Dr. Colin Eatock, composer
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Accounting For Taste

12/12/2011

3 Comments

 
Picture
MRI scanner: a bargain at $1 million.
Over on The Gramophone’s website, there’s a fine blog by Jeremy Nicholas about musical tastes (here) – and about how many people are wary of admitting that they dislike any composer or work considered “important.”

He expresses a kind of bemused fascination with people who appear to like everything – especially radio announcers, whose job it is to like everything they play – while ever-so-gently calling into question the sincerity of their expressed views.


In particular, I’m struck by several sentences from Nicholas’s blog:

“Another hugely knowledgeable friend who works in the classical music industry cannot understand my passion for second division composers of the 19th century nor my fervour for the first-rate talents of Liszt and Rachmaninov … I, on the other hand, cannot quite believe that he gets as much enjoyment as he says he does from Stockhausen, Carter and Babbitt …”

I too cannot believe the enthusiasm of people who claim to enjoy Stockhausen, Carter and Babbitt. It’s as though someone is speaking to me in a language that is not merely foreign, but somehow untranslatable into my own. These days, whenever I encounter such folk, I simply shake my head and walk away in disbelief.

But now there may be a better way to determine just where these people are coming from.

I recently wrote an article for Listen magazine about the current state of research on music and the brain. (You can read it here.) Things are moving forward by leaps and bounds in this area of scientific inquiry. And with new technologies come new ways of understanding how humans process music.

At Montreal’s McGill University, Robert Zattore recently conducted an interesting experiment in his laboratory. He asked people to bring in recordings of music they especially enjoy, and hooked them up to instruments for measuring brain activity.

“People brought classical, jazz, folk music – it was all over the place,” he told me. “But what they all had in common was that they showed activity in the dopamine system. We observed that the chemical dopamine is released when people hear music that they really like – and not at all when they’re listening to music they feel neutral about, or don’t really like.”

Musical enjoyment is now a scientifically measurable phenomenon.

So I’m saving up to buy my own magnetic resonance imaging scanner: they can be had for as little as $1 million. And when I own one, I’ll invite some of the people I know who claim to be devout lovers of high-modernism to step into my MRI, so I can see just what is going on in their brains when they listen to Le Marteau Sans Maître.


© Colin Eatock 2011
3 Comments
Barbara Scales link
12/26/2011 10:17:42 pm

I especially enjoy Brahms' sextets, Bach's double violin concerto and Ligeti's second string quartet. I think it unlikely that each would stimulate dopamine in my brain in the same way. I doubt that Beethoven's late quartets would stimulate dopamine in the same way that Beethoven's 9th symphony "Ode to Joy" would in any individual. Would the dopamine work the same way for a young person or a person from another culture who has never heard the pleasure-inducing music before? I am interested to hear the music of Carter or Babbitt or Boulez because it is music written by an intelligent user of musical language, a craftsman. I read Hegel and Kant - sometimes in German - not for pleasure - but for their questions and curiosity, and for daring to track an idea to its end or at least to give it shape and for insights into how the mind works. Laborious, far form pleasurable but part of what it is to be human. I am interested in that. Not sure what it does to my dopamine.

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    Eatock Daily

    I'm a composer based in Toronto – and this is my classical music blog, Eatock Daily.

    When I first started blogging, Eatock Daily was a place to re-post the articles I wrote for Toronto’s Globe and Mail and National Post newspapers, the Houston Chronicle, the Kansas City Star and other publications.

    But now I have stepped back from professional music journalism, and I'm spending more time composing.

    These days, my blog posts are infrequent, and are mostly concerned with my own music. However, I do still occasionally post comments on musical topics, including works I've discovered, enjoyed, and wish to share with others.


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