Even today, neuroscience cannot explain how a man whose speaking voice has become so hesitant – whose memory of events, people and places has largely disappeared – can, at the sound of a musical clue, raise his voice in song with such beauty and expression, except to say that music and singing appear, as Levitin pointed out, from areas of the brain quite distinct from those associated with speech and language. The strong feelings released by music can connect listeners to their deep emotional memories, even those inaccessible to the conscious mind.
And so it went, for the next hour, a miraculous concert that was, quite literally, a gift for an observer and a walk on the memory tape.
“How about Duke Ellington’s song?” Musiker said – and immediately Tony’s voice floated to the ceiling like notes from a wonderful trumpet.
“In my loneliness,” he sang, “It haunts me / With awful ease / For days gone by. / In my loneliness / You mock me / With memories / Who never die ”.
On Boulevard of Broken Dreams, the first single he cut for Columbia in 1950, Tony, 23, ended the song with a full bel canto painter – and amazingly reproduced it now: “… and dance along the boulevaaaaaahd of terrible dreams! In “Fly Me to the Moon”, he raised his voice slightly in the air, as he had done in his gorgeous 1965 recording, and on the up-tempo “The Lady’s in Love With You”, he moved easily. through the complicated verses as if scattered. He ended his performance of “Smile” (“… although your heart breaks …”) with a long-drawn “smiiiiiiiiiiii” that made Susan use an expression that Tony liked to say when she put in the final version of a song, “Right there,” she said. Musiker shook his head in astonishment, looked at Tony and punched his heart.
“This is it,” he told Tony. “Heart”.
“Every time,” Tony said – his first spontaneous verbal reaction this afternoon. As the rehearsal continued, he exchanged more and more short conversations with Musiker. At the end of a “When You Smile” Musiker jokingly alluded to their three-person audience as 3 million people. “Actually,” he added, “did you once say that even if only one person – do you remember saying that years ago?”
“Oh, yes,” Tony said.
“If there’s a person in the club,” Musiker said.
“Then you really give it,” Tony said. “It’s very intimate like that.”
Later, when I spoke to Musiker about what makes Tony special, he said, “Proper vocal training and the innate sense of a musician, not the innate sense of a singer. As an instrumentalist, he hears everything. He’s constantly taking me out. Then sincerity and full love. ”
Unfortunately, the way music can reconnect demented patients to family and friends, to memory and to the past is, unfortunately, temporary. Lucidity, memory, conversation can persist for a few minutes. But for those who long for the old connection, who desperately miss the spark of animation in a loved one, even these brief leaks of the person they knew, these fleeting connections, end up as a blessing. For Susan, the obvious pleasure Tony receives from singing is a precious gift. “I would like him to keep his painting, but that didn’t fit the way he sang.” The coal landscape on the easel, she said, was a rarity. But not singing. Not yet. “Singing is everything to him,” Susan told me as I prepared to leave. “Everything. She saved her life many times. Many times. Through divorces and things. If she ever stops singing, then we’ll know … Her voice catches on, she stops.
Two days earlier, actor Sean Connery had died of dementia at the age of 90. Connery’s widow said that in her last months she could not communicate, but that, fortunately, she slipped quietly into her sleep. “I hope so with Tony,” Susan told me. “Let’s hope he goes to bed one night and that will be it. I hope and pray that he does not return to evil. He was silent for a moment. Then he smiled. “I miss him a lot,” she said. “Because he’s not old Tony anymore.” Again, her voice caught and looked down. Then he controlled himself, stood up to me and smiled. – But when he sings, he’s old Tony.