Tag: listening

  • A musical gift that changes lives

    This year, instead of giving a gift card from a favorite bookstore or a DVD from the Met Opera Shop, how about giving an iPod or donation to Music and Memory in the name of that special someone?  A non-profit organization, Music and Memory brings music to the elderly and disabled, particularly those with Alzheimer’s, and the results have…

  • Listening as practice: mirror neurons and music, part V

    I still remember Sue’s performance of Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata on her senior recital.  I knew from hearing her earlier in a masterclass that her concept of the sonata was epic – distant machine gun fire in the opening repeated chords, various musical depictions of war in the first movement, death in the second, and angels in heaven in the…

  • Setting the stage for auditory mirror neurons: the auditory-motor loop

    Ohad (Udi) Bar-David, cellist with the Philadelphia Orchestra, says that when he first began playing with Arab musician Simon Shaheen, it was difficult to play the microtones that are prevalent in Arab music. “But,” he says, “when you start hearing it, your fingers just take you there.” Your fingers “just take you there” because of…