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Motorcortical excitability and synaptic plasticity is enhanced in professional musicians
No full textMusicians not only have extraordinary motor and sensory skills, but they also have an increased ability to learn new tasks compared with non-musicians. We examined how these features are expressed in neurophysiological parameters of excitability and plasticity in the motor system by comparing the results of 11 professional musicians and 8 age-matched non-musicians. Parameters of motor excitability were assessed using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to measure motor-evoked potentials (MEPs) together with recruitment of corticospinal projections [input–output curve (IOcurve)] and of short-latency intracortical inhibition (SICIcurve). Plasticity, here defined as change of synaptic effectiveness, was tested by measuring MEPs and IOcurves after paired associative stimulation (PAS), which consists of an electric median nerve stimulus repeatedly paired (200 times at 0.25Hz) with a TMS pulse over the hand motor area. Using an interstimulus interval of 25 ms (PAS25) or 10 ms (PAS10), this leads to long-term potentiation- or long-term depression-like plasticity, respectively. Musicians showed steeper recruitment of MEPs and SICI (IOcurve and SICIcurve). Additionally, PAS25 increased and PAS10 decreased the MEP amplitudes and the slope of the IOcurves significantly more in musicians than in non-musicians. This is consistent with a wider modification range of synaptic plasticity in musicians. Together with the steeper recruitment of corticospinal excitatory and intracortical inhibitory projections, this suggests that they regulate plasticity and excitability with a higher gain than normal. Because some of these changes depend on age at which instrumental playing commenced and on practice intensity, they may reflect an increase in number and modifiability of synapses within the motor area caused by long-term musical practice. ******* This article is available open access on the publisher's website at the Official URL given below *******
Organizing labor: composers, performers, and “the renewal of musical practice” in the Netherlands, 1969–72
No full textIn the history of postwar Dutch music, the generation of composers who rose to prominence during the early 1960s has a special place. Figures such as Louis Andriessen, Reinbert de Leeuw, Misha Mengelberg, and Peter Schat championed serialism, Cagian conceptualism, and graphic notation, thereby transforming the musical landscape in the Netherlands, which had hitherto been resistant to the musical innovations of the years after the end of the Second World War. This generation also identified openly with the political and social movements that sprang up in Amsterdam and other Dutch cities during the 1960s.1 Peter Schat, for instance, shared the basement of his Amsterdam home with the anarchist group Provo, and in 1968 travelled to Havana to attend Castro's Cultural Congress; Schat and Andriessen travelled together to Paris in May 1968, where they saw Sartre speak at the occupied Odéon Theatre. The composers' leftist preoccupations were often manifested in their musical activities: these included political concerts, campaigns against establishment institutions, and a large-scale collective music theater piece about Che Guevara and the Latin American struggle against U.S. imperialism. Their activism reached a height of notoriety in November 1969, when Schat, Andriessen, Leeuw, Mengelberg, and other young musicians disturbed a concert by the Concertgebouw Orchestra in protest against “this status symbol of the ruling elite in our society.”2 In the long term, such exploits were to be credited with “shaking Dutch musical life out of its suffocating provincialism.
Revolutions per minute
No full textMusic for the short film 'Revolutions Per Minute' directed by Joseph Knowles
Preschool children’s emotional responses to music: a window into learning in the early years
No full textTaming two Spanish women: reflections on editing opera
No full textWhen François Lesure first entrusted me with the task of reviving Debussy’s unfinished opera Rodrigue et Chimène I had no idea what a profound effect this would have on my musicological activities. This article is in recognition of Lesure’s faith in my ability to restore Rodrigue, not so much to chart the processes of revival, but more to establish editorial principles with regard to two disparate operas on Spanish themes—the other being Bizet’s Carmen
Sueños
No full textFor bass baritone soloist with bass flute, oboe d'Amore, clarinet in A, bassoon, flugelhorn, tuba in F, percussion, guitar, accordion, violin, viola, cello and bass. Duration 23 minutes. The piece is a setting of Antonio Machado poems predominantly about dreams (‘sueños’) and was commissioned by the Southbank Centre. It was first performed in November 2007 by Roderick Williams (baritone) and the London Sinfonietta and has eight movements:
1] cigüeña (‘stork’) - instrumental
2] un fanal de lluvia y sol (‘a lantern of rain and sun’)
3] la lira inmensa (‘the vast lyre’)
4] aire sombrio (‘shadowy air’) - instrumental
5] señas lejanas (‘distant signals’)
6] garabato (‘pot hook’) - instrumental
7] este dia triste (‘this sad day’)
8] el demonio (‘the Devil’)