Plastic music

“How plastic is our ability to understand music?” asked Scott Thurow speaking of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring on Private Passions on Radio 3 recently. He was referring to the human ability to learn to appreciate & to love the unfamiliar or experimental & to recognise it as music.

I am not alone in finding myself unable to warm to much of the ‘classical’ music composed during the later C20th century, despite making very real efforts to do so, remembering always how puzzled I was as a young teenager to learn that some people still thought that The Rite of Spring was too difficult, or perhaps even not music.

I respect the composers, I really do not think they are trying to make fools of us, or treat us with contempt, but there is something which just stops my brain from - something. In this particular context it almost seems more appropriate to say loving, rather than understanding.

Under the title Music and Brain Plasticity on his Neurologica blog Dr Steven Novella discusses how far changes in ability that accrue with training to play a musical instrument result in changes to the brain itself – a different question.

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