Books, Arts & Manners: Improve Your Musical IQ

THE Center for Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, University of California at Irvine, reports that ten minutes of listening to Mozart raised students’ IQ scores by nine points and led to an improvement in the solution of spatial puzzles. This was reported at length by the New York Times, which, if you’re concerned about boosting intelligence, might have better used the space for a discussion of The Art of Music, by Hector Berlioz—now rereleased by Indiana University Press with a foreword by Jacques Barzun. Here Berlioz, who was not only a great composer but also among the great music critics, comments with tremendous insight— and pleads for an end to the constant rise in pitch of music, contributing to the ruin of many great voices. The Art of Music may not improve your IQ score or give you a handle on spatial problems, but it will open great windows to the understanding of music.

I was probably one of the first halfdozen music critics to write about Edith Piaf, before she became the darling of the faddists. What those of us at the time had to go on was a few not-too-well-recorded discs issued by one of the minor record companies and some enthusiastic comments by Jean Cocteau. But the recordings were enough. For la mome, the little sparrow, was far more than a product of Montmartre and the existentialists who enriched the entertainment of postwar Paris.

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Ralph de Toledano

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THE Center for Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, University of California at Irvine, reports that ten minutes of listening to Mozart raised students’ IQ scores by nine points and led to an improvement in the solution of spatial puzzles. This was reported at length by the New York Times, which, if you’re concerned about boosting intelligence, might have better used the space for a discussion of The Art of Music, by Hector Berlioz—now rereleased by Indiana University Press with a foreword by Jacques Barzun. Here Berlioz, who was not only a great composer but also among the great music critics, comments with tremendous insight— and pleads for an end to the constant rise in pitch of music, contributing to the ruin of many great voices. The Art of Music may not improve your IQ score or give you a handle on spatial problems, but it will open great windows to the understanding of music.

I was probably one of the first halfdozen music critics to write about Edith Piaf, before she became the darling of the faddists. What those of us at the time had to go on was a few not-too-well-recorded discs issued by one of the minor record companies and some enthusiastic comments by Jean Cocteau. But the recordings were enough. For la mome, the little sparrow, was far more than a product of Montmartre and the existentialists who enriched the entertainment of postwar Paris.