NONFICTION - Nov. 22, 1992

MUSIC AND THE MIND by Anthony Storr (Free Press: $22.95; 206 pp.). Enamored with music (“it is an irreplaceable, undeserved, transcendental blessing”) British psychiatrist Anthony Storr clearly yearns to find a connection between it and his own life pursuit--the study of the mind. But after enlisting every discipline from philosophy to medicine in his search, Storr is forced to concede that music, like the heart, may affect us too intangibly to be understood through intellectualizations: “The brain operates in mysterious ways which are not under voluntary control: we must sometimes let it alone if it is to function at its best.” Rather than the pioneering scientific work it initially promises to be, then, this book ultimately becomes a love letter to what Storr sees as a “fixed point of reference in an unpredictable world . . . a source of reconciliation, exhilaration, and hope.” While on the way to that romantic conclusion, though, Storr’s bold, broad-minded inquiry--the sort we haven’t seen much of since the late 19th Century--manages to unravel a few of music’s secrets. Storr sees music as a kind of medicine, a balm against the most ubiquitous of human maladies: the sense that the world is chaotic and unpredictable: “(Music) is a paradigm of the fundamental human organizing activity . . .: to seek unity in the midst of diversity or order in the midst of complexity.”

While Storr’s notion of music as medicine is highly intriguing, one suspects he goes overboard in presenting it as a panacea. He hails it, for instance, as the great social emollient (it “simultaneously coordinates the emotions of a group of people”) but also as a spur to self-discovery (it taps “the wellsprings of creative fantasy which make life worth living”). Music, of course, can be both, but Storr, so in love with this art, doesn’t seem to see that it also can be neither. Hitler’s use of Wagner, for instance, hardly encouraged individualism. The arts, it seems, can be a force for social good only when they are thought about as well as felt--a lesson brought home in an observation from Goya quoted in, of all places, Anthony Storr’s 1972 book, “Human Destructiveness”: “Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of their marvels.”