Composers' Discord: Musicians and Mental Illness

Composers' Discord: Musicians and Mental Illness
Washington Post Health 12/22-29, 92

By Brenda C. Coleman
Associated Press

CHICAGO - Music may have charms to soothe a savage breast, but it ultimately tortured the deteriorating minds of composers Maurice Ravel and Robert Schumann, said experts at a symposium on music and the brain.

The illnesses of two of the most famous composers ever to suffer from brain ailments indicate how the brain learns music and illustrate how far science has come in dealing with brain injuries and illnesses that affect musical abilities, experts said.

The aim of the three-day conference last month was to stimulate cooperative research among experts in psychiatry, psychology, music, education and communications. In the case of Ravel, the French composer who died in 1937, a mysterious brain deterioration robbed him of some musical abilities but not others, said Justine Sergent, director of the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at the Montreal Neurological Institute. "He could generate melodies and harmonies in his head, but he was unable to write them down on a score, to play them on a piano or to sing them," she said.

Nothing was wrong with Ravel's muscles or voice. But his brain malfunction kept him from being able to sight read and play from memory, while allowing him to perceive pitch and rhythm, she said.

To learn the areas of the brain associated with the aptitudes Ravel retained or lost, Sergent tested blood flow in the brains of 10 musicians as they performed various musical tasks requiring those aptitudes. That showed the problem was most probably in a particular area on the left side of the brain, she said. The tests also showed that, contrary to previous assumptions, sight reading music uses different parts of the brain than reading words, she said.

In the case of Schumann, the German composer who died in 1856, the problem included severe depression, excited agitation and intermittent hallucinations.

The sick man reported that he heard the tone 'A' constantly ringing in his ears. He heard entire symphonies repeating themselves," said Peter Ostwald, a psychiatry professor at the University of California School of Medicine in San Francisco.

Schumann attempted suicide by throwing himself into the Rhine River, prompting his admission to the mental hospital where he spent the last two years of his life before dying at age 46, possibly from self-starvation.

When he wasn't psychotic, he could compose beautifully and coherently and even played chamber music with Johannes Brahms, a rising star heralded by Schumann and who visited him in the hospital. Schumann's affliction was diagnosed at the time as "softening of the brain," Ostwald said.

He said Schumann's career-long pattern of explosive bursts of composition followed by periods of prolonged depression suggest the composer might have had a brain ailment called a temporal lobe disorder.