I'm in the middle of reading The Madness of Prince Hamlet and Other Extraordinary States of Mind by Robert M. Youngson, which is a sort of collection of essays on psychiatry for the masses, a bit like what Asimov's non-fiction did for science and maths. So, it's nice easy wee read (just what I need today after last night's kamekaze binge - I had intended to get over to T
Is this a discussion or are you just thinking out loud? ))
Are these finger taps from the same finger? Surely not. This reminds me of a communication given at one of the Physiological Society meetings in Glasgow. Physiology and musicianship. Someone gave a talk on lung capacity and the playing of wind instruments. So to another thought. Many people on this site have strong views on what is acceptable at a session and what is not. Eh, how about steroids as performance enhancers? (bigger lungs, faster fingers etc.) Would that be ok. Ah, full circle now we're back to that posting of yours from a few months ago. 'Drinking and smoking at sessions' - or something like that. Ok, now I'm just thinking out loud too. Shut up Craig.
Pity you didnt stay long in Glasgow. Hope to see you next time.
Craig - Discussion or thinking out loud? Now that someone's finally replied it must merit as a discussion! So thanks for that.
Performance enhancers? I used to know some guys who did Charlie before a sesh/gig! Not for me thanks. So would they be disqualified from sessions by official session police for unethical performance?
Those physiologists - I'm surprised they didn't get the vO2 max of the musicians also.
Anyway, I'm still thinking of how I can scan the chapter and get a link to it so we might all have a look at it, maybe then I'll get more replies! Perhaps I'll create one of those AOL webpages for it.
No, dammit, you have to have aol's easy designer to view it.
I'll just paste the whole goddam chapter....
The mind of the musician
The mind of the musician: nature or nurture?
The mind of the musician is capable of synthesizing internal music that is heard almost exactly as performed music is heard. It is capable of responding emotionally to musical experience in a manner shared by other musicians. All musicians agree that major keys are bright and minor keys sombre. All respond emotionally in much the same way to pentatonic modes (music using only the black keys on a keyboard). Many keyboard musicians share subtle emotional responses in common to different keys, although equal temperament tuning is supposed to make the intervals between all semitones the same. The latter capacity also seems to have survived several changes in the frequency of the standard pitchfor music (see also The chromatic mind). Many musicians have 'perfect pitch' the ability to name with complete accuracy any note played. Musical physiologists believe that this capacity is possible because such people have an internal standard of pitch a reliable memory of a single note, such as A (440 hertz) to which other notes are related.
Musicians can not only perform known music internally, creating ideal performances that they might not be able to match on the concert platform, they can also perform new imagined music, both as an almost unwilled improvization and in a controlled and carefully structured manner. The ability to convert printed music to internally heard sound is remarkable. A musician will pick up a score of a string quartet and will at once 'hear' the music. In the same way, the creative musician can translate what he or she hears in the mind into a complex score. Many composers do not compose on an instrument, but in their head, writing their composition down without having to play it first.
Musical memory is another extraordinary feature of the mind of the musician. It is a commonplace of musical biography to read of pianists learning a new piece from the music while travelling in a train and giving a creditable public performance without the music, on arrival. The German conductor von Bulow even memorized the whole score of a symphony by Stanford in the course of a train journey and was then able to conduct the work without score. Menuhin reports a remarkable instance of musical memory by the Romanian violinist and composer Georges Enesco (18811955). Enesco and Ravel were trying out a new violin sonata that Ravel had just written. After going through it once, Enesco suggested that they play it again just to be sure that everything was right. To Ravel's amazement, Enesco dosed the violin part and played the whole work entirely from memory. LisA's favourite pupil, Karl Tausig (184171) is said, by the age of 29, to have memorized every important work in the whole pianoforte and harpsichord literature as it then existed.
The question of musical taste is a difficult one. In general, taste is related to the overall standard of musicality and grows with musical education and experience. It is, of course, variable. Some executive musicians of extraordinary skills are capable of displaying lapses of taste that horrify the discriminating. On the other hand, taste which includes originality and unpredictability is generally deemed to be the most important element in determining artistic quality both in performance and in composition. Today, a very high standard of technical performance is expected of all professional musicians and, to a large extent, the factors that distinguish the great from the merely competent are those indefinable elements we mean when we talk of taste.
The kind of music for which a musician is best known does not necessarily correspond to his or her ideal of taste. Economic factors may detemdne the direction of a musical career. There are even cases on record in which a high level of taste can be inhibitory. Musicality, as we shall see, runs in families. When one highly musical family was studied it was found that there was one member who, in the opinion of the others, was quite devoid of musical talent. On investigation, however, this man was found to have all the elements of musical ability present to an unparalleled degree significantly greater than those of his very famous brother. It turned out that he was intensely musical but that the level of his taste was so high that nearly all the music he heard sounded banal and boring to him and he could not bear either to perform or to hear it.
Musicians live in a world of emotion and artistry, rather than in a world of reason. It does not seem to be necessary to be particularly intelligent in order to he a capable musician; indeed, some mentally retarded people show high musical sensitivity and even talent. For these reasons it has occasionally been suggested that musicians are commonly short on intelligence. This is a typical case of arguing from the particular to the general and it is as wrong as such arguments usually are. There is no evidence that musicians, as a class, are any less bright or more bright, for that matter than a comparable group of nonmusidans. The distribution of intelligence seems to be the same in musical populations as in general populations. It has to be said, however, that musicians in the highest class are commonly supremely intelligent people. Professional distinction in music demand the same high levels of intelligence as distinction in any other profession.
It seems possible that obsessivecompulsive neurosis (or perhaps just plain superstition) is commoner in performing musicians than in the generality of mankind. There are numerous tales of the eccentric antics of instrumental players, singers and conductors arising from this particular idiosyncrasy. The pianist V1adimir Pachmann could never get his piano stool at the right height. It is on record that he asked whether anyone in the audience had a train ticket he could borrow. Other pianists will sit staring at the audience until the silence is absolute and no one dare breathe. Shura Cherkassky must always step on to the stage with his right foot first, and his ~ice time is measured exactly to the second. Ludano Pavarotti has to find a bent nail in the floorboards before beginning a concert. The conductor
Artur Rodzinski always had a loaded gun in his pocket when at work on the rostrum.
Professional musical performers differ from ordinary mortals in more ways than the purely psychological. If they are to be successful they require certain innate physical abilities some of which are rare outside the world of music. Carl Seashore, the doyen of musical psychology and physiology, once put together a battery of tests called the 'Seashore Measures of Musical Talent'. These include such things as the ability accurately to discriminate pitch and interval, to maintain strict tempo, to analyse rhythmical patterns, to appreciate subtle differences in loudness, to distinguish differences in timbre (such as the difference between the same note played on a clarinet and on an oboe), and to understand phrasing in a succession of notes. What may surprise many people is that one of the important standard measurements of musical capacity is the ability to move the fingers very quickly. People with a naturally slow tapping rate less than about seven taps per second, averaged over a 5 second period can improve to some extent with practice, but will never become virtuoso performers. Seashore says that the tapping rate, in association with steadiness, precision and endurance, deserves to be rated highly in the selection of young musicians for training. Few people can achieve more than 12 taps per second.
One aspect of the musical mind that seems incomprehensible to nonmusicians is the ability to dissociate musical activity from everyday thought and to engage in both simultaneously. A competent sightreader can give an adequate performance while thinking about something quite different. This is not to suggest that a brilliant performance is possible if the leader of a string quartet is having fantasies about the beautiful girl in the front row. But that it should be possible to do this at all is remarkable and tells us something about the nature of musical execution and how it differs from other mental activity. Edvard Grieg showed the manuscript of his piano concerto to Franz Liszt for the first time. Many guests were present and Liszt asked Crieg to play it. Grieg demurred, though, saying he had never
practised it. Liszt went to the piano and read off the work at sight, giving a remarkable performance. Astonishingly, in the course of this, at a time when his interpretation was at its finest, he started to talk to the guests about the work, indicating to one or to the other which parts he especially liked.
So how does the mind of the musician come about? There have been great arguments about whether musical capacity is inherited or the result of environmental influences, and these arguments still go on. Unfortunately, the same evidence can be used by both sides. There are numerous historical examples of musical families in which the talent appears in generation after generation. But a musical family necessarily provides an intensely musical environment to which new children are exposed. So the process could operate in. either way or both.
There is, however, a good deal of evidence to show that genetics is important in determining musicality. Take, for instance, the case of Mozart, who is regarded by many as the greatest musician of all time. Mozart certainly came from a musical family, but his talents were apparent at such an early age that they could hardly have been wholly the result of this environment. It must be remembered that the full expression of musical ability cannot occur before the neurological development of the individual allows it or before considerable musical education has occurred, so the very early years may show little of the potential. We have unique information in this context in the case of Mozart because, when he was eight years old, his musical powers were formally studied in London by the lawyer, antiquary and amateur scientist the Honourable Daines Barrington (17271800). This careful man sent a report to the Royal Society entitled 'An account of a very remarkable musician'. By the time Barrington studied Mozart the musician was already performing regularly in public, and it was in the course of one of the overseas tours in which his talents were being exploited by his father, Leopold Mozart, that Barrington met him. Barrington's report contains documentary evidence of Mozart's age, and records the boy's prowess at playing at sight from a previously unseen fivepart score. It seems that the boy was a better sightreader than his experienced father. The report also records Mozart's skills at improvization in various styles. There is a remarkable insight into the mind of the true musician, in that on being asked to improvise an angry piece, Mozart became so emotionally involved that, in the course of the performance, he was worked up to a frenzy, rose to his feet and beat the harpsichord like a mad person. Although his little fingers could only stretch to a fifth, he played with amazing skill and musical understanding, especially in his own compositions. In particular, he was able to modulate freely from one key to another an indication of remarkable musical maturity in one so young. From other evidence we know that Mozart was playing and composing at the age of four and that his musical memory was phenomenal. After hearing Allegri's Miserere in the Sistine Chapel, Mozart went home and wrote out the entire score from memory. This was a major work in nine parts scored for two choirs.
It is inconceivable that Mozart's musical abilities could have arisen and at such an early age from purely environmental influences. Most of the qualities that enabled him to become a musician of such stature and to develop into such a great composer must have been innate and hence of genetic origin. It is apparent, however~ that musical capacity is a complex entity: there can be no question of a single gene for musicality. This is an example of what geneticists call multifactorial inheritance, involving a number of different genes.
In Mozart's case, and in that of many other great musicians, we are dealing with an exceptionally rare combination of genetic factors that laid down the potential for high musicality. It is possible that, in the absence of a musical environment, explicit musical capacity might not have developed. But it seems likely that it does not require a highly musical environment to stimulate the musical interests and ambitions of people genetically endowed to this degree. If the underlying set of abilities is present, almost any exposure to music would prompt in the person concerned a powerful desire to hear and to make music. The greatest value of a musical environment is in its educational effect.
Much music will be heard, taste will be formed, and familiarity with the current stage of musical evolution quickly achieved. At this point, the way will be open for new and original creativity. This process can readily be followed in the careers of the great composers.
The Madness of Prince Hamlet......
The Madness of Prince Hamlet......
I'm in the middle of reading The Madness of Prince Hamlet and Other Extraordinary States of Mind by Robert M. Youngson, which is a sort of collection of essays on psychiatry for the masses, a bit like what Asimov's non-fiction did for science and maths. So, it's nice easy wee read (just what I need today after last night's kamekaze binge - I had intended to get over to T
# Posted on May 3rd 2003 by Rudall the time
Re: The Madness of Prince Hamlet......
Wow!
What a brainy geezer!
Check out the link:
http://vlp.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/people/data/per318.html
Danny.
# Posted on May 3rd 2003 by Rudall the time
Re: The Madness of Prince Hamlet......
Hey Danny,
))
Is this a discussion or are you just thinking out loud?
Are these finger taps from the same finger? Surely not. This reminds me of a communication given at one of the Physiological Society meetings in Glasgow. Physiology and musicianship. Someone gave a talk on lung capacity and the playing of wind instruments. So to another thought. Many people on this site have strong views on what is acceptable at a session and what is not. Eh, how about steroids as performance enhancers? (bigger lungs, faster fingers etc.) Would that be ok. Ah, full circle now we're back to that posting of yours from a few months ago. 'Drinking and smoking at sessions' - or something like that. Ok, now I'm just thinking out loud too. Shut up Craig.
Pity you didnt stay long in Glasgow. Hope to see you next time.
Craig.
# Posted on May 4th 2003 by bouzyboy
Re: The Madness of Prince Hamlet......
Craig - Discussion or thinking out loud? Now that someone's finally replied it must merit as a discussion! So thanks for that.
Performance enhancers? I used to know some guys who did Charlie before a sesh/gig! Not for me thanks. So would they be disqualified from sessions by official session police for unethical performance?
Those physiologists - I'm surprised they didn't get the vO2 max of the musicians also.
Anyway, I'm still thinking of how I can scan the chapter and get a link to it so we might all have a look at it, maybe then I'll get more replies! Perhaps I'll create one of those AOL webpages for it.
Danny.
# Posted on May 5th 2003 by Rudall the time
Re: The Madness of Prince Hamlet......
Ok - I think I've saved it as a web page, soon find out, haven't looked myself yet:
# Posted on May 12th 2003 by Rudall the time
Re: The Madness of Prince Hamlet......
No, dammit, you have to have aol's easy designer to view it.
I'll just paste the whole goddam chapter....
The mind of the musician
The mind of the musician: nature or nurture?
The mind of the musician is capable of synthesizing internal music that is heard almost exactly as performed music is heard. It is capable of responding emotionally to musical experience in a manner shared by other musicians. All musicians agree that major keys are bright and minor keys sombre. All respond emotionally in much the same way to pentatonic modes (music using only the black keys on a keyboard). Many keyboard musicians share subtle emotional responses in common to different keys, although equal temperament tuning is supposed to make the intervals between all semitones the same. The latter capacity also seems to have survived several changes in the frequency of the standard pitchfor music (see also The chromatic mind). Many musicians have 'perfect pitch' the ability to name with complete accuracy any note played. Musical physiologists believe that this capacity is possible because such people have an internal standard of pitch a reliable memory of a single note, such as A (440 hertz) to which other notes are related.
Musicians can not only perform known music internally, creating ideal performances that they might not be able to match on the concert platform, they can also perform new imagined music, both as an almost unwilled improvization and in a controlled and carefully structured manner. The ability to convert printed music to internally heard sound is remarkable. A musician will pick up a score of a string quartet and will at once 'hear' the music. In the same way, the creative musician can translate what he or she hears in the mind into a complex score. Many composers do not compose on an instrument, but in their head, writing their composition down without having to play it first.
Musical memory is another extraordinary feature of the mind of the musician. It is a commonplace of musical biography to read of pianists learning a new piece from the music while travelling in a train and giving a creditable public performance without the music, on arrival. The German conductor von Bulow even memorized the whole score of a symphony by Stanford in the course of a train journey and was then able to conduct the work without score. Menuhin reports a remarkable instance of musical memory by the Romanian violinist and composer Georges Enesco (18811955). Enesco and Ravel were trying out a new violin sonata that Ravel had just written. After going through it once, Enesco suggested that they play it again just to be sure that everything was right. To Ravel's amazement, Enesco dosed the violin part and played the whole work entirely from memory. LisA's favourite pupil, Karl Tausig (184171) is said, by the age of 29, to have memorized every important work in the whole pianoforte and harpsichord literature as it then existed.
The question of musical taste is a difficult one. In general, taste is related to the overall standard of musicality and grows with musical education and experience. It is, of course, variable. Some executive musicians of extraordinary skills are capable of displaying lapses of taste that horrify the discriminating. On the other hand, taste which includes originality and unpredictability is generally deemed to be the most important element in determining artistic quality both in performance and in composition. Today, a very high standard of technical performance is expected of all professional musicians and, to a large extent, the factors that distinguish the great from the merely competent are those indefinable elements we mean when we talk of taste.
The kind of music for which a musician is best known does not necessarily correspond to his or her ideal of taste. Economic factors may detemdne the direction of a musical career. There are even cases on record in which a high level of taste can be inhibitory. Musicality, as we shall see, runs in families. When one highly musical family was studied it was found that there was one member who, in the opinion of the others, was quite devoid of musical talent. On investigation, however, this man was found to have all the elements of musical ability present to an unparalleled degree significantly greater than those of his very famous brother. It turned out that he was intensely musical but that the level of his taste was so high that nearly all the music he heard sounded banal and boring to him and he could not bear either to perform or to hear it.
Musicians live in a world of emotion and artistry, rather than in a world of reason. It does not seem to be necessary to be particularly intelligent in order to he a capable musician; indeed, some mentally retarded people show high musical sensitivity and even talent. For these reasons it has occasionally been suggested that musicians are commonly short on intelligence. This is a typical case of arguing from the particular to the general and it is as wrong as such arguments usually are. There is no evidence that musicians, as a class, are any less bright or more bright, for that matter than a comparable group of nonmusidans. The distribution of intelligence seems to be the same in musical populations as in general populations. It has to be said, however, that musicians in the highest class are commonly supremely intelligent people. Professional distinction in music demand the same high levels of intelligence as distinction in any other profession.
It seems possible that obsessivecompulsive neurosis (or perhaps just plain superstition) is commoner in performing musicians than in the generality of mankind. There are numerous tales of the eccentric antics of instrumental players, singers and conductors arising from this particular idiosyncrasy. The pianist V1adimir Pachmann could never get his piano stool at the right height. It is on record that he asked whether anyone in the audience had a train ticket he could borrow. Other pianists will sit staring at the audience until the silence is absolute and no one dare breathe. Shura Cherkassky must always step on to the stage with his right foot first, and his ~ice time is measured exactly to the second. Ludano Pavarotti has to find a bent nail in the floorboards before beginning a concert. The conductor
Artur Rodzinski always had a loaded gun in his pocket when at work on the rostrum.
Professional musical performers differ from ordinary mortals in more ways than the purely psychological. If they are to be successful they require certain innate physical abilities some of which are rare outside the world of music. Carl Seashore, the doyen of musical psychology and physiology, once put together a battery of tests called the 'Seashore Measures of Musical Talent'. These include such things as the ability accurately to discriminate pitch and interval, to maintain strict tempo, to analyse rhythmical patterns, to appreciate subtle differences in loudness, to distinguish differences in timbre (such as the difference between the same note played on a clarinet and on an oboe), and to understand phrasing in a succession of notes. What may surprise many people is that one of the important standard measurements of musical capacity is the ability to move the fingers very quickly. People with a naturally slow tapping rate less than about seven taps per second, averaged over a 5 second period can improve to some extent with practice, but will never become virtuoso performers. Seashore says that the tapping rate, in association with steadiness, precision and endurance, deserves to be rated highly in the selection of young musicians for training. Few people can achieve more than 12 taps per second.
One aspect of the musical mind that seems incomprehensible to nonmusicians is the ability to dissociate musical activity from everyday thought and to engage in both simultaneously. A competent sightreader can give an adequate performance while thinking about something quite different. This is not to suggest that a brilliant performance is possible if the leader of a string quartet is having fantasies about the beautiful girl in the front row. But that it should be possible to do this at all is remarkable and tells us something about the nature of musical execution and how it differs from other mental activity. Edvard Grieg showed the manuscript of his piano concerto to Franz Liszt for the first time. Many guests were present and Liszt asked Crieg to play it. Grieg demurred, though, saying he had never
practised it. Liszt went to the piano and read off the work at sight, giving a remarkable performance. Astonishingly, in the course of this, at a time when his interpretation was at its finest, he started to talk to the guests about the work, indicating to one or to the other which parts he especially liked.
So how does the mind of the musician come about? There have been great arguments about whether musical capacity is inherited or the result of environmental influences, and these arguments still go on. Unfortunately, the same evidence can be used by both sides. There are numerous historical examples of musical families in which the talent appears in generation after generation. But a musical family necessarily provides an intensely musical environment to which new children are exposed. So the process could operate in. either way or both.
There is, however, a good deal of evidence to show that genetics is important in determining musicality. Take, for instance, the case of Mozart, who is regarded by many as the greatest musician of all time. Mozart certainly came from a musical family, but his talents were apparent at such an early age that they could hardly have been wholly the result of this environment. It must be remembered that the full expression of musical ability cannot occur before the neurological development of the individual allows it or before considerable musical education has occurred, so the very early years may show little of the potential. We have unique information in this context in the case of Mozart because, when he was eight years old, his musical powers were formally studied in London by the lawyer, antiquary and amateur scientist the Honourable Daines Barrington (17271800). This careful man sent a report to the Royal Society entitled 'An account of a very remarkable musician'. By the time Barrington studied Mozart the musician was already performing regularly in public, and it was in the course of one of the overseas tours in which his talents were being exploited by his father, Leopold Mozart, that Barrington met him. Barrington's report contains documentary evidence of Mozart's age, and records the boy's prowess at playing at sight from a previously unseen fivepart score. It seems that the boy was a better sightreader than his experienced father. The report also records Mozart's skills at improvization in various styles. There is a remarkable insight into the mind of the true musician, in that on being asked to improvise an angry piece, Mozart became so emotionally involved that, in the course of the performance, he was worked up to a frenzy, rose to his feet and beat the harpsichord like a mad person. Although his little fingers could only stretch to a fifth, he played with amazing skill and musical understanding, especially in his own compositions. In particular, he was able to modulate freely from one key to another an indication of remarkable musical maturity in one so young. From other evidence we know that Mozart was playing and composing at the age of four and that his musical memory was phenomenal. After hearing Allegri's Miserere in the Sistine Chapel, Mozart went home and wrote out the entire score from memory. This was a major work in nine parts scored for two choirs.
It is inconceivable that Mozart's musical abilities could have arisen and at such an early age from purely environmental influences. Most of the qualities that enabled him to become a musician of such stature and to develop into such a great composer must have been innate and hence of genetic origin. It is apparent, however~ that musical capacity is a complex entity: there can be no question of a single gene for musicality. This is an example of what geneticists call multifactorial inheritance, involving a number of different genes.
In Mozart's case, and in that of many other great musicians, we are dealing with an exceptionally rare combination of genetic factors that laid down the potential for high musicality. It is possible that, in the absence of a musical environment, explicit musical capacity might not have developed. But it seems likely that it does not require a highly musical environment to stimulate the musical interests and ambitions of people genetically endowed to this degree. If the underlying set of abilities is present, almost any exposure to music would prompt in the person concerned a powerful desire to hear and to make music. The greatest value of a musical environment is in its educational effect.
Much music will be heard, taste will be formed, and familiarity with the current stage of musical evolution quickly achieved. At this point, the way will be open for new and original creativity. This process can readily be followed in the careers of the great composers.
# Posted on May 12th 2003 by Rudall the time