Radiolab - Unraveling Bolero

Episode Date: May 22, 2018

This week, we're throwing it back to an old favorite: a story about obsession, creativity, and a strange symmetry between a biologist and a composer that revolves around one famously repetitive piece of music. Anne Adams was a brilliant biologist. But when her son Alex was in a bad car accident, she decided to stay home to help him recover. And then, rather suddenly, she decided to quit science altogether and become a full-time artist. After that, her husband Robert Adams tells us, she just painted and painted and painted. First houses and buildings, then a series of paintings involving strawberries, and then ... "Bolero." At some point, Anne became obsessed with Maurice Ravel's famous composition and decided to put an elaborate visual rendition of the song to canvas. She called it "Unraveling Bolero." But at the time, she had no idea that both she and Ravel would themselves unravel shortly after their experiences with this odd piece of music. Arbie Orenstein tells us what happened to Ravel after he wrote "Bolero," and neurologist Bruce Miller helps us understand how, for both Anne and Ravel, "Bolero" might have been the first symptom of a deadly disease.  Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate. Read more: Unravelling Bolero: progressive aphasia, transmodal creativity and the right posterior neocortex Arbie Orenstein's Ravel: Man and Musician

Hi, I'm Robert Crulwich. Radio Lab is supported by Audible. As we explore this story of obsession, creativity, and symmetry, check out, This is Your Brain on Music, both a cutting-edge study and a tribute to the beauty of music. Go to audible.com slash radio lab or text Radio Lab to 500-500 for a free 30-day trial and a free audiobook. Hi, I'm Robert Crilwich. Radio Lab is supported by Casper. As we continue this episode on creativity and symmetry, check out the Casper or The Wave mattress with a support system that mirrors your body shape. Get $50 towards select mattresses by visiting casper.com slash radio lab and using code radio lab at checkout. Terms and conditions apply.

This is Jad. Before we start, I would like to let you know about a new podcast that is out there in the world that is aimed at. Drum roll, please. Kids. I must say I'm particularly excited about this because my kids just discovered podcasting. It's this thing that we can do together. This particular one, which is called This Podcast Has Flees, tells the story of a dog and a cat who live in the same house and have competing podcasts.

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has bonus toes Jay Farrow Saturday Night Live Alam plays the cat Emily Lynn plays a dog Alec Baldwin plays a goldfish If you have kids If you don't check it out

It's called This podcast has fleas From WNYC studios You get it wherever you get your podcasts Hey you're pretty good at that Jaddy McDaddy Thank you And I gotta say I just love your show

It's an inspiration You sure you're not a cat? Yeah Wait, you're listening Okay All right Okay All right

You're listening to Radio Lab Radio Lab From WNY S C See? I'm Chad I boomrod I'm Robert Crulwich

This is Radio Lab So okay So this one This one I think you weren't around for the first time I did it I wasn't I was gone for it But then I listened afterwards You hate listened

I hate listened Exactly I hate listened And then As is often the case I sort of reluctantly became a like listener. Oh, that's the nicest thing you've ever said to me. No, so this one is a, it's, you know, me, I'm a music nerd, right?

You are. This is a story about the weirdness of creativity and a piece of music that, frankly, I had to study in school, but which unites two people across space and time in a really bizarre way. It's a kind of rhyme. The first story begins in the 1980s in Vancouver, British Columbia, with a woman named Ann Adams, who by all accounts was a brilliant cell biologist. Oh, yes. Anne was highly articulate. That's her husband, Robert Adams.

You know, extremely capable with language. She did cancer research. She actually developed a cell line that I believe still exists. Wow. So she was very sharp. He says that as a scientist, she was unnatural. But then, rather suddenly, at the age of 46, and kind of did a 180.

Something happened in 86, which changed the course of her life. It all started when their third son, Alex, gets into a really bad car accident. And we were told that he would probably never, ever walk again. And decided she's going to take some time off to help him recover, and he does. He does learn to walk again. But while at home, she just decides to quit, to quit science, and become a painter. Yeah, Anne made up her mind then and there that she was, going to take up art full time.

Had she ever painted it before? Well, she did a fair amount of it when she was in high school. Which was a very long time ago. So the whole thing struck him as kind of out of the blue, but he rolled with it. And within a short period of time, she had converted a room in their house into a studio, and she was painting. Houses and buildings, little churches. Simple at first.

Then after that. Brightly colored versions of what you see when you look down the barrel of a microscope. You know, cells. bacteria. After that, strawberries. A series of paintings involving these blazing red strawberries. For instance, a water faucet and out of it would be coming a stream of strawberries. There was things called strawberry universe where the strawberries had rings around them like Saturn and so on. I think there was something like 35 or 36 strawberry paintings. But then she would switch to something else. Even after their son had fully recovered. Even threw away his crutches and went

back to school. And kept on painting. And she would work all day long. Ten hours a day, making these paintings that got bigger and bigger and more abstract. And there were times, he says, when he was like, Wow. Because for someone who hadn't painted since high school, she was suddenly so prolific. And it's entirely possible that something was happening to her even then. Way below the surface. I mean, on the surface, she was just painting and it was working. People were buying the painting. She was having solo shows, she was becoming a successful artist. But then in 1994, she decided, I don't know what gave her this idea. I never knew what gave her any of her ideas. But she decided she was going to do a painting of, well, this. Bolero. Bolero. Yes, yeah, Palero. Robert says he's

not quite sure how it happened, but at some point that year, and heard this famous piece by Maurice Ravel, became obsessed. Couldn't stop. listening to it, then playing it on the piano, then deconstructing it, mapping every pitch and the melody and the bass to a color. Here's one page, which isn't very long. This is from her notes. She's got A silver, A flat copper, B leaf green, B flat metallic green. Eventually, the painting.

It was quite a large work, two panels side by side. Very electric colors. A blizzard of symbols and triangles, little tooth-type things with a bowels. marks on them that all mean something and rectangles and marching back and forth across the first panel there was a triangle in the bottom of each one of the rectangle and the height of the rectangle represented the loudness it's an incredibly obsessive translation of the music into visual language and just like the melody in bolero the symbols repeat and repeat and repeat obsessively getting bigger and bigger and bigger until at the very end of the second panel things unravel

By the way, her title for the painting was unraveling Bolero. And that unraveling? Turns out it had happened before. When we come back, we're going to explain what we mean by a rhyme. We don't have to explain it. It'll just rhyme. Hello. This is Emily Volani from Austin, Texas.

Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about science. at www.sloan.org. Hi, I'm Robert Crillwich. Radio Lab is supported by Audible. As we explore this story of obsession, creativity, and a strange symmetry

between a biologist and a composer, check out, This Is Your Brain on Music, the science of a human obsession, available on Audible. Both a cutting-edge study and a tribute to the beauty of music itself, This is Your Brain on Music, unravels a host of mysteries

that affect everything from, pop culture to our understanding of human nature. Go to audible.com slash radio lab or text Radio Lab to 500-500 for a free 30-day trial and a free audiobook. Hi, I'm Robert Crilwich. Radio Lab is supported by Casper.

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Chad, Robert, Radio Lab. Getting back to our story, we heard Anne's story about painting the strawberries and then painting the painting of that piece of music. Now we're going to tell you a different story. Different time, different place, different person. But strangely rhymed. Yeah.

Story number two. Well, okay, should we jump in? Yeah, please. This is R.B. Ornstein. Professor of Music at the Aaron Copeland School of Music at Queens College. He's written about Ravel, performed Ravel, talk to anyone who ever knew Ravel. He kind of is a, what shall I say, a kind of a living presence inside my head. head. So, okay, Maurice Ravel,

is a composer, obviously, one of the greats. Born in 1875. Papa was an engineer. Mother was from an old Basque family. As in she was Spanish? Yes. Which is why some of his music, like Bolera, does sound a bit Spanish.

In any case, Mom encourages him to study music. He goes off to Paris in the 1890s meets Claude W.C. And together they sort of invent this style of music, which we now call Impressionism, which was this kind of... Free-floating... most dreamlike, sensuous, a lot of colors.

Very flowery. Yes. But then, like Anne, Ravel makes a kind of shift. 1928. When he was 53, about the same age Anne was when she did the painting. Revelle is having an absolutely phenomenal year. Just toured the United States, performed for thousands. He's at the zenith of his creativity.

And he's back in France, at a beach house. Wearing a pink bathing suit. And story goes right before he steps out onto the beach, this melody. swoops into his head. He runs over to the piano. Takes his index finger and he goes, da-da-dun-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-tun-tun-tun. There it was.

It just came to him fully formed? Well, I don't know if he played the whole melody, but he at least started it off. But here's the shift when he sat down to flesh the whole thing out. Instead of developing the melody, making it super flowery like his other stuff, decided no, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to take this melody and repeat it,

Again and again and again. And then again some more. And then some more. The theme never changes one note. The only thing that does change is the orchestration, which grows around the melody. Very slowly. Bit by bit.

It gets bigger. Bigger? More accompaniment. More instruments play the melody. But the melody itself? For 340 bars? Never varies. To the point he says where the performers,

They're ready to see a psychiatrist by the time they're done playing this piece. And Revelle at the first performance in Paris, some woman screamed out. He's crazy. Which turned out to be, well, not exactly true, but in the neighborhood. Six years after he wrote Bolero, this is 1933, Revelle begins to forget words. He'd always been forgetful, so no one really noticed at first. But then one day at dinner, he grabs the knife by the wrong side.

And he doesn't realize it. And he continues to try to eat. Holding the sharp side of the knife and trying to cut with the handle. Then he visits a friend, leaves. Now two hours go by, knock on the door, it's Ravel again. He didn't remember that he'd been there before. Just two hours earlier. Eventually.

By 1935, he could not write anymore. Or speak. His language had evaporated. Arby says there are documents where you can see Ravel desperately trying to relearn the alphabet. A, A, A. A, A, over and over again. Wow. B, B, with a kind of a shaking hand, very small.

It's very, very painful to see. Whatever it was that was wrong was getting worse. Here's the weird symmetry, just like Ravel, six years after finishing her bolero. By 2000, I would say. Anne also begins to forget words. She would try to say things and couldn't. She would try to find worse.

and couldn't. So how are you today? Fine. Eventually, Anne ends up at the University of California, San Francisco. And this was in 2002, and they gave her a bunch of tests. Can you tell me your full name, please? Aunt Teresa Adams. There's a video of one of these tests, and in it you can see Anne sitting at a table

in a black sweater, gray hair, glasses, very composed. And can you tell me your address? Like someone who's used to knowing the answers to questions, people ask her. For 23. Which town? Which town? Vancouver. Great.

By the time Anne had come to see us, her communication abilities were markedly diminished. That's Dr. Bruce Miller. He's a neurologist. He runs the Memory and Aging Center at UCSF. example we asked her to describe. Okay, and I'll allow you to take a look at this picture. A very complex, rich picture with... Take your time.

Children with a kite, with a sailboat on the ocean. And please tell me what you see. And if you can, please try to speak in sentences. Anne would be able to say single words with no grammar. She'd go, sailboat. Tree. Boy. Um...

Water. People. Cite. Cite. Flag. And that four or five words would come out over about a minute's time. She was very frustrated.

Both Anne Adams and Maurice Rovell were unraveling in the exact same way at the exact same speed to the same soundtrack, you might say, but just roughly 60 years apart. We think he and Anne down to the very molecular process. had the exact same disease.

And he thinks Bolero, the music, and then the painting. In both their cases, was the first symptom of that disease. This takes a couple steps to explain. Bear with me. But to start, the disease is called frontotemporal dementia. And it begins when certain cells in your frontal cortex, which is sort of above your forehead, begin to wither away, in some cases,

literally leaving holes in your frontal cortex. And we know this about Anne. from tests and brain scans, we suspected about Ravelle because, according to Arby, just before he died. On December 28, 1937. A French surgeon opened up his skull and saw that one of the lobes of the two lobes of the brain had sunk. Because it was disintegrating. Now, in both of their cases, the part of their brain, the part of their cortex got hit, was on the left. It was the part of the brain that does a lot of things, has a lot to do with memory.

But most importantly for our story, this is the part of their brain. of your brain that largely governs language. And what you see is that people who suffer from frontotemporal dementia, they lose their words. They can no longer string words together. And here's the thing about losing something like language. It has all kinds of other effects in the brain, because according to Bruce, you know,

our brain is a series of interconnected circuits. And when in a normal brain, a dominant circuit-like language turns on, it is basically wired to turn a bunch of other circuits off. It basically goes shh to other parts of the brain. We have this constant dance where one circuit or many circuits turn on and then they're obligatorily turning off other circuits. So language acts as a kind of break on other things the brain can be doing,

like daydreaming, thinking and pictures. But when the language is no longer there to hold things back, Often what happens is that those other parts, like say the visual parts, can rush forward. And suddenly the mind is just flooded with images and you hear reports of people having these intensely visual experiences. They've just got to express. This is very common. We see a number of patients who become visually obsessed. He says he sees, you know, investment bankers who've never shown any interest in art.

Never even walked into an art museum. All of a sudden they decide in their 50s, well, I'm going to move into a loft. take up painting. That's right. How many of these cases have you seen? 50, 60. Some of them have sculpted. Some of them have painted.

He says he's seen people take up gardening, graphic design. And what so many of the cases have in common is that the sort of visual creativity that bursts forth, it's not the free-flowing kind. It's very mechanical. The repetition, the obsession. They get stuck in a kind of loop, taking one visual idea and doing it again and again and again. Like an Anne Adams painting. or Bolero.

This drive to repeat happens very early in the course of this illness. So he says what can seem like a simple creative choice to repeat a melody may actually be driven by a condition that you won't even know you have for six years. We think that this had something to do with the very unusual, rhythmic, repetitive sorts of music that Ravelle produced. I asked Bruce, so why the repetition, Where does that come from? I think this is a release of a broader problem.

But he offered up a theory which I find fascinating, which may get to the root of creative obsession of any kind. He says there might be several parts of the brain that are held back by the language circuit, and one of them is this very ancient part of the brain. Basil ganglia, the part of the brain we move with. You can call it our reptile brain. This is the part of our...

us that governs, you know, basic behaviors like eating, running. Motor programs that we do repetitively every day. That's all it does. It sends commands saying move, move, eat, eat, run, run. Birds and snakes get by with basically just this part of the brain. Keeps them alive. Now, normally he thinks the language part of us... Inhibits these habits, these repetitive motor programs. But when the language part of the brain is not there to do the shushing, these motor commands

filter up too. So imagine you're one of these people. Your mind is flooded with all of these images, maybe sounds. It's also flooded with all of these kinetic repetitive instructions. Move, move, move, do it again. And in the early stages of the illness, you still have enough brain to make sense of it all. There's still a lot of cortex that is still available to act upon this desire to repeat. And so you get art that is obsessive and repetitive, but also beautiful and abstract, like Anne's painting unraveling Bolero. But then Bruce says as the disease progresses and more of that sort of cortexy humaney part fades away.

The repetition becomes much simpler. In the latter stages of a disease, he says you'll often see patients. Pouring water into a cup a hundred times in a day, squishing ants over and over again. The complexity of the behaviors are diminishing as we're losing these parts of the brain that make us so human. This is sort of what you see in Anne's work. Her paintings start off simple, explode into abstraction and then get simple again. But what's unusual compared to the other patients is that she kept painting almost all the way to the end.

Until literally it was not possible for her to hold and direct a brush or a pen. That's her husband Robert again. Anne became progressively paralyzed on the right side of her body. She lost the ability to paint 2005. early and that that that was sad towards the end he says he would go into her studio and I would see her there in front of a blank canvas and she wouldn't be doing anything she would just be looking at it and I'd come back a couple of hours later and she still wouldn't have done anything she had lost the ability

to do the art and that to me is one of the I dare say beautiful parts of of Anne's story, that the drive to create is as primal as anything else in the body, that even after she couldn't eat, after she could barely swallow, she still sat there in her studio trying to paint. She had gone downhill so far by that time that she was hardly recognizable as herself. At some point in the disease, and you can see that in this early tape, Painting was really all she had. I don't have the memories of this.

It was basically all she was. Can you tell me what your job is? Are you still working? I do art. Great. She died in 2007? Yes, in January of 2007. Almost exactly 60 years after Maurice Ravelle.

Thanks to Robert Adams, Bruce Miller at the University of California, San Francisco, and R.B. Ornstein at Queens College. Well, that's a song that's not. That's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's a piece that is not going to stay the same. Mm-mm. It's funny. I used to think of Bolero as like a happy jaunty tune. Now I'm like, oh, it's kind of haunted. It's an interesting sort of, uh, paradox that this, this thing ends on. She sits in front of her canvas, throciously stalls. It's the ferocious part. That creativity comes from a kind of restlessness, and the restlessness may be one of the things that leaves last.

Yeah. All right, speaking of leaving, we should go. Thanks for listening. Hi, this is Mitch Lotto from Kalamazoo, Michigan. Radio Lab was created by Jad Abramrod and is produced by Soren Wheeler. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Maria Matasar Padilla is our managing director. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Maggie Bertolomeo, Becca Bressler, Rachel Cusick, David Gable, Bethelhoobty, Tracy Hunt, Matt Kielty, Robert Crulwich, Annie McEwan, Latif Nosser, Melissa O'Donnell, Ariane Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster.

With help from Amanda Aronchick, Shima, O'Lei, Jake Arlo, and Reed Canaan. Our fact checker is Michelle Harris. Hi, I'm Robert Crilwich. Radio Lab is supported by Audible. Check out, this is your brain on music, both a cutting-edge study and a tribute to the beauty of music. Go to audible.com slash radio lab or text Radio Lab to 500 for a free 30-day trial and a free audiobook. Hi, I'm Robert Crilwich. Radio Lab is supported by Casper. Check out The Casper or The Wave Mattress with a support system that mirrors your body shape. Get $50 towards select mattresses by visiting casper.com slash radio lab and using code radio lab at checkout.

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