I am not sure whether this author should be listed as American or Canadian as he has appointments at both McGill and Stanford universities, But he was born in the U.S. and refers to travel from his home in Montreal. He is a polymath/neuroscientist and musician and is known internationally for his studies of the responses to music using the fancy mapping techniques of modern neuroscience.
I am also certain that the lady who suggested this dry erudite book to me has not read all of it; perhaps she hoped I could explain it to her in simple language. If so, she will be disappointed.
In the first few chapters, the author outlines some characteristics of music such as pitch, melody, harmony, note duration, rhythm, meter, tempo, loudness and timbre, and tries to track each to the neurological pathways we use to enjoy music (with variable success.) The scattered sketches of neuroanatomical pathways involved and the later musical notations are labelled with impossibly small print and add nothing to the text.
Complex studies of subjects with William’s Syndrome and even attempts to define musicality left me confused. In successive chapters the author cites the supposed benefits of music therapy on a wide variety of populations such as those with movement disorders, Parkinson’s Disease, multiple sclerosis, trauma victims, mental illnesses, pain, dementia and stroke, again with variable success.
On the same page, the author claims that as a group, musicians are happier than the general population, but then “Yet statistics show that professional musicians experience greater incidence of alcohol and drug addiction, depression, poor health outcomes and higher mortality.”
While the author pays lip service to the gold standard of the controlled trial, and cites a few, he cites many more instances of anecdotal apparent benefits of music therapy and there is no doubt as a musician himself, he has a bias in seeing those benefits. As someone who never had an opportunity to learn to play an instrument or sing, and who listens mainly to classical music while exercising, and various artists when in the car (Paul Robson’s rendition of Old Man River never ceases to give me goosebumps), I can be accused of the opposite bias.
Linguistic pragmatics and situational contextual knowledge discussed ad nauseam in the penultimate chapter just confused me and I think of some future AI program choosing music for me, because it knows so much about me, as dystopian rather than utopian. Apart from repeating the old joke about Grover Cleveland and the rooster, there is no humour anywhere in this book.
The author bemoans the paucity of licensed music therapists in longterm care facilities and advocates for music as an alternative to medicines rather than a supplement to them.
In many places the text breaks what should be one word into two such as Environ mental, teste monial, typic ally, limit less, cere bellum, navi gating, cog nitive, Nat ural, reinvig orate, his torians, ness essary, pharmacol ogical, miti gate, Rehab ilitation, natural istic, Spot ify, oxygen ation, import ant and transport ation. I may be mistaken but this suggests to me that a crude AI assistant actually did much of the writing, or at least transcribed dictation without anyone spell checking.
I am sure that many amateur musicians will enjoy this book and understand it more than I did, but it left me cold.
1.5/5
Thanks, Michelle.
The Passionate Reader 