As I was soaring through the skies of Pennsylvania the other day, my iPod served up Leopold Stokowski’s 1937 recording of Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (not currently available on CD, alas). You may know it as the piece to which Mickey Mouse nearly drowned in Fantasia. No sooner did it start playing than I broke out in a broad grin. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice always does that to me–and did so long before I ever saw Fantasia. It’s one of the many pieces of music that has the mysterious power to make me happy.
Readers of this posting will recall that I’ve been reading Daniel J. Levitin’s This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. Among the many tasty tidbits of research-derived fact tucked into its pages is this delicious nugget:
The nucleus accumbens (NAc) is the center of the brain’s reward system, playing an important role in pleasure and addiction. The NAc is active when gamblers win a bet, or drug users take their favorite drug. It is also closely involved with the transmission of opioids in the brain, through its ability to release the neurotransmitter dopamine. Avram Goldstein had shown in 1980 that the pleasure of music listening could be blocked by administering the drug nalaxone, believed to interfere with dopamine in the nucleus accumbens….
The rewarding and reinforcing aspects of listening to music seem, then, to be mediated by increasing dopamine levels in the nucleus accumbens, and by the cerebellum’s conribution to regulating emotion through its connections to the frontal lobe and the limbic system. Current neuropsychological theories associate positive mood and affect with increased dopamine levels, one of the reasons that many of the newer antidepressants act on the dopaminergic system. Music is clearly a means for improving people’s moods. Now we think we know why.
To which I reply: I thought so. I’ve always found music to be one of the most potent means of attitude adjustment known to man, and now science has proved it. Ha!
All of which inspires me to pass along this list of things to which I listen whenever I feel the urgent need to upgrade my mood:
Debussy’s L’isle joyeuse
Stan Kenton’s recording of Gerry Mulligan’s “Young Blood”
Bernstein’s Candide Overture
Wild Bill Davison’s 1943 recording of “That’s A-Plenty” (turned up very loud)
Luciana Souza’s “Doce de Coco” (from Brazilian Duos)
Noël Coward’s “Uncle Harry”
Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Lookin’ Out My Back Door”
The Band’s “Up on Cripple Creek”
Elgar’s Cockaigne Overture
The finale to Fauré’s incidental music to Shylock (George Balanchine used it in Emeralds)
The John Kirby Sextet’s “It Feels So Good”
Buddy Rich’s 1966 live recording of “Love for Sale”
Booker T. and the MGs’ “Hip Hug-Her”
Gershwin’s An American in Paris
Shostakovich’s Festive Overture
Johnny Cash’s “Hey Porter”
Deidre Rodman and Steve Swallow’s “Famous Potatoes”
Copland’s “Buckaroo Holiday” (from Rodeo)
Jelly Roll Morton’s “Wolverine Blues” (with Baby and Johnny Dodds)
The Who’s “Shakin’ All Over” (from Live at Leeds)
The finale of Hindemith’s Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes of Carl Maria von Weber
Blossom Dearie’s “If I Were a Bell” (the version on Winchester in Apple Blossom Time)
The Dixieaires’ “Joe Louis Was a Fighting Man”
Donald Fagen’s “Morph the Cat”
Sidney Bechet’s 1932 recording of “Maple Leaf Rag”
Doc Watson’s “Let the Cocaine Be”
Lee Wiley’s “You’re a Sweetheart”
Sergio Mendes’ 1966 recording of “Mais Que Nada” (not the icky hip-hop remake, eeuuww!)
Wesla Whitfield’s “Lucky to Be Me”
Mendelssohn’s Rondo capriccioso
The Dominoes’ “Sixty Minute Man”
Stephen Sondheim’s “A Weekend in the Country” (from A Little Night Music)
The first movement of Mozart’s A Major Piano Concerto, K. 488
Frank Sinatra’s “Witchcraft”
Steely Dan’s “My Old School”
Walton’s Crown Imperial (as played by Frederick Fennell and the Eastman Wind Ensemble)
Flatt and Scruggs’ “Farewell Blues”
Stan Getz and Bob Brookmeyer’s “Open Country”
The first movement of Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto
R.E.M.’s “Radio Free Europe”
The Beatles’ “Revolution”
Bill Monroe’s “Rawhide”
The first movement of Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony
Johann Strauss’s Fledermaus Overture
Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Three little maids from school are we” (from The Mikado)
Django Reinhardt’s “Swing 42”
Pretty much anything by Count Basie, Erroll Garner, Fats Waller, Haydn, or John Philip Sousa
The sound of Louis Armstrong’s voice
I don’t guarantee results, but all of the items on this list can be counted on to give me a cheap, easy high–with no side effects.