Oliver Sacks Shares Tales of Musical Hallucinations
By Ben Thomas | April 22, 2013 |
When the piece first premiered, critics called it “repellent,” “incomprehensible;” a “confusion.” The audience didn’t even call for an encore – a slight that threw the piece’s composer into a rage. He sneered that the masses were ignorant “cattle” and “asses” – and by that point in his career, few men would’ve refused him the right to shout such things. Though Beethoven’s hearing had been deteriorating for more than 20 years, many of his compositions still packed out auditoriums and commanded premium prices. Thunderclap symphonies like his Fifth and Ninth had carried the man’s legend to the farthest courts of Europe.
So why, when his Great Fugue premiered in 1826, did audiences react with such horror and disgust? And why, more than a century after the fact, do critics now hail this same piece as a stroke of genius; an idea that arrived decades before its time? The most obvious reason, in both cases, is that the Fugue looks much more pleasing on paper than it sounds to an unprepared ear. Though it remains one of the most intricate and technically demanding pieces in all symphonic music, its wild dissonance has led even fans who praise its “perfection of detail” to caution that it’s one of several Beethoven works that “should be excluded from performance.”
In short, musical compositions that look beautifully balanced – even ornamental – on the page can produce painful cacophonies when translated into sound. Unlike printed text, which can only be read aloud one word at a time, musical notes have to sound beautiful – or meaningful, at least – not only when played one-at-a-time, but when played in rhythm with every other note in the same beat or measure.
This is also one of the most striking difference between hallucinations of music – which often take the form of familiar or catchy songs – and the more unusual cases of patients who hallucinate musical notation. As neurologist Oliver Sacks, author of the recent book Hallucinations, has discovered as he’s studied these cases, even the most intricate and ornate hallucinated notation often translates to musical nonsense – which begs the questions of how and why people hallucinate such detailed notation in the first place.
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http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog/2013/04/22/oliver-sacks-shares-tales-of-musical-hallucinations/
= new reply since forum marked as read
I love Oliver Sacks 
