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© The Author (2006). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Guarantors of Brain. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Editorial
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
The 1972 Danube Symposium on the neurology of music prompted Macdonald Critchley and Ronald Henson to edit the volume that appeared in 1977 as ‘Music and the Brain’. One contributor had a musical training; the rest were amateurs. Dr Geoffrey Bush ironed out musical bêtises. Sir Michael Tippett wrote the preface. Resistant to any cool scientific analysis of ‘what is music?’, Sir Michael ruminates that this is no more tractable a question than ‘what is memory?’. Music combines activation of the nervous system to produce the affect, and the psyche to create a dream-like state: ‘the knowledge . . . (entering) my music by an alchemy which transmutes the experience of reading into metaphor . . . "divine madness" to use Plato's jargon’ . . . and, from (WB) Yeats, ‘Music, to calm, perhaps, That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea’.
A note appended to the reprinted version
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