Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir 2.0 — Sleep

A stunning glimpse of the future of the new media:

Are babies born to dance?

“Babies Are Born to Dance, New Research Shows” is the headline of a recent report in Science Daily: “Researchers have discovered that infants respond to the rhythm and tempo of music and find it more engaging than speech.”

Data like this connect with key issues about mind-body integration. Music seems to be central to every major human capacity — emotion, thought, memory, and physical movement.

* Music and emotion: Music seemingly automatically generates emotional responses.
* Music and thought: We often grope for thoughts and images to capture what music means, and music combined with lyrics intensifies the experience of both.
* Music and memory: We learn and love the ABC song as kids, and the song makes it easy for us to learn and memorize 26 symbols in the proper order. Or: If you were asked to memorize the list of ingredients in the McDonald’s Big Mac, it might be a chore. But put the list to music and it’s easy and fun to memorize, and we remember it with nostalgic pleasure years later. (Or maybe that’s just me.)
* Music and kinetics: Music naturally makes us want to move over bodies — from finger-tapping to head-bobbing to all-out dancing.

All of that has implications for education: If music is so central, so powerful, and so much fun, can we better use music across the curriculum to teach children?

The connection between music and movement reminds me of John Locke’s Some Thoughts concerning Education and the striking fact that he mentions dancing first when outlining his curricular choices. (Here is my discussion of John Locke on education.)

Franz Schubert’s early death

Franz Schubert was a great lyrical composer of the early nineteenth century. He died at the relatively young age of 31, and while his music is usually too melancholy for my taste, what a sadness.

Franz was lucky to get that many years. Biographer Christoper Gibbs reports that Schubert’s parents had fourteen children and “nine of their fourteen children died in infancy.” That’s from The Life of Schubert (Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 23).

The death rate for infants was appallingly high before the twentieth century, as it was even for those who survived to adulthood.

Among musicians, here’s a partial list: Mozart died at 35, Carl Maria von Weber died of tuberculosis at age 40. Bellini died at 36, Chopin at 39, Bizet at 34, Glinka died after a cold at age 52, Mendelssohn at 38, Mussorgsky at 52, Schumann at 46, and Tchaikovsky died at age 53, most likely of cholera.

What a carnage.

More on how great artists become great

Some fascinating glimpses of Franz Liszt, the virtuoso pianist and composer. Biographer Alan Walker writes:

“The young Liszt developed into a voracious reader. A genuine thirst for knowledge drove him to such diverse authors as Sainte-Beuve, Ballanche, Rousseau, and Chateaubriand. His reading was, as yet, quite chaotic and lacked the intellectual purpose of his later years. His bookshelves embraced both the sacred and the secular. He filled his head not only with the ‘Defence of Catholicism’ by Lamennais, but also with the skeptical writings of Montaigne; prose of Voltaire. He often sat up half the night with such literature, looking for some key with which to unlock the world. D’Ortigue once saw Liszt remain motionless for four hours, sitting beside the chimneypiece, a volume of Lamartine in his hands” (p. 138).

That’s from Volume I of Franz Liszt: The Virtuoso Years. The Virtuoso Years, 1811-1847.

Liszt himself, at age 21, wrote a letter to Pierre Wolff about his intensive reading and thinking habits:

“Paris, May 2, 1832
“For a whole fortnight my mind and my fingers have been working like two lost souls. Homer, the Bible, Plato, Locke, Byron, Hugo, Lamartine, Chateaubriand, Beethoven, Bach, Hummel, Mozart, Weber are all around me. I study them, meditate on them, devour them with fury; besides this, I practice four to five hours of exercises (thirds, sixths, octaves, tremolos, repetition of notes, cadenzas, etc.). Ah! Provided I don’t go mad you will find in me an artist! Yes, an artist … such as is required today” (pp. 173-174).

Liszt’s path to greatness reminds me of an earlier post on Beethoven and Michelangelo: How great artists become great.

Also interesting is Liszt’s comment, after a trip to Florence and Rome to study the painters and sculptors of the Italian Renaissance, that “the various arts were really unified, that ‘Raphael and Michelangelo make Mozart and Beethoven more easy for me to understand’” (p. 266).

Could Tchaikovsky play Tchaikovsky?

An amusing anecdote from Tchaikovsky, by Anthony Holden.

Tchaikovsky was traveling from St. Petersburg to Tiflis “via the scenic route, aboard a steamship down the Volga. Concealing his identity from the other passengers, he agreed one evening to accompany an amateur soprano in a romance by Tchaikovsky, only to be told by the singer that he had no feeling for a piece. ‘Allow me to know how this song should be sung,’ she publicly chided her unknown pianist. ‘I went through it with my teacher, who was taught how to perform it by Tchaikovsky himself.’ He bowed respectfully” (p. 264).

Anthony Holden’s Tchaikovsky

I finished Anthony Holden’s Tchaikovsky (Random House, 1995), an outstandingly well-written account of the great composer’s life.

Here is an indication of the young Pyotr’s aptitude for music: “Tchaikovsky’s parents entertained a Polish pianist of their acquaintance, who naturally gave an evening concert for the thin line of local gentry. After the Pole had played two Chopin mazurkas, six-year-old Pyotr Ilyich insisted on taking over at the piano, and repeated the music from memory with sufficient aplomb for the maestro to compliment him as a ‘promising’ musician.”

But at other times music’s hold on him seemed too much for him to bear: “On another such evening the boy fled from the room, to the surprise of Fanny [his governess] and his parents, who had been expecting pleas to be allowed to stay up late. Two hours later Fanny looked into Petya’s bedroom, to find the child still fully dressed, sprawled on his bed in hysterical tears. ‘Oh, the music, the music!’ he sobbed. ‘Save me from it, Fanny, save me! It’s here … in here!”—he struck his forehead—‘and it won’t leave me in peace.’”

Holden goes on to tell the story of Tchaikovsky’s training for a career in the civil service, his struggles to establish his voice and musical career, his passionately Platonic correspondence with his patron Nadezhda von Meck, his active homosexuality and the joys and torments it brought him, the awesome power and range of his mature music, and the mystery of his sudden death in 1893.

Highly recommended.

[The image is of Nikolai Kuznetsov's portrait of Tchaikovsky, painted in 1893 and now in the Tret'iakov Gallery in Moscow.]

How great artists become great

Beethoven, according to biographer Maynard Solomon’s Beethoven:

“Wegeler tells us that when a series of lectures on Kant was organized in Vienna in the 1790s, ‘Beethoven didn’t want to attend even once, even under my urging.’ Rather, Beethoven preferred self-education through voracious reading in popularizations of the works of the major thinkers; through rich encounters with poetry, drama, and opera; and, most happily, through discourse and conversation with good minds in pleasant surroundings—whether in the salon or the tavern, the palace or the coffeehouse.” (pp. 36-37)

And: “In 1809 [Beethoven] wrote to the Leipzig music publisher Breitkopf & Hä̈rtel: ‘There is hardly any treatise which could be too learned for me. I have not the slightest pretension to what is properly called erudition. Yet from my childhood I have striven to understand what the better and wiser people of every age were driving at in their works.’” (p. 37)

That intense engagement with the great works of the great minds reminds me of Michelangelo’s early and ongoing education.

When Michelangelo was a teen, according to biographer William Wallace, he was exposed to the best of the Florentine intellectual ferment:

“To begin with, the young boy was taken into the famiglia by Lorenzo the Magnificent, who treated him like a son. He spent two of the happiest years of his life in the Medici Palace, surrounded by the members of Lorenzo’s humanist circle and alongside his future patrons, Giovanni and Giulio de’ Medici (respectively popes Leo X and Clement VII).” (The Genius of the Sculptor in Michelangelo’s Work, p. 152)

That engagement with discussion, reading, and thinking, remained a lifelong passion. From James Hall’s Michelangelo and the Reinvention of the Human Body:

“Michelangelo venerated Dante throughout his life, and addressed two of his own poems to him. When he stayed in Bologna for about a year after the fall of the Medici in 1494, he is said to have read every evening to his patron Giovan Francesco Aldovrandi passages from Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio – only stopping when his employer fell asleep.” (p. 21)

Talgam and Zander on leadership and music

Two talks at TED on music, leadership, and passion. In my next life, I think I want to be a musician.

Itay Talgam:

Benjamin Zander: