Opera Legend Renée Fleming on What Makes Our Minds Sing
Music and the Brain Issue, Part 1: plus a Q&A with Fleming and a review of her new book; a video and discount on mind-music app Spiritune; and a Tech Review article on “DNA and Music” from my archive
Renee Fleming speaking about her brain and music at the NIH.
In this issue of FUTURES
Theme: Music and the Brain, Part 1
New Essay: Renée Fleming on What Makes Our Minds Sing By David Ewing Duncan
Book Review: Music and the Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness, ed. By Renée Fleming. Foreword by Francis Collins, MD, PhD
Q&A: Renée Fleming
App Demo: A video about using the music and mind app Spiritune with CEO Jamie Pabst—plus get a free month of using the app if you sign up.
Article from my archives: “Making Music Out of Genes: by David Ewing Duncan, MIT Technology Review, May 3, 2007.
What I’m reading now: a list of recent reads and videos for you to check out
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Coming soon: Music and the Mind—Part 2: Polyvagal Music to Sooth the Mind, a conversation with Steve Porges, PhD, pioneer of the vagal nerve theory; co-creator of Polyvagal Music, LLC; and co-author of Our Polyvagal World: How Safety and Trauma Change Us.
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FUTURES is a column and a newsletter about possible futures at a pivotable moment in history, where the future could turn out wondrous—or not. We’re seeing a flurry of innovations and fresh ideas in technology, health, science, art, policy, and matters of the heart even as we face existential threats like climate change, authoritarianism rising, a crisis of misinformation, and anxieties about powerful new technologies like AI. I’m asking the most interesting people I can find what they are most excited about and most afraid of for the future, and why.
For more check out my website: www.davidewingduncan.com
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New Essay
Renée Fleming singing with former NIH Director Francis Collins at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC.
Renée Fleming on What Makes Our Minds Sing
The opera phenome has teamed up with former NIH Director Francis Collins to delve deeply into why our brains love and possibly crave music. A column and a book review.
By David Ewing Duncan—May 21, 2024
I lived for my art, I lived for love, In my hour of grief, Lord, Why have you forsaken me?
Slowly, regally, the soprano sings these words of tragedy and anguish as the notes of “Vissi d’arte” build, the notes rising, the music so devastatingly beautiful and painful that pulses race and breathing is suspended. Sung by a distraught woman whose lover is in grave danger, this aria from Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca gradually peaks, hanging in the air before resolving and concluding on a long note that fades into a shattering silence.
There is a pause as Renée Fleming, playing Floria Tosca, turns her eyes upward as if beseeching the heavens. Then the applause comes in a tremendous release of shared emotion.
Most of us have felt something like this. If not with opera, then jazz, hip-hop, heavy metal, country, or lullabies sung to us as a child. All of which makes us wonder why we feel this way. What is it about these pitches, tones, and ripples of sound that so profoundly affect pulses, breathing, emotions?
It starts with our ears picking up acoustic waves that are carried by auditory nerves into our brains, where billions of neurons fire up in a dozen neural regions that control and regulate everything from deep emotion and memory to the beating of our hearts.
The mechanics of how music connects with our gray matter and our physiology is all the rage right now as scientists and philosophers labor not only to understand the interplay of sounds and frequencies on pathways of nerves and neurons, but also why and how music unites people to swoon or rage or feel joy as a shared experience that evolution seems to have deemed critical to being human. Some biologists, including Charles Darwin, believe that music was crucial to our ancestors’ very survival as they needed togetherness to procreate, take care of the kids, and use strength in numbers to fend off saber-tooth tigers and other dangers that seldom ended well when Homo sapiens faced them alone.
In the past few decades, scientists have made great progress in understanding the role of neurotransmitters like dopamine that make us feel good, and oxytocin that makes us feel safe—both of which are activated by music. Using MRI scanners and EEGs researchers have mapped complex networks of reactions in the prefrontal frontal lobe, visual cortex, amygdala, hippocampus, auditory and sensory cortex, and more.
They have observed that mothers singing to their babies can relieve symptoms of postpartum depression and increase the bonding experience with their little one by reducing levels of the stress hormone cortisol. Music can help dementia patients activate memories that temporarily restore their ability to be present with loved ones. Certain frequencies of music can activate the vagal nervous system that can act to calm us and make us feel safe—something I’ll get into in more detail in part two of this Music and the Brain two-parter.
Several years ago, Renée Fleming says she stumbled on the science of music and mind as she was casting about with some desperation to understand why she was sometimes debilitated by stage fright. At times the anxiety and heavy weight of responsibility of carrying entire operas and multi-city tours impacted her somatically, causing extreme pain in her neck and trapezius muscles until she learned what was happening to her, and how to dial down the anxiety.
The five-time Grammy Award winner went on to devote herself to understanding and promoting a marriage of neuroscience and the arts that resulted in her new book, Music and the Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness (Viking, 2024). This collection of 36 essays and research papers from scientists and artists leads with an “Overture” written by Fleming that describes her quest to cure herself, and how this led to almost a decade of collaboration with scientists, physicians, and artists to use and understand the power of music to heal.
The book’s foreword is written by physician and researcher Francis Collins, the former Director of the National Institutes of Health, whom Fleming met by chance at a dinner in 2015. Collins is famous for leading the multi-billion-dollar effort in the late 1990s and early 2000s to sequence the first human genome. He also is a musician, having grown up in the Shenandoah Valley on a farm that became a well-known arts community where famous performers often came to act and sing.
He tells the story of meeting Fleming in 2015 at an elegant country inn outside of Washington, DC. As the evening unfurled, the politics of the moment was adding tension as Collins did what he often does at an event with live music: he stepped on stage and joined the band to sing a few tunes. That’s when a “…stunning and elegant woman approached us,” he writes, “and suggested that some group singing might bring everyone together.”
The woman was Renée Fleming. She joined Collins and the band not to sing not opera, but to belt out tunes like “The Water Is Wider” and “Country Roads.” When everyone joined in, “the tone of the evening changing dramatically,” writes Collins. That same evening, the NIH Director and the soprano got to talking and decided to work together.
“And so our partnership began,” writes Collins, who went on to work with Fleming on music and the brain projects that helped inspire the $20 million Sound Health initiative, a collaboration of the NIH, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in DC. Fleming has been an artistic advisor to the Kennedy center since 2016 and received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2023.
She also heads her own foundation that supports the music and the mind effort with awards and collaborations, including a program that she co-founded called the NeuroArts Blueprint that has joined forces with the Johns Hopkins International Arts + Mind Lab and the Aspen Institute’s Health, Medicine & Society Program.
During the pandemic, when Fleming was forced off the stage, she hosted a series of Zoom videocasts called Music and the Mind LIVE with scientists and artists that became the source of many of the contributions to her book.
Essays in the book are written by a fascinating cast of scientists and artists ranging from the Tufts evolutionary psychologist Aniruddh Patel to country singer Rosanne Cash; and celloist YoYo Ma to neuroscientist Concetta Tomaino, who works on the clinical applications of music in neuro-rehabilitation and co-founded the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function with Oliver Sachs. There is such an abundance of riches in this thick book that’s it’s almost too much, with some essays easy to understand and others that are dense and academic but still worth a read, much like certain operas can be daunting but rewarding if you stick with them.
Fleming ends her Overture with a story about a post-pandemic visit to another famous soprano, Leontyne Price, one of the first African American opera stars to achieve worldwide acclaim. Price is a mentor and friend to Fleming, and has helped her get through challenging times in her career, including her bouts with stage fright. “Nearly ninety-six,” writes Fleming of Price, “she answered the door that day singing a sustained high C. She told me she begins each day, exercising the gift God gave her, and she means to take care of it until her last breath.”
“Leontyne gave me another gift that night,” concludes Fleming. “She is the perfect example of how art can be a sustaining force in life, and I left feeling uplifted, hopeful, and full of joy.”
Q&A with Renée Fleming
Below is a conversation I had with Renée Fleming at the Lake Nona Impact Forum near Orlando, Florida, edited for clarity and space. As always, I start by asking her the question I’m asking all my guests for this column about the future:
What are you most excited about and afraid of for the future, and why?
Fleming’s answer and the conversation that followed is about music, the arts, health, evolution, stage fright, climate change, her new anthology, Music and Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness —and the future.
Renée, what are you most excited about and most afraid of for the future, and why?
What I’m most excited about is the tremendous growth of the arts and health movement. The NeuroArts Blueprint [Fleming is co-chair of this nonprofit effort] is up and running, looking at every aesthetic or artistic experience that we have, in order to understand its impact on the brain. This includes things like being in nature, even doodling—anything we do that allows us that wonderful experience of creativity, and the joy and health benefits that stem from it. On some level, we all know the power of art and how it impacts our brains and emotions, but in mainstream science it’s been under-appreciated. So we’re working to change this, and the community of artists and scientists working in this field is making an impact.
Why do you think music is so important to us?
It’s part of evolution that we really need to be together, and music plays a role in this—in how groups of people experience music and art. It can move hundreds, or millions of people and allow us to feel a shared joy or sadness. It’s an important way for us to communicate; to sooth minds who are feeling anxious or traumatized. It’s also exciting how music and art can bring us together in a lot of different ways, depending on the creative expression.
We do seem to be programmed to want to be together. It’s as if we’ve evolved to feel out of sorts when we’re alone, which probably makes sense given that working together we are more effective.
You're absolutely right. We are social and since the beginning of time, we have had this instinct to be together. And it didn't just go away in the modern world, where now people are living apart more and more; we have an actual epidemic of loneliness. We're very isolated by that thing in your hand. [Fleming points to my smart phone recording this interview]. Since the beginning of the year, I've changed my lifestyle to use my phone less. I look at the news just once a day, and make more time to go to museums, theater, concerts, and things that I really enjoy.
I want to get to what you're afraid of, which I guess we just partly got to talking about isolation and smart phones.
A fear I’ve dealt with for a long time is stage fright. This is personal, but during my career there have been periods when it was really challenging. Not so much when I was starting out, but as success brought more responsibility, it became worse, even debilitating at times. I experienced somatic pain caused by, or in reaction to, the anxiety and all the pressure, that sometimes made it difficult to perform. So I tried to figure out what was going on, and I began to learn about scientists who were looking at the brain and music.
Has the stage fright gone away? Or are you still working on it?
I have it mostly under control. I have to be very careful about making sure I'm prepared. I’m choosing performances that don’t cause anxiety, and bring me joy, because I should be enjoying my performances and doing things I love. Now I have control over that, but when you're in the building phase of a career, you have to take a lot of risks. Imagine having a job where newspapers review you the next day, every day. That’s the life of a performer.
Anything else you’re afraid of for the future?
I’m also fearful about climate change. I don't see us getting a handle on this. I don't see people collaborating in a productive way. I think it would be tragic if we harm this extraordinary planet. I’m afraid that what actually might happen is that humans could die off, but the planet is likely to restore itself.
You’re trying in your own way to use your platform as an entertainer to address your fear of climate change, right?
Yes. Artists can use their platforms for issues they care about, and mine right now is climate change, along with arts and health. This keeps me very busy. I'm currently touring with a program focused in part on the climate crisis. [She’s singing songs from her Grammy-award-winning album “Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene"]. I've been in more than a dozen cities so far, including at number of universities, and I plan on touring this repertoire for the next year and a half. So that's absolutely something artists can do, and I’m getting the word out as best I can to my audience. And I'm enjoying it. It's fulfilling.
Do you think you can reach the people that need to make the decisions to change things for something like climate change, through singing and activism?
You don't know who you can reach. You could reach the granddaughter of someone who can change things. Young people are really energized about doing something about climate change right now.
Do you think that younger people might be the key to dialing back climate change?
I’m hopeful about this. They certainly have an incentive, but policies need to be created, and not just at the national level– it's a global issue. We have to work with other countries that have a huge impact, like China. We need to reach China in general, I would say, on biodiversity and appreciation for animal life. There's so much learning that needs to occur, across the whole world. We need to get more people involved and connected to this work.
Where do you think we’ll be with music and the brain in 10 years, 20 years? What are your goals for this work you have helped to set in motion?
The most immediate goal is increased public awareness of this work, through efforts like my book and programs like the Neuroarts Resource Center and the Sound Health Network. With increased funding, I believe we’ll see more rigorous and expansive exploration of the healing impact of music and the arts. A major long-term goal is for insurers, Medicare, and Medicaid to cover clinical creative arts therapies. Ultimately, I believe that is when we’ll realize the full potential of music and art to improve our health and wellbeing.
App Demo: Spiritune
Spiritune CEO Jamie Pabst giving a demo at Cure in New York City.
Do you feel chill, anxious, energetic, or lethargic? How would you like to feel? Check out the Spiritune app, which uses music and tonal experiences designed by neuroscientists to shift your mood, reduce anxiety or help you sleep.
Video of Spiritune co-founder and CEO Jamie Pabst giving a demo of the app at the Transform conference in Las Vegas.
Discount on the Spiritune App. You can try the app for yourself by signing up using this link and using the code: mamas. After downloading the app, *sign in* with the same email and password you created on the sign-up page.
Enjoy… and be chill.
From My Archives: MIT Technology Review
Each issue of Futures contains an article, book excerpt, or broadcast that’s relevant to the theme that comes from my archive of over 600 stories written, filmed, and broadcast over the years.
For another type of connection between music and human physiology, I wrote this article 2007 about an enterprising graduate student who heard music in the AGCTs of DNA.
Making Music out of Genes
A UCLA graduate student creates melodies out of genetic and protein sequences, allowing us to “listen” to DNA.
By David Ewing Duncan—MIT Technology Review, May 3, 2007
Listen to this.
It’s the music created by the human protein thymidylate synthase A (ThyA). Really. At least, it’s the notes created to “play” the music using this string of amino acids, with each amino acid assigned a chord.
Rie Takahashi, a graduate student at UCLA, dreamed up the idea of making music out of proteins when she read about a blind meteorology student at Cornell who converted the colors of a contoured weather map into tones corresponding to different hues.
Takahashi hopes her creation will help disabled geneticists “read” sequences using sound, she writes in a report in Genome Biology. “We wanted to be able to move away from a two-dimensional string of letters across a sheet of paper, and to see if adding another dimension–sound–would help,” Takahashi told Nature.com.
Helping blind biologists “hear” DNA is laudable, but I’m also finding the notion of amino acids as chords strung together to be something eerie and wonderful, like putting my ear to a seashell and hearing the ocean. In addition, the idea makes sense, given that music is essentially digital–a series of precise calibrations of sound that the ancient Greeks thought of as a form of mathematics. For instance, the ancient Greek mathematician Pythagoras developed “The Music of the Spheres” to describe the proportional movements of the planets, moon, and sun in what he believed to be whole-number ratios identical to musical intervals.
To read the rest of the article go here.
Update
Note: The links in the article above are no longer active. The 2007 article in Genome Biology is cited and available here.
For an update on Rie Takahashi’s work with DNA and music, check out “Science and Culture: Musical Genes,” by John Carey, a news article in PNAS published on 23 February 2016.
Today, Dr. Takahashi, MD, PhD, is a dermatologist in Oregon.
What I’m Reading Now
And wild, wild sings the bird. – Mary Oliver
The New Yorker: How to Live Forever, The simplest, most foolproof way to extend life is to do so backward, by adding years in reverse, by David Owen
The New York Times: A.I. Is Learning What It Means to Be Alive, Given troves of data about genes and cells, A.I. models have made some surprising discoveries. What could they teach us someday? By Carl Zimmer
MIT Technology Review: Scarlett Johansson Says OpenAI Ripped Off Her Voice for ChatGPT, In a scorching statement, Scarlett Johansson claims that after she turned down an invitation to voice ChatGPT, OpenAI brazenly mimicked her distinctive tones anyway, by Will Knight
Psychology Today: Can Ketamine Improve Treatment-Resistant Depression? A study explores ketamine's brain effects, aiding depression treatment research, by Bill Haseltine
Wired: The First Person to Receive a Pig Kidney Transplant Has Died, by Emily Mullin
Wired: Welcome to the Age of Technofeudalism, In Yanis Varoufakis’ latest book, the former Greek finance minister argues that companies like Apple and Meta have treated their users like modern-day serfs, by Morgan Meaker
That’s it! Thanks for reading.