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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

TT: Make me smile

October 10, 2006 by Terry Teachout

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.

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Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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