Jump to content

Gabriela Montero


mjzee

Recommended Posts

The November 2019 edition of BBC Music Magazine has a profile of Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Montero.  I had never heard of her before.  She was one of those freakishly talented prodigies.  She loves to improvise, much as in a jazz way, but within the classical idiom.  There is a video of her performance of the Haydn D minor Concerto when she was 9.  She does an encore that's an improvisation (begins at the 7 minute mark):

 

I found this interesting, from the article:

In recent times, she and McElroy (her husband) have been on a journey of discovery.  A neuroscientist in Baltimore, Dr. Charles Limb, has been exploring the changes in Montero's brain during improvisation.  McElroy describes the challenge: "What we're trying to find out is whether or not in Gaby's particular case her brain functions differently when she plays memorized music as opposed to improvised music.  For the experiment, she was given instructions in 30-second random bursts to play a pre-designated memorized piece of music - and then to switch as soon as she was asked to do so by the computer to the improvised state.  So, in other words, her environment didn't change.

"What Limb actually saw was that Gaby's auditory cortex, which processes sound - and which you'd expect to be on fire if you're creating in the moment - was closing down or switching off.  It was sort of getting out of the way.  So Dr. Limb then had to ask the question, "Well, if the normal systems are not being used then what is being used?"  And so they created a 3D model of Gaby's brain through the computer and sliced through it until they found some sort of activity.

"In fact, they found a huge amount of activity in her visual cortex - a firework display of activity during the improvised process.  She was looking at music and seeing it as a landscape in a way that some mathematicians view numbers."

But Montero says that this does not reflect her own thinking, so Limb has concluded that the pianist's visual cortex is co-opted to help with the complicated business of improvising, in the way that a laptop can be made more powerful by using an extra graphics card, for example.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...