Even today, neuroscience cannot explain how a man whose speaking voice has become so hesitant – whose memory of events, people, and places has largely disappeared – can raise his voice in song with such beauty at the sound of a musical signal. and expression, except to say that music and song, as Levitin has pointed out, arise from areas of the brain that are distinctly different from those related to speech and language. The powerful feelings released by music can connect listeners to their deep emotional memories, even those that are inaccessible to the conscious mind.
And so it went, for the next hour, a wonderful concert that was, quite literally, a gift to a spectator and a walk through memories.
“What about Duke Ellington’s tune?” Musiker said – and immediately Tony’s voice soared to the ceiling like notes from a nice muffled trumpet.
“In my loneliness,” he sang, “You haunt me / With awful ease / From days gone by / In my loneliness / You taunt me / With memories / That never die.”
On Boulevard of Broken Dreams, the first single he made for Columbia, in 1950, Tony, at the age of 23, had finished the song with a full bel canto window rattle – and amazingly, he was now reproducing it: … and dance along the boulevaaaaaahd of brooooooken dreams! On ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ he let his voice gently into the air, just as he had in his beautiful 1965 recording, and on the up-tempo ‘The Lady’s in Love With You’ he moved deftly through the complicated lyrics. as if they were scatting. He ended his rendition of “Smile” (“… though your heart breaks …”) with an elongated “smiiiiiiiiiiile” that made Susan use a phrase Tony liked to say when he finished of a song, “Right in there,” she said. Musiker shook his head in surprise, looked at Tony, and hit his heart with a fist.
“This is it,” he said to Tony, “the heart.”
“Every time,” said Tony – his first spontaneous verbal response of the afternoon. As the rehearsal progressed, he increasingly switched short conversations back and forth with Musiker. At the end of a rousing “When You’re Smiling”, Musiker jokingly alluded to their audience of three people as 3 million people: “Actually,” he added, “you once said that if there was only one person – know remember saying this years ago? “
“Oh yes,” said Tony.
“If there’s one person in the club,” said Musiker.
“Then you really give it to him,” said Tony. “It’s really intimate like that.”
Later, when I spoke to Musiker about what makes Tony special, he said, “Good vocal training and the innate feel of a musician, not the innate feel of a singer. As an instrumentalist he hears it all. I’m constantly knocked out. Then the complete honesty and love. “
The often miraculous way in which music can reconnect dementia patients with family and friends, the memory and the past, is unfortunately temporary. Lucidity, memory, and conversation can linger for a few minutes. But for those who crave the old connection, who desperately miss the spark of animation in a loved one, even this brief glimpse of the person they knew, these fleeting connections, come as a blessing. For Susan, the obvious pleasure Tony gets from singing is a precious gift. “I wish he would continue painting, but that’s not true like singing.” The charcoal landscape on his easel, she said, was a rarity. But not the singing. Not yet. “Singing is everything to him,” said Susan, as I was packing to leave. “Everything. It has saved his life many times. Many times. From divorces and stuff. If he ever stops singing, we’ll know …” Her voice faltered and stopped.
Two days earlier, the actor Sean Connery had died of dementia at the age of 90. Connery’s widow said he hadn’t been able to communicate in his last months, but luckily he’d slipped quietly in his sleep. “I hope so with Tony,” Susan said to me. ‘Hopefully he will only go to sleep once and that’s that. I hope and pray he won’t take a bad turn. “She paused. Then she smiled.” There’s a lot about him that I miss, “she said.” Because he’s not the old Tony anymore. “Her voice stopped again and she looked down. Then she controlled herself, looked up at me and smiled. “But when he sings, he’s the old Tony.”