Sacks on Music

[sawyl]

This Saturday's Guardian featured an fascinating extract from Oliver Sacks' book Musicophilia: Tales Of Music And The Brain. The excerpt focused on the tragic case of the musician Clive Wearing, who was afflicted with very severe amnesia after catching a virus. Wearing was left unable to remember much of his past after the 1960s or to remember new events for more than a few seconds, but intriguingly, his musical abilities were left intact.

In describing the way that Wearing is forced to live, balanced on stepping stones of consciousness in the middle of the Lethe, Sacks mentions that many of Wearing's coping strategies involve talking and being active, trying to prolong his consciousness. In one rather beautiful section, he speculates the the reason that Wearing is still able to perform as a musician is because of music's sheer ephemerality:

Deborah [Wearing] speaks of the "momentum" of music. Every bar, every phrase, arises organically from what preceded it and points to what will follow. Dynamism is built into the nature of melody. And over and above this, there is the intentionality of the composer, the style, the order, and the logic that he has created to express his musical ideas and feelings. Schopenhauer wrote of melody as being "one thought from beginning to end". It may be that Clive, incapable of remembering or anticipating events because of his amnesia, is able to sing and play and conduct music because remembering music is not, in the usual sense, remembering at all. Remembering music, listening to it, or playing it, is entirely in the present.

What a truly beautiful way of putting it. I'm definitely going to add this to my to-read list.