6/29/2023 0 Comments Oliver sacks music bookSacks wrenched his leg while mountain-climbing and managed to get down the mountain before nightfall by singing “The Old Volga Boatman” he found himself “musicked along” as its rhythms and melodies made his mind forget pain. His retelling of the “complex musico-motor events” described in A Leg To Stand On points us to the core of his enterprise: a fascination with music as a cluster of patterns and imagery as unfathomably complex as the human brain, and as vital as life itself. The son of a London doctor who owned an 1894 Bechstein grand piano and always had a set of miniature orchestral scores in his pocket, the young Sacks read The Oxford Companion to Music as if it were The Arabian Nights, “an inexhaustible source of musical stories.” The leitmotif in his new book is the habit of referring back to musical episodes in his previous books, and it is Sacks himself who is his own most interesting patient when it comes to musical symptoms. Signs of Sacks’ musicophilia-an outsized passion for music-were manifest early on.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |