Musicophilia

much of it as I could remember. But I hardly knew how to notate what I heard.”

Cicoria started to hear music in his head. “The first time,” he said, “it was in a dream. I was in a tux, onstage; I was playing something I had written. I woke up, startled, and the music was still in my head. I jumped out of bed, started trying to write down

enamored of a Vladimir Ashkenazy recording of Chopin favorites—the Military Polonaise, the Winter Wind Étude, the Black Key Étude, the A-flat Polonaise, the B-flat Minor Scherzo.

But I could find scarcely any mention of the subject until the 1977 publication of Macdonald Critchley and R. A. Henson’s book Music and the Brain,

I have found music continually forcing itself on my attention, showing me its effects on almost every aspect of brain function—and life.

William James referred to our “susceptibility to music,” and while music can affect all of us—calm us, animate us, comfort us, thrill us, or serve to organize and synchronize us at work or play—it may be especially powerful and have great therapeutic potential for patients with a variety of neurological conditions.

Some people—a surprisingly large number—“see” color or “taste” or “smell” or
“feel” various sensations as they listen to music—though such synesthesia may be accounted a gift more than a symptom.

The power to perceive (or imagine) music may be impaired with some brain lesions; there are many such forms of amusia. On the other hand, musical imagery may become excessive and uncontrollable, leading to incessant repetition of catchy tunes, or even musical hallucinations

Much that occurs during the perception of music can also occur when music is “played in the mind.” The imagining of music, even in relatively nonmusical people, tends to be remarkably faithful not only to the tune and feeling of the original but to its pitch and tempo. Underlying this is the extraordinary tenacity of musical memory, so that much of what is heard during one’s early years may be “engraved” on the brain for the rest of one’s life.

Music expresses only the quintessence of life and of its events, never these themselves.”