The Well-Tempered Ear
Music builds brain health. Which composers and pieces would you recommend?
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By Jacob Stockinger
If you think music education and music lessons are only for young people who are still growing and maturing, you couldn’t be more wrong.
More and more research studies show that in adults and older people, even in Alzheimer’s patients, music has force and can break through.
Music is — like many other kinds of art including poetry, dance and paintings — a key that unlocks the plasticity of the human brain (below is an image from Shutterstock) and the brain’s ability to grow and endure in a healthy manner.
Here is one of the most recent studies that was covered in a story by NPR (National Public Radio), which you can read or listen to:
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/04/03/1167494088/your-brain-on-art-music-dance-poetry
The Ear finds it convincing food for thought.
Certain genres of music, for example, come to mind as brain-healthy. Think Schubert. Art songs which combine music and words, even poetry, seem an especially likely candidate.
String quartets and theme-and-variations also come to mind as artistic and brain-developing genres. So does the sonata form that is used to develop and establish harmonic and thematic logic in symphonies and concertos as well as sonatas.
As for specific composers, The Ear thinks Johann Sebastian Bach (below) stands out as a one whose music requires active listening and critical thinking.
Preludes and fugues by Johann Sebastian Bach (below and in the YouTube video at the bottom where Friedrich Gulda plays the Prelude and Fugue No. 1 of the WTC) in The Well-Tempered Clavier and his many suites and Beethoven’s string quartets, especially the late ones, are individual challenging works that do the same.
Are there musical genres that you think are good for the brain and would recommend?
Are there certain composers you think are especially helpful in building brain health?
Are there any particular pieces that you think also work toward brain health and plasticity?
The Ear wants to hear.
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Classical music: Is this summer’s Token Creek Festival on or off? And if it is on, what form will it take? We will know the delayed decision by July 15
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By Jacob Stockinger
For 30 years, the Token Creek Festival (below), which takes place in a refurbished barn, has been a welcome and distinguished bridge from the summer concert season to the autumn season.
It usually takes place from late August through early September.
And by this time we usually know the theme, the performers and the ever-inventive programs that co-directors John and Rose Mary Harbison (below), along with managing director Sarah Schaffer, have put together. (Editor’s note: You can hear festival participants rehearsing the beautiful opening of the slow movement to the Piano Quartet by Robert Schumann in the YouTube video at the bottom.)
But not this year.
Thanks to challenges and complications from the coronavirus and the public health crisis posed by COVID-19, a stop-or-go decision has been postponed until July 15.
Will there be one or more live events? Will the festival be virtual and online? Will guest artists and even the Harbisons risk traveling by plane? Will the mainly older public attend? There are many variables to take into account.
Here is an official announcement from the festival:
Dear Friends,
The middle of June is when we usually announce our concerts for the season, scheduled every year to begin in late August and run through Labor Day.
As we continue to endure the many shifts of the crises of health, politics and civil rights, we find ourselves struggling to understand all the contradictions.
In spite of it all, we have some hopes for a concert emblematic of the festival — perhaps a single event taking advantage of the small venue (below top and bottom), with the audience socially distanced or virtually engaged, or perhaps new dates later in the season — having a chance to recall what we have enjoyed together.
So we are delaying our announcement of what the Token Creek Festival might present, with a final decision by July 15. (Editor’s note: You can check at: http://tokencreekfestival.org.)
It is hard to give up something that has been evolving for 30 years and counting. It is a luxury and a lifeline for both the performers and the listeners, something that holds us fast in spite of the present challenges.
We are not yet advertising or taking ticket orders or building new facilities. But we, and the artists who are holding dates for us, are doing something else: We are practicing, imagining, thinking in real terms about presenting concerts again.
If for no other than those reasons, we beg the indulgence of our friends as we become perhaps the last to depart the season, or among the few to be able to propose some radical, slim, socially distanced, barn-size festival.
We hope you will stay tuned, as we are staying tuned.
And we’ll let you know what’s possible by mid-July.
With warm wishes,
John and Rose Mary and Sarah, TCF Directors
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Classical music: FREE Just Bach concerts start again this Wednesday at noon. Bach Around the Clock has almost filled performing slots
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ALERT: Bach Around the Clock, a daylong celebration of the birthday of Johann Sebastian Bach with performances by professional and amateur musicians, will take place on Saturday, March 28, from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, 1833 Regent Street, in Madison. The festival schedule of performers is almost full, but a few spaces are still available. Please contact BATC soon if you are thinking about performing.
By Jacob Stockinger
The Just Bach series of FREE monthly noontime concerts (below) will start again this week on Wednesday, Jan. 22, at noon at Luther Memorial Church, 1021 University Avenue.
It is free and open to the public, with a goodwill offering collected. Food and beverages for lunch are allowed.
Singers for the concert are: Sarah Brailey, soprano; Lindsey Meekhof, mezzo-soprano; James Mauk, tenor; and UW-Madison professor Paul Rowe, bass-baritone (below, in a photo by Michael R. Anderson).
The period-instrument players are: Brian Ellingboe, bassoon; Marika Fischer Hoyt, violin 1; Thalia Coombs, violin 2; Micah Behr, viola; Anton TenWolde, cello; and Mark Brampton Smith, organ.
The concert will open with the Toccata and Fugue in F Major, BWV 540, performed by organist Mark Brampton Smith (below).
Just Bach co-founder, UW graduate student and acclaimed soprano Sarah Brailey (below) will lead the chorale sing-along, a beloved audience-participation feature of the programs.
The concert closes with Cantata 155 ‘Mein Gott, wie lang,’ ach lange?’ (My God, how long, ah, how long?). You can hear the title aria in the YouTube video at the bottom.
Says co-founder and baroque violist-violinist Marika Fischer Hoyt (below): “It is a beautiful five-movement work about enduring the darkness of hard times and emerging once more into the light.
“The four vocal soloists shine in the first four movements (including an alto-tenor duet featuring a lovely bassoon obbligato part), and the Cantata concludes with a Chorale in which all take part.
Other Just Bach concerts this spring, all Wednesdays at noon, are: Feb. 19, March 25, April 15 and May 20.
Future programs will be announced at: https://justbach.org
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Classical music: What composers and what pieces give you shelter and sanctuary during troubled times?
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By Jacob Stockinger
A week ago, The Ear went to the inspired all-Mozart program given by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Pro Arte Quartet with guest cellist Jean-Michel Fonteneau (below center) and guest clarinetist Alicia Lee (below right), who was making her debut as a new UW faculty member.
He expected a fine performance and he was not disappointed. Indeed, he shares the same very positive reactions that critic John W. Barker expressed in his review for this blog. Here is a link to that review:
But something else happened too.
The sublime music of Mozart (below) – especially the Larghetto slow second movement of the late Clarinet Quintet, K. 581, but also the other movements and the String Quartet in G Major, K. 387 -– took The Ear into another world, into a parenthesis in time.
(You can hear a live performance in Japan by Yo-Yo Ma and others in the Larghetto movement, plus the rest of the Clarinet Quintet, in the YouTube video at the bottom.)
For a brief time – perhaps a total of about 80 or 90 minutes – The Ear was totally transported. He temporarily blocked out the political strife in Washington, D.C. and the Trump White House; the government turmoil here in Madison and around the world; and the terrible, deadly natural disasters of floods, hurricanes and wildfires in the U.S. and elsewhere around the globe.
He just let the transcendent music and the performances wash over him, refreshing him with their beauty before he reemerged onto the street and into the painful reality of current events after the concert ended.
So The Ear offers a deeply felt thank you to the performers for planning and playing such a timely and therapeutic program. He needed that more than he knew. And he hopes more such concerts are in store. The times demand such balm, not as escapism but as a reminder of great good things that endure.
So here is The Ear’s question: What other composers and what other pieces or works do you find offer the same kind of sanctuary or shelter?
Leave a COMMENT with a link to a performance on YouTube if possible.
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The Well-Tempered Ear 