EL DORADO -- I filled up an iPod with music, but on the way down here we mostly listened to NPR.
We caught a program named Snap Judgment, which I hadn't listened to before. It was different than I thought it would be; for some reason I thought it was about slam poetry and other forms of verbal playfulness. But what we heard were two compelling inter-related stories.
The first was about a man who learned he was going, slowly and inevitably, deaf. In order to prepare himself for this eventuality he began to memorize pop songs, so he could store them in his head for replay once the silence--which we learned isn't exactly silence--descended. And for the first time in his life he began to listen to music with intent, for he said it wasn't until he began purposefully listening to the Beatles that he realized "music had layers."
The man's doctor told the truth when he said the man was lucky he was only losing his hearing. The tumors that were causing the hearing loss could have done more damage if they had appeared elsewhere in his body. They could have killed him. Still, it was very sad to think of the man losing his hearing even as he was developing a greater appreciation for the sense.
But it was an inspiring story too. Because the music the man was listening to--he had a strong preference for happy, uncynical music was affecting some sort of change in him. He met a woman with whom he could listen to this music. And she re-arranged her life in amazing ways to accommodate his coming disability.
Then came the moment he went deaf. And then came a twist in the story.
There was an experimental procedure the man could have that could possibly restore his hearing. And so, only a month after he went deaf, he had surgery. And his hearing slowly began to come back. The story suggested that it came back about as gradually as it left him, that at first the couldn't distinguish a dog's bark from a doorbell. Then everything sounded like it was happening underwater. But over time, it was almost fully restored, and he could once again listen to music. He married the woman, they had children. Now most of the emotional associations he has with music are from the period after he regained his hearing.
The second story didn't end quite so happily. It was about a man named Derek Amato who as an adult dove into the shallow end of a swimming pool, hit his head and suffered a brain injury that somehow gave him the ability to play music. (The condition has been dubbed by psychiatrist Daniel Treffer, who has studied people like Amato for more than 50 years, "acquired savant syndrome.")
He was completely unmusical before his accident. Afterward he felt compelled to sit down at a keyboard and play. And what he made was undeniably music, organized and complex. They played some of Amato's music; he sounded like a gifted pianist playing a newly discovered sonata.
But Amato couldn't really be said to be spontaneously composing this music. It was more like he was a channel for it. He could only play what was flashing through his head in a kind of code he described as a series of black and white squares that somehow told him where to place his fingers on the keyboard. He could only transcribe this flow of symbols; actually he said he could only partially transcribe it. There was simply too much information for him to get it all down.
He couldn't play a pop song. He said he couldn't find a C or D on a keyboard. Yet somehow this music had been locked inside him.
Amato had received a kind of gift, but at a cost. He felt driven to get this music out, and quit a lucrative job in order to perform. But he had no idea what he was going to play at any given time--a blues or a fugue or a snatch of reggae so giving a traditional concert was out of the question. Amato was more like a trick pony than a fluent musician; what he played he played beautifully, but the results were irreproducible, at least by him.
Both of these stories made me wonder about the fundamental nature of human beings. Why is it that concepts of melody and harmony or even the agreed-upon intervals of Western music should be locked inside anyone? Isn't music more like a language we learn than something instinctual and innate? That's what I would guessed, that music is a man-made construct, an artificial creation that wouldn't exist but for our need to organize the randomness of the universe toward meaning.
Stories like these suggest something different, that music is more than a human convention. It's related to math and languages, and there are reports of people acquiring prodigious gifts for both these subjects after suffering trauma. But I've always been skeptical of accounts of people who suddenly wake up able to speak German because I don't believe that things like grammar and vocabulary are somehow buried inside us waiting to be unlocked, that those are things we have to import.
Or maybe it's not there all along, its just that someone like Amato has somehow gained the ability to learn and absorb what's really new knowledge at a lightning-fast clip. Maybe his perception of what he's doing isn't reliable; maybe he's doing the same thing the guy who lost his hearing did after his operation, only at a much faster speed.
Some people default to mystical solutions. All I know is that we don't know everything. And that the power and persistence of music is the best evidence we have of human nature as fundamentally irrational. Which is one reason we're here in the Murphy Arts District to see Richard Thompson and Jason Isbell play a show.
Because music will make you believe in magic.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 05/08/2018