Letters: The Sound of Music (2 Letters)

To the Editor:

Re “To Tug at the Heart, Music First Must Tickle the Neurons” (April 19): Mozart’s music is deceptively simple, and performers tend to overinterpret his works. Daniel J. Levitin asked about a performance of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 27, “What is the pianist doing to mess this up?” I would venture that the pianist was occasionally adding pauses after the first beat in each measure. This practice has become increasingly common; consequently, audiences have begun to think that Mozart’s piano music isn’t so great. How sad! When they are not violated, Mozart’s rhythms grab hold of our souls.

George Jochnowitz

New York

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To the Editor:

What is the sense of trying to pin down the magic of musical expression? So what if someone prefers the mechanized version of Chopin over some famous pianist’s? It only adds to Chopin’s luster that he can appeal to so many different tastes and experiences, and it tells us nothing about the brain, except to define some kind of illusory deviance. Daniel Levitin is brilliant at promoting his research, but he interacts not at all with humanistic music researchers. For them, the point is not to normalize music or musical expression but to defamiliarize it — to discover the infinite ways to make and hear it, and to help us understand humanity through these diverse expressions and responses. Bring on the robot Chopin!

Michael Tenzer

Vancouver, British Columbia

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