Richard Perry/The New York Times

He Parked His BarreIn Harvard YardWhat could top 23 years of ballet stardom? Damian

Woetzel chose a heavy course load and a master’s thesis.

By DANIEL J. WAKIN

BOSTON

DURING a recent morning class at its stately

brick building in the South End, the BostonBallet had a visitor whose swept-back hair,high cheekbones and long triangle facewould be quickly recognizable to most bal-

letomanes. He positioned himself at the barre in a cor-ner and, as a pianist played, he slid his foot out and in,out and in: the basic ballet movement called tendu.

9:45 A.M.The room was filled with about 60 dancers. Several

of the company’s stars — Larissa Ponomarenko, Car-los Molina, Karine Seneca, Erica Cornejo — were gath-ered near the man, who kept the beat of the music bytapping his wedding ring on the barre. The visitor wasDamian Woetzel, a popular and virtuosic principaldancer with New York City Ballet who has been a reg-ular visitor these last few months. At breaks, he chat-ted amiably with members of the company and tookhis turns with everyone else in the back of the linewhen the class moved to the center of the room.

Before the class was over, he was off to the first offour other classes he had that day — not at a dance stu- Continued on Page 30

Damian Woetzel,City Ballet’s seniormale principal,says that he willretire by themiddle of 2008.By then he willhave completed 23years at thecompany.

dio but at the John F. Kennedy School of Governmentat Harvard. Since autumn 2005 Mr. Woetzel had beenstudying there for a master’s degree in public adminis-tration while continuing to dance, passing daily be-tween contrasting universes: the Boston Ballet and theKennedy School, the physical world of the barre andthe cerebral arena of the lecture hall. It was an unusualcombination, and it produced a punishing schedule.

10:45 A.M.During a break he slips out and changes from his

dance costume of black fleece jacket, Harvard Busi-ness School workout pants and ballet slippers to hisMr. Preppy costume: white button-down shirt, graycashmere sweater, neat jeans and dark-brown suedeshoes. Six minutes later, holding a coffee cup, Mr.Woetzel strides out to his Honda Pilot S.U.V. and drivesoff for Harvard, NPR playing on the radio.

Music Of theHemispheres

By CLIVE THOMPSONMONTREAL

“Listen to this,” Daniel Levitin said. “Whatis it?” He hit a button on his computer keyboardand out came a half-second clip of music. It wasjust two notes blasted on a raspy electric guitar,but I could immediately identify it: the openinglick to the Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar.”

Then he played another, even shorter snip-pet: a single chord struck once on piano. Again I

could instantly figure out what it was: the firstnote in Elton John’s live version of “Benny andthe Jets.”

Dr. Levitin beamed. “You hear only onenote, and you already know who it is,” he said.“So what I want to know is: How we do this? Whyare we so good at recognizing music?”

This is not merely some whoa-dude epiph-any that a music fan might have while listeningto a radio contest. Dr. Levitin has devoted his ca-reer to exploring this question. He is a cognitivepsychologist who runs the Laboratory for MusicPerception, Cognition and Expertise at McGillUniversity in Montreal, perhaps the world’sleading lab in probing why music has such an in-tense effect on us.

“By the age of 5 we are all musical experts,so this stuff is clearly wired really deeply intous,” said Dr. Levitin, an eerily youthful-looking49, surrounded by the pianos, guitars and enor-mous 16-track mixers that make his lab lookmore like a recording studio.

This summer he published “This Is YourBrain on Music” (Dutton), a layperson’s guide tothe emerging neuroscience of music. Dr. Levitinis an unusually deft interpreter, full of strikingscientific trivia. For example we learn that ba-bies begin life with synesthesia, the trippy confu-sion that makes people experience sounds as

Images from an experiment to locate the neural regions of the brain involved in listening to music. Daniel Levitin and another scientistscanned the brains of 13 people as they listened to scrambled and unscrambled versions of a tune.

Continued on Page 26

Are our brains wired for sound? Oneprofessor has provocative theories, and they

started with Blue Öyster Cult.

Images courtesy of Vinod Menon (Stanford University) and Daniel Levitin (McGill University)

Sunday, December 31, 2006

By JESSE GREEN

AT Frank E. Campbell’s funeral chapel on

Madison Avenue two weeks ago,friends and colleagues gathered to re-member the actor Peter Boyle, whodied on Dec. 12 at 71. Acquaintances

told stories about his impishness, his artfulness,his liberal fervor. Judy Collins sang “AmazingGrace.”

In the pews Patricia Heaton couldn’t stopsobbing. For the nine seasons she had playedDebra Barone on the sitcom “Everybody LovesRaymond,” Mr. Boyle had played her Neander-thal father-in-law. They passed much of theirdowntime jousting about politics.

More conservative than he, she would callhim a “pinko flag-burning Commie.” He wouldcounter, “So tell me about this Christian God ofyours.” Feeling unarmed for such battles, RayRomano, the show’s star, said he usually hustledoff “to see what the new doughnut was at thecraft table.” He needn’t have. Their differenceswere serious, but the jibes were good-natured:tokens of closeness, not distance. And now hewas gone. And not just him. In the nearly twoyears since “Raymond,” one of America’s most

popular television shows, went off the air, a lot ofthe former givens have disappeared. ABC toyedwith but chose not to broadcast a new sitcom Ms.Heaton developed; a documentary that she pro-duced (and that her husband, David Hunt, di-rected) had trouble finding a distributor.

“It was like I had been the queen of a planetwhere everyone loved me and did everything Iasked, and suddenly I was back home on Earth,”she said with a laugh over breakfast recently. “Iwasn’t worshiped anymore.”

She was speaking, in part, about the instantdowngrading of her self-image from celebritymother to plain old mom, complete with soccerschedules and puky laundry. (She and Mr. Hunthave four boys: 13, 11, 9 and 7.) But she was alsospeaking about the difficulty of finding satisfying

Not Everyone

Loves Patricia

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Patricia Heaton, a star of “The Scene” at Sec-ond Stage, isn’t reluctant to speak her mind.

Continued on Page 4

Her faith-based politics

make her controversial,

but she just wants life

after sitcom heaven.

INSIDE

31WATCHING THE DETECTIVES

How is a fingerprint analyst like an art

expert? Hint: Neither needs science.

34THE NEWEST APPRENTICES

Donald Jr. and Ivanka Trump were hired.

But they weren’t sure they wanted the job.

28LPS IN A SINGLES WORLD

The album is dead. Long live the album in

concert.

4THEATER

7FILM26

MUSIC

30DANCE

31ART34

TELEVISION

Sxxx,2006-12-31,AR,001,Bs-4C,E1

26 AR THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, DECEMBER 31, 2006

smells or tastes as colors. Or that the cerebel-lum, a part of the brain that helps govern move-ment, is also wired to the ears and producessome of our emotional responses to music. Hisexperiments have even suggested that watchinga musician perform affects brain chemistry dif-ferently from listening to a recording.

Dr. Levitin is singular among music scien-tists for actually having come out of the musicindustry. Before getting his Ph.D. he spent 15years as a record producer, working with artistsranging from the Blue Öyster Cult to ChrisIsaak. While still in graduate school he helpedStevie Wonder assemble a best-of collection; in1992 Dr. Levitin’s sensitive ears detected thatMCA Records had accidentally used third-gener-ation backup tapes to produce seven Steely DanCDs, and he embarrassed the label by disclosingit in Billboard magazine. He has earned ninegold and platinum albums, which he tucks in cor-ners of his lab, office and basement at home.“They look a little scary when you put them all inone place, so I spread them around,” he said.

Martin Grant, the dean of science at McGill,compares Dr. Levitin’s split professional per-sonality to that of Brian Greene, the pioneeringstring-theory scientist who also writes mass-market books. “Some people are good populariz-ers, and some are good scientists, but not usuallyboth at once,” Dr. Grant said. “Dan’s actuallycutting edge in his field.”

Scientifically, Dr. Levitin’s colleagues cred-it him for focusing attention on how music af-fects our emotions, turf that wasn’t often cov-ered by previous generations of psychoacous-ticians, who studied narrower questions abouthow the brain perceives musical sounds. “Thequestions he asks are very very musical, veryconcerned with the fact that music is an art thatwe interact with, not just a bunch of noises,” saidRita Aiello, an adjunct professor in the de-partment of psychology at New York University.

Ultimately, scientists say, his work offers anew way to unlock the mysteries of the brain:how memory works, how people with autismthink, why our ancestors first picked up instru-ments and began to play, tens of thousands ofyears ago.

DR. LEVITIN originally became inter-

ested in producing in 1981, when hisband — a punk outfit called the Mor-tals — went into the recording studio.None of the other members were in-

terested in the process, so he made all the deci-sions behind the board. “I actually became a pro-ducer because I saw the producers getting allthe babes,” he said. “They were stealing themfrom the guitarists.” He dropped out of college towork with alternative bands.

Producers, he noted, were able to notice im-possibly fine gradations of quality in music.Many could identify by ear the type of amplifiersand recording tape used on an album.

“So I started wondering: How was the brainable to do this?” Dr. Levitin said. “What’s goingon there, and why are some people better thanothers? And why is music such an emotional ex-perience?” He began sitting in on neuroscienceclasses at Stanford University.

“Even back then, Dan was never satisfiedwith the simple answer,” said Howie Klein, a for-mer president of Reprise and Sire Records. “Hewas always poking and prodding.”

By the ’90s Dr. Levitin was disenchantedwith the music industry. “When they’re droppingVan Morrison and Elvis Costello because theydon’t sell enough records,” he said, “I knew itwas time to move on.” Academic friends per-suaded him to pursue a science degree. They betthat he would have good intuitions on how to de-sign music experiments.

They were right. Traditionally music psy-chologists relied on “simple melodies they’dwritten themselves,” Dr. Levitin said. Whatcould that tell anyone about the true impact ofpowerful music?

For his first experiment he came up with anelegant concept: He stopped people on the streetand asked them to sing, entirely from memory,one of their favorite hit songs. The results wereastonishingly accurate. Most people could hit thetempo of the original song within a four-percentmargin of error, and two-thirds sang within asemitone of the original pitch, a level of accura-cy that wouldn’t embarrass a pro.

“When you played the recording of themsinging alongside the actual recording of theoriginal song, it sounded like they were singing

along,” Dr. Levitin said.It was a remarkable feat. Most memories

degrade and distort with time; why would popmusic memories be so sharply encoded? Per-haps because music triggers the reward centersin our brains. In a study published last year Dr.Levitin and group of neuroscientists mapped outprecisely how.

Observing 13 subjects who listened to classi-cal music while in an M.R.I. machine, the scien-tists found a cascade of brain-chemical activity.First the music triggered the forebrain, as it an-alyzed the structure and meaning of the tune.Then the nucleus accumbus and ventral teg-mental area activated to release dopamine, achemical that triggers the brain’s sense of re-ward.

The cerebellum, an area normally associat-ed with physical movement, reacted too, re-sponding to what Dr. Levitin suspected was thebrain’s predictions of where the song was goingto go. As the brain internalizes the tempo,rhythm and emotional peaks of a song, the cere-bellum begins reacting every time the song pro-duces tension (that is, subtle deviations from itsnormal melody or tempo).

“When we saw all this activity going on pre-cisely in sync, in this order, we knew we had thesmoking gun,” he said. “We’ve always knownthat music is good for improving your mood. Butthis showed precisely how it happens.”

The subtlest reason that pop music is so fla-vorful to our brains is that it relies so strongly ontimbre. Timbre is a peculiar blend of tones inany sound; it is why a tuba sounds so differentfrom a flute even when they are playing thesame melody in the same key. Popular perform-ers or groups, Dr. Levitin argued, are pleasingnot because of any particular virtuosity, but be-cause they create an overall timbre that re-mains consistent from song to song. That qualityexplains why, for example, I could identify evena single note of Elton John’s “Benny and theJets.”

“Nobody else’s piano sounds quite like that,”he said, referring to Mr. John. “Pop musicians

compose with timbre. Pitch and harmony are be-coming less important.”

Dr. Levitin dragged me over to a lab com-puter to show me what he was talking about.“Listen to this,” he said, and played an MP3. Itwas pretty awful: a poorly recorded, nasal-sounding British band performing, for some rea-

son, a Spanish-themed ballad.Dr. Levitin grinned. “That,” he said, “is the

original demo tape of the Beatles. It was re-jected by every record company. And you cansee why. To you and me it sounds terrible. ButGeorge Martin heard this and thought, ‘Oh yeah,I can imagine a multibillion-dollar industry builton this.’

“Now that’s musical genius.”

THE largest audience that Dr. Levitinhas performed in front of was 1,000people, when he played backup sax-ophone for Mel Tormé. Years of beingonstage piqued Dr. Levitin’s interest in

another aspect of musical experience: watchingbands perform. Does the brain experience a liveperformance differently from a recorded one?

To find out, he and Bradley Vines, a gradu-ate student, devised an interesting experiment.They took two clarinet performances and playedthem for three groups of listeners: one thatheard audio only; one that saw a video only; andone that had audio and video. As each group lis-tened, participants used a slider to indicate howtheir level of tension was rising or falling.

One rapid, complex passage caused tensionin all groups, but less in the one watching and lis-tening simultaneously. Why? Possibly, Dr. Lev-itin said, because of the performer’s body lan-guage: the clarinetist appeared to be relaxedeven during that rapid-fire passage, and the au-dience picked up on his visual cues. The reversewas also true: when the clarinetist played in asubdued way but appeared animated, the peoplewith only video felt more tension than those withonly audio.

In another, similar experiment the clarinet-ist fell silent for a few bars. This time the view-ers watching the video maintained a higher levelof excitement because they could see that he wasgearing up to launch into a new passage. The au-dio-only listeners had no such visual cues, andthey regarded the silence as much less exciting.

This spring Dr. Levitin began an even moreinvolved experiment to determine how muchemotion is conveyed by live performers. In Aprilhe took participants in a Boston Symphony Or-chestra concert — the conductor Keith Lockhart,

five of the musicians and 15 audience members— and wired them with sensors to measure theirstate of arousal, including heart rate, bodymovements and muscle tension.

At one point during the performance Mr.Lockhart swung his wrist with such force that asensor attached to his cuff went flying off. Dr.Levitin’s team tried to reattach it with duct tape,until the conductor objected — “Did you just putduct tape on an Armani?” he asked — and light-er surgical tape was used instead.

The point of the experiment is to determinewhether the conductor creates noticeablechanges in the emotional tenor of the perform-ance. Dr. Levitin says he suspects there’s a dom-ino effect: the conductor becomes particularlyanimated, transmits this to the orchestra andthen to the audience, in a matter of seconds. Mr.Lockhart is skeptical. “As a conductor,” he said,“I’m a causatory force for music, but I’m not acausatory force for emotion.” But Dr. Levitin isstill crunching the data.

“It might not turn out to be like that,” hesaid, “But wouldn’t it be cool if it did?”

Dr. Levitin’s work has occasionally under-mined some cherished beliefs about music. Forexample recent years have seen an explosion of“Baby Mozart” videos and toys, based on theidea — popular since the ’80s — that musical andmathematical ability are inherently linked.

But Dr. Levitin argued that this could not betrue, based on his study of people with Williamssyndrome, a genetic disorder that leaves peoplewith low intelligence. Their peak mental capaci-ties are typically those of young child, with noability to calculate quantities. Dr. Levitin onceasked a woman with Williams to hold up herhand for five seconds; she left it in the air for aminute and a half. “No concept of time at all,” hesaid, “and definitely no math.”

Yet people with Williams possess unusuallyhigh levels of musical ability. One Williams boyDr. Levitin met was so poorly coordinated hecould not open the case to his clarinet. But oncehe was holding the instrument, his coordinationproblems vanished, and he could play fluidly.Music cannot be indispensably correlated withmath, Dr. Levitin noted, if Williams people canplay music. He is now working on a study thatcompares autistics — some of whom have ex-cellent mathematical ability, but little musicalability — to people with Williams; in the longrun, he said, he thinks it could help shed light onwhy autistic brains develop so differently.

Not all of Dr. Levitin’s idea have been easilyaccepted. He argues, for example, that music isan evolutionary adaptation: something that mendeveloped as a way to demonstrate reproductivefitness. (Before you laugh, consider the sex livesof today’s male rock stars.) Music also helpedsocial groups cohere. “Music has got to be usefulfor survival, or we would have gotten rid of ityears ago,” he said.

But Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist atHarvard known for his defense of evolutionarypsychology, has publicly disparaged this idea.Dr. Pinker has called music “auditory cheese-cake,” something pleasant but not evolutionarilynutritious. If it is a sexual signal for reproduc-tion, then why, Dr. Pinker asked, does “a 60-year-old woman enjoy listening to classical musicwhen she’s alone at home?” Dr. Levitin wrote anentire chapter refuting Dr. Pinker’s arguments;when I asked Dr. Pinker about Dr. Levitin’s bookhe said he hadn’t read it.

Nonetheless Dr. Levitin plugs on, and some-times still plugs in. He continues to perform mu-sic, doing several gigs a year with DiminishedFaculties, a ragtag band composed entirely ofprofessors and students at McGill. On a recentDecember afternoon members assembled in acampus ballroom to do a sound check for theirperformance that evening at a holiday party.Playing a blue Stratocaster, Dr. Levitin croonedthe Chris Isaak song “Wicked Game.” “I’m not agreat guitarist, and I’m not a great singer,” hesaid.

But he is not bad, either, and still has thoseproducer’s ears. When “Wicked Game” ended,the bass player began noodling idly, playing thefirst few notes of a song that seemed instantly fa-miliar to all the younger students gathered.“That’s Nirvana, right?” Dr. Levitin said, cock-ing his head and squinting. “ ‘Come As You Are.’I love that song.”

MUSIC

Music of the Hemispheres: Wired for Sound

Stuart McCall/Getty Images, for The Boston Globe

Continued From Page 1

Daniel Levitin,above, is the raremusic scientist tohave worked inthe musicbusiness. “Popmusicianscompose withtimbre,” he said.“Pitch andharmony arebecoming lessimportant.” Leftand below, imagesthat show thebrain reacting tomusic.

Figures and detail courtesy of Vinod Menon (Stanford University)

‘Music has got to be

useful for survival, or

we would have gotten

rid of it years ago.’

Sxxx,2006-12-31,AR,026,Bs-4C,E1