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[ Renée Fleming: "The Water is Wide/Shenandoah" ]
[Renée]: My interest in creating this project bringing together the Kennedy Center and
the National Institutes of Health was an amplifying the breadth of the work in
research and childhood development and certainly in therapies.
I noticed research coming out about the fact that music has been discovered to
be in a lot of parts of the brain and therefore it engages so much of us
I felt instinctively that not enough people knew about this work and I also
felt that it helps music in the arts maintain a place in society that they
really should have.
So, what was it like for you in that brain scanner?
Well you know it's an incredible challenge because you're not supposed to move and it was
two hours I was in the machine for two hours.
I offered myself as a guinea pig
in this fMRI experiment on music and the test was devised to try and understand
how music affects the brain in a different way so they had me singing,
imagining singing, and speaking. I chose something that I thought I could sing
13 times comfortably, and I also chose something that I thought I could have an
emotional connection to in an MRI and it was The Water is Wide.
[ Renée sings "The Water is Wide" in the MRI ]
[ Renée sings "The Water is Wide" ]
The result when you look at the pictures is that different parts of the brain are
engaged in all three cases and surprisingly, imagining singing was the
most powerful. Had the most engagement. The actual singing piece was easier but the
imagining piece took more effort. A little bit more focus more intention.
There's musical elements I think we will eventually understand to have more power
over us whether it's melody, certain harmonies, harmonic tension. You know, why
do we cry in certain music, why do certain music lift us up make us feel
joy or inspire us to action. There's a small amount of creativity and
improvisation going on in performance because that's the art of interpretation
you know how am I going to shape this line how am I going to create a color
that is particularly effective in this moment or you know how will I build the
emotional content.
[ Renée sings "The Water is Wide" ]
[ Applause ]