Emotion and healing power Part III

[Kautilya]

This springs from Alan and Chris' thoughts and the responses.

 

I have been interested for a long time in the possibility that blind musicians have something extra. Without boring you with how I know, Andrea Bocelli thinks perhaps he has what one might call a seventh sense which gives him that something extra.

 

This link below and its reference to music being "..particularly important as a source of comfort, helping them [blind children] to relax and express their emotions", is an interesting development.

 

While a bit p'ed off that someone has got ahead of me on the formal research front :ph34r: , I am delighted thst Prof. Ockelford at the Institute of Education confirms what many of us thought already; and confirms further of course the importance of music's power to bring the talent of autistic children out into the world so the painfully average of us can enjoy their various often stupendous gifts.

 

There may also be some learning tips for the sighted here in the sense that learning to play a tune by ear basically means not physically "looking at" the dots but 'registering' the 'colours' and the patterns of the sound in the brain. Greensleeves, for example, conjures up in my mind the lush rolling sward and the forest of Robin Hood (Hollywood style of course without the brutality of serfdom and Alan Rickman as Sheriff,Notts. County, or Severus Snape in Potter). Thoughts anyone?

 

if interested in more, go see: The Guardian May 18 2010 p 5 Education

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/may/18/musical-talent-link-with-blindness

Edited May 20, 2010 by Kautilya

[m3838]

There may also be some learning tips for the sighted here in the sense that learning to play a tune by ear basically means not physically "looking at" the dots but 'registering' the 'colours' and the patterns of the sound in the brain. Greensleeves, for example, conjures up in my mind the lush rolling sward and the forest of Robin Hood (Hollywood style of course without the brutality of serfdom and Alan Rickman as Sheriff,Notts. County, or Severus Snape in Potter). Thoughts anyone?

 

 

I read the article and here are my thoughts.

1. There is usually a great bit of ignorance among newspaper reporters, who are neither writers nor investigators. The article is full of contradictory statements put together and there is strong smell of PC-ness in it. Obviously written with awareness of what makes an article published.

2. It is very unfair to support one's point of view with exceptional examples. Most autistic and blind children will grow into second class citizens, without much prospect. Most of them also have other disabilities, making lives of their caregivers a nightmare. Show mentally healthy child with exceptional musical talents as example of such population is "Hollywood science" and can only be shrugged off by those dealing with real world.

3. The article has number of interesting statements.

 

a. Working with around 40 blind children, as well as surveying parents, teachers and music therapists, the study showed that blind children are 4,000 (!?) times more likely to have perfect pitch – a traditional marker of exceptional musical ability (?)– than their fully sighted peers.

Is it possible to come up with 4000 figure, working with only 40 children?

 

b. The research ... found that 48% of blind children demonstrate significant interest in everyday sounds compared to 13% of those with full sight.

Statement makes no sense whatsoever.

 

c. More than two-thirds of the blind and partially sighted children played at least one instrument, compared with 41% of the sighted group.

 

Tho things: working with only 40 kids researchers can't make any wide percentiles. The search pool is too small. Large cities vs. small villages. White color families vs. blue. Existence of musical shops and teachers, particular instrument, musical culture of parents, income levels. One needs at 4000 children from various circles of life. And what does it mean "played"? Another thought: wouldn't it be kind of natural for parents to educate a blind child in accessible ways? Doesn't mean kid is talented.

 

d. Perfect pitch isn't a condition for great musicianship, but it is necessary in the development of exceptional musicality among people with learning difficulties

 

Well, of course. Why then make statement a. about perfect pitch?

 

e. There are still a lot of stereotypes around about children with disabilities being harder for music teachers to teach," he says. "Parents have told me they've tried every piano teacher in their area, but none will teach their child when they find out he or she can't see."

Clare Black agrees. She found it "hugely difficult" to find a teacher for Joshua. "Joshua learns in a different way, mainly by ear – the Suzuki learning method has been the perfect way for him to learn the violin, for example...

 

That is true. Music teachers teach the way they were taught. Talented teachers are few and far in-between. Just proves how correct was Leo Tolstoy, when he raged against art schools. Suzuki method, as far as any other non-concervatory method is taken by establishment with animosity, like a competitor. For good reason!!! Another thought is this: blind ear learners can develop into great musicians with just as much "ease" as sighted ones, but to become academic classically trained musician takes lots of usage of the eyesight.

 

And finally

 

f. It would be really raising the level of conversation, if presenting such heart wrenching topics, we abstain from ridiculous Hollywood imagery.

[Kautilya]

There may also be some learning tips for the sighted here in the sense that Another thought is this: blind ear learners can develop into great musicians with just as much "ease" as sighted ones, but to become academic classically trained musician takes lots of usage of the eyesight*.

 

And finally

 

f. It would be really raising the level of conversation, if presenting such heart wrenching topics, we abstain from ridiculous Hollywood imagery.

Well... that struck a dis-chord eh?! :blink: Putting Alan Rickman and Hollywood lightly (as was intended)to one side, a few further thoughts:

 

"but to become academic classically trained musician takes lots of usage of the eyesight"*

 

* Not so sure about this : e.g. Vierne, Jean Langlais,or see Gaston Litaize at

http://www.musimem.com/INJA.htm and André Marchal, Georges Schott, Dominique Levacque, Joséphine Boulay

 

Some of them were pupils of Franck; and Widor, (here's the man himself playing that toccata and he was a great supporter of the National Institute for the Young Blind where most of the above studied. A certain Louis Braille, who went blind at three, was a pupil at the institute, and not only became an organist but developed his reading system, and not only for text but also musical notation)

 

 

ps - not really interested in developing a ding-dong con-cer-frontation here, but a discussion to see if there is something that may not only help with learning but musical expression. So, if folk think this is a dead end thread,nema problema, I shall happily continue, as before, to plough this furrow on my ownio,

Edited May 21, 2010 by Kautilya

[m3838]

Well... that struck a dis-chord eh?!

 

Yes. I hate those shmucks with passion.

They stop at nothing to plot their bad taste, seduce and brainwash.

 

"but to become academic classically trained musician takes lots of usage of the eyesight"*

 

* Not so sure about this : e.g. Vierne, Jean Langlais,or see Gaston Litaize at

http://www.musimem.com/INJA.htm and André Marchal, Georges Schott, Dominique Levacque, Joséphine Boulay

 

 

Unfortunately these are single examples. Before becoming a soloist a musician usually needs to go through the ranks. While doing so for years he must see conductor, go to available schools (average), learn from available teachers (average) etc. The question is whether blindness inherently makes one a better musician, is not answered by the article in the Guardian for above stated reasons. One needs to read actual research papers.

There is at least one blind painter, if you want Hollywood interpretation of the tragedy.

To link this topic to healing power of music, I'd say - not only music, but sound has healing power. I studied Massage therapy and one of the subjects was "Sound Healing". So we all got to sing each other to relaxation.

Exceptional eye opening experience!

Autism, mental retardation, blindness - all is too concrete in american elementary schools, where kids are put together. So far I haven't seen any happy geniuses.

But I myself am very pissed off by standard musical education. My kid has some sort of learning problem and reading music is very difficult for her. However, she is very musical. I have a suspicion that all her abilities will die because of non-cooperation of education system.

Heck, I myself tried to pry my accordion teacher off his plywood horse - no avail.

 

 

[Rod]

This springs from Alan and Chris' thoughts and the responses.

 

I have been interested for a long time in the possibility that blind musicians have something extra. Without boring you with how I know, Andrea Bocelli thinks perhaps he has what one might call a seventh sense which gives him that something extra.

 

This link below and its reference to music being "..particularly important as a source of comfort, helping them [blind children] to relax and express their emotions", is an interesting development.

 

While a bit p'ed off that someone has got ahead of me on the formal research front :ph34r: , I am delighted thst Prof. Ockelford at the Institute of Education confirms what many of us thought already; and confirms further of course the importance of music's power to bring the talent of autistic children out into the world so the painfully average of us can enjoy their various often stupendous gifts.

 

There may also be some learning tips for the sighted here in the sense that learning to play a tune by ear basically means not physically "looking at" the dots but 'registering' the 'colours' and the patterns of the sound in the brain. Greensleeves, for example, conjures up in my mind the lush rolling sward and the forest of Robin Hood (Hollywood style of course without the brutality of serfdom and Alan Rickman as Sheriff,Notts. County, or Severus Snape in Potter). Thoughts anyone?

 

if interested in more, go see: The Guardian May 18 2010 p 5 Education

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/may/18/musical-talent-link-with-blindness

 

The gift of sight can, under certain circumstances, be a distraction. How often we see people who close their eyes in order to concentrate more fully upon another sensation such as fragrance,sound, memory etc. etc.?

[Anglo-Irishman]

ps - not really interested in developing a ding-dong con-cer-frontation here, but a discussion to see if there is something that may not only help with learning but musical expression. So, if folk think this is a dead end thread,nema problema, I shall happily continue, as before, to plough this furrow on my ownio,

 

Kautilya,

I think what gets people's backs up - mine at least - is this "social science" approach to things that are perfectly accessible to common sense paired with human experience.

 

Like that blind children are more aware of their acousical surroundings than sighted children are. Nice to have this quantified, but the percentages tell us nothing we don't already know. And above all, they don't tell us why this is so - which is what we need to know if we want to really use the information. But who needs social "scientists" for that?

 

If one perceptory channel is closed, you're bound to use the remaining channels more intensively - common sense!

Are blind people better musicians (as I think the author of the linked article was trying to say)?

Well, I bet there are blind people who are better musicians than I am, but that's not the point. How many blind people are there in the list of musical peak performers like Bach, Mozart, Mutter, Hendrix, Sting, Satchmo ...?

Some are up there: Carolan, Ray Charles, Jose Feliciano, Andrea Boccelli ... But they aren't a class better than everyone else.

 

So being blind doesn't apparently make one more musical. (What it probably does do is make one more likely to develop one's musical potential to the full, be it little or great.)

Is there a higher proportion of competent musicians among the blind population than among the sighted population? That would be an interesting statistic!

Focussing on the top people (for lack of information about the competent midfield): how many blind people can you think of who are household names? Quite frankly, the only ones that occur to me are musicians of some sort! There are musicians among the sighted household names, too, but also actors, artists, inventors, sportsmen ...

Why?

Again, the reason is a common-sense one. There are droves of very competent, sighted amateur musicians. "Amateur" means that they have a day job other than music. At some point in each of their lives, they made a choice (conscious or otherwise) between music and something else as a career. Some chose to become surgeons, some carpenters, some snooker players ... These choices are often marginal. If a musical young school-leaver had put his time and energy into studying music rather than engineering, he might be composing film music today, rather than building bridges and playing in an amateur orchestra. Obviously, for an equally musical blind school-leaver, the above choices and many more are not open.

 

So a blind person who is good at music is more likely to choose music as a career than a sighted person is, and will of course get even better at music.

Then there's the question of how large the grey area is in which there are musical people we don't know of, and who perhaps don't realise it themselves. A certain proportion of children grow up in musically deprived homes. Even if their musical curiosity is awakened at school or through the media, it is suppressed because the parents consider academic, commercial, technical or other activities to be far more important. If a child's blindness prevents him or her being forced into Father's footsteps, even these parents will look around for things that the child can do, and the chances are that music will be one of the options.

 

So, if a blind child is any way musical, he or she is more likely to be encouraged at it than a sighted child that can fulfil other wishes of its parents.

 

Do the blind have anything to teach us about playing by ear? I don't think dyslexia has anything to do with eyesight! I can see perfectly well (at reading distance, even without glasses!) but I've never been able to sight-read for an instrument. I learn from listening and understanding the rhythm, melody and harmony. When I compose, I do so on the instrument, improvising repeatedly until the piece solidifies. After that, there's no point in writing it down, because it's in my head and fingers anyway. So I might just as well be blind in that respect!

(I do read music when singing in a choir - but blind singers use a Braille score, which instrumentalists can't, because they need their fingers for the instrument. And I do rely on chord symbols when learning new instrumental accompaniments - but if I had the verbal memory of my blind philosophy professor, I could get someone to read me the chord symbols through a couple of times, and I'd be OK.)

 

So there are aspects of music that have nothing to do with being blind or sighted, but with some mental phenomenon. For these, we must find some other explanation and remedy.

The only blind-musician biography that I know any way well is that of Turlough O'Carolan (1670 - 1738). At the age of 18, he went blind as a result of the smallpox, and the wife of his landowner befriended him. Rather than giving him alms, she bought him a harp and paid for tuition on it, then gave him a horse and a manservant and sent him off to earn his living on the "music circuit", playing at the stately homes of Ireland. Starting at the "advanced" age of 18, Carolan never reached full mastery of the harp as a player, but his compositions were taken up by other harpers and passed down to us. They have that instantly recognisable quality that Bach's and Mozart's compositions have.

 

This is anecdotal, of course, but what do we learn from it?

Had Carolan not gone blind, the world would have had one genius less. His labourer father could never have financed his instrument and tuition.

His benefactress wanted to enable him to earn a living (give him a fishing-rod rather than a fish, so to speak). And the only decent living for a blind person back then was music.

Being blind didn't make him a better harper. He never caught up with sighted (and blind) harpers who started learning at a younger age.

His compositions were outstanding. Was this because he was blind? Consider that many old Irish harpers were blind, and their compositions have not endured. Bach (15 years younger than Carolan) stood equally head and shoulders above his colleagues, and he was sighted.

 

It all boils down to the fact that, if he hadn't gone blind, Carolan wouldn't have been a musician at all. Had he not had that talent for composing, he's be just another one of many forgotten, blind harpers.

Long posting - but perhaps it proves that you're not the only one ploughing this furrow!

 

Cheers,

John

[Kautilya]

[quote name='Anglo-Irishman' date='21 May 2010 - 01:58 PM' timestamp='1274446705'

Long posting - but perhaps it proves that you're not the only one ploughing this furrow!

 

Cheers,

John

Tks & V interesting, particularly Carolan, as I did not know he went blind, though at much later age than most of the world-class organists that were mentioned earlier (most were born blind or lost their sight as infants).

 

Certainly be interesting to see what percentage such world-class blind players are of the total of professional organists. In the last 30 years there was a flow of organ students from the UK who went to Norway, as the Lutheran church, being state-funded, had lots of paid organists' jobs empty in town and village churches. I don't know whether that flow continues or not.

 

Gavoty* is reported to have said of Vierne (who died in 1937) that his music "is and remains pure lyricism, speaking the language of the heart" * He was an organist too, a pupil of Vierne's and one of Dupre's star students, later music critic of Le Figaro and member of the Fine Arts Academy.

 

Speed the plough! and would be interesting to have some more insights.

[m3838]

Long posting - but perhaps it proves that you're not the only one ploughing this furrow!

 

Long and outstanding. Read it with great interest. Can't find anything I'd add to it or disagree with.

Pure music.