Unraveling Bolero

Welcome back to my blog! I’m back with another music-related post, only this time, it’s not strictly focused on a particular composer. Rather, it’s about the surprising connections that can sometimes occur between other fields and music- in this case, art and neuroscience. 

 

Let’s get into it!

 

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By all accounts, Anne Adams was a brilliant scientist. Holding degrees in physics and chemistry, she went on to get her PhD in cellular biology before taking a position as a professor at a local college. She even went on to work in cancer research, developing a new cell line that- according to her husband- is still used today. 

 

However, the trajectory of her life was forever changed after a car accident in 1986 left her son severely injured. She decided to put her career on hold in order to be able to stay home and care for him. It was during this period that she began to paint.

 

At first, it was merely a way to pass her time. After all, she hadn’t really had the opportunity to do art since high school and it was a good way to take her mind off of her son’s condition. Her artwork focused on what she saw around her, mostly landscapes and still-lifes.

 

Then she converted one of the house’s rooms into a studio.

 

Then she began spending the majority of her day in the studio. 

 

Then her son made a full recovery and resumed his previous activities. She continued to paint. 

 

Soon enough, she decided to quit science entirely and to paint full time. This time was a period of intense creativity and productivity. Whereas before her art had been rooted in reality, now it was abstract and very elaborately planned. 

 

In 1994, she began to develop an obsession with the piece “Boléro” by the French composer Maurice Ravel. It gave her the inspiration for her next project: she decided that she was literally going to paint the music. 

In order to accomplish this, she represented each measure as a rectangular figure and meticulously deconstructed the music into its elements- for example- dynamics (volume), note (as in pitch), and instrumentation (what instruments are currently playing, brass/winds/strings?). Each one of these elements was assigned a corresponding visual component: the dynamics were represented by the length of the rectangular figure and the instrumentation was depicted by silver, gold, and copper paint. Of course, there’s more than one note in the measures of Bolero, so she chose what she thought was the most interesting note in each measure and assigned it a color. For example, she assigned the note G to this Prussian blue-ish color, so for every measure where she thought that G was the most interesting note, the background color of its corresponding rectangular figure was painted blue.

 

If you listen to the piece, you’ll hear how it starts off with one quiet rhythm played by the snare drum and then gradually gets crazier and crazier as Ravel layers more instruments into the piece. It’s incredibly fascinating to see how Adams was able to capture these intricacies of the piece and translate it visually onto canvas. 

 

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By now, you’re probably thinking that this sounds a lot like synesthesia. That’s what I thought too when I first heard this story- after all, synesthesia is when one sense is stimulated but another is perceived. Perhaps she was able to hear colors?

 

While we might never know if she did have synesthesia, we do know that her obsession with art and the repetition present within Boléro was caused by something far more debilitating.

 

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By 2000, Adams began to make grammar mistakes in her speech and found it increasingly difficult to communicate. Her language capabilities only deteriorated from there. Four years later, doctors at UCSF found that she often required ten to fifteen seconds to begin to speak, and even then, she could only speak in three to four word phrases. These symptoms exhibited by Adams were first determined to be primary progressive aphasia, a disorder in which a person gradually loses the ability to comprehend or express speech. That wasn’t the full picture however, later brain scans revealed that she actually suffered from frontotemporal dementia. The cells in her frontal cortex, the part of the brain that deals with language processing, were dying- which greatly affected her speech. 

 

Since her brain was no longer able to focus on language, researchers involved in her case believe that her frontotemporal dementia caused more activity in other parts of her brain as a result. Many patients with FTD become very visually oriented but the images that they see are characterized by this repetition. While researchers don’t know why that is yet, Adams’ case is particularly interesting because her paintings provide remarkable insight into what was happening in her brain as the disorder progressed. Even though it was years before her symptoms became evident through her speech, we’re still able to tell when the disorder began affecting her brain by looking at when she began to paint these beautiful abstract, yet repetitive paintings. 

 

But wait, there’s more!

 

Maurice Ravel himself, the person who composed the piece that inspired Adams, also suffered from primary progressive aphasia and is now thought to have had FTD. 

 

Ravel was one of the pioneers of the impressionist movement in music, which is characterized by the lack of a strong rhythmic pulse and using pitches, not so that they fit into an overall chord progression, but rather because they contribute to the overall atmosphere of the music. It’s very fluid and evocative of various moods, unrestrained from the conventions and norms of Romantic music.

 

In other words, it’s the complete opposite of Boléro.

 

Instead, Boléro is very rigid and repetitive. Again, if you listen to it, you’ll hear the snare drum playing the same exact rhythm for 340 measures. That’s around 15 minutes. Within those 15 minutes, there are maybe three different melodies. 

 

Just as with Adams and “Unraveling Boléro,” we now know that the original Boléro was one of the first signs that something was not quite right with Ravel’s brain. When the condition began to affect Adams, her art changed from landscapes to these abstract depictions of concepts. When the condition began to affect Ravel, his music changed from being flowy and unrestrained to having this very metronomic quality to it. 

 

Even the time frame matches up! Six years after Ravel wrote Bolero, he began to experience aphasia symptoms and lose his ability to speak. Six years after Adams painted “Unraveling Ravel,” she began to lose her ability to speak. 

 

Here we have two people, separated by time and space, and yet connected by their shared condition and a piece of music. As the podcast Radiolab describes it, there’s a strange symmetry between them. How does that happen? What drew her to that particular piece? Was there something within Adams’ mind that recognized fragments of itself within Ravel’s music? Did Adams’ ever find out that they were connected in more ways than Boléro? I suppose we’ll never know, but I do know that her story will live in my mind for a while. 

 

Sources:

The original paper: https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/131/1/39/346188 

Podcast transcript about paper: https://radiolab.org/podcast/unraveling-bolero

Definitely check out the links above if you’re interested in this story! They do a much better job at explaining it that I could ever do.

The piece itself by Ravel: Ravel: Boléro – BBC Proms 2014 (it may or may not get stuck in your head)