a little bit of Musicophilia does a writing student a world of good...*

These last few weeks I've been reading Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks. It is truly fascinating. In this book sacks tells countless 'tales of music and the brain'. All of them amazing, some of them bizarre. All of them a testament to the remarkable thing that is the human brain, some of them inspiring jealousy (why am I not a musical savant? Why don't I see every key as a colour?) and some are deeply disturbing and heart breaking (imagine hearing noise and never melody, or being so severely struck with amnesia you forget absolutely every memory you have and can recall no single experience, except when sat in front of piano you know how to play).

Musicophilia has significantly informed my creative piece for one of my uni subjects, ENGL 390: writing portfolio. My story 'Arthur's Wife', began as not much more than the story of a man who held conversations with characters from Mozart operas rather than with is wife. It was a good idea, I think, but it was moving in all sorts of strange directions and I needed to get it into a decent shape.

While trying - without much luck - to re-write this piece tonight I was struck with a sudden urge to play 'Cara Sposa'. Its a shame my piano playing does it no justice. When I play it Handel's beautiful and magical chord progressions suddenly sound like slowed down Beethoven being badly thumped out by an over zealous twelve year old.

All the same, I really think it helped because after playing it through twice I came back to my computer and actually had a productive writing session. It was the perfect piece of music to help me tie together my awkward piece, because in essence 'Arthur's Wife' is about loss. It about the loss of love and also the loss of hearing, and therefore a loss of music. So once again music and my brain have had a little conversation and all of a sudden I saw my way to the end of the story with a bit more clarity than I had this morning.

In other news, I'm very glad that this piece now includes references to 2 of the top 4. My world would be a darker place without Handel and Mozart.


...Cara sposa, amante cara, dove sei, dove sei? deh! ritorna a'pianti mie deh! ritorna a'pianti mie ...


* http://musicophilia.com/music_links.htm