Let’s face it: Many of us looking to sharpen our intellectual edges have already passed the age when becoming a prodigy is an option. We missed the opportunity to start clarinet lessons at 5. We lacked the discipline to practice for hours on end. We were told we couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket.

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American scientists have restored speech to stroke victims by getting them to sing words instead of speaking them, a leading neurologist said.

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MUSIC is a mystery. It is unique to the human race: no other species produces elaborate sound for no particular reason. It has been, and remains, part of every known civilisation on Earth. Lengths of bone fashioned into flutes were in use 40,000 years ago. And it engages people’s attention more comprehensively than almost anything else: scans show that when people listen to music, virtually every area of their brain becomes more active.

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I think it’s time to emphasize solutions on my blog. I’ve made so many criticisms of the classical music world — justified criticisms, I don’t hesitate to say. And I love the theoretical discussions we get into, which I’m often (but, wonderfully, not at all always) the one to start.

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When the exquisite Soviet figure skating pair Ekaterina Gordeeva and Sergei Grinkov took the ice for their free-skate program at the 1988 Winter Olympics, they bounded off to the rousing lilt of Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 4 (“Italian”): music that matched their lyricism, drive and evident weightlessness as they flew across the ice.

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A PENSIVE Janet Leigh is behind the wheel of a car, casting furtive glances into her rear-view mirror, countryside whizzing past as she flees the city in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film Psycho.

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For performing a routine colorectal surgery, Dr. Claudius Conrad prefers the music of Bach, whose fugues and preludes mirror the methodical, structured steps of the procedure. But when operating on a patient with terrible burns, Conrad queues up techno or rap to set the right tone of tension and urgency.

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Norman Lebrecht examines the changing role of the critic in the 21st century.
 
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What makes great creators go silent? And is it always a bad thing?
 
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Music Therapy Opens a Path to the Past for Alzheimer’s Patients; Creating a Personal Playlist. One of the raps on iPods is that users tend to close themselves off from other people and retreat into their own private world. But with stroke and dementia patients, iPods and other MP3 players are having just the opposite effect.
 
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