The Brain and Music

This year I wanted to do a special Father’s Day Issue in memory of my own father, the Rev. Dr. Michael Benjamin Hudnall. Daddy was a United Methodist minister in the S.C. Conference of the United Methodist Church. I was born in Durham, N.C. while he was in seminary at Duke University on the G.I. Bill after World War II.

Some of my earliest musical memories took place, not surprisingly in church and as a tiny girl I loved singing songs in Sunday School and hymns in church. My father always sang hymns lustily and made me want to do so as well. He always seemed so happy up there at the pulpit singing hymns and listening to the choir and would always turn around approvingly when they finished their anthems.
As a little girl, Daddy would come into my sister’s and my bedroom and teach us songs he learned as a child and some that he learned in the Army. We loved singing these songs and I especially remember singing “My Grandfather’s Clock,” “Oh My Pa-pa,” “Do Your Ears Hang Low,” and “A Capital Ship.” If you’d like to see a performance of “My Grandfather’s Clock” and “A Capital Ship,” you can click below. Even though this isn’t my father, sister and me, you can imagine what fun we had singing these songs.

When I started taking piano lessons at age 8, Daddy was always my biggest fan and I remember him telling me at one point that he could just lie on the living room couch, listening to me playing the piano and “float right up to Heaven!” Needless to say, that made me very happy! I always knew that even if my recitals didn’t go perfectly, Daddy would be first in line to congratulate me on a beautiful performance.

My father told me that he wished he could have taken piano lessons as a child but that his family didn’t have the money during the Great Depression and so he and his family enjoyed singing and making music other ways. Music is a gift from God and I never take it for granted. As I grew up and became a parent and a professional musician I wanted to give my own children the love and appreciation for music that my father gave me. He was also extremely proud of my children’s musical ability and encouraged them as he did me. A few years ago, my oldest daughter played her violin in Carnegie Hall and I knew that Daddy was there with us in spirit. He passed away in 1999 and was a very beloved human being. At his funeral, three different ministers gave tributes to him. If you’d like to read what the newspapers said about him, go HERE. I miss my father very much today but I have all of this sermons and a few tapes of him preaching and singing the hymns of Charles Wesley that he loved so much.

Well, tomorrow’s my birthday!! And it’s one of the big ones. I’ll let you guess: One late May afternoon, at Duke University Hospital (Watts Hospital) a baby girl was born to Benjamin and Alice Adelaide (“Tumpy”) Hudnall. The year was 1948 and I was their firstborn. My father was just about to get his Master’s of Divinity degree so that he could be an ordained Methodist minister. Have you figured out how old I’ll be? Now to the musical part. Every year on our birthdays, there’s a song we hear, pretty much all over the Western World! Just the sound of that famous song releases endorphins in ths brain and makes people feel excited anticipation about the day and the moment. Often it brings floods of images of the past year and years. Hopefully it brings a sense of deep love and appreciation from family and friends. These things are definitely true for me. Want to help me celebrate my birthday tomorrow (May 22)? I’d like to know what music you associate with your birthday and what your favorite music is this year and this moment. I will compile some lists and get back to you with what music my readers like.
The cake in the picture is a lime-coconut cake that friends of mine made at my home tonight. It’s my favorite and will be garnished tomorrow with a lime twist. Thanks for all the cards, letters, balloons and flowers! Love to all!
Alice

This is an excerpt from the introduction to the wonderful book “Your Brain on Music” by Daniel Levitin. I highly recommend it!!

“Many people who love music profess to know nothing about it. I’ve found that many of my colleagues who study difficult, intricate topics such as neurochemistry or psychopharmacology feel unprepared to deal with research in the neuroscience of music. And who can blame them? Music theorists have an arcane, rarified set of terms and rules that are as obscure as some of the most esoteric domains of mathematics. To the nonmusician, the blobs of ink on a page that we call music notation might just as well be the notations of mathematical set theory. Talk of keys, cadences, modulation, and transposition can be baffling.

Yet every one of my colleagues who feel intimidated by such jargon can tell me the music that he or she likes. My friend Norman White is a world authority on the hippocampus in rats, and how they remember different places they’ve visited. He is a huge jazz fan, and can talk expertly about his favorite artists. He can instantly tell the difference between Duke Ellington and Count Basie by the sound of the music, and can even tell early from late Louis Armstrong. Norm doesn’t have any knowledge about music in the technical sense – he can tell me that he likes a certain song, but he can’t tell me what the names of the chords are. He is, however, an expert in knowing what he likes. This is not at all unusual, of course. Many of us have a practical knowledge of things we like, and can communicate our preferences without possessing the technical knowledge of the true expert. I know that I prefer the chocolate cake at one restaurant I often go to over the chocolate cake at my neighborhood coffee shop. But only a chef would be able to analyze the cake – to decompose the taste experience into its elements – by describing the differences in the kind of flour, or the shortening, or the type of chocolate used.”