Music | War in Context

BBC News reports: Listening to new music is rewarding for the brain, a study suggests.

Using MRI scans, a Canadian team of scientists found that areas in the reward centre of the brain became active when people heard a song for the first time.

The more the listener enjoyed what they were hearing, the stronger the connections were in the region of the brain called the nucleus accumbens.

The study is published in the journal Science.

Dr Valorie Salimpoor, from the Rotman Research Institute, in Toronto, told the BBC’s Science in Action programme: “We know that the nucleus accumbens is involved with reward.

“But music is abstract: It’s not like you are really hungry and you are about to get a piece of food and you are really excited about it because you are going to eat it – or the same thing applies to sex or money – that’s when you would normally see activity in the nucleus accumbens.

“But what’s cool is that you’re anticipating and getting excited over something entirely abstract – and that’s the next sound that is coming up.” [Continue reading…]

America can make very few claims to have made lasting contributions to global culture that are quintessentially American. But nothing is more American than jazz.

It’s ironic then that nowadays nowhere has a more vibrant jazz scene than Norway — thanks in part to a very un-American concept: public funding.

NPR: Did you hear about the Italian gallery owner who burned his gallery’s paintings last year — with the cooperation of the painters? It was a sort of desperate smoke signal to his government; a means of protesting funding cuts. If there haven’t been similar protests in the U.S. lately, it could be because we’re used to declining arts funding.

In today’s strained environment for arts support, the funding wonderland of Norway can incite jealousy. Yes, Norway is an oil-rich country; it also allots a respectable percentage of its oil wealth to pioneering art, making it a model for exactly what well-spent money for the arts can engender.

Especially in jazz. Public support has helped the country’s improvised-music scene expand from a handful of artists in the late ’60s to a thriving network of recording, performing and educational opportunities today. It’s not perfect, of course; I’ll address some chinks in Norway’s funding armor. But the country’s improvised music flourishes largely on public support. [Continue reading…]

And for those unfamiliar with Norwegian jazz, here’s a sampling of work by some of its leading figures:

Arve Henriksen — ‘Hyperborean’