Musicophilia

Music, as Sacks points out in this book, is a peculiar thing. It's the only human art form that is (almost) completely abstract and yet resounds emotionally with most people; sure you can set words to it, you can specifically use it for something, but the musical notes, melodies, harmonies and rhythms themselves don't have any logical meaning. We are perfectly aware of this (Sacks quotes Arthur C Clarke's Overlords from Childhood's End, saying humanity is the only species they've ever come across to invent something as useless as music). And yet it's everywhere; in our oldest archeological findings, in every single culture, in maternity wards and in old folk's homes, in wars and in love scenes... And it seems to work on us on a much deeper level than simple enjoyment, deeper than memory, deeper than language.

Sacks (Awakenings, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat) is a neurologist and psychiatrist first and foremost, but also an amateur musician and very knowledgeable (classical) music fan. In Musicophilia he collects a number of case histories of people who have been mentally damaged, either from birth, illness or accidents, some more severely than others, and their relationship to music; those who suddenly find themselves unable to even hear music as anything but random noise, those who suddenly find an almost pathological passion for music take over their entire life, musicians who suddenly find their brains going out of tune... but also musical idiots savants, people suffering from severe memory loss or brain damage who are still able to communicate with their loved ones and live through music, people who have been locked inside themselves for decades but who can be woken by a familiar song. He can tackle both the rather mundane problem of tunelessness and the very serious cases, like the man whose short-term memory has been reduced to mere seconds but can still conduct an orchestral piece that's much, much longer.

Musicophilia is consistently fascinating and occasionally both heartbreaking and -warming in the stories it tells; but personally, I think I came at it from the wrong direction. Sacks, as a doctor, gives plenty of examples of how music works in relationship to various cases, how it can be used to help people or how he's seen people's relationship to it change with their illnesses, and the specific workings in our brains that help (or hinder) us process information; but never really gets to the heart of what music means to us in a larger sense. He's a good writer and the book is an easy read, but to a layman like me, the book could have used more of a frame story, a cohesive theory... relevance to make it more than just a collection of interesting case studies. Still, at the end of it, you'll know a lot more both about how we work and how music works with and on us; but if the Overlords ever come asking, you may not have an easier time explaining it to them.