Alexia Without Agraphia in a Composer

Abstract

A 77-year-old composer had a left occipital lobe haemorrhagic infarct giving a severe reading disturbance with well-preserved writing and without appreciable aphasia. He continued to read music and to compose. His text- and music-reading performance under different conditions suggests that this unusual dissociation was primarily due to four factors. (1) He was unusually talented musically and inferred a great deal about the music he was reading. (2) The symbols of staff music notation are more visually distinctive than the symbols of phonetic language writing systems. (3) In staff music notation, pitch is represented ordinally, and other symbols are also distinguishable by their relative positions and sizes. (4) Music notation can be usefully read by interpreting it acoustically, kinaesthetically or in terms of formal musical concepts; in contrast to written language, it need not be interpreted referentially or in terms of auditory-verbal images. His disorder fits the classic visual-verbal disconnection account of alexia without agraphia and the contemporary view that music involves a family of related but distinct skills probably involving many brain areas in both hemispheres, although different cortical areas make characteristic contributions to different musical behaviours.

Mapping the musician brain

“…These findings do not appear to be inconsistent with neurological evidence obtained from braindamaged musicians [see Judd et al, 1983, for a detailed review], even if some authors have reported no dissociation between verbal and musical reading. The requirements of sight-reading, although they differ from those of verbal reading, comprise a series of processes and transformations that are not altogether unlike those of verbal reading (mapping visual and auditory representations; translating the outcome of visual analysis into information suitable for motor production).…”

“…Some authors have inquired whether, and in what way, verbal text reading and musical note reading differ from one another by examining the pattern of dissociations in neurological patients with musical expertise who have become alexics [e.g., Souques and Baruk, 1930;Brust, 1980;Judd et al, 1983;Signoret et al, 1987;Fasanaro et al, 1990;Stanzione et al, 19901. No consensus has emerged from such investigations, and this area of research is characterized by the same inconsistencies that are observed in the neuropsychological study of music.…”

“…No consensus has emerged from such investigations, and this area of research is characterized by the same inconsistencies that are observed in the neuropsychological study of music. Some authors suggest that verbal and musical reading rely on the same processes and neural structures [e.g., Fasanaro et al, 1990;Stanzione et al, 19901 while others, on the basis of clear dissociations between verbal and musical reading, reached the opposite conclusion [e.g., Souques and Baruk, 1930;Judd et al, 1983;Signoret et al, 19871. Although these studies clarify some of the issues, they do not speak to the actual cognitive architecture of musical sight-reading that must be specified to understand functional-structural mapping.…”

Processing pitch and duration in music reading: a RT–ERP study

“…Pitch and temporal information are represented in western modern notation differently one from the other. The diasthematics (from Greek diasthema: interval) of staff notation, that is the pitch dimension, is in part ordinal and in part intervallic [22]. It is ordinal in the way higher notes are represented proportionally higher on the staff.…”

The Influence of Brain Lesion on Musical Masterpieces of Famous Composers

“…Finally, as the preserving or deterioration of the composition competence after cerebral lesion, vascular or degenerative, the composers described in the previous literature are rare [11,13,[16][17][18][19][20].…”