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Hearing is clearly the most important sense for a musician, particularly a composer, so the trauma of experiencing difficulties with this sense is hard to imagine. Beethoven famously suffered deteriorating hearing for much of his adult life; an affliction which brought him to despair at times. The cause of his deafness is still unknown, although much speculated upon, but the composer’s feelings about his situation are well-documented: Beethoven kept ‘Conversation Books’ full of discussions of his music and other issues which give a unique insight into his thoughts, and in a letter to his brothers (the Heiligenstadt Testament) he wrote a heart-wrenching description of his sense of despair and isolation caused by his inability to hear.

Despite his catastrophic loss of hearing Beethoven continued to compose — producing some of the greatest works in Western musical history. So how was this possible? How can a musician, particularly a composer, continue without full, or even hyper-sensitive, hearing?

We can get a modern day insight from Michael Berkeley — one of OUP’s composers who, over recent years, has been struggling with hearing troubles himself. Berkeley’s hearing damage was the result of a blocked ear, brought on by a fairly minor cold, which has caused irreparable nerve damage. These days there’s better help available to sufferers of hearing loss. However, sound distortion remains a problem, and hearing aids can only help so far, as Berkeley explains:

“Music was appallingly distorted, and in fact I couldn’t go to concerts as it was just so painful. I got a condition called hyperacusis, where loud sounds are unbearably painful. I got some very good digital hearing aids which made a great difference to speech, but it can only amplify what I’m already hearing so it didn’t help for music.”

Michael Berkeley explains how he continued to write music:

“If you are trained as a composer you can write in your head: you hear the sounds internally, and you’ve been trained how to get those sounds onto the page without a piano or any intermediary. It’s something you learn to do gradually through lots of hard work and by instinct. The problem is, when the music is played back I can’t comment very usefully: what I hear may not be what the conductor or the rest of the audience hear…it could be my hearing disability is distorting the real sound.

“The extraordinary thing is, I realised after a number of months that I was beginning to hear music more clearly. I remember there was a Haydn string quartet on, and I suddenly realised I was hearing it better: I was so overjoyed that I went to bed with an iPod and played it all night long! Apparently what can happen is that the brain begins to rewire itself. We hear with our brains — the ear is essentially a conduit — so if you have a template of musical knowledge then the brain begins to compensate for the distortions. My brain is learning to reprocess sound, and so it’s like discovering music anew: it’s absolutely wonderful!

“I’ve always thought that less is more. In Beethoven’s late music, particularly the late string quartets, the music is pared down to the absolute essentials, and I now find in my writing, partly because I can hear better when I play it back, that I’m beginning to concentrate much more on the essence of the sound and try to rid it of extraneous notes.

“I do feel that the music I’ve written in these last two years is actually as good as everything I’d written up until then: hopefully better.”

Michael Berkeley is the composer of a substantial number of highly acclaimed works, including three operas which have been produced in Europe, America and Australia. In addition to having been an associate composer to both the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Berkeley has had performances of his works given by many of the world’s finest orchestras, ensembles, soloists and opera companies, and many of his works have been released on CD. He is currently composing an anthem for the service of enthronement of Archbishop of Canterbury-elect, Justin Welby, in March 2013.

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The post The Beethoven question: How does a musician cope with hearing loss? appeared first on OUPblog.

Robert Cohen teaches social studies and history at New York University and chairs the department of Teaching and Learning in NYU’s Steinhardt School of Education.  His new book, Freedom’s Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s, is the first biography of Savio, the brilliant leader of the Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement, who helped carry the students to victory in their struggle against the university.  In the excerpt below we are introduced to Savio.

Few protest leaders have burst upon the American political scene more dramatically than did Mario Savio in fall 1964 when he was a twenty-one-year-old Berkeley student.  The University of California (UC) had become the scene of nonviolent political warfare, with the administration enforcing and students defying a campus ban on political advocacy that closed down the free speech area at UC’s busy southern entrance.  Coming at a time when student civil rights activism was surging, the ban seemed an attack on the civil rights movement and a gross violation of the right to free speech, igniting protests in mid- and late September.  This conflict escalated just before noon on October 1 as police drove a squad car to UC Berkeley’s central thoroughfare, Sproul Plaza, to arrest civil rights organizer Jack Weinberg because he, like many free speech activists, was defying the ban by staffing a political advocacy table on the plaza.  Before the police could arrest, someone shouted, “Sit down!”  Within moments a crowd of students surrounded the car in a nonviolent blockade that would last thirty-two hours.  Shortly after the blockade began, Mario Savio, a leader of the civil rights group University Friends of SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee), removing his shoes so as not to damage the police car, climbed on top of it and into national headlines, using its roof as a podium to explain the protest and demand freedom of speech.  From those first moments atop that car Savio emerged as the Berkeley rebellion’s key spokesperson, symbolizing all that was daring, militant, and new about the Free Speech Movement (FSM).

…Savio was among the first media starts of America’s New Left – the 1960s student movement “committed to redressing social and political inequalities of power,” challenging cold war nationalism, and renewing “the atrophied institutions of American democracy” by creating “new institutions of popular participation to replace existing bureaucratic structures.” In 1964, when Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) had yet to attract the media coverage it would receive as the key New Left organization of the mid- and late 1960s, Savio was making headlines leading the largest, most disruptive campus rebellion in American history.  He helped to define a new role for American college students, that of a dynamic youth leader igniting mass student protest.

Savio’s fame was closely linked to his oratory.  Back in 1964 the press – with its cold warrior disdain for radicalism – hardly knew how to react to his militant yet popular oratory because it seemed so out of place on U.S. campuses, which had almost never witnessed mass protest…  Time magazine thus looked outside the States for comparisons, evoking Fidel Castro and attributing to Savio “an almost Latin American eloquence…a sense of demagoguery and a flair for martyrdom.”  Yet not even Time’s antiradical editors could miss the fact that Savio had prevailed over a university administration undermined by its “habit of vacillating between concessions and crackdowns.”  The Bay Area press uncomfortably conceded his eloquence, hinting that its appeal was based on emotion rather than reason.  “He harangues in rapid fire staccato,” explained one San Francisco reporter, “shrill at times, emotionally charged always.  He’s a slender 6 foot 1, sloping at the shoulders, clad usually in baggy slacks and a heavy jacket, bushy hair…unkempt, his blue eyes sparkling and intense.”

Friends and foes alike recognized that Savio on the stump “cut an extraordinary figure,” whose words and delivery made a lasting impression.  Berkeley history professor Reginald Zelnik termed Savio “the most original public speaker I would ever hear.” Zelnik saw in him in the reflectiveness of a genuine intellectual, the questioning spirit of the most iconoclast undergraduate, and an intense desire to inspire thought and dialogue.  Berkeley immunology professor Leon Wofsy reflected, “He wasn’t doing it for show.  He wasn’t doing it to provoke.”  When Savio argued on behalf of the FSM, as Wofsy put it, “he was speaking from his heart and from his head.  There was certain quality there.  Not just his rhetoric, but there was a quality of sincerity and thoughtfulness that just lifted him above the others.”

It is Savio’s speeches, not those of professors or campus officials, that have found their way into the histories of the 1960s.  This was in part because during the FSM, as historian Henry May noted, students were the actors, making history through their protests, while faculty and administrators were merely reactors, trying to come to grips with this unprecedented outburst of activism and civil disobedience.  But it more than simply Savio’s insurgent status that made his words memorable.  After all, many Berkeley protesters spoke up, but none of their words have proven so enduring, and none of these speakers could match Savio’s passionate yet logical, accessible, democratic, and at times poetic oratory…

…Savio did not have to be speaking from atop a police car for his words to be remembered.  His most famous speech occurred two months after the police car blockade as he urged students outside Sproul Hall to join the FSM’s culminating sit-in on December 2, 1964.  He demanded that college youth heed their consciences and embrace activism.  “There’s a time, ” Savio exhorted his classmates,

when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part.  You can’t even passively take part.  And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop.  And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free the machine will be prevented from working at all!

This dramatic call to resist unjust authority embodied the youthful idealism and iconoclasm of the insurgent sixties.  Well into our own century it continues to appear in feature films, documentaries, protest songs, and television shows that explore that decade and other times of revolt against oppression.  The speech helped convince some thousand students to occupy Sproul Hall, paving the way for a mass sit-in, which for its time was the greatest act of mass civil disobedience…on an American campus.

3086 Claremont Ave, Berkeley, CA, 94706.

Go there, for stacks and stacks of the most eccentric, awesome, obscure, culty, random collection of titles ever. The books are literally falling off the walls, in something that resembles alphabetical order, and it's literally my favorite place to waste hours and money. There are plenty of books that I could write down the titles of and order through my store (and plenty used or UK editions that I could not) but I buy them there. Why? Because it's the only place I know that would stock everything that they stock and so they deserve the sale.

Recently purchased there:

The Wizard in the Tree by Lloyd Alexander,

and 3 Bellairs middle-grade horror/mysteries, including one recommended on the Dark Carnival website, The Chessmen of Doom.

Thanks for being awesome, Dark Carnival.

http://www.darkcarnival.com/

Sobs. The 3 Evil Cousins must report that after 52 years of business, our local bookstore, Cody's in Berkeley was forced to close its last store.

Cody’s Books was famous for its support of the free speech movement in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1989, they were firebombed for refusing to remove Salman Rushdie's controversial novel "The Satanic Verses” from their storefront. Through more than a half a century, they hosted countless poets, authors and booklovers. This year, the rent at their final store on 4th street was nearly tripled. In a last ditch effort to save the store, they moved to a new, smaller location near the UC Berkeley Campus, but even that was not enough.

The 3 Evil Cousins were privileged in Cody’s final weeks to co-host several events. These included book signings by Melissa Marr, Cody Doctorow and Cassandra Clare.

In honor of Cody’s, and in hopes we can do something small for other Independents who still struggle to stay afloat during this age of mega-bookstores and the ease of purchasing online we will link all the books we review to IndiBound.org. IndiBound (previously known as Book Sense) is the effort of independent booksellers located throughout all our neighborhoods. We hope others will join us in helping to support our local bookstores.

Yours Truly,
3 Evil Cousins

This past Saturday, I visited the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia to read a selection from "Lymeria" to patients.
It was really fun to be there and play with the kids. (I can't believe I lost that Care-Bear Memory Matching Game twice!)
It made me happy to know that everyone was able, if for just a few moments, to travel with me to the magical world of Lymeria.
I would like to say thank you to everyone that was there: the administration of CHOP, the staff, but especially the kids.....you know who your are...for allowing me this opportunity. I hope you enjoy the rest of the book and that Lymeria becomes a special place for you as it is for me.
I hope to come back soon. (Maybe next time I'll win that game.....)
Kristina