the piece to Menuhin, followed by d'Arányi's melodramatic crashing of the premiere, has all of the hallmarks of a well-crafted publicity stunt.

I have to admit that I was a little disappointed to discover how easy this one was to debunk.  Of course, I don't know that my explanation is correct; maybe the two sisters were visited by the ghost of Robert Schumann, who had been wandering around in the afterlife, pissed off that his last masterwork wasn't being performed.  But if you cut the story up using Ockham's Razor, you have to admit that the spirit-voices-and-séance theory doesn't make nearly as much sense as the two-sisters-pulling-a-clever-hoax theory.

A pity, really, because a good spooky story always adds something to a dark, melancholy piece of music.  I may have to go listen to Danse Macabre, The Drowned Cathedral, and Night on Bald Mountain, just to get myself back into the mood.

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Last week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week, Simon Singh's The Code Book, prompted a reader to respond, "Yes, but have you read his book on Fermat's Last Theorem?"

In this book, Singh turns his considerable writing skill toward the fascinating story of Pierre de Fermat, the seventeenth-century French mathematician who -- amongst many other contributions -- touched off over three hundred years of controversy by writing that there were no integer solutions for the equation  aⁿ + bⁿ = cⁿ for any integer value of n greater than 2, then adding, "I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain," and proceeding to die before elaborating on what this "marvelous proof" might be.

The attempts to recreate Fermat's proof -- or at least find an equivalent one -- began with Fermat's contemporaries, Evariste de Gaulois, Marin Mersenne, Blaise Pascal, and John Wallis, and continued for the next three centuries to stump the greatest minds in mathematics.  It was finally proven that Fermat's conjecture was correct by Andrew Wiles in 1994.

Singh's book Fermat's Last Theorem: The Story of a Riddle that Confounded the World's Greatest Minds for 350 Years describes the hunt for a solution and the tapestry of personalities that took on the search -- ending with a tour-de-force paper by soft-spoken British mathematician Andrew Wiles.  It's a fascinating journey, as enjoyable for a curious layperson as it is for the mathematically inclined -- and in Singh's hands, makes for a story you will thoroughly enjoy.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The attraction of the unexpected

I've always been fascinated by why people like particular pieces of music and not others.

It's extremely personal, and also rather mysterious and unpredictable.  This is why I find it funny when someone asks if I like classical music.  That's a little like saying, "Do you like food?"  I love some classical music, and some of it does nothing for me at all.  But what's eternally fascinating to me is that two people who are alike in a great many respects can come to completely opposite opinions about music.  Take my buddy Dave, for example, who is passionately fond of the Romantic composers -- Brahms, Mahler, Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky.  I, on the other hand, have never heard a piece of music by Brahms I've liked -- my tastes run more to the very early (Tallis, Susato, Praetorius, Palestrina, Bach) and the much more recent (Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Vaughan Williams, Holst).  If I had to pick one very favorite piece of music it would be Stravinsky's Firebird:

I'm hard-pressed to say why, however.  And what's the connection between that one, and the piece that had me bawling -- at age seventeen, no less -- the first time I heard it, Ralph Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis?:

One fascinating piece of the puzzle was discovered five years ago, when two researchers at Wesleyan University, Luke Harrison and Psyche Loui, found that people have strong physical reactions when listening to music they love, and if you hook them up to a fMRI or PET scanner, you find that at the climax of the piece of music, the same parts of the brain light up as when they have an orgasm.

No wonder we love music so much.

That whole tension/resolution thing, with its obvious parallels to sexual response, is pretty universal to music of all sorts.  I remember this being demonstrated to me when I was in the college chorus, and the director was telling us about dynamic tension in chord progression and resolution to the tonic, and demonstrated by going to the piano and playing us a line from the Christmas carol "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing."  He played, "Hark, the herald angels sing, glory to the newborn."

And stopped.

About a dozen people sung out "KING" in tones that clearly communicated, "Don't leave us hanging, bro!"

So tension/resolution is part of it.  But just this week, a paper was published in Current Biology that added another piece to the puzzle.  Apparently, we also tend to like music that surprises us -- that takes us on a path that we didn't expect.

In "Uncertainty and Surprise Jointly Predict Musical Pleasure and Amygdala, Hippocampus, and Auditory Cortex Activity," neuroscientists Vincent K.M. Cheung, Lars Meyer, and Stefan Koelsch (of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences), Peter M.C. Harrison and Marcus T. Pearce (of the Queen Mary University of London), and John-Dylan Haynes (of the Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin) found that we're grabbed by twists and turns we didn't see coming.

The authors write:

Listening to music often evokes intense emotions.  Recent research suggests that musical pleasure comes from positive reward prediction errors, which arise when what is heard proves to be better than expected.  Central to this view is the engagement of the nucleus accumbens—a brain region that processes reward expectations—to pleasurable music and surprising musical events...  Here, we demonstrate that pleasure varies nonlinearly as a function of the listener’s uncertainty when anticipating a musical event, and the surprise it evokes when it deviates from expectations.

That certainly agrees with my experience.  I love being surprised, and my favorite music (in any genre) often contains unexpected or startling rhythmic patterns.  Take, for example, the brilliant "Ring Out, Solstice Bells," by Jethro Tull:

I've played Balkan music for years -- with mutant time signatures like 11/16, 22/16, and (no lie) 25/16 -- and I'm damned if I can figure out what time signature this song is in.

And I love that.

My passion for music has been with me for a very, very long time.  My mother used to love to tell the story about how I pestered her incessantly (I couldn't have been more than three or four years old) to learn how to use the record player so I wouldn't have to ask her every time I wanted to listen to music (which was basically all the time).  She finally acquiesced -- and she was impressed that I cared enough about the music that I never damaged either the record player or one of the fragile, easily-scratched vinyl LPs that were all we had back then.  And there was one piece of music I played over and over and over and over, and my mom couldn't figure out (and of course, at that point I couldn't articulate) why I loved it so much.  This was the tail-end of the Big Band era, and my parents had several LPs from Lawrence Welk's band.  Most of them were "meh," in my opinion, but there was one that was different.

It's called "Scarlett O'Hara."  Listen for the completely unexpected key change -- not at all characteristic of Big Band music -- from A Major to (of all the weird keys...) B Major that happens a couple of times.  I used to get a visceral thrill from that moment, even at the tender age of four.

My favorite example of surprise, though, comes from classical music.  I distinctly remember the first time I listened to Bach's magnificent Mass in B Minor, and the sweet, sedate aria "Quoniam Tu Solus Sanctus" drew to a close, and without any warning I was launched forward into the breathtaking chorus "Cum Sancto Spiritu:"

Talk about a brain orgasm.

So we're gradually figuring out some possible reasons for that mysterious phenomenon -- musical taste.

Since I'm on a roll and having way too much fun roaming around YouTube listening to music, I think I'll end with two more of my favorites, one rock and one classical.  I don't know if there's anything similar about them -- see if you can figure it out.  For now, I'm just enjoying listening.

The Kongos, "Come With Me Now:"

  

Jean Sibelius, Lemminkainen's Return:

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Last week's Skeptophilia book recommendation was a fun book about math; this week's is a fun book about science.

In The Canon, New York Times and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Natalie Angier takes on a huge problem in the United States (and, I suspect, elsewhere), and does it with her signature clarity and sparkling humor: science illiteracy.

Angier worked with scientists from a variety of different fields -- physics, geology, biology, chemistry, meteorology/climatology, and others -- to come up with a compendium of what informed people should, at minimum, know about science.  In each of the sections of her book she looks at the basics of a different field, and explains concepts using analogies and examples that will have you smiling -- and understanding.

This is one of those books that should be required reading in every high school science curriculum.  As Angier points out, part of the reason we're in the environmental mess we currently face is because people either didn't know enough science to make smart decisions, or else knew it and set it aside for political and financial short-term expediency.  Whatever the cause, though, she's right that only education can cure it, and if that's going to succeed we need to counter the rote, dull, vocabulary-intense way science is usually taught in public schools.  We need to recapture the excitement of science -- that understanding stuff is fun.  

Angier's book takes a long stride in that direction.  I recommend it to everyone, layperson and science geek alike.  It's a whirlwind that will leave you laughing, and also marveling at just how cool the universe is.

The ghost of Robert Schumann

Yesterday, I was driving home from work, and was listening to Symphony Hall, the classical music station on Sirius-XM Satellite Radio, and the announcer said that we'd be hearing the Violin Concerto in D Minor of the brilliant and tragic composer Robert Schumann.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

"And there's quite a story to go with it," he said, and proceeded to tell us how the composer had written the piece in 1853, three years before his death, for his friend and fellow musician Joseph Joachim.  Joachim, however, thought the piece too dark to have any chance at popularity, and after Schumann attempted suicide in 1854 the sheet music was deposited at the Prussian State Library in Berlin, and everyone forgot about it.

In 1933, eighty years later, two women conducting a séance in London were alarmed to hear a "spirit voice" that claimed to be Schumann, and that said they were to go to the Prussian State Library to recover an "unpublished work" and see to it that it got performed.  So the women went over to Berlin, and found the music -- right where the "spirit" said it would be.

Four years later, in 1937, a copy was sent anonymously to the great conductor Yehudi Menuhin.  Impressed, and delighted to have the opportunity to stage a first performance of a piece from a composer who had been dead for 84 years, he premiered it in San Francisco in October of that year.  But the performance was interrupted by one of the two women who had "talked to Schumann," who claimed that she had a right to first performance, since she'd been in touch with the spirit world about the piece and had received that right from the dead composer himself!

We then got to hear the piece, which is indeed dark and haunting and beautiful, and you should all give it a listen.

Having been an aficionado of stories of the paranormal since I was a teen -- which is, not to put too fine a point on it, a long time ago -- it's not often that I get to hear one that I didn't know about before.  Especially, given my love for music, one involving a famous composer.  So I thought this was an intriguing tale, and when I got home I decided to look into it, and see if there was more known about the mysterious piece and its scary connection to séances and ghosts.

And -- sorry to disappoint you if you bought the whole spirit-voice thing -- there is, indeed, a lot more to the story.

Turns out that the announcer was correct that violinist Joachim, when he received the concerto, didn't like it much.  He commented in a letter that the piece showed "a certain exhaustion, which attempts to wring out the last resources of spiritual energy, though certain individual passages bear witness to the deep feelings of the creative artist."  And he not only tucked it away at the Prussian State Library, he included a provision in his will (1907) that the piece should not be performed until 1956, a hundred years after Schumann's death.  So while it was forgotten, it wasn't perhaps as unknown as the radio announcer wanted us to think.

Which brings us up to the séance, and the spirit voice, and the finding of the manuscript -- conveniently leaving out the fact that the two woman who were at the séance, Jelly d'Arányi and Adila Fachiri, were sisters -- who were the grand-nieces of none other than Joseph Joachim himself!

Funny how leaving out one little detail like that makes a story seem like it admits of no other explanation than the supernatural, isn't it?  Then you find out that detail, and... well, not so much, any more.

It's hard to imagine that d'Arányi and Fachiri, who were fourteen and nineteen years old, respectively, when their great-uncle died, wouldn't have known about his will and its mysterious clause forbidding the performance of Schumann's last major work.  d'Arányi and Fachiri themselves were both violinists of some repute, so this adds to their motivation for revealing the piece, with the séance adding an extra frisson to the story, especially in the superstitious and spirit-happy 1930s.  And the forwarding of the piece to Menuhin, followed by d'Arányi's melodramatic crashing of the premiere, has all of the hallmarks of a well-crafted publicity stunt.

I have to admit that I was a little disappointed to discover how easy this one was to debunk.  Of course, I don't know that my explanation is correct; maybe the two sisters were visited by the ghost of Robert Schumann, who had been wandering around in the afterlife, pissed off that his last masterwork wasn't being performed.  But if you cut the story up using Ockham's Razor, you have to admit that the spirit-voices-and-séance theory doesn't make nearly as much sense as the two-sisters-pulling-a-clever-hoax theory.

A pity, really, because a good spooky story always adds something to a dark, melancholy piece of music. I may have to go listen to Danse Macabre, The Drowned Cathedral, and Night on Bald Mountain, just to get myself back into the mood.

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A particularly disturbing field in biology is parasitology, because parasites are (let's face it) icky.  But it's not just the critters that get into you and try to eat you for dinner that are awful; because some parasites have evolved even more sinister tricks.

There's the jewel wasp, that turns parasitized cockroaches into zombies while their larvae eat the roach from the inside out.  There's the fungus that makes caterpillars go to the highest branch of a tree and then explode, showering their friends and relatives with spores.   Mice whose brains are parasitized by Toxoplasma gondii become completely unafraid, and actually attracted to the scent of cat pee -- making them more likely to be eaten and pass the microbe on to a feline host.

Not dinnertime reading, but fascinating nonetheless, is Matt Simon's investigation of such phenomena in his book Plight of the Living Dead.  It may make you reluctant to leave your house, but trust me, you will not be able to put it down.

Musical post-mortem

A few years ago, I wrote a piece in Skeptophilia about people who claim they're channeling the spirits of dead musicians, writers, and artists, so that we can get a chance to enjoy additional works by our favorite dead creative types.

So according to these folks, Beethoven is still composing, not just decomposing.

One of the folks I looked at in this post was Rosemary Brown (1916-2001), a British housewife who (despite little in the way of musical training) said she was writing -- if you believe her, a better word would be transcribing -- new works by Bach, Liszt, Chopin, and Debussy.  Some people have been extremely impressed, even baffled, by her ability; pianist Elene Gusch, who wrote a biography of Brown, said, "It would have been difficult for even a very able and well-trained composer to come up with them all, especially to produce them at the speed with which they came through."

Not everyone, however, is as taken with her compositions.  André Previn, conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, said, "If the newfound compositions are genuine, they would best have been left on the shelf."

Rosemary Brown in action

So this has been one of those enduring mysteries that the believers say is absolutely convincing and the scoffers say is a ridiculous false claim.  But until now, no one has tried to do any kind of rigorous analysis of her work (or, if you believe Brown's story, the very-posthumous works of Bach et al.).

Enter Carleton University Ph.D. student Érico Bomfim.  Bomfim has undertaken a detailed analysis of Brown's compositions, with the aim of finding out if there's enough commonality with known works by famous composers to be at all confident that there's something otherworldly happening here.

"She claimed to be in touch with the spirits of those composers," Bomfim said, in an interview with  CBC Radio's All In A Day.  "She claimed to be able to talk to them, and she said that they were dictating pieces to her...  It's certainly a possibility [that it's a hoax], and that's certainly what the skeptics think about it, but the thing is, she [wrote] one piece [in front] of the cameras when BBC was recording, and it's quite a complex piece."

Bomfim believes that Brown's lack of musical training supports the possibility that her claim was true.

"[S]he didn't seem to have a very deep musical knowledge," he explained. "She just had some piano lessons, she was not a trained composer.  So it's quite hard to believe that she would be able to write that kind of piece, especially if we keep in mind that it's close to Liszt's late style."

And she wasn't just able to mimic Liszt's style.  Bomfim said that her talent for writing in the styles of famous composers was uncanny.

"To reproduce so many styles [of classical music], that never happened... There's not any other case besides Rosemary Brown.  There are many musicians that are able to imitate styles, but mostly ... it's a humorous practice, playing Happy Birthday To You in Beethoven's style.  But those are trained musicians, and they didn't show themselves to be able to write lots of new musical pieces in lots of different styles...  Rosemary Brown's case is absolutely unique, and that's why I believe it really deserves close attention from musicology."

I definitely approve of Bomfim's general approach.  No claim should be rejected out of hand, although some of them can be rejected pretty quickly (as Christopher Hitchens put it, "What is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.").  Word-analysis software has become pretty good at figuring out who wrote passages of text using information such as word choice, word length distribution, and sentence structure; I know (much) less about any sort of musicological approach to the analogous question with compositions, but I would imagine the same sort of thing could be done there.

My intuition is that Rosemary Brown was a talented fake, or possibly simply delusional.  But intuition isn't evidence, and it'll be interesting to see what Bomfim comes up with.  And if it turns out that deceased composers are still writing music, no one will be happier than me.  For one thing, I hate that I've pretty much run out of new things to listen to by Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and Vaughan Williams.  For another, it would mean that my writing career won't be over when I kick the bucket.  It might be harder to find a publisher after I'm dead, but at least I might be able to find a competent medium to talk into being my locum.

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In writing Apocalyptic Planet, science writer Craig Childs visited some of the Earth's most inhospitable places.  The Greenland Ice Cap.  A new lava flow in Hawaii.  Uncharted class-5 rapids in the Salween River of Tibet.  The westernmost tip of Alaska.  The lifeless "dune seas" of northern Mexico.  The salt pans in the Atacama Desert of Chile, where it hasn't rained in recorded history.

In each place, he not only uses lush, lyrical prose to describe his surroundings, but uses his experiences to reflect upon the history of the Earth.  How conditions like these -- glaciations, extreme drought, massive volcanic eruptions, meteorite collisions, catastrophic floods -- have triggered mass extinctions, reworking not only the physical face of the planet but the living things that dwell on it.  It's a disturbing read at times, not least because Childs's gift for vivid writing makes you feel like you're there, suffering what he suffered to research the book, but because we are almost certainly looking at the future.  His main tenet is that such cataclysms have happened many times before, and will happen again.

It's only a matter of time.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Playing on the heartstrings

I'm a pretty emotional guy, and one of the things that never fails to get me is music.  Among the musical moments that always grab me by the feels and swing me around, sometimes to the point of tears, are:

• the finale to Stravinsky's Firebird
• Couperin's Mysterious Barricades
• Beethoven's Symphony #9 (if you want a good happy cry, watch this video of a flash mob in Spain performing the "Ode to Joy")
• Debussy's The Drowned Cathedral
• Mozart's Requiem (one of the peak experiences of my life to date was seeing this performed live in Carnegie Hall)
• Thomas Tallis's Spem in Alium

Then, there are the ones that send chills up my spine.  A few of those:

• Saint-Saëns's Danse Macabre
• the "Scherzo" from Litolff's Concerto Symphonique #4
• the second movement of Prokofiev's Symphony #5
• "Quoniam Tu Solis Sanctus" and "Cum Sancto Spiritu" from the J. S. Bach Mass in B Minor
• Rameau's "Rondeau" from Les Indes Galantes
• the last movement of Saint-Saëns's Symphony #3

I've always been fascinated by this capacity for music to induce emotion.  Such a response is nearly universal, although which music causes tears or that little frisson up the spine varies greatly from person to person.  Most of Mozart's music (with the exception of the Requiem and a couple of other pieces) really doesn't do much for me.  It's pleasant to listen to, but doesn't evoke much in me other than that.  I actively dislike Chopin, Brahms, and Mahler, and I know people for whom those are the absolute pinnacle of emotional depth in music.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

In a paper released just last week in Nature, neurophysiologists Kazuma Mori and Makoto Iwanaga of Osaka University looked into an explanation for how this phenomenon happens, if not exactly why it happens.  Their paper, "Two Types of Peak Emotional Responses to Music: The Psychopathology of Chills and Tears," describes experiments they ran in which they allowed test subjects to listen to music while monitoring their reactions not only via subjective description but by such physiological criteria as skin conductivity (a common measure of stress).

And what happened was pretty cool.  They found that (as I have done above) strongly evocative pieces of music tended to fall into two categories, ones that elicit tears and ones that elicit chills.  The authors write:

The present study investigated the psychophysiological responses of two types of peak emotions: chills and tears.  We used music as the stimuli because the chills response has been confirmed in music and emotion studies... The chills and tears responses were measured by self-report sensations during song listening.  We conducted an experiment measuring subjective emotions and autonomic nervous system activity.  The hypothesis was that tears would be different from chills in terms of both psychological and physiological responses.  With respect to psychophysiological responses, we predicted that chills would induce subjective pleasure, subjective arousal, and physiological arousal whereas tears would induce subjective pleasure, relaxation, and physiological calming.  In addition, we asked participants to rate song expression in terms of happiness, sadness, calm, and fear in order to understand the emotional property of chills-inducing songs and tear-inducing songs...  [The] results show that tears involve pleasure from sadness and that they are psychophysiologically calming; thus, psychophysiological responses permit the distinction between chills and tears.  Because tears may have a cathartic effect, the functional significance of chills and tears seems to be different.

Which supports the contention that my experience of bawling the first time I listened to Ralph Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis served the purpose of emotional catharsis.  I know my mood was better after the last chords died out, with the exception of the fact that I felt a little like a wrung-out dishrag; and despite the fact that I don't exactly like crying, I listen to these tear-evoking pieces of music over and over.  So there must be something there I'm seeking, and I don't think it's pure masochism.  The authors write:

The current results found that the mixed emotion of chills was simultaneous pleasure, happiness, and sadness.  This finding means that chills provide mainly a positive experience but the sadness factor is necessary even though a favourite song is the elicitor.  Given that music chills activate reward-related brain regions, such an emotional property could make chills a unique experience and separate chills from other mixed emotional experiences.  Furthermore, as the mixed emotion of tears was simultaneous pleasure and sadness, it was different from the mixed emotion of chills.  The tears response contributes to the understanding of the pleasure of sad music.  As people generally feel displeasure for sad things, this is a unique mixed emotional response with regard to music.  Although previous studies showed that sad music induced relatively weak pleasure, the current tears’ results showed that sad songs induced strong pleasure.  It is difficult to account for why people feel sad music as pleasurable; however, the current results suggested that the benefit of cathartic tears might have a key role in the pleasure generated by sad music.  Therefore, the two types of peak emotional responses may uniquely support knowledge of mixed emotion.

So that's pretty awesome, and it's nice to know that I'm not alone in my sometimes overwhelming response to music.  And now I think I'll go listen to Shostakovich's Symphony #5 and have a nice long cry.  I know I'll feel better afterwards.