#307 Music and Mind with Renée Fleming and Dan Levitin
The Road to Now
Benjamin Sawyer
4.8 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 27 May 2024
⏱️ 49 minutes
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Summary
We guarantee you will feel better after listening to the Road to Now this week. We are joined by world-renowned soprano and arts/health advocate Renée Fleming and neuroscientist, cognitive psychologist and the best sell author of This is Your Brain on Music, Dan Levitin. We are discussing Renée's new book Music and Mind about how to harness the arts to improve health and wellness. The book is a collection of essays from leading Doctors, scientists, researchers, as well as artists Yo-Yo-Ma, Rhiannon Giddens, and Rosanne Cash.
Renée and Dan join Bob to discuss the history of the study of what happens to our brains when we are listening to or even thinking about music. Our guests also discuss how music and art are being used in therapy for certain illnesses and conditions and how they might effective treatments for other conditions. This is an episode you don't want to miss!
This episode was edited by Gary Fletcher.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Bob Crawford, and this is The Road to Now. |
| 0:09.0 | This week on The Road to Now, we are honored to have five-time Grammy-winning soprano and arts and health advocate Renee Fleming to talk about her new book, |
| 0:24.1 | Music in the Mind, which is a compilation that she edited together of different essays, medical |
| 0:33.5 | research, artist anecdotes. And it's the first, I think it's the first real compilation of both studied and anecdotal |
| 0:45.6 | research about the power of music on the human brain. |
| 0:49.7 | And its power to heal both emotionally and physically. |
| 0:54.8 | And we are really lucky because she brought a friend, Dan Leviton. |
| 1:02.2 | And Dan Leviton wrote a book that was very popular when I was at the Music Conservatory |
| 1:08.7 | at Winthrop University in the early 2000s. |
| 1:12.3 | And it was, Dan, just correct me if I'm wrong on this, this is your brain on music. |
| 1:16.7 | Yep. |
| 1:17.5 | And this has become a classic. |
| 1:19.9 | I mean, this has become one of those. |
| 1:22.4 | Every music student has on their shelf, they have like the Oxford Dictionary of Music, or the |
| 1:30.4 | Cambridge or the Oxford Dictionary of Music, and then next to it they have Dan's book. And I |
| 1:36.2 | bet in a couple weeks they will add Renee's book. I agree. To that musician's shelf. So I am |
| 1:43.3 | overwhelmed to have both of you here on the road to now. So welcome. |
| 1:48.5 | Thank you. Renee, during the pandemic, you and I were introduced by mutual friend. And it was because of |
| 1:58.0 | this project that you've had for some time, this study of music in the brain, |
| 2:04.5 | the connection of music in the brain. Where did this start for you? Well, for me, it started with |
| 2:11.0 | my own issues as a performer. I had stage fright and somatic pain. So pain actually would become very intense, and it didn't really |
| 2:20.0 | even matter how it manifested or where it was, but it would become extremely intense before |
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