Radiolab22 Mai 2018

Unraveling Bolero

This week, we're throwing it back to an old favorite: a story about obsession, creativity, and a strange symmetry between a biologist and a composer that revolves around one famously repetitive piece of music.

Anne Adams was a brilliant biologist. But when her son Alex was in a bad car accident, she decided to stay home to help him recover. And then, rather suddenly, she decided to quit science altogether and become a full-time artist. After that, her husband Robert Adams tells us, she just painted and painted and painted. First houses and buildings, then a series of paintings involving strawberries, and then ... "Bolero."

At some point, Anne became obsessed with Maurice Ravel's famous composition and decided to put an elaborate visual rendition of the song to canvas. She called it "Unraveling Bolero." But at the time, she had no idea that both she and Ravel would themselves unravel shortly after their experiences with this odd piece of music. Arbie Orenstein tells us what happened to Ravel after he wrote "Bolero," and neurologist Bruce Miller helps us understand how, for both Anne and Ravel, "Bolero" might have been the first symptom of a deadly disease.

Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate.

Unravelling Bolero: progressive aphasia, transmodal creativity and the right posterior neocortex

Arbie Orenstein's Ravel: Man and Musician

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(670)

23 Weeks 6 Days

When Kelley Benham and her husband Tom French finally got pregnant, after many attempts and a good deal of technological help, everything was perfect. Until it wasn't. Their story raises questions tha...

11 Sep 1h 3min

60 Words

We’re coming up on the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and it had us thinking about an episode we produced in 2014. It’s the story of one sentence, written in the hours after September 11th, 200...

4 Sep 58min

Dolly Parton's America: Sad Ass Songs

The world lost a legend recently, and we wanted in some small way to pay tribute to the great Dolly Parton. So we’re playing you an episode from a series we had a small part in back in 2017, Dolly Par...

28 Aug 1h 4min

Patient Zero

The greatest mysteries have a shadowy figure at the center—someone who sets things in motion and holds the key to how the story unfolds. In epidemiology, this central character is known as Patient Zer...

21 Aug 51min

Nigel and the Real Gannet

In 2016, Chris Bell, a ranger with New Zealand’s Department of Conservation, was the sole human inhabitant of a small island off the west coast of the country, called Mana Island. He was there to take...

14 Aug 25min

Red Herring

It was the early '80s, the height of the Cold War, when something strange began happening off the coast of Sweden. The navy reported a mysterious sound deep below the surface of the ocean. Again, and ...

7 Aug 36min

The Shoe Thrower

When no one seems to be listening, how far do you go to be heard? In December 2008, George W. Bush made a surprise visit to Baghdad for a press conference. And at the very end of his remarks, a shoe c...

31 Jul 1h 17min

Return of Alpha Gal

Several years ago, in 2016, we told a story about Amy Pearl. For as long as she could remember, Amy loved meat in all its glorious cuts and marbled flavors. And then one day, for seemingly no reason, ...

24 Jul 55min