This week I’ve been re-reading sections of Oliver Sacks’s 2007 book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain in which the neuroscientist delves into the science behind his long-term interest in music. As Sacks said last October at Frederick P. Rose Hall, where Musicophilia was awarded an ASCAP-Deems Taylor award, since he was about 5 years old he has had two loves: Bach and smoked salmon. Sacks, now 75, reports that both of these preferences have been remarkably consistent over time.

Finding out why we have the musical preferences we do is just one of the investigations of Nova: Musical Minds, which airs this month and was inspired by that book. read more

It seems like it’s been raining forever in New York, but recently, the showers stopped long enough for me to try out the city’s latest amenity: The High Line park running along Tenth Avenue. Rising 30 feet into the air, the park has been created out of an old railway trestle built in the 1930s to carry freight from the old Pennsylvania Yards on West 34th Street to the Meatpacking district laying 1.45 miles to the south. In its current configuration, the park, which takes its cues from a similar project in Paris called the Promenade Plantée, extends nine blocks, from Gansevoort Street to West 17th street; eventually, it will continue north as West 30th Street, if not all the way to Javits Center.

I must confess here that my visit was motivated by more than just civic curiosity. In the 1980s, I used to work near the High Line, back when it was an abandoned stretch of rusting steel, sheltering transexual hookers as they plied their trade to motorists heading for the Lincoln Tunnel. I’d often stop to admire its poetry of riveted steel, wondering what the view from up there must be like. Later, in the early ’90s, news that then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani wanted to tear the High Line down was quit upsetting to me, as I’d assumed something of a proprietary interest in it. I was just as relieved a few years later when a group of concerned citizens, inspired in part by photographer Joel Sternfeld’s wonderful book, Walking The High Line, rallied to save the structure, and convince the newly elected mayor, Michael Bloomberg to transform it into its current form. read more

Keigwin + Company and nicholas leichter dance, two very appealing New York-based companies, take over the Joyce the week of June 23, alternating dates through Sunday the 28th. Both groups, led by accomplished choreographers who are unafraid to experiment, have tremendous popular appeal. Coincidentally, Nicholas Leichter and Larry Keigwin happen to be among the most riveting performers of our time; both will dance with their respective companies. What’s more, if you go to one or both, you’ll have fun.

Leichter, who founded his company in 1996, infuses his dances with an irrepressible musicality and freely blends wildly disparate dance styles. Recently, he has choreographed to compositions by Debussy and Stravinsky; at the Joyce, in the premiere of Killa, he returns to pop music. Leichter’s work can be enjoyed on many levels—of course, purely on the sensory level, but audiences can also look for a conceptual underpinning there for the mining. read more

Why do we hear music the way we do? Why do human beings make music in the first place? Are its various components things that can even be explained by science? These were topics covered in just one of the events, “Notes and Neurons: In Search of the Common Chorus,” at this year’s five-day World Science Festival from June 10 to 14. The festival was packing them in at events on topics like fMRI brain research, dark energy, quantum mechanics, microbiology, and behavioral science. Many of the presentations were affairs bringing together experts from diverse fields to bring their joint creative focus to commuter traffic, the earth’s atmospheric levels of CO2, and the question of nothingness.

So judging from the sellout response, New Yorkers are pretty interested in science—as entertainment, anyway, with renowned scientists mixing it up with Hollywood actors and poets and journalists and Juilliard-trained musicians in a sort of cross-cultural musico-scientific extravaganza. read more

Machines machines machines machines machines machines machines  is garbage. Literally. The set appears to be largely composed of bits of string and rope, junk from the attic, parts of old tools recombined into bionically repurposed ones, thrift shop furniture, and cardboard sets made futuristic with discarded calculator keypads. In this dismal economy, the show—a production of rainpan 43 and Here Arts Center, where it runs through June 27—reflects parsimonious resourcefulness to the extreme. The pseudonymous heart of the show are Rube Goldbergian inventions that are used (or attempted to be used) to perform mostly banal tasks. Hilarity definitely ensues. read more