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Music, Language, and the Brain.

Article Excerpt
Music, Language, and the Brain. By Aniruddh D. Patel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. [x, 513 p. ISBN-13: 9780195123753. $62.95.] Illustrations, music examples, bibliography, indexes.

Some months ago, a conservatory student who had recently completed a course I teach on the cognitive psychology of music made an appointment to see me. I sensed caution in his manner and voice, and indeed he had been unhappily surprised by an aspect of his own behavior, a recurring response to music-making that he regarded as unusual. Of late, during periods of intense practice, and sometimes in performance as well, he found himself weeping silently but uncontrollably. He felt no awareness of any profound associations with the circumstances when this occurred, nor did the prospect of performing consciously elicit anxious or dispiriting thoughts. In a few cases he had felt embarrassed before other musicians, but chiefly he worried that the growing distraction would impede his concentration. Thus his concern was practical: he was interested to discover what lay behind his unprompted crying in order to preempt it. For my part, the episode served as a distinct reminder of how ill-prepared those of us involved in arts education are to frame, much less pursue, questions we may have about relationships between our behavior and our biology, or perhaps more precisely, about the biology of our behavior as individuals.

Knowledge of our perceptual and cognitive faculties might be thought integral to a cultivation of awareness of how it comes to pass that we perceive and cognize--experience--aspects of our own behavior. But practicing artists and musicians do not find exploration of relevant disciplines, from genetic evolution to neuropsychology, constituent within arts education; it seems fair to generalize that most of us either remain at sea or take refuge in platitudes about the primacy of human self-expression (whatever that may mean). This is unfortunate, for it is hard to imagine what we have in common more than the continuities of our biological inheritance. I do not mean to suggest that closure on central questions now lies within our grasp, if only we would...

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