2482. The Meaning of Bob Dylan’s Silence

By Adam Kirsch, The New York Times, October 27, 2016 

Bob Dylan at a London concert in 2011

In the summer of 1964, Bob Dylan released his fourth album, “Another Side of Bob Dylan,” which includes the track “It Ain’t Me Babe.” “Go ’way from my window/Leave at your own chosen speed,” it begins. “I’m not the one you want, babe/I’m not the one you need.”

That fall, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre played a variation on the same tune in a public statement explaining why, despite having been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, he would not accept it. “The writer,” he insisted, must “refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution, even if this occurs under the most honorable circumstances.” Mr. Dylan was talking to an imaginary lover, Sartre to an actual Swedish Academy, but the message was similar: If you love me for what I am, don’t make me be what I am not.

We don’t know whether Mr. Dylan was paying attention to l’affaire Sartre that fall 52 years ago. But now that he has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, he seems to be following in Sartre’s footsteps. Indeed, Mr. Dylan has done the philosopher one better: Instead of declining the prize, he has simply declined to acknowledge its existence. He hasn’t issued a statement or even returned the Swedish Academy’s phone calls. A reference to the award briefly popped up on the official Bob Dylan website and then was deleted — at his instruction or not, nobody knows. And the Swedes, who are used to a lot more gratitude from their laureates, appear to be losing their patience: One member of the Academy has called Mr. Dylan’s behavior “impolite and arrogant.”

There is a good deal of poetic justice in this turn of events. For almost a quarter of a century, ever since Toni Morrison won the Nobel in 1993, the Nobel committee acted as if American literature did not exist — and now an American is acting as if the Nobel committee doesn’t exist. Giving the award to Mr. Dylan was an insult to all the great American novelists and poets who are frequently proposed as candidates for the prize. The all-but-explicit message was that American literature, as traditionally defined, was simply not good enough. This is an absurd notion, but one that the Swedes have embraced: In 2008, the Academy’s permanent secretary, Horace Engdahl, declared that American writers “don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature” and are limited by that “ignorance.”

Still, it’s doubtful that Mr. Dylan intends his silence to be a defense of the honor of American literature. (He did, after all, accept the Pulitzer Prize for “lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.”) No one knows what he intends — Mr. Dylan has always been hard to interpret, both as a person and as a lyricist, which is one reason people love him. But perhaps the best way to understand his silence, and to praise it, is to go back to Sartre, and in particular to Sartre’s concept of “bad faith.”

Bad faith, Sartre explains in “Being and Nothingness,” is the opposite of authenticity. Bad faith becomes possible because a human being cannot simply be what he or she is, in the way that an inkwell simply is an inkwell. Rather, because we are free, we must “make ourselves what we are.” In a famous passage, Sartre uses as an example a cafe waiter who performs every part of his job a little too correctly, eagerly, unctuously. He is a waiter playing the role of waiter. But this “being what one is not” is an abdication of freedom; it involves turning oneself into an object, a role, meant for other people. To remain free, to act in good faith, is to remain the undefined, free, protean creatures we actually are, even if this is an anxious way to live.

This way of thinking is what used to be called existentialism, and Mr. Dylan is one of its great products. Living like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone, is living in Sartrean good faith, and much of the strangeness of Mr. Dylan’s life can be understood as a desperate attempt to retain this freedom in the face of the terrific pressure of fame. In a profile in The New Yorker in that same year of 1964, Mr. Dylan was quoted as saying that he didn’t “want to write for people anymore” but rather wanted to “write from inside me.”

To be a Nobel laureate, however, is to allow “people” to define who one is, to become an object and a public figure rather than a free individual. The Nobel Prize is in fact the ultimate example of bad faith: A small group of Swedish critics pretend to be the voice of God, and the public pretends that the Nobel winner is Literature incarnate. All this pretending is the opposite of the true spirit of literature, which lives only in personal encounters between reader and writer. Mr. Dylan may yet accept the prize, but so far, his refusal to accept the authority of the Swedish Academy has been a wonderful demonstration of what real artistic and philosophical freedom looks like.

Adam Kirsch, a poet and critic, is the author, most recently, of “The People and the Books: 18 Classics of Jewish Literature.”

2191. New Ways Into the Brain’s ‘Music Room’

By Natalie Angier, The New York Times, February 8, 2016

Whether to enliven a commute, relax in the evening or drown out the buzz of a neighbor’s recreational drone, Americans listen to music nearly four hours a day. In international surveys, people consistently rank music as one of life’s supreme sources of pleasure and emotional power. We marry to music, graduate to music, mourn to music. Every culture ever studied has been found to make music, and among the oldest artistic objects known are slender flutes carved from mammoth bone some 43,000 years ago — 24,000 years before the cave paintings of Lascaux.

Given the antiquity, universality and deep popularity of music, many researchers had long assumed that the human brain must be equipped with some sort of music room, a distinctive piece of cortical architecture dedicated to detecting and interpreting the dulcet signals of song. Yet for years, scientists failed to find any clear evidence of a music-specific domain through conventional brain-scanning technology, and the quest to understand the neural basis of a quintessential human passion foundered.

Now researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have devised a radical new approach to brain imaging that reveals what past studies had missed. By mathematically analyzing scans of the auditory cortex and grouping clusters of brain cells with similar activation patterns, the scientists have identified neural pathways that react almost exclusively to the sound of music — any music. It may be Bach, bluegrass, hip-hop, big band, sitar or Julie Andrews. A listener may relish the sampled genre or revile it. No matter. When a musical passage is played, a distinct set of neurons tucked inside a furrow of a listener’s auditory cortex will fire in response.

Other sounds, by contrast — a dog barking, a car skidding, a toilet flushing — leave the musical circuits unmoved.

Nancy Kanwisher and Josh H. McDermott, professors of neuroscience at M.I.T., and their postdoctoral colleague Sam Norman-Haignere reported their results in the journal Neuron. The findings offer researchers a new tool for exploring the contours of human musicality.

“Why do we have music?” Dr. Kanwisher said in an interview. “Why do we enjoy it so much and want to dance when we hear it? How early in development can we see this sensitivity to music, and is it tunable with experience? These are the really cool first-order questions we can begin to address.”

Dr. McDermott said the new method could be used to computationally dissect any scans from a functional magnetic resonance imaging device, or F.M.R.I. — the trendy workhorse of contemporary neuroscience — and so may end up divulging other hidden gems of cortical specialization. As proof of principle, the researchers showed that their analytical protocol had detected a second neural pathway in the brain for which scientists already had evidence — this one tuned to the sounds of human speech.

The new paper “takes a very innovative approach and is of great importance,” said Josef Rauschecker, director of the Laboratory of Integrative Neuroscience and Cognition at Georgetown University. “The idea that the brain gives specialized treatment to music recognition, that it regards music as fundamental a category as speech, is very exciting to me.”

In fact, Dr. Rauschecker said, music sensitivity may be more fundamental to the human brain than is speech perception. “There are theories that music is older than speech or language,” he said. “Some even argue that speech evolved from music.”

And though the survival value that music held for our ancestors may not be as immediately obvious as the power to recognize words, Dr. Rauschecker added, “music works as a group cohesive. Music-making with other people in your tribe is a very ancient, human thing to do.”

Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, the director of the Music Cognition Lab at the University of Arkansas, said that when previous neuroscientists failed to find any anatomically distinct music center in the brain, they came up with any number of rationales to explain the results.

“The story was, oh, what’s special about music perception is how it recruits areas from all over the brain, how it draws on the motor system, speech circuitry, social understanding, and brings it all together,” she said. Some researchers dismissed music as “auditory cheesecake,” a pastime that co-opted other essential communicative urges. 

“This paper says, no, when you peer below the cruder level seen with some methodologies, you find very specific circuitry that responds to music over speech.”

Dr. Kanwisher’s lab is widely recognized for its pioneering work on human vision, and the discovery that key portions of the visual cortex are primed to instantly recognize a few highly meaningful objects in the environment, like faces and human body parts. The researchers wondered if the auditory system might be similarly organized to make sense of the soundscape through a categorical screen. If so, what would the salient categories be? What are the aural equivalents of a human face or a human leg — sounds or sound elements so essential the brain assigns a bit of gray matter to the task of detecting them?

To address the question, Dr. McDermott, a former club and radio disc jockey, and Dr. Norman-Haignere, an accomplished classical guitarist, began gathering a library of everyday sounds — music, speech, laughter, weeping, whispering, tires squealing, flags flapping, dishes clattering, flames crackling, wind chimes tinkling. Wherever they went, they asked for suggestions. Had they missed anything?

They put the lengthy list up for a vote on the Amazon Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing service to determine which of their candidate sounds were most easily recognized and frequently heard. That mass survey yielded a set of 165 distinctive and readily identifiable sound clips of two seconds each (listen to a selection of them here). The researchers then scanned the brains of 10 volunteers (none of them musicians) as they listened to multiple rounds of the 165 sound clips.

Focusing on the brain’s auditory region — located, appropriately enough, in the temporal lobes right above the ears — the scientists analyzed voxels, or three-dimensional pixels, of the images mathematically to detect similar patterns of neuronal excitement or quietude.

“The strength of our method is that it’s hypothesis-neutral,” Dr. McDermott said. “We just present a bunch of sounds and let the data do the talking.”

The computations generated six basic response patterns, six ways the brain categorized incoming noise. But what did the categories correspond to? Matching sound clips to activation patterns, the researchers determined that four of the patterns were linked to general physical properties of sound, like pitch and frequency. The fifth traced the brain’s perception of speech, and for the sixth the data turned operatic, disclosing a neuronal hot spot in the major crevice, or sulcus, of the auditory cortex that attended to every music clip the researchers had played.

“The sound of a solo drummer, whistling, pop songs, rap, almost everything that has a musical quality to it, melodic or rhythmic, would activate it,” Dr. Norman-Haignere said. “That’s one reason the result surprised us. The signals of speech are so much more homogeneous.”

The researchers have yet to determine exactly which acoustic features of music stimulate its dedicated pathway. The relative constancy of a musical note’s pitch? Its harmonic overlays? Even saying what music is can be tricky.

“It’s difficult to come up with a dictionary definition,” Dr. McDermott said. “I tend to think music is best defined by example.”

Justice Potter Stewart of the Supreme Court likewise said of pornography that he knew it when he saw it. Maybe music is a kind of cheesecake after all.

1452. Cuba’s Buena Vista Social Club Sets Farewell Tour

By Associated Press, The Washington Post, June 17, 2014

In this Friday, Jan. 24, 2014 file photo, remaining members of Cubaís Buena Vista Social Club band, Omara Portuondo, 81, front left, Jesus Aguaje Ramos, 63, front right, Luis Manuel Guajiro Mirabal, 80, back left, Eliades Ochoa, 68, back center, and Barbarito Torres, 60 pose for a picture after a press conference at the Hotel Nacional in Havana, Cuba. The Buena Vista Social Club has joined together for a their last worldwide tour under the name ìAdios Tourî. The tour begins in June 2014 in Europe and ends in Havana in late October 2015 with a concert at the Karl Marx theater. (Franklin Reyes, File/Associated Press)

HAVANA — The legendary Cuban musical group Buena Vista Social Club is going on a global farewell tour before disbanding next year after nearly two decades.

Communist Party newspaper Granma reported Tuesday that the tour will kick off next week and travel to the United States, Europe, Latin America and Asia.

The Buena Vista Social Club was formed in 1996 when U.S. musician and director Ry Cooder producer brought together a collection of aging, nearly forgotten Cuban performers.

The resulting album won a Grammy, and the group shot to international fame.

A documentary of the same name was nominated for an Academy Award.

Several of the original members have died over the years, and only a handful remain with the group.

1434. Cuba Women Drummers Overcome Stigma

By Associated Press, U.S. News, June 3, 2014

Wendy Garcia of the Obiní Batá orchestra of women percussionists plays the drums in Old Havana, Cuba. Photo Credit: AP/Franklin Reyes

HAVANA  — It wasn't that long ago that Cuba's rich percussion scene was essentially a boys' club, dominated by men due to macho attitudes and religious tradition. 

Perceived as too weak for the physical demands of drumming, and unsuitable for an instrument considered a means of communicating with the gods, women were shut out of rehearsal spaces and barred from using "bata" drums belonging to the National Folkloric Ensemble. Instructors were warned that if they taught women, it could cost them a place in a traveling tour or a major performance.

Over the years, doors slowly began opening for female drummers — just as women gradually took on greater roles in politics, academics and other areas of Cuban society. Today, experts say, the island is seeing a boom in women percussionists as the generation that first started playing in the 1990s comes into its own and inspires younger talent to follow.

"I threw myself into the unknown," said Eva Despaigne, the 60-year-old director of Obini Bata, Cuba's first all-female bata orchestra, which takes its name from the Yoruban word for woman. "I have suffered many headaches."

Under Afro-Cuban beliefs, the two-sided bata (pronounced ba-TAH') are sacred, used for connecting with Santeria spirits. Tradition dictates the drums be made only from the hides of male goats. Players must undergo a lengthy consecration ritual. And, above all, the sacred bata are to be played only by men.

Despaigne, however, was determined to fight convention. As an Afro-Cuban folkloric dancer, Despaigne saw the drum as a means to experience her art at a deeper level.

"It is the fundamental instrument of the genre. I figured by playing it, I could broaden my development as an artist and have greater expressiveness," she said.

Despaigne patiently worked to persuade male batistas that her desire to play was not for religion, but for art. Little by little, she began to win them over.

After breaking off from the National Folkloric Ensemble in 1994, Obini Bata spent years on the margins of acceptance. With time, however, more women took up the hourglass-shaped drum and also became percussionists in other genres such as jazz and big band.

"From the 1990s to today, the girls have begun studying percussion (more) and the number of those who have graduated is great," said Mercedes Lay, a percussionist and musicologist who works with the governmental Center for Research of Cuban Music.

At a recent show in Havana, the six women who make up Obini Bata pounded infectious beats on leather-skinned drums with their carefully manicured hands and danced in colorful blouses and headscarves. The performance was part of the government-organized musical festival Cubadisco, underscoring Obini Bata's firm arrival in the musical mainstream.

Female batistas are still banned by traditional Afro-Cuban priests, who see their drumming as sacrilegious.

But women drummers' growing acceptance is evidenced by their inclusion in rumba and rock groups, as teachers and in bands touring overseas.

Acclaimed players include Yissy Garcia, a jazz percussionist who comes from an accomplished musical family, and Naile Sosa, an energetic rock 'n' roll drummer who has collaborated with local stars such as David Blanco.

Yaimi Karell, a 33-year-old who plays with the popular island Afro-pop fusion group "Sintesis" and also teaches percussion, said women drummers have proven themselves and gained the respect of their male peers.

"There has been a very big opening for women," she said.

Part of breaking down the barriers has entailed overcoming the perception that women were physically unsuited for the drums.

“In percussion it's not, as people sometimes think, all about strength and speed. It's a matter of technique and taste," said Raul Fernandez, a social scientist at the University of California, Irvine, who researches Cuban music. "Even among male percussionists, often one who plays with lots of vigor and speed doesn't play as well as one with better technique and taste."