I watched the movie ‘Amadeus’ way back when it came out in 1984. It was a thoroughly entertaining and educational (though with numerous Hollywood embellishments) look at Mozart’s life and times. I even had the chance to visit his apartment in Vienna in ’94, and felt the goosebumps as I walked through the spacious room where he sat at his pianoforte. There was a vast amount of natural light streaming through the room from opposite sides. I imagined him practicing one of his signature parlor tricks, with his back facing the instrument, with his hands over his head, playing flawlessly.
But the moment that sticks in my mind to this day, and has since influenced me musically, was the deathbed scene where Salieri helps Mozart write his final work. Wolfgang instructs him to write some of the instruments and voices to play in UNISON. Salieri is confused. This was simply not done in those days. “Yes, yes”, Mozart replied, as if it was a no-brainer.
This is not to say that I’ve written everything in unison because of this. Quite the contrary. But what it instilled in me was the courage to challenge the musical status quo, so to speak. To break the rules and go where no one has gone before. Consider the early days of Gregorian chant, when the dissonant ‘devil’s interval’ (tritone, 3 whole tones apart) was forbidden. Every harmony had to be ‘consonant’.
What would the Neanderthals have done if they’d heard rock and roll? Run for cover or dance? It’s an interesting thought to ponder.
The ways instruments are conventionally played have been altered by innovative musicians in many cases.
Consider much adored Joni Mitchell. Never having taken a guitar lesson, she proceeded to invent her own tunings that would allow what she heard in her head. Seasoned guitar players everywhere scratched their heads in amazement. Many a book has been written on her innovations in this regard.
Dizzy Gillespie, due to a mishap with his horn which twisted it, he decided to run with it. Together with his gopher pouched cheeks style of playing, he became an icon of ingenuity.
There are scores of others, but you get the idea.
As time has gone by, at any given moment, one might think there is nothing new under the sun. Maybe some of us come along and grab these ideas out of the ether somehow. In any case, our species continues to evolve due to the eccentricity of those musicians that march to a different drum.
CommentI was one of those who suffered tinnitus, and who has overcome this supposedly incurable condition. In my rock and roll days of the late 70′s and early 80′s, I was in a very loud band, confronted 6 nights a week with being in direct line with the lead guitar player’s excruciating amp volume. This may or may not have been the cause of my fairly rare form (known to some researchers as ‘pulsating tinnitus’), appearing in the late 90′s. The symptoms were either a low- frequency clicking or rumbling earthquake in the middle of my head. The clicking was rhythmic, though not based on my heartbeat, and though it may have been enjoyable for certain drummers, it wasn’t for me. And it had nothing to do with TMJ syndrome.
I was directed to the most respected ear, nose and throat specialist in Toronto, Ontario. He basically told me there was nothing I could do about it. I was stuck with it. His advice was to learn to live with it. That helpful little bit of information was the norm until fairly recently.
Don’t ask me how, but it pretty much went away by itself. Maybe because I started doing something right, such as eliminating the high stress factors in my life. But I’d like to bring up a perhaps related event that happened earlier, that might shed some additional light on the mysterious workings of the inner ear.
Around 1991, I participated in a research project for the late Dr. Alfred Tomatis. He was a genius on the subject of hearing/ listening, albeit highly controversial amongst the scientific community. He concluded that the voice can only reproduce what the ear hears. This is debatable. But he produced so many miraculous reversals in the realm of so-called lost hearing capacity, among other things, such as treating attention deficit disorder, autism, preparing the ear to learn new languages.
The premise behind the research was that he took several subjects who had already been doing intensive toning training on their own. He wanted to see if we had quicker results in improving the higher end of our frequency response for hearing after the 10 day experiment. That is, quicker than people who had not undertaken this training. The experiment was to listen to special filtered music on headphones for up to 6 hours per day. This music, filtered in a quite irritating way at times (it was either Mozart or Gregorian chant) was designed to gradually restore our higher frequency response.
As this experiment ultimately resulted in my ability to hear higher frequencies than I had become accustomed to (proven via before and after hearing tests) I’ll admit that it does not really explain how I got rid of the low frequency earthquakes later on, to be sure. But it does seem to point me to the conclusion that we are malleable, that the course of history can be overturned. Cilia (the itsy bitsy little hairs lining the ear canal that are each responsible for a particular frequency) that have been laying down and playing dead can be taught to stand up again and become functional. Tomatis claimed that the reason they’d been lying down in the first place was due to early traumatic experiences involving those very frequencies. Psychological/ physiological damages, if you will. So perhaps the reverse is also true. We can learn to turn down the volume of the troublesome frequencies.
So, though I’m certainly no expert, I’m throwing around ideas here that might correlate to the whole topic of tinnitus, hearing loss, hearing gain, relief of debilitating symptoms.
Here’s a suggested natural cure for this nagging problem from one of my favorite sources of alternative healing, NaturalNews.com
Here’s a collection of videos on current treatments.
Sharry Edwards has also been highly successful in her approach to tinnitus. It is just one area of many that is addressed in her ground breaking work, Bio Acoustics Therapy.
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