A little clunky
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I got quite excited when I read articles about this book. It has not really lived up to my expectations.
It tells you about people who hear music in their heads, people with perfect pitch who lose it and vice versa, people with tinnitus and so on. The trouble for me was that in the end it becomes just a big long list of notes on the patients Sachs has treated. I could have used a bit more context, or even philosophical speculation and wonder. But the author is a medical man so he confines himself pretty much to the facts. And he reams them out - the patient experienced this, the patient reacted like that....
Its fascinating material but in all honesty the book is not well written. It is more academic than I had expected. Of course some people will prefer that. I didn't.
Some of the snippets I read in reviews and magazine articles were quite intriguing, but when I got to the full book I found that many of them remained snippets - a footnote about a piece of shrapnel in Shostakovich's head is a good example. Its just a couple of sentences and you want to know more about it but you are left unfulfilled.
Maybe I had too high expectations of this book. I don't want to be too negative as its a perfectly OK book. Its just not anything like as interesting as it appears.
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Disappointing introspection
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While I have been a fan of Oliver Sacks, I am beginning to realise that a lot of his books seem to be constructed so that they can be easily divided into magazine articles (or they at least appear that way). I have read the first few chapters of Musicophilia only so far and to be totally honest, as a musician with training in the neurosciences, I found it interesting as a subject. However, the book is not well written. It has long segments of rather egocentric introspection and navel gazing. I wish it would focus more on the case studies and have a much more consistent approach to the subject. It is convoluted in parts and much of it seems to lose it's thread and drift into talking about other things, especially at the end of chapters. While Oliver Sacks is undoubtedly an intelligent man, I think that maybe he has neglected the advice of editors and been allowed to do so because he has sold so many books in the past. I bought the book in hardback and actually regret spending so much on it.
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A Music-Loving Neurologist Tells Us About Extreme Forms of Musical Interaction
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Musicophilia made me realize how others perceive music. It was a shock. I assumed that everyone experienced music the same way. Wrong!
Do you ever ask anyone what happens when they hear music? I didn't before I read this book. Now I plan to ask everyone.
Dr. Sacks has the kind of fine writing style and awareness of music that makes his tales seem as appealing as the cases that Dr. Sigmund Freud wrote about. As Dr. Sacks pointed out, Dr. Freud didn't care for music so that gentleman failed to investigate and report on many of the phenomena in this book.
We don't exactly know why the mind and body interact with music in the ways that they do. Part is undoubtedly heredity. Part is undoubtedly due to exposure to musical influences. Some may relate to the language spoken in the home. Difficulties with seeing may also be an influence. Injuries to the body and brain can play a large role. Dr. Sacks does a masterly job of using case after case to explore one aspect or another of these dimensions so that a complex picture emerges that's even more remarkable than the brain processes involved in reading.
One of the biggest surprises in the book is that musical talent seems to be inhibited by some parts of the brain. In similar way, music can also inhibit some other brain functions that we would like to get rid of.
I had always wondered about those with perfect pitch, and the book explores that. There are also wonderful sections on other seemingly inherited musical abilities.
Dr. Sacks adds a lot of perspective to the history of music by making observations about various composers and the way that their compositions reflect certain musical abilities than others while explaining how the mental processes are different. Today, we can map the brain's activation in order to get clues about why certain behaviors are possible. That final perspective adds a lot to the case histories.
If you are like me, you'll find some of the cases to be heart-wrenching. I was comforted a bit to realize that music made those sad lives better so there's reason to rejoice in that sense.
So what was my big personal discovery? When I listen to classical music of any kind, I can choreograph a ballet along with costumes, sets, and props to go along with the music that I see in color when I close my eyes . . . even if the music has never been used for ballet. I didn't realize that others usually don't do that. What a wonder!
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Worth a read
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This is a pretty good book, of interest to anyone who feels themselves somewhat musicophiliac and wants to know more about how music has the effect it does. If you're not really into music you probably won't be too interested. This book isn't particularly focused and doesn't really go too deep into how music works on the brain, it's mostly just a string of case studies, most of which are pretty interesting. It's well-written and accessible, and worth a read, though it doesn't offer any major insights.
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