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April 20, 2023

Inside the Extraordinary Experiment to Save the Stradivarius Sound

An entire town went quiet so the world’s most iconic violin could be immortalized by Chuck Squatriglia

The masterpieces that Antonio Stradivari created three centuries ago will not live forever. One museum hopes digitizing their melodious voice will save them for future generations. Photo by Isabella de Maddalena for The New York Times / Redux Pictures

Antonio De Lorenzi takes a seat onstage in the concert hall of Museo del Violino in Cremona, Italy, and carefully tucks a Stradivarius under his chin. The violin, crafted in 1727 and called Vesuvio, gleams red in the soft light of the auditorium. Through an earpiece, the soloist hears a metronomic beat as a voice says, “Go.”

De Lorenzi draws his bow across the lowest string and plays G for half a beat. He pauses, then follows with A-flat. Then A. He moves up the scale, never changing his pace as he works through all four strings. Once he finishes, he repeats the exercise, this time sounding each tone just a bit faster.

Clearly, this is no ordinary concert—or a typical practice. Outside, police have cordoned off the street to traffic. Inside, workers have shut down the heater despite the January chill, dimmed the lights, and unscrewed any buzzing bulbs. As each solitary note reverberates, an audience of 32 microphones dotted throughout the auditorium silently listens.

De Lorenzi’s performance is part of a campaign to preserve the Stradivarius sound. Although many of the approximately 1,100 stringed masterpieces that Antonio Stradivari and his sons handcrafted in this town have endured for some 300 years, they are still mortal. Almost half have been lost to accidents, haphazard repairs, or the wear that comes with age. Of the 650 or so that survive, some have grown too fragile to play, their wood too thin or joints too weak to take the string tension or bowing pressure. Even those that still see regular use may change over the decades, as time and vibration slowly alter their mellifluous tone.

Stradivari remains the defining figure in violin-making, a name on par with Chanel or Ferrari. He fashioned instruments for kings and cardinals, and his creations bring their distinctive voice to the repertoires of modern soloists like Itzhak Perlman and Anne-Sophie Mutter. Musicians, luthiers, and scientists have tried for decades to figure out what gives a Strad its beautiful sound, yet no one has ever quite replicated it. And so the dream is to create a digital archive that will survive long after the last Stradivarius falls silent, allowing composers and artists to continue making music with them.

De Lorenzi proceeds, working through scales at varying tempos, intensities, and volumes with the precision and passion he’d bring to a Dvořák symphony or Verdi opera. In a stuffy, soundproofed room tucked beneath the auditorium’s seats, audio engineer Thomas Koritke, whose company will create a virtual version of the instrument, listens through speakers as his computer records it all. He will do this every day for five weeks, meticulously documenting thousands of variations of the sounds Vesuvio and three other masterworks of its era can produce.

The museum hopes this painstaking exercise grants the rare treasures a degree of immortality so they might enchant future generations. “These instruments have been played for 300 years,” says Fausto Cacciatori, a curator there. “We are committed to making them play for another 300.”

Recording the instruments required an array of 32 mics placed throughout the concert hall. Isabella de Maddalena for The New York Times / Redux Pictures

The Museo del Violino, which opened in 2013 to celebrate the work of Stradivari and others, sits in the heart of Cremona. The ancient city, about an hour outside Milan, began as a Roman colony in 218 B.C. and developed a rich, cosmopolitan culture under Spanish, French, Austrian, and Italian rule. By the 17th century, the town was home to a thriving community of instrument-makers. (Even now it boasts some 250 luthiers.)

Historians credit craftsman Andrea Amati with creating the modern violin here in the 1500s. But it was Stradivari, born around 1644, who combined three key innovations that helped accelerate the instrument’s transition from the chamber rooms of the Baroque period to the concert halls of the Classical: He designed his offerings slightly larger than his contemporaries. He flattened the arch of the top plate, called the belly, and made the piece lighter than was customary. He elongated the f-shaped holes that permit the belly to vibrate freely and allow the air resonating inside to more easily radiate as music. These changes provided the powerful sound and projection musicians sought. “He perfectly understood the new requirements of the violinists of the time,” Cacciatori says.

At base, the material used to craft any stringed instrument determines its sound. Violin-makers have, since Amati’s time, considered spruce ideal for the belly; its grain has the strength to endure the tension of taut strings, yet provides enough flexibility to vibrate freely. The best of it comes from Alpine regions, where cold weather slows tree growth, creating the tight grain that maximizes resonance. “If you choose a very good piece of wood and understand how to work with it, you’ll have a very good violin,” says Massimo Lucchi, co-founder of the Academia Cremonensis, a violin- and bow-making school in Cremona. Luthiers favor maple for the body and neck for its ideal mix of strength, resonance, and aesthetics.

The Museo del Violino preserves and celebrates the work of Stradivari and other masters. Isabella de Maddalena for The New York Times / Redux Pictures

Given the importance of wood, it’s natural that any effort to understand what gives a Stradivarius its storied voice would begin there. In 2003, researchers suggested that the lumber Stradivari sourced from forests in the Val di Fiemme in northern Italy’s Dolomite Alps was the beneficiary of an unusual cool period in history. For 70 years, beginning in 1645, average temperatures dropped as much as 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit throughout Europe and North America. Trees grew slowly during this time, called the Maunder Minimum, resulting in denser structure with tighter grain that, the thinking goes, made Stradivari’s instruments more resonant. A radiologist at Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands bolstered that theory in 2008, when his CT scans of two Stradivari creations, three by his peer Giuseppe Guarneri, and eight modern ones revealed that the old masters’ handiwork featured slightly more-even grain. Skeptics like retired biochemist Joseph Nagyvary of Texas A&M University discount the idea, however, arguing that luthiers throughout the continent relied upon the same forest, yet their results do not rival the Strad tone.

Nagyvary, who also builds violins, has spent four decades seeking Stradivari’s secrets. He has used tools like electron micrographs and infrared spectroscopy to argue that a variety of substances altered the structure of the craftsman’s spruce and maple. He believes Cremonese luthiers used borate and salts of copper, iron, and chromium to prevent woodworm infestations, and that some of these materials bonded with polysaccharides in the wood, stiffening it and improving its resonance. He also suspects that Stradivari took the added step of smoking the timber in his chimney. Beyond killing pests, the practice would have reduced moisture, giving his instruments superior tone. “You cannot have a Stradivari sound unless your wood is preserved and restructured by chemical manipulations,” Nagyvary says.

Researchers led by Hwan-Ching Tai, a chemist at National Taiwan University, bolstered that idea in a paper published in 2017. His team tested maple shavings taken from several Stradivari instruments during repairs. Ionizing them with plasma and analyzing the atoms released by that process revealed traces of many elements that Nagyvary claims the master used to treat his wood.

Chemists have also scrutinized the red varnish that Stradivari started using in the 1690s. Researchers have claimed that the coating, made with the cochineal beetles of Mexico, contained everything from eggs and animal protein to myrrh and amber. But an analysis of five Stradivarius creations by French chemist Jean-Philippe Échard found nothing more than finishes widely available to luthiers at the time.

All of this speculation stems from the fact that Stradivari didn’t share his methods. He left no notes, no diaries, nothing to reveal how he built his instruments or what gave them their tone. Science can provide clues, but few believe we’ll ever solve the mystery. We are left only with the sound.

Vesuvio, crafted in 1727, is one of 650 or so remaining Stradivarius instruments. Isabella de Maddalena for The New York Times / Redux Pictures

One night in February 2019, Koritke was sitting in his small control room when he heard an odd noise. It took a moment to realize what it was: the soft snoring of the armed guard who always accompanied the prized instruments. A kind word from the musician gently woke the fellow. “We all had a good laugh,” Koritke says.

The idea for Koritke’s endeavor, dubbed the Stradivarius Sound Bank, started about five years ago with sound engineer Leonardo Tedeschi. The former DJ was working on a project using a software program from Koritke’s company e-Instruments that replicates an 11-piece string ensemble. Tedeschi found it so impressive that he wanted to create a similar tool for Stradivarius violins, which he was surprised to learn no one had ever sampled in detail. He pitched the idea to Koritke. As a fan of acoustic music, Koritke immediately saw an opportunity to preserve an irreplaceable masterpiece.

The museum’s auditorium was an ideal venue. Its designer had tuned the shape and dimensions to perfectly reverberate the sound of stringed instruments. “When I saw the concert hall, I thought, This is something really extraordinary ,” Koritke recalls. Yet he worried about ambient noise, and proceeded only after city officials promised to mitigate the interference.

Koritke planned to record a lone Stradivarius violin, but after discussing the project with museum staff, chose a string quartet. In addition to Vesuvio, the combo included a Guarneri violin named Prince Doria, the Amati viola known as Stauffer, and a Stradivari cello also called Stauffer.

His team spent three years planning the undertaking, mapping out the thousands of articulations required to create a database of every sound those instruments can produce. “It was all written out as music on sheet paper,” Koritke says. “This is quite a challenge. Most of the musicians had never done that kind of an exercise.”

Koritke’s crew spent a day setting up all the recording equipment and another three arranging the array of microphones. “It became quite difficult because there were so many in quite a small area,” he says. During each phase, the musicians would run through scales and arpeggios at varying volumes and tempos, performing dozens of intonations of every note. They repeated these routines for hours at a time, using different bowing techniques or by plucking the strings, playing thousands of transitions with exacting precision. “Sometimes the musicians would stop at a certain note because they weren’t happy, but we thought it was OK,” Koritke says. “They would say, ‘No, I don’t like this part; let’s do it again.’”

Outside noise frequently disrupted the process. Although the city closed two streets near the concert hall and a nearby parking lot, bicycle tires rolling on cobblestones, barking dogs, and clinking glasses in the museum cafe all interrupted the sessions. That prompted the mayor to urge the city’s 70,000 residents to keep quiet in the area, though there wasn’t much anyone could do about the peal of church bells or the drone of airplanes occasionally passing overhead.

In the end, Koritke captured 1 million individual audio files, totaling 8 terabytes. His team will cull the trove to create virtual versions of the instruments that anyone can add to off-the-shelf recording programs like Pro Tools. That means choosing the most musical and precise instance of every tone, a process he expects will take until early 2020 [this article was written in Winter 2019]. “You must listen to all of them and decide how they match,” Koritke says. “How does the G match to the G-sharp, the C match to the C-sharp, and so on.”

Tedeschi is eager to see what musicians create with the digitized string quartet. He sees the software, which should be available for purchase by mid-2020, introducing the instruments to new audiences through entirely new styles: “Maybe Skrillex will do crazy stuff with a Stradivarius violin,” he says. “You can use it in a lot of genres.”

The question is, will anyone realize it’s a Strad?

person sitting at desk with recording equipment

Audio engineer Thomas Koritke recorded 8 terabytes of data during a project that took five weeks. Isabella de Maddalena for The New York Times / Redux Pictures

The premise of the Stradivarius Sound Bank rests on the idea that nothing sings as finely as the original. Joseph Curtin isn’t sure that’s true. He took up the violin at age 10 and started making them about a decade later, in 1978. Like many luthiers, he developed an abiding fascination with Stradivari and his peers, and hoped to replicate the renowned tone of their masterpieces. In time, Curtin began pondering theories to explain their superiority until a physicist friend suggested he first prove that Strads truly do eclipse all others. “That’s when I realized there was no scientific evidence suggesting the old Italian instruments sounded better than modern ones,” he says.

That prompted Curtin and Claudia Fritz, who studies psychoacoustics at the Sorbonne in Paris, to conduct a double-blind study. In 2010, 21 soloists meeting in Indianapolis for an international competition donned dark welding goggles, and each played two Stradivariuses, a Guarneri, and three modern violins. Thirteen of them preferred new instruments, and seven liked one of the Strads least of all.

The two researchers drew criticism for their methods, which included holding the test in a hotel room. So the pair ran a more rigorous study in Paris in 2012 involving six violins crafted by Italian masters (five of them Strads) and six by present-day luthiers. They used new instruments that were weathered to appear old, and the 10 professional soloists once again wore goggles. Each used their own bow while playing during 75-minute sessions in a rehearsal space and a small concert hall. Six preferred the sound of the modern models. On average, the musicians favored the playability, articulation, and projection of contemporary violins, and none could identify the Strads with better than coin-toss accuracy. “We have yet to find that players can discern old from new,” Curtin says.

That, of course, does not diminish the quality of Stradivari’s masterpieces, or his contributions to the art of making violins. “I don’t have one whit less reverence for his work,” Curtin says. “I am challenging the assumption that they are necessarily better-sounding than modern instruments.”

All of this might be beside the point. Strad’s unique voice and historical importance alone make them worthy of preservation. Around the world, institutions and archivists conserve paintings, sculptures, and documents like the Magna Carta and US Constitution. Those behind the recording project say sound deserves similar consideration. “When you look at museums all over the world, digitizing their content is standard,” Koritke says. “Why not do that for instruments? It is a bit of a departure from traditional thinking to preserve the sound of something. This could open the door to that.”

He envisions museums allowing patrons to use a tool like the Stradivarius Sound Bank to hear what these masterpieces sound like. He believes that the pipe organs of Europe’s great cathedrals are likewise worthy of saving. You could make a case for digitizing icons like, say, Trigger, Willie Nelson’s battered acoustic guitar. Tedeschi favors recording the offbeat, even outlandish, musical creations of avant-garde musicians like Björk or Martin Molin. “There are,” Koritke says, “so many other famous instruments in the world that would benefit from being digitized.”

March 9, 2023

Nature Is Always Listening: The Science of Mushrooms, Music, and How Sound Waves Stimulate Mycelial Growth

What playing music has to do with the happiness of the forest.

By Maria Popova

Fungi are the evolutionary cardinals of the Earth — the first to conquer it and the last to inherit it, composing the living substratum beneath every forest and every field and every backyard ecosystem. Each cubic inch of mycelium compresses eight miles of fine filaments folded unto themselves — the original superstrings of this terrestrial universe. Wildly unlike us, they are inseparable from our creaturely inheritance. Since the dawn of our adolescent species, they have been touching our cuisine and our consciousness in ever-evolving ways, the underlying mystery of which we are only just beginning to unravel.

Art by Arthur Rackham from *Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens*. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

In the early 2000s, a series of groundbreaking studies began revealing yet another facet of that mystery — the way mushrooms respond to sound, despite having no auditory organs. One [PDF] found that high-frequency sounds inhibit spore generation and mycelial growth. Another [PDF] affirmed the correlation from the other side, finding that low-frequency sound waves stimulate mycelial growth.

The aptitudes and abilities of every organism — ours included — are puppeteered by evolutionary adaptation. This means the curious relationship between sound vibration and mycelial growth must confer some substantive evolutionary advantage upon mushrooms, honed over the eons.

Master-mycologist Paul Stamets, author of the millennial bible Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World (public library), set out to solve the enigma.

*Amanita muscaria* from “Atlas des Champignons Comestibles et Vénéneux,” 1891. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy)

In an episode of musician Matt Whyte’s altogether wonderful podcast Sing for Science podcast, Stamets offers a possible — and deliciously plausible — hypothesis.

In that peculiar and recurring way indigenous wisdom has of anticipating the discoveries of science, the folkloric traditions of many first nations across Europe, North America, Japan, and Russia hold that lightning strikes mushrooms more readily than other organisms. Stamets observes that we now know this to be true in measurable ways that contour a measurable evolutionary advantage — the 50,000 volts of electricity a log incurs when struck by lightning greatly stimulates the yield of the shiitake mushrooms growing on it.

This is where Stamets’s deduction gets interesting: Before lightning strikes, thunder sounds — a rolling tide of low-frequency waves unspooling from the horizon. Having had hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary training and triumph by harnessing the elements and the environment, mushrooms would want something to awaken them to the impending rain event in order to get ready to absorb the water and electricity so beneficial to their propagation. Low-frequency sound waves, under this hypothesis, act as a warning bell — a mycelial clarion call for duty.

Satan’s bolete (*Rubroboletus satanas*) from *Atlas des Champignons Comestibles et Vénéneux,* 1891. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy)

Stamets reflects on the deeper undertones of this interdependence:

Nature is always listening via mycelium. Mycelium is like strings on a violin, strings on a piano, strings on a guitar — these are filaments that are sensitive to vibrations.

Sensing these low-frequency sound waves, the mycelium begins “responding with joyous, bountiful nutrients” — compounds that nourish not just the fruiting body of the mushroom above, but the entire forest ecosystem — which, as we now know (thanks to pioneering forester Suzanne Simard, who appeared in the inaugural episode of Sing for Science), is undergirded by a complex mycelial communication network carrying simple electrical and chemical signals between trees and other plants. The healthier the mycelium, the happier the canopy, and the more plentiful the flowers and berries beneath it.

Chanterelles (*Cantharellus cibarius*) from *Atlas des Champignons Comestibles et Vénéneux,* 1891. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy)

Returning to the consanguinity between science and music the show celebrates, Stamets reflects:

People coming together and celebrating with music: nature is responding with the mycelial networks being invigorated and inducing upchannel nutrients benefitting the commons.

What an astonishing world we live in — a world in which, as the poetic naturalist John Muir observed epochs before our science, “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”

Complement with cellist Zoë Keating reading and reflecting on Sylvia Plath’s poem “Mushrooms” from The Universe in Verse — a kindred celebration of science through the lens of poetry, with a side of music — then revisit Peter Rabbit creator Beatrix Potter’s influential illustrated studies of mushrooms.

December 31, 2022

Les Paul, and ‘The Log’

IN HIS OWN WORDS

“I took a length of 4 x 4 pine, put an Epiphone neck on it, wound a couple of homemade pickups and mounted them on the wood. Then I added a bridge and a Vibrola tailpiece, strung it up, and I had the Log. It was crude, but when I plugged it into an amp, it worked.

On a Saturday night, I took it to The Sheik, a little club in Sunnyside, where I played the same songs (on the Log) with the same trio I often jammed with, and nobody gave much notice to it. I was getting a very cool, unusual sound with this electric Log … A piece of lumber being played as an electric guitar was something nobody had ever seen before, or even thought of, but it didn’t seem to make a big impression.

So I went back to the Epiphone factory, took the sound box of an old Epiphone archtop, and sawed it in half right down the middle. Then I braced up the halves so they could be

attached to the sides… With wings attached, I took the Log

back to the same club, and jammed again with the same trio.

And to my surprise, there was a great reaction. Everyone

started talking about the unusual sound and asking questions about the guitar and my amplifier. There was a positive reaction to the sound I got that night, which was the same sound the same people had heard before. So I came to the conclusion that people hear with their eyes.” –Les Paul

December 6, 2022

Where did all the key changes go?

Mallika Seshadri

The key change has been used by musicians like Beyoncé, Travis Scott, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys and Michael Jackson for decades. Nowadays, it’s getting harder and harder to find in top songs.

Kevin Winter/The Recording Academy/Getty Images; Rick Kern/Getty Images; Ron Galella/Getty Images; GARCIA/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images

Many of the biggest hits in pop music used to have something in common: a key change, like the one you hear in Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody.”

But key changes have become harder to find in top hits.

Chris Dalla Riva, a musician and data analyst at Audiomack, wanted to learn more about what it takes to compose a top hit. He spent the last few years listening to every number one hit listed on the Billboard Hot 100 since 1958 – more than 1100 songs.

“I just started noticing some trends, and I set down to writing about them,” says Dalla Riva, who published some of those findings in an article for the website Tedium.

He found that about a quarter of those songs from the 1960s to the 1990s included a key change.

But from 2010 to 2020, there was just one top song: Travis Scott’s 2018 track, “Sicko Mode.”

How the key change is used in pop music

According to Dalla Riva, changing the key – or shifting the base scale of a song – is a tool used across musical genres to “inject energy” into a pop number.

There are two common ways to place a key change into a top hit, he says. The first is to take the key up toward the end of a number, like Beyoncé does in her 2011 song “Love on Top,” which took listeners through four consecutive key changes. This placement helps a song crescendo to its climax.

The second common placement, Dalla Riva says, is in the middle of a song to signal a change in mood. The Beach Boys took this approach in their 1966 release “Good Vibrations,” as did Scott’s “Sicko Mode.”

“The key is just a tool,” Dalla Riva says. “And like all tools and music, the idea is to evoke emotion.”

Key changes falling flat

According to NYU professor and author of “Dilla Time” Dan Charnas, the key change has faded out of popularity alongside the often slow and emotional ballad, which he calls a “bastion of key changes.” Meanwhile, hip-hop has taken center stage.

“Hip-hop is a rejection of a lot of the tropes of traditional musicianship,” Charnas says. Music composition has also changed, prioritizing rhythm and texture over individual notes and chords.

There are some numbers from the late 80s, like Michael Jackson’s 1988 hit “Man in the Mirror,” where the key change can be seen as both a mark of beauty and a cliché.

“You can look at that song in two different ways. On one level, it’s a perfectly constructed song, a beautiful piece of songwriting. A lot of craft goes into it,” Charnas says. “In another view, it’s tropey, maudlin and completely manipulative.”

While the key change was once a mark of musical sophistication, many now consider it a crutch. Dalla Riva says a lot of his peers think using the key change is lazy.

“It’s just like you get to the last chorus and you’re like, all right, we need to inject some more energy. Let’s just shift the key up a half-step or a whole step.”

Where pop music is headed

Some fans and pop music experts might be inclined to mourn the “death” of the key change, but Charnas says musical tools and composition techniques are constantly evolving.

“There’s lots of ways to get dynamics in a song and in a composition,” Charnas says. “Key change is just one of the ways.”

In the absence of key changes – and in a time where hip-hop and electronic music have gained popularity – composers have turned to varying rhythmic patterns and more evocative lyrics.

And if you’re one of those folks who wants the key change to come back, Charnas believes there’s one way to do it: fund music education.

“You want to know why Motown was such an incredible font of composition? Three words: Detroit Public Schools.”

Though it can be cliched, Charnas says he does miss hearing a key change when it’s used at its best.

“Do I miss good key changes? Absolutely. Do I wish more people could rock a key change like Stevie Wonder? Absolutely.”

October 19, 2022

The divine origin of music and flute in Greek Mythology

by Yulia Berry

The ancient Greeks thought music was of divine origin. The gods and Muses were connected with music, and some even invented musical instruments: the lyre by Hermes or Apollo, the simple flute by Athene, the shepherd’s flute by Pan.

The Greeks cultivated music at a very early epoch. They used it not only for entertainment and all kinds of events, but also gave it a great importance in refining the feelings and building the character. Numerous myths tell us how powerful the music can be. (Remember the beautiful and sad myth of Orpheus and Euridice?)

At the public festivals, such the Pythian games the Greeks also held music contests. Athens, the home of Greek dramatic poetry, in its golden age was the main city where professional musicians met each other. Public concerts became common towards the end of the Republic and formed a part of the musical contests. By the time of the Persian Wars the music got to its highest point of the development, which completed the ancient system.

Dancing and music entertainment became common at the meals of aristocratic families. Younger family members took instruction in these arts, as it was a part of higher education.

It’s interesting to note that the flute playing was limited to certain occasions, as its sound seemed to the ancients to arouse enthusiasm and passion [Aristotle, Politics, viii 3]. For example, dramatic music was introduced with the Greek Drama, but limited to flute-playing.

Let’s review some mentions to flute and music in Greek mythology.

Euterpe

Euterpe is one of the nine muses, fathered by Zeus. All the muses were assigned various roles and Euterpe became Muse of Music and Lyric Poetry. She is almost always depicted holding a flute.

Composers often drew inspirarion from the Greek myphology. Below are a few pieces that any flutist, who loves myphology, can add to their repertoire:

Euterpe by Augusta Read Thomas. A two-minute fanfare composed in 2008.

Euterpe: Greek Muse of Music by Kevin Kaisershot. Composed in a moderate 4/4 time, the flute soloist gets a chance to show their technical ability intertwined with ornamentation in a light and lilting melody.

Athena

The goddess Athena was the goddess of wisdom, strategy in warfare, and crafts. She was the patroness of the city of Athenes and helped Greek heroes, such as Hercules and Odysseus on their adventures.

Athene invented the flute, but discarded it after discovering that her face is distorted while playing.

Hyginus included a great story about Athena’s flute in his book, written in Latin around 300-400 A.D.

“They say that (Athena) was the first to fashion a flute out of deer-bone. She came to the gods’ banquet table to play it, but (Hera) and (Aphrodite) made fun of her because she turned blue and puffed out her cheeks.”

Athena ran to a forest and tried to play it again by herself. Suddenly she caught her reflection in a stream and realized that her fellow goddesses were right.

“There was every reason for them to poke fun at her,” wrote Hyginus.

Athena got so upset that she threw out the flute and cursed it. The curse would severely punish anyone who picks up the flute.

The satyr Marsyas found the discarded instrument and learned how to play it.

Marsyas

Marsyas became so skilled in flute playing that he challenged Apollo, the god of music (!), to a musical duel! It was judged by the Muses and King Midas (who later got the golden touch). The terms of the duel stated that the winner could treat the defeated side any way he wanted.

First, Marsyas played such a wild and coaxing tune that the birds hopped from the trees to get near, the animals came up closer, and the trees swayed as if they wanted to dance. Then, all living creatures started dancing wildly, and Midas thought it was the sweetest music in the world.

When it got to his turn, Apollo rose, holding a golden lyre in his hands. He touched the strings of the lyre, and suddenly the music mesmerized them all. Never before gods or mortals heard anything as beautiful and emotional as Apollo’s music. The wild creatures stood still, the trees kept every leaf from rustling, and the earth and air went utterly silent. When Apollo stopped playing, it took some time for the spell of his music to break. Finally, the listeners fell at Apollo’s feet and proclaimed him the winner.

All but Midas, who alone would not admit that the music was better than Marsyas. “If thine ears are so dull, mortal,” said Apollo, “they shall take the shape that best suits them.”

Apollo touched the ears of Midas, and they turned into the donkey ears.

**Karel van Mander, 1548-1606, Amsterdam. Landscape with the Judgment of Midas.**

However, several versions tell us more about how it all went at the end.

The most notable are found in Diodorus Siculus’ Library of History, Hyginus’ Fabulae, 165, Pseudo-Apollodorus’ Bibliotheke i.4.2, and Pliny’s Natural History 16.89.

According to Hyginus, Marsyas was departing as the victor after the first round, when Apollo turned his lyre upside down and played the same tune. Marsyas could not do with his flute, so he succumbed.

According to Diodorus Siculus, who admired Marsyas for his intelligence and self-control, he was defeated when Apollo started singing along playing the lyre. Marsyas protested, arguing that it is not fair because he can’t sing while playing the flute. However, Apollo replied that by blowing into the flute, Marsyas was doing almost the same thing himself. Thus, the Muses supported Apollo and announced his victory.

Yet another version states that Marsyas played the flute out of tune! Out of shame, he accepted the defeat and Apollo’s punishment, which was absolutely cruel. Apollo had the satyr strung up by a tree and flayed alive. The legends describe how his skin was nailed to a pine tree and moved joyfully when a flute was played.

**Guido Reni, 1575-1642, Bologna. Apollo flaying Marsyas, 1633**

Marsyas’ brothers, nymphs, gods, and goddesses mourned his death. Their tears, according to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, were the source of the river Marsyas in Phrygia, which today is called Çine Creek. A bridge on the river Marsyas, built towards the end of the Roman period, is still called by the satyr’s name, Marsyas.

The contest symbolizes the eternal struggle between two aspects of human nature and has been a favorite subject in art.

Paintings taking Marsyas as a subject also include “Apollo and Marsyas” by Michelangelo Anselmi (c. 1492 – c.1554), “The Flaying of Marsyas” by Jusepe de Ribera (1591–1652), the Flaying of Marsyas by Titian (c. 1570–1576) and “Apollo and Marsyas” by Bartolomeo Manfredi (St. Louis Art Museum).

There are beautiful music compositions that will make a great addition to any flutist repertoir:

Leonardo Lorenzo, Mythological Suite Suite mitologica, for flute, op. 38 has three parts: Pan, Marsyas and Apollo.

Lorenzo (1875-1962) was an Italian virtuoso flutist, composer for the flute repertoire, researcher and prominent flute pedagogue. Among his students was Julius Baker. He was a soloist of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, directed by Gustav Mahler and had a very successful flute career.

Pan and Syrinx

One of the most famous myths about Pan told us about the origin of his pan flute. A pan flute is also known as panpipes or Syrinx. It consists of multiple pipes without lateral holes, which are fastened together and gradually increasing in length. The pipes are typically made from local reeds, giant cane, or bamboo. Other materials include wood, plastic, metal, and ivory.

Pan was the god of the wild and patron of shepherds. He was half-goat and half-man. The Romans identified Pan with the Italian Faunus.

Ovid included the story of Pan and Syrinx in Book One of the Metamorphoses.

The story begins when Pan fell in love with a nymph named Syrinx. One day while romping through the forest of Arcadia, Pan saw a beautiful nymph Syrinx, a daughter of the River God, Ladon. Pan immediately felt a desire and determination to have the beautiful nymph for himself. Syrinx was used to being pursued because her incredible beauty brought her lots of unwanted attention from both gods and men. Syrinx was a skilled huntress who could move fast through a forest and could endure a long run. She could easily elude her pursuers in the past, but unfirtunately not this time. Unlike the other men, Pan was able to run for long periods of time through the forests and mountains without tiring. He chased Syrinx for days through the hills, mountains, forests and valleys of Arcadia. Syrinx was exhausted and desperate to escape Pan’s chase. She ran to the river, where she begged her father, river god Ladon to help her. A moment before Pan’s grasp, she was turned into wild marsh reeds.

Syrinx by Rubens, Peter Paul; 1577–1640, and Brueghel, Jan the Younger; 1601–1687.
“Landscape with Pan and Syrinx”, undated.
*(Figures painted by Rubens, landscape and birds by Brueghel)*

Enraged, Pan smashed the marsh reeds into pieces. As he sat at the river bank distraught over his lost “love,” the wind picked up and blew through the broken reeds. It made a magical sound, which reminded Pan the sweet melody of Syrinx’s voice. Desperate to hear her voice again, Pan gathered nine different sizes of broken marsh reeds, tied them together in a line from smallest to largest, and named the instrument Syrinx in honor of his reluctant love.

In the end, Pan got what he wanted – he never spent a day without his love.

**Pan playing his pipes by Walter Crane, 1883**

The legend inspired some of the greatest composers to write incredibly beautiful music and flute solos.

Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune by Claude Debussy

In 1894 Claude Debussy wrote a beautiful symphonic poem Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun). It is based on the poem by the famous French poet Stephané Mallarme.

At the premiere in Paris, the flute solo was played by Georges Barrère.

Gustave Doret, the conductor who premiered the piece wrote in his memoirs, Temps et contretemps, 1942:

“There was a vast silence in the hall as I ascended to the podium and our splendid flutist, Barrère, unfolded his opening line. All at once I felt behind me, as some conductors can, an audience that was totally spellbound. It was a complete triumph, and I had no hesitation in breaking the rule forbidding encores.”

Composer and conductor Pierre Boulez even declared that

“the flute of the faun brought new breath to the art of music.”

There are many available arrangements for flutists who would like to perform the solo at concerts.

Syrinx by Claude Debussy

In 1913 Debussy wrote a piece for solo flute Syrinx, expressing Pan’s sadness over losing his love. The work became incredibly popular and is an indispensable part of any flutist’s repertoire.

La Flûte De Pan, op.15 by J.Mouquet

In 1904 Jules Mouquet composed sonata La Flûte De Pan, op.15 for flute and piano. It includes Pan et les Bergers, Pan et les Oiseaux and Pan et les Nymphes. There is also a version for flute and orchestra. The sonata is dedicated to French flutist and teacher Léopold Jean Baptiste Lafleurance, who had been a student of Paul Taffanel. Jules Mouquet taught at the Conservatoire de Paris in the early 1900s as a professor of harmony and composition.

Bourdin, Chanson De Pan, Flute Solo piece (1968)

Roger Bourdin (1923-1976) was a French flutist. He was a professor at the Versailles conservatory. He founded a flute quartet with Pol Mule, Jean-Pierre Rampal and Eugène Masson in 1945. Bourdin had a successful carrier as a performer, teacher and conductor.

Jacques Charpentier: Pour Syrinx (Flute & Piano)

Jacques Charpentier (1933-2017) was a French composer and organist. Pour Syrinx was published in 2002.

Daphnis

In Greek mythology, Daphnis was a Sicilian shepherd who was the son of Hermes and a nymph who created the genre of pastoral poetry and was taught by Pan to play the shepherd’s flute. In the later legends, he was named a teacher of Marsyas.

In the second century A.D., Greek novelist Longus wrote Daphnis and Chloe. The story tells us about a girl and a boy, abandoned at birth and brought up by shepherds. They fall in love at an early age, but soon get kidnapped and separated. After several adventures, they reunited.

**“Daphnis et Chloé” by Baron François Gérard, 1824-1825**

Maurice Ravel’s ballet Daphnis et Chloé (1912) refers to Pan and Syrinx’s story. Pan is described throughout a flute solo after he appears to rescue Chloé from pirates. At the banquette in his honor, he plays a passionate and tender melody, remembering Syrinx, while Chloé dances. The flute solo became one of the most important solos in the flute orchestral repertoire and is often included in audition requirements.

There is an arrangement for flute and piano Daphnis et Chloe, Suite no.2 and more various arrangements for flute ensembles on the same website.

Orpheus and Eurydice

Ovid opened the Book 10 of Metamorphoses with one of the greatest and most enduring stories of Orpheus and Eurydice.

**Ary Scheffer (1795–1858), Orpheus Mourning the Death of Eurydice (c 1814)**

Orpheus loses the love of his life Eurydice after she is bitten by a poisonous snake. He mourns his loss and the whole world mourns with him. Heartbroken and desperate, he starts begging Hades, the god of the underworld to give her back. Moved by his love Hades agrees to this, but with one condition: he must not look back to his beloved before they are safe together again in the world of men.

**Edward Poynter (1836–1919), Orpheus and Eurydice (1862)**

He fails at the end, and loses Eurydice this time forever.
After three years a group of female worshipers of god Dionysys, called Maenads, blind hatred, teared him alive to pieces for refusing to entertain them while mourning the loss of his wife. His soul floats down to Hades, where he is finally reunited with Eurydice.

Dance of the Blessed Spirits

In 1762 Christoph Willibald Gluck wrote opera Orfeo ed Euridice. It was the first of Gluck’s “reform” operas in which he attempted to replace the complex music and plot from the traditional ‘opera seria’ for more clean and simpler structure.
Since the premiere happened for the birthday of Emperor Franz of Austria, Gluck was forced to change the bloodthirsty end.

In 1774 Gluck revised the score for a production by the Paris Opera and included a ballet part Dance of the blessed spirits, which contains a famous flute solo.

Hector Berlioz wrote in his Treatise on Instrumentation (1843):

“When listening to the D-minor melody of the pantomime in the Elysian-Fields scene in Orfeo, one is immediately convinced that only a flute could play this melody appropriately… The voice starts almost inaudibly, seeming afraid to be overheard; then it sighs softly and rise to the expression of reproach, of deep pain, to the cry of a heart torn by incurable wounds; gradually it sinks into a plaint, a sigh, and the sorrowful murmur of a resigned soul. Gluck was, indeed, a great poet!”

The flute repertoire has more beautiful pieces, based on Greek mythology.

Polymnia e Tersicore for Solo Flute by Onorio Zaralli

Polymnia is the Muse of sacred poetry, sacred hymn, dance, and eloquence as well as agriculture and pantomime. Tersicore (Terpsicore) is one of the nine Muses and goddess of dance and chorus.

The Nymphs by Onorio Zaralli for piccolo and three flutes.

Different from other goddesses, nymphs are generally regarded as divine spirits who animate nature, and are usually depicted as beautiful, young nubile maidens who love to dance and sing; their amorous freedom sets them apart from the restricted and chaste wives and daughters of the Greek polis. They are beloved by many and dwell in mountainous regions and forests by springs or rivers.
Other nymphs, always in the shape of young maidens, were part of the retinue of a god, such as Dionysus, Hermes, or Pan, or a goddess, generally the huntress Artemis.
Nymphs tended to frequent areas distant from humans but could be encountered by lone travelers outside the village, where their music might be heard, and the traveler could spy on their dancing or bathing in a stream or pool, either during the noon heat or in the middle of the night. Nymphs were the frequent target of satyrs.

I hope this article made you inspired to dive into the incredibly beautiful, dramatic and intense world of Greek Mythology and explore the available flute repertoire.

Yulia Berry

September 7, 2022

Music, Emotion, and Well-Being

How does music affect the way we think, feel, and behave?

Shahram Heshmat Ph.D.

One of the most important issues in the psychology of music is how music affects emotional experience (Juslin, 2019). Music has the ability to evoke powerful emotional responses such as chills and thrills in listeners.

Positive emotions dominate musical experiences. Pleasurable music may lead to the release of neurotransmitters associated with reward, such as dopamine. Listening to music is an easy way to alter mood or relieve stress. People use music in their everyday lives to regulate, enhance, and diminish undesirable emotional states (e.g., stress, fatigue). How does music listening produce emotions and pleasure in listeners?

1. Musical pleasure. The enjoyment of music appears to involve the same pleasure center in the brain as other forms of pleasure, such as food, sex, and drugs. Evidence shows that an aesthetic stimulus, such as music, can naturally target the dopamine systems of the brain that are typically involved in highly reinforcing and addictive behaviors.

In one study, participants listened to their favorite songs after taking naltrexone. Naltrexone is a widely prescribed drug for treating addiction disorders. The researchers found that when study subjects took naltrexone, they reported that their favorite songs were no longer pleasurable (Malik et al., 2017). However, not everyone experiences intense emotional responses to music. Roughly 5% of the populations do not experience chills. This incapacity to derive pleasure specifically from music has been called musical anhedonia.

2. Musical anticipation. Music can be experienced as pleasurable both when it fulfills and violates expectations. The more unexpected the events in music, the more surprising is the musical experience (Gebauer & Kringelbach, 2012). We appreciate music that is less predictable and slightly more complex.

3. Refined emotions. There is also an intellectual component to the appreciation for music. The dopamine systems do not work in isolation, and their influence will be largely dependent on their interaction with other regions of the brain. That is, our ability to enjoy music can be seen as the outcome of our human emotional brain and its more recently evolved neocortex. Evidence shows that people who consistently respond emotionally to aesthetic musical stimuli possess stronger white matter connectivity between their auditory cortex and the areas associated with emotional processing, which means the two areas communicate more efficiently (Sachs et al., 2016).

4. Memories. Memories are one of the important ways in which musical events evoke emotions. As the late physician Oliver Sacks has noted, musical emotions and musical memory can survive long after other forms of memory have disappeared. Part of the reason for the durable power of music appears to be that listening to music engages many parts of the brain, triggering connections and creating associations.

5. Action tendency. Music often creates strong action tendencies to move in coordination with the music (e.g., dancing, foot-tapping). Our internal rhythms (e.g., heart rate) speed up or slow down to become one with the music. We float and move with the music.

6. Emotional Mimicry. Music doesn’t only evoke emotions at the individual level, but also at the interpersonal and intergroup level. Listeners mirror their reactions to what the music expresses, such as sadness from sad music, or cheer from happy music. Similarly, ambient music affects shoppers’ and diners’ moods.

7. Consumer behavior. Background music has a surprisingly strong influence on consumer behavior. For example, one study (North, et al., 1999) exposed customers in a supermarket drinks section to either French music or German music. The results showed that French wine outsold German wine when French music was played, whereas German wine outsold French wine when German music was played.

8. Mood regulation. People crave ‘escapism’ during uncertain times to avoid their woes and troubles. Music offers a resource for emotion regulation. People use music to achieve various goals, such as to energize, maintain focus on a task, and reduce boredom. For instance, sad music enables the listener to disengage from the distressing situations (breakup, death, etc.), and focus instead on the beauty of the music. Further, lyrics that resonate with the listener’s personal experience can give voice to feelings or experiences that one might not be able to express oneself.

9. Time perception. Music is a powerful emotional stimulus that changes our relationship with time. Time does indeed seem to fly when listening to pleasant music. Music is therefore used in waiting rooms to reduce the subjective duration of time spent waiting and in supermarkets to encourage people to stay for longer and buy more (Droit-Volet, et al., 2013). Hearing pleasant music seems to divert attention away from time processing. Moreover, this attention-related shortening effect appears to be greater in the case of calm music with a slow tempo.

10. Identity development. Music can be a powerful tool for identity development (Lidskog, 2016). Young people derive a sense of identity from music. For example, the movie Blinded by the Light shows the power of Springsteen songs to speak to Javed’s experience on a personal level. The lyrics help him to find a voice he never knew he had, and the courage to follow his dreams, find love, and assert himself.

References

Droit-Volet S, Ramos D, Bueno JL, Bigand E. (2013) Music, emotion, and time perception: the influence of subjective emotional valence and arousal? Front Psychol; 4:417. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00417.

Gebauer L, and Morten L. Kringelbach (2012) Ever-Changing Cycles of Musical Pleasure: The Role of Dopamine and Anticipation Psychomusicology: Music, Mind, and Brain, Vol. 22, No. 2, 152–16.

Juslin PN (2019), Musical Emotions Explained, Oxford University Press.

Lidskog Rolf (2016), The role of music in ethnic identity formation in diaspora: a research review, International Social Science Journal, Vol. 66, nr 219-220, s. 23-38.

Malik Adiel, at al (2017) Anhedonia to music and mu-opioids: Evidence from the administration of naltrexone. Scientific Reports volume 7, Article number: 41952 DOI:10.1038/srep41952

North AC, Shilcock A, Hargreaves DJ. The effect of musical style on restaurant customers’ spending. Environ Behav. 2003;35:712–8.

Sachs E Matthew, et al., (2016), Brain connectivity reflects human aesthetic responses to music, Social and Affective Neuroscience. 1-8.

September 1, 2022

Banishing stage fright with the Jazzmen

Last week I told you the story of Darryl Jones, who played bass for Sting when he started his solo career with the album Dream of the Blue Turtles. Today I want to tell you about another of Sting’s musicians, so that we can learn another useful tool to conquer stage fright.

To recap the story…

If you recall, Sting was trying something totally new. He was leaving a very successful band, and was striking it out on his own with a whole new group of musicians. They were about to play their first concert – a new band, playing a set of songs where half were completely new and unheard, and all of which were being re-interpreted. Sting, if you recall, hadn’t got together just any old band. He had found a group of jazz musicians, and was creating a whole new jazz-rock fusion sound.

Director Michael Apted filmed the build-up to the concert. He asked each musician in turn if they were nervous. Last week we learned from Darryl Jones’ reply. This week we turn to saxophonist Branford Marsalis, to see what he can teach us.

The other jazz man.

Branford Marsalis is another profoundly inventive jazz musician. Back in 1985 he was just at the beginning of his career, but he already had an impressive resume. And he was never one to mince his words! So when Michael Apted asked him if he was nervous about the upcoming gig with Sting, this is what he said:.

“If I was Sting I might be nervous but I’m not Sting, I play jazz, I know what it’s like to be shat on, you know what I mean? I am a jazz musician, I know what it’s like to play some stuff that nobody wants to hear.”*

I know this is a little stronger language than normally appears in my articles, so bear with me…

Branford Marsalis isn’t nervous. Why not? Because he is used to an audience not necessarily liking the music he is playing! Marsalis here leads us towards what I believe is a very strong motivating factor that lies behind many performers’ stage fright:

they fear the audience’s bad opinion.

Fear of the audience is a strong reason why people fear going out to perform. Back when I worked in professional theatre, I can remember actors nervously peering out from the wings, scanning the audience suspiciously, and wondering if they would be a ‘good’ house that night. And by ‘good’, they meant an audience that liked them and liked the play.

Wanting to be liked is completely understandable and natural. The problem arises when we think about the audience so much that we begin to lose sight of what it is that we need to do in order to win their good opinion.

We need to perform.

In other words, we need to summon up all that we have learned from our hours of research and rehearsal, all the work that we have done, and carry out the performance in a way that we have reasoned out is going to best achieve our goals.

‘But shouldn’t we be thinking about the audience?’ I hear you cry. Well… Yes, but not in the way that most people do. Obviously we need to remember that the audience is there. But do we need to tie ourselves in knots to try to please them? Well, no, not according to Branford Marsalis! His experience very clearly included situations where, in pursuit of his creative goals, he played in such a way that the audience just didn’t like it. On that day. At that time.

The thing is, not everyone can be happy all the time. But what might you sacrifice in order to satisfy your audience? What if Stravinsky had burned the score of The Rite of Spring straight after its controversial first performance? Western classical music would have been very different!

FM Alexander said, “where the ‘means-whereby’ are right for the purpose, desired ends will come. They are inevitable. Why then be concerned as to the manner or speed of their coming? we should reserve all thought, energy. And concern for the means whereby we may command the manner of their coming.”

Branford Marsalis, when faced with the choice of playing the way he wanted, or trying to be ‘right’ for the audience, chose to play in the way that he had decided was best. He stuck with the process he had chosen. And fear of the audience’s reaction became unimportant as a result.

What about you? Will you stick to the process you’ve reasoned out will get you to your goal?

* Sting, Bring on the Night, directed by Michael Apted. Quote occurs at about 60.58 on the DVD release.
** FM Alexander, The Universal Constant in Living in the Irdeat Complete Edition, p.587.

August 6, 2022

The 110-year-old Titanic violin that miraculously survived the sinking ship

The violin that survived the Titanic belonged to bandmaster Wallace Hartley, who perished with the ship. Picture: Getty / Alamy

By Siena Linton

This violin holds a lifetime of stories in the grain of its wood…

Of all the instruments in the world, violins and other string instruments are often renowned for their longevity, with the centuries-old creations of Italian luthiers, Amati and Stradivari, holding hundreds of years’ worth of stories, and selling for millions of pounds today.

Few, however, can compete with that of the Titanic violin – the instrument played in April 1912, as the RMS Titanic sank into the North Atlantic Ocean after its fatal collision with an iceberg.

Today, the violin is held at the Titanic Museum in Tennessee, as part of their public display of artefacts and memorabilia from the ship.

But the story of how it got there is not quite so simple…

An inscription on the tailpiece of the violin, which helped to identify it as the instrument Maria Robinson gifted to her new fiancé Wallace Hartley as an engagement present, before he set sail on RMS Titanic. Picture: Getty

A wedding that never took place

The now-famous violin was crafted in Germany in 1910, and was gifted to Wallace Hartley of Colne, Lancashire, as an engagement present from his new fiancée Maria Robinson. An inscription on the instrument’s tailpiece read, ‘For Wallace, on the occasion of our engagement, from Maria’.

The sweethearts likely met in Leeds, where Hartley played as a musician in various institutions around the city. Having previously provided musical entertainment on the RMS Mauretania, Hartley was contacted shortly before the RMS Titanic departed from Southampton on its maiden voyage with a request that he become its bandleader.

After his initial reluctance at leaving his fiancée, Hartley agreed to join the transatlantic crossing, hoping to secure future work with some new contacts before returning for his June wedding.

Tragically, the wedding never took place. Four days into the crossing, the Titanic hit an iceberg in the North Atlantic ocean, and sank on the 15 April 1912, taking more than 1,500 passengers and crew members with it – Hartley included.

The 1997 Titanic film, directed by James Cameron and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, immortalised the depiction of the ship’s musicians performing ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’ as the ship sank. Picture: Alamy

‘Gentlemen, it has been a privilege playing with you tonight’

In a depiction made famous by the 1997 film Titanic (see above), the eight musicians on board the ship continued to play amid the havoc, as women, children and first-class passengers were loaded hurriedly onto lifeboats.

At maximum capacity, the lifeboats barely had space for half the people on the ship, and as the wooden boats began to depart with seats still vacant, it soon became clear that many of those still on board the rapidly sinking cruise liner would not be saved.

As was his command, bandleader Wallace H. Hartley gathered his seven fellow musicians to play music in an attempt to calm the pandemonium and still people’s fears. Survivors of the ship report that the band played upbeat music, including ragtime and popular comic songs of the late 19th and early 20th century.

One of the popular myths surrounding the Titanic and its historic fate is that the band played the hymn ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’ in their final moments. Some accounts dispute this, claiming that the musicians were last heard playing Archibald Joyce’s waltz, ‘Dream of Autumn’, before abandoning their instruments.

A portrait of Wallace Hartley, bandmaster of the RMS Titanic who perished with the ship. Picture: Alamy

If the musicians were indeed playing music to the very end, it does seem likely that Hartley would have chosen the hymn as their swan song.

Hartley’s father, Albion, was the choirmaster at the Methodist chapel in the family’s hometown, and had introduced ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’ to the congregation.

Hartley had also told a former colleague on the Mauretania that, should he ever find himself aboard a sinking ship, the hymn would be one of two pieces he would play in his final moments – a chilling foreshadowing of events to come.

Only three of the musicians’ bodies were recovered from the wreckage, including Hartley’s. A detailed inventory documents the personal effects that were found with him, including a gold fountain pen and silver match box, both engraved with his initials, and a diamond solitaire ring.

The violin was discovered enclosed within a satchel, embossed with Wallace Hartley’s initials. It’s thought that the case could have played a role in preserving the violin against the icy salt water conditions of the Atlantic ocean. Picture: Getty

Rediscovered in an attic

Despite some reports to the contrary, there is no evidence that his violin was found strapped to his chest in its case. We do know, however, that it must have been recovered, along with a satchel embossed with Hartley’s initials, as a telegram transcript from Maria Robinson to the Provincial Secretary of Nova Scotia reads, ‘I would be most grateful if you could convey my heartfelt thanks to all who have made possible the return of my late fiancé’s violin’.

When Robinson died in 1939, her sister gave the violin to the Bridlington Salvation Army, who passed it on to a violin teacher. The teacher passed it on further, and in 2004 it was rediscovered in an attic in the UK.

Sceptics initially refused to believe that this could be the real thing, assuming that the violin would have been so badly damaged by water that it simply could not have survived.

However, after nine years of evidence gathering and forensic analysis, including CT scans and a certification by the Gemological Association of Great Britain, it was confirmed that this was, in fact, the violin that Wallace Hartley had played aboard the RMS Titanic.

Forensic experts certified that the engraving on the metal tailpiece was “contemporary with those made in 1910”, and that the instrument’s “corrosion deposits were considered compatible with immersion in sea water”.

Wallace Hartley’s headstone at the Methodist church in Colne, Lancashire, where his father was choirmaster, features an inscription of the famous hymn and a violin carved out of stone. Picture: Alamy

Sold for nearly a million

On 19 October 2013, the violin was sold at auction by Henry Aldridge & Son in Wiltshire for £900,000 (equivalent to over £1,000,000 in 2022), a record figure for Titanic memorabilia. The previous record was thought to have been £220,000 paid in 2011 for a plan of the ship that had been used to inform the inquiry into the ship’s sinking.

The violin is irreparably damaged and deemed unplayable, with two large cracks caused by water damage and only two remaining strings. Its current owners are unknown, but believed to be British.

As for Hartley, he was buried in his hometown of Colne in Lancashire, at a funeral service that was attended by over 20,000 people, and included the hymn that will forever be associated with him, ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’.

The headstone of his final resting place includes an inscription of the hymn’s opening notes, above a violin carved out of stone.

July 7, 2022

Kimball Upright Piano

Fran McGaha in El Lago has a lovely upright Kimball piano that needs a new loving home, please give her a call if interested

281-532-1610

June 30, 2022

IQ Tests Can’t Measure It, but ‘Cognitive Flexibility’ Is Key to Learning and Creativity

Are you good at changing perspectives? If so, it may benefit you in more ways than you imagine.

Barbara Jacquelyn Sahakian
Christelle Langley
Victoria Leong

Einstein thought imagination was crucial. Robert and Talbot Trudeau/Flickr, CC BY-NC

IQ is often hailed as a crucial driver of success, particularly in fields such as science, innovation and technology. In fact, many people have an endless fascination with the IQ scores of famous people. But the truth is that some of the greatest achievements by our species have primarily relied on qualities such as creativity, imagination, curiosity and empathy.

Many of these traits are embedded in what scientists call “cognitive flexibility” – a skill that enables us to switch between different concepts, or to adapt behaviour to achieve goals in a novel or changing environment. It is essentially about learning to learn and being able to be flexible about the way you learn. This includes changing strategies for optimal decision-making. In our ongoing research, we are trying to work out how people can best boost their cognitive flexibility.

Cognitive flexibility provides us with the ability to see that what we are doing is not leading to success and to make the appropriate changes to achieve it. If you normally take the same route to work, but there are now roadworks on your usual route, what do you do? Some people remain rigid and stick to the original plan, despite the delay. More flexible people adapt to the unexpected event and problem-solve to find a solution.

Cognitive flexibility may have affected how people coped with the pandemic lockdowns, which produced new challenges around work and schooling. Some of us found it easier than others to adapt our routines to do many activities from home. Such flexible people may also have changed these routines from time to time, trying to find better and more varied ways of going about their day. Others, however, struggled and ultimately became more rigid in their thinking. They stuck to the same routine activities, with little flexibility or change.

Huge advantages

Flexible thinking is key to creativity – in other words, the ability to think of new ideas, make novel connections between ideas, and make new inventions. It also supports academic and work skills such as problem solving. That said, unlike working memory – how much you can remember at a certain time – it is largely independent of IQ, or “ crystallised intelligence”. For example, many visual artists may be of average intelligence, but highly creative and have produced masterpieces.

Contrary to many people’s beliefs, creativity is also important in science and innovation. For example, we have discovered that entrepreneurs who have created multiple companies are more cognitively flexible than managers of a similar age and IQ.

So does cognitive flexibility make people smarter in a way that isn’t always captured on IQ tests? We know that it leads to better “ cold cognition”, which is non-emotional or “rational” thinking, throughout the lifespan. For example, for children it leads to better reading abilities and better school performance.

It can also help protect against a number of biases, such as confirmation bias. That’s because people who are cognitively flexible are better at recognising potential faults in themselves and using strategies to overcome these faults.

Cognitive flexibility is also associated with higher resilience to negative life events, as well as better quality of life in older individuals. It can even be beneficial in emotional and social cognition: studies have shown that cognitive flexibility has a strong link to the ability to understand the emotions, thoughts and intentions of others.

The opposite of cognitive flexibility is cognitive rigidity, which is found in a number of mental health disorders including obsessive-compulsive disorder, major depressive disorder and autism spectrum disorder.

Neuroimaging studies have shown that cognitive flexibility is dependent on a network of frontal and “striatal” brain regions. The frontal regions are associated with higher cognitive processes such as decision-making and problem solving. The striatal regions are instead linked with reward and motivation.

Some people have more flexible brains. Utthapon wiratepsupon/Shutterstock

There are a number of ways to objectively assess people’s cognitive flexibility, including the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test and the CANTAB Intra-Extra Dimensional Set Shift Task.

Boosting Flexibility

The good news is that it seems you can train cognitive flexibility. Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), for example, is an evidence-based psychological therapy which helps people change their patterns of thoughts and behaviour. For example, a person with depression who has not been contacted by a friend in a week may attribute this to the friend no longer liking them. In CBT, the goal is to reconstruct their thinking to consider more flexible options, such as the friend being busy or unable to contact them.

Structure learning – the ability to extract information about the structure of a complex environment and decipher initially incomprehensible streams of sensory information – is another potential way forward. We know that this type of learning involves similar frontal and striatal brain regions as cognitive flexibility.

In a collaboration between the University of Cambridge and Nanyang Technological University, we are currently working on a “real world” experiment to determine whether structural learning can actually lead to improved cognitive flexibility.

Studies have shown the benefits of training cognitive flexibility, for example in children with autism. After training cognitive flexibility, the children showed not only improved performance on cognitive tasks, but also improved social interaction and communication. In addition, cognitive flexibility training has been shown to be beneficial for children without autism and in older adults.

As we come out of the pandemic, we will need to ensure that in teaching and training new skills, people also learn to be cognitively flexible in their thinking. This will provide them with greater resilience and wellbeing in the future.

Cognitive flexibility is essential for society to flourish. It can help maximise the potential of individuals to create innovative ideas and creative inventions. Ultimately, it is such qualities we need to solve the big challenges of today, including global warming, preservation of the natural world, clean and sustainable energy and food security.

Professors Trevor Robbins, Annabel Chen and Zoe Kourtzi also contributed to this article.