What a Rare Condition Can Teach Us About the Power of Music

"Forty years ago, Bill Weiss, a student at Columbia University, went to see James Galway, a virtuoso Irish flutist, perform at the 92nd Street Y. Weiss had recently earned an A in a required musical-humanities course, and he thought that at the show he might finally feel moved by great music-an experience that had, until then, evaded him. His seat was in the front row. "I got to see the look of intensity in his eyes," Weiss told me. "I got to see every bead of sweat that was cascading down his face. I could see that he was completely at one with the music." He waited to experience some comparable upwelling of emotion, but it never came. Although he could appreciate Galway's talent and passion, he felt nothing."

"People have relished music for so long that we have evidence, from forty thousand years ago, of humans making a flute-like instrument out of a vulture bone. We feel that even wordless music reflects our moods. Music lovers have gone so far as to assign feelings to the keys that songs are played in. Marc-Antoine Charpentier, a seventeenth-century French composer, called F minor "obscure and plaintive," and Johann Mattheson, an eighteenth-century German composer, said that it "sometimes causes the listener to shudder with horror." Mattheson believed that music literally mimicked emotions; in his telling, joy was an "expansion of our vital spirits," and so joyful music had expansive intervals between notes."

Musical anhedonia is a rare condition in which people cannot enjoy music despite normal hearing and appreciation of technical skill. Bill Weiss attended a virtuoso performance, observed intense musical expression, and experienced no emotional reaction. Humans have produced music for tens of thousands of years, evidenced by a forty-thousand-year-old flute-like instrument. Musical traditions and theorists have long associated keys and intervals with specific emotions; Charpentier described F minor as "obscure and plaintive," and Mattheson linked musical intervals to feelings such as horror and joy. Researchers study musical anhedonia to separate auditory perception from emotional reward processing in the brain.

Read at The New Yorker