Neuroscience still cannot explain how a man whose voice speaks has become so hesitant – the memory of facts, people and places has largely disappeared – can, at the sound of a musical signal , raise your voice in a song with so much beauty and expression, except to say that music and singing arise, as Levitin has pointed out, from areas of the brain quite different from those associated with speech and language. The powerful feelings released by music can connect listeners with their deep emotional memories, even those inaccessible to the conscious mind.
And so it was, for the next hour, a miraculous concert that was literally a gift for an observer and a walk down the lane of memory.
“How about Duke Ellington’s tune?” Musiker said, and then Tony’s voice floated to the ceiling like the notes of a beautiful trumpet off.
“In my loneliness,” he sang, “You pursue me / With terrible ease / Of days gone by./ In my loneliness / You mock me / Of memories / That never die.”
In “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” the first single he cut for Columbia in 1950, Tony, 23, had finished the song with a full range of bel canto, and played it surprisingly now: “… and dance along the boulevaaaaaahd of incredible dreams! ”In“ Fly Me to the Moon, ”he threw his voice softly into the air as he had done in his magnificent 1965 recording, and to the beat of“ The Lady’s in Love With You “, he moved agilely through the intricate lyrics. as if scattering. He finished his performance of” Smile “(” … even though your heart breaks … “) with a long “smiiiiiiiiiiile” that made Susan use an expression she liked to say to Tony when she nailed the final version of a song, “Right in there,” he said. Musiker shook his head in surprise, looked at Tony and punched his heart.
“That’s all,” he told Tony. “The heart.”
“Every time,” Tony said, his first spontaneous verbal reaction of the afternoon. As the rehearsal progressed, he switched more and more brief back and forth conversations with Musiker. At the end of an exciting “When You’re Smiling,” Musiker jokingly alluded to his three-person audience as 3 million people. “Actually,” he added, “did you ever say that if even one person … remember you said it years ago?”
“Oh, yes,” Tony said.
“If there’s one person in the club,” Musiker said.
“Then, he really gives it up,” Tony said. “It’s very intimate that way.”
Later, when I spoke to Musiker about what makes Tony special, he told me, “Proper vocal training and the musician’s innate sense, not the singer’s innate sense. As an instrumentalist, I feel it all. It makes me out constantly. Then complete honesty and love. ”
The way, often miraculous, of recognizing music with family and friends, memory, and the past, is, unfortunately, temporary. Lucidity, memory, conversation can last for a few minutes. But for those who yearn for the old connection, who desperately miss the spark of animation in a loved one, even these brief visions of the person they knew, these fleeting connections, come as a blessing. For Susan, the obvious pleasure Tony enjoys singing is a beautiful gift. “I’d like him to continue his painting, but that hasn’t stayed the same as singing.” He said the easel’s charcoal landscape was rare. But not singing. Not yet. “Singing is all for him,” Susan told me, as she packed her bags to leave. “All. It has saved his life many times. A lot of times. Through divorces and things. If he never stops singing, then that’s when we’ll know … His voice caught on and stopped.
Two days earlier, actor Sean Connery had died, at age 90, of dementia. Connery’s widow said that in her last months she had not been able to communicate, but that, fortunately, she had escaped quietly during sleep. “I’m looking forward to this with Tony,” Susan told me. “We hope he goes to bed one night and that’s it. I have hope and prayer not to take a turn for the worse, this is really crazy. He was silent for a moment. Then he smiled. “I find a lot of things I miss,” he said. “Because he’s no longer old Tony.” Once again, his voice caught on and he looked down. Then she controlled herself, looked me up and smiled. “But when he sings, it’s old Tony.”