Neuroscience today can not explain how a man whose speaking voice has become so hesitant – whose memory of events, people and places has largely disappeared – with the sound of a musical tone can uplift his voice with such beauty and expression, except to say that music and song, as Levitin remarked, emerge from parts of the brain that are very different from those associated with speech and language. The powerful feelings released by music can connect listeners with their deep emotional memories, even those that are inaccessible to the conscious mind.
And so it went for the next hour with a miraculous concert that was literally a gift for an observer and a walk across memory.
“How’s the Duke Ellington tune?” Musician said – and immediately Tony’s voice drifted to the ceiling like notes of a sweet muffled trumpet.
“In my loneliness,” he sang, “You haunt me / With terrible ease / From days gone by. / In my loneliness / You taunt me / With memories / Who never die.”
On ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams’, the first single he cut in 1950 in Columbia, Tony, at the age of 23, ended the song with a full bel-canto window rattle – and surprisingly, he now rendered it: ‘… and dance next to the boulevaaaaaahd of brooooooken dreams! On ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ he raised his voice gently, just as he did in his beautiful recording in 1965, and in the uptempo ‘The Lady’s in Love With You’ he moved briefly through the intricate lyrics as if it were skater. He ends his version of ‘Smile’ (‘… although your heart breaks …’) with a long drawn ‘smiiiiiiiiile’ that made Susan use an expression that Tony wanted to say when he did the final version of ‘ nailed a song: “Right in there,” she said. Musician shakes his head in surprise, looks at Tony and slams his fist against his heart.
“That’s it,” he tells Tony. ‘The heart.’
“Every time,” Tony said – his first spontaneous oral response of the afternoon. As the rehearsal continued, he traded increasingly short conversations back and forth with Musiker. At the end of an exciting “When You’re Smiling” Musician jokingly alluded to their audience of three people over 3 million people. “Actually,” he added, “did you once say that even one person – remember that, said it years ago?”
“Oh, yes,” Tony said.
“If there’s one person in the club,” Musiker said.
“Then you really give it to him,” Tony said. “It’s really intimate that way.”
Later, when I was talking to Musician about what makes Tony special, he said: ‘Proper vocal training and an innate sense of a musician, not an innate sense of a singer. Like an instrumentalist, he hears everything. Strikes me out constantly. Then the complete honesty and love. ”
The music that is often miraculous in reconnecting dementia patients to family and friends, memory and the past is sadly temporary. Lucidity, memory, conversation can linger for a few minutes. But for those who yearn for the old connection, who desperately miss the spark of animation in a loved one, this brief glimpse of the person they knew comes across these fleeting connections as a blessing. For Susan, the obvious pleasure Tony enjoys singing is a precious gift. “I wish he kept his painting, but it doesn’t beat like the song.” The charcoal landscape on his donkey was a rarity, she said. But not the singing. Not yet. “Singing is everything to him,” Susan told me as I was packing to leave. ‘Everything. It has saved his life many times already. Many times. Through divorces and things. If he ever stops singing, then we will know … ‘Her voice touched, she stopped.
Two days earlier, actor Sean Connery had died of dementia at the age of 90. Connery’s widow said that in his last months he was unable to communicate, but that he happily slipped away quietly in his sleep. “I hope so with Tony,” Susan told me. ‘Hopefully he’s only going to sleep one night, and that will be it. I hope and pray that he will not make a turn that is bad. “She pauses for a moment. Then she smiled. “There’s a lot I miss,” she said. “Because he’s no longer the old Tony.” Once again, her voice caught on and she looked down. Then she mastered herself, looked up at me and smiled. “But if he sings, he’s the old Tony.”