Last Sunday's New York Times carried Clive Thompson's interesting article on the neuroscience of music perception: "Music of the hemispheres." I've found myself thinking about the opening paragraphs all week:

"Listen to this," Daniel Levitin said. “What is it?” He hit a button on his computer keyboard and out came a half-second clip of music. It was just two notes blasted on a raspy electric guitar, but I could immediately identify it: the opening lick to the Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar.”

Then he played another, even shorter snippet: a single chord struck once on piano. Again I could instantly figure out what it was: the first note in Elton John’s live version of “Benny and the Jets.”

Dr. Levitin beamed. “You hear only one note, and you already know who it is,” he said. “So what I want to know is: How we do this? Why are we so good at recognizing music?”

This is not merely some whoa-dude epiphany that a music fan might have while listening to a radio contest. Dr. Levitin has devoted his career to exploring this question. He is a cognitive psychologist who runs the Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition and Expertise at McGill University in Montreal, perhaps the world’s leading lab in probing why music has such an intense effect on us.

Dr. Levitin's research may or may not have scientific merit, but he certainly seems to have identified an interesting phenomenon. I wonder how much of the observed effect may be attributable to pure repetition. Perhaps he takes up the question in his book on the subject, This Is Your Brain on Music.

The poetry of Walt Whitman is full of musical cadences, themes and metaphors. As Paul Zweig points out in Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet (now out of print), Whitman himself promoted the idea of musical structure in his poems. According to Zweig, Whitman "claimed that his method was that of the Italian opera." Here, for example, is section 18 of "Song of Myself," Whitman's signature poem:

With music strong I come, with my cornets and my drums,
I play not marches for accepted victors only, I play marches for conquered and slain persons.
Have you heard that it was good to gain the day?
I also say it is good to fall, battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won.
I beat and pound for the dead,
I blow through my embouchures my loudest and gayest for them.
Vivas to those who have failed!
And to those whose war vessels sank in the sea!
And to those themselves who sank in the sea!
And to all generals that lost engagements, and all overcome heroes!
And the numberless unknown heroes equal to the greatest heroes known!

"The greatest hero known" to Whitman may well have been Abraham Lincoln. In Whitman's great elegy for Lincoln -- "When Lilacs Last In the Dooryard Bloom'd" -- Whitman brought his full powers to bear on the death of America's Great Liberator. It is a poem of death, grief and renewal. In Zweig's view, it represents Whitman "aroused to a final greatness."

Contemporary composers have frequently turned his work to their own uses. See, for example, Thomas Hampson's excellent "I hear America singing." Whitman's Lincoln elegy in particular is full of musical themes, great swelling lines and rolling rhythms. It virtually cries out to be set to music, and, not surprisingly, there has been no shortage of composers who have answered the call. Paul Hindemith, for example, set it to music in 1946 and Roger Sessions turned it into a cantata in 1971.

Now Power Line reader Steve Dobrogosz has turned "Lilacs" into a magnificent choral work. Steve seems to me to have thought deeply about the poem and created an incredibly moving musical setting for it. His work has been recorded on a just-released compact disc by the St. Jacobs Chamber Choir and Uppsala Chamber Symphonics. Check out Steve's page on the recording with its link to an audio clip of part VI of the work.

For an informative reading of the poem at the Library of Congress, watch this performance followed by a brief question and answer session. Daniel Mark Epstein is the gifted poet and writer who, in Lincoln and Whitman, reflected on their "parallel lives." Jeffrey Hart's appreciative comments on Epstein's book are accessible here. At the Library of Congress Epstein also performed Whitman's famous speech on Lincoln, which is accessible here. They should all whet your appetite for the recording of Steve's beautiful work.

UPDATE: Professor Levitin writes in response to my comments above:

I read in your blog today about the New York Times article that appeared last week, and discussed my research. You write: "Dr. Levitin's research may or may not have scientific merit..." This strikes me as the work of a somewhat lazy blogger! Whether my work (or anyone's) has scientific merit can be easily determined, but looking at whether or not the research has been published in peer-reviewed journals. A number of databases report on this, including the ISI Web of Science, MedLine, and PubMed. Peer review is the standard for scientific merit. I am not offended nor affronted that the validity of my work was called into question, only that the answer to the question would have been easily obtainable!

Of course the thing about blogs is that anyone can write anything they want, but I had the impression from previous postings on Power Line that you intend (and in many cases succeed) in being taken as serious journalism.

To say the least, I meant no disrepect to Professor Levitin or his work, which I find of great interest. I simply am in no postion to pass on its merits and the Times article itself quotes Steven Pinker "disparag[ing]" one of Professor Levitin's speculations concerning the evolutionary basis for his findings.