Building A Brain with Music – Part XXXIX

Building A Brain with Music – Part XXXIX

The First 1000 Days of Life – Article 39

It was indeed a case of love at first sound indeed! My first encounter with Acker Bilk’s ‘Stranger On The Shore’! The song was being played at a record shop near the Chairing Cross Underground Railway Station in London. I stood outside the shop for a few minutes as the melody had reached the core of my heart. I had just crossed my teens, stepped into the twenties and was really a stranger on the shore of the River Thames. I had stopped in London for a few days on my way to Glasgow in Scotland to pursue my research studies at the University there. In Glasgow also, I was going to be a stranger on the shore of River Clyde.

The year was 1962. I could easily identify with the emotion conveyed – it was so penetrating. No wonder, the song became UK’s biggest selling single of 1962. It spent more than 50 weeks on the UK chart, peaking at number two, and was the second No. 1 single in the United States by a British artist.

Now, exactly 60 years hence in 2022, when I am introduced to the ‘Stranger On The Shore’ for the second time, I am an altogether different person. I am a seasoned and experienced Human Scientist researching on the impact of music on body, brain, mind and soul. Apart from the sudden nostalgia, I have the following observations to make from altogether different angles.

Observation 1: What Emotion Does the Song ‘Stranger On The Shore’ Convey? We’ve two theory versions on human emotions. One was proposed and popularised by the great Indian sage Bharata (200 BCE – 200 CE/500 BCE – 500 CE). He had talked and written about ‘Nava Rasas’ – nine emotions. These are: Sringaram (love, attractiveness); Hasyam (laughter, mirth, comedy); Karunyam (compassion, mercy); Bibhatsam (disgust, aversion); Bhayankaram (horror, terror); Veeram (courage, valour); Adbhuta (surprise, wonder); Shantam (peace, tranquility). There is no place here for ‘sadness’ which Acker Bilk wanted to convey through his musical piece. Nevertheless, we find it included in the battery of six basic emotions proposed by Paul Ekman (born in 1934 - formerly prof. emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco) based on his worldwide research: fear, anger, joy, SADNESS, disgust & surprise.

The song was, apparently, addressed to the musician’s little daughter – but why – was it his emotional outburst after the loss of a dear one or was it his SOUL singing based on its last life’s experience – I could not figure out from my internet search.

Observation 2: The song reflects ‘sadness’ – a negative emotion, the place of which according to the authentic research by Prof. Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA, is in the ‘Right Brain (RB)’ of right-handed people. If an ECG recording is done when we listen to this song, I suppose RB activity will be observed as it carries a message of unhappiness – just like it happens when we listen to the great composer Ananda Shankar’s (who died young) ‘Missing You’ which he composed in memory of his renowned dancer-choreographer father Uday Shankar – the elder brother of maestro late Pt. Ravi Shankar. Both the musical scores evoke RB activity.

Observation 3: If listening to ‘The Stranger On The Shore’ makes you cry – brings even a few drops of tears into your eyes, then it would have released the neuro-chemical ‘Endorphin (E)’ inside your brain. ‘E’ is our endogenous pain-killer and stress-reliever. You must have noticed that even after a loss or some misery, a few moments of crying make us feel light, taking away the heaviness of sorrow. Was it the purpose of Acker Bilk, I wonder? Did he want us to use this song as a pain-killer?

Experiment 1: If my observation 3 stands to be valid, then why don’t you do a little experiment? Listen to this song a few times so that your eyes turn wet – when you have trivial aches and pains like toothache, headache, stomach ache, inflammatory muscle or joint pain and the like. Whether it will work in the case of chronic pains like migraine or ‘Irritable Bowels Syndrome (IBS)’ or arthritic pain, is yet to be seen.

Why Acker Bilk (1929 – 2014) took up playing the clarinet? He learnt to play this wind instrument in the Army at the age of 18 – and fell in love with the sound. His instrument had no reed. He attributed his distinctive vibrato sound to a pair of childhood accidents. He lost part of a finger in a sledding accident, and two teeth in a fight in school. His juvenile loss did become gain for us – his listeners. He was addicted to smoking. However, a heart attack at the age of 47 compelled him to give up the bad habit. In 1999, he was diagnosed with throat cancer. He fought back to continue performing around the world after six weeks of radiotherapy. An example of TRUE PASSION indeed!!

Links have been provided to: ‘Stranger On The Shore’ by Acker Bilk (clarinet); same song by Andy Williams with lyrics and also by Roger Whiitaker; and Ananda Shankar’s ‘Missing You’

https://youtu.be/_cEr4CCtllA

https://youtu.be/OlN3mQpBngs

https://youtu.be/sFhTm6SDiXs

https://youtu.be/Tom-CkgZE_o

Acknowledgement: I thank my dear friend technical entrepreneur and music lover Indranil Roy for re-introducing the song to me after a long period of 60 years.

{References:

1. Acker Bilk – Wikipedia

2. Nava Rasas – Wikipedia

3. Paul Ekman – Wikipedia]