Posted: Wednesday 2 June 2010
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Guys, you're pulling my leg. April 1st was weeks ago. Are you seriously saying that Mozart's music is being used to speed up the decomposition of sewage in a water treatment plant near Berlin?!
Apparently so. Words fail me, but I am still suspicious... how was this discovered? Did the samples in the lab where a Mozart CD was playing all day decompose faster than those in the lab where there was silence, or where the German equivalent of Radio 1 was blaring away? The mind boggles as to how this was scientifically proven...
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The official 'Mozart Effect' - ie heightened IQ after listening - may have been officially debunked, but it's no bad thing for children to grow up listening to the perfection of his music. As a pianist, I have a long and happy relationship with Mozart, starting with a First Prize at a festival playing the D minor Fantasie as a child; then a potentially disastrous memory lapse in a Sonata in another festival - a left hand chord was momentarily elusive, so I skipped four bars and continued to the end. In her summing up, the adjudicator mentioned 'two pianists who dealt with memory lapses with such aplomb' - and awarded us both a 'Highly Commended'. I bless that lady to this day.
On a visit to Mozart's Birth House in Salzburg a few years ago, the first thing that struck me was the sight of his tiny, child-size violin - a beautifully crafted instrument, a reminder that stringed instruments were part of the personal sound world he brought to piano composition, as were voice/opera and orchestra. The transparent textures and colours of his keyboard music, and its inherent drama, sometimes need to be viewed through those lenses.
Various uses of Mozart's music, from school detentions to crime deterrents, have been mentioned in the press and in the MusBook forum discussions; and who can forget the film 'Amadeus', or the scene in ' The Shawshank Redemption' where Mozart is played over the prison loudspeakers. But I will post again
this link to the buskers in Covent Garden, and the two children who succumbed to the effervescent joy of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. Is that the Mozart Effect? Bring it on...
