Slow death by music and art

Around 1979 all the talk in Mumbai was about a sizzling sexy lady called Bo Derek The movie was called 10 and it popularised the use of the 10point scale for rating female sexiness as in Shes a perfect 10 manBo Derek was a perfect 10 and in the movie love blossoms between Jenny Hanley Bo and an unlikely podgy middleaged but cute composer called George Webber British comedian Dudley Moore I remember the movie for several reasons not least of them the havoc Bo Derek played in our steamy adolescent mindsI remember it for the haunting composition Boleacutero by French composer and conductor Maurice Ravel which was the background score to which Jenny and George first have sex Hear it here httptinyurlcomme9jjx7I remember it for the legendary Dudley Moore whose hilarious routines with Peter Cooke had given me many a laugh Decades later in 2015 I remembered it again when my mother lost her life to Progressive Supranuclear Palsy the same disease Dudley Moore died of in 2002 and the topic of my last column httpstinyurlcomyafufdsz Towards the end of their lives both Moore and my mother could not speak at all but just stared into nothing faces frozen in grimacesMore recently I learned another odd thing towards the end of his life Maurice Ravel composer of Boleacutero had complete lost the ability to speak He had been growing progressively absentminded since 1932 and got worse after a head blow in an accident that year Neurologists thought the mishap might have aggravated an existing brain disorder which they conjectured might be either frontotemporal dementia Alzheimers disease or CreutzfeldtndashJakob diseaseThings get weirder For the final link in this bizarre story we meet Anne Adams a Canadian artist who used to teach chemistry at the University of Toronto before moving to Vancouver with her husband There she raised four children and retrained as a cell biologist When her son was badly injured in a car crash in 1986 doctors said he might not walk again Anne gave up work to nurse himAt home fulltime now Anne took up painting to everyones surprise She proved breathtakingly good at it to everyones greater surprise Her gorgeous and fantastical works were built around stunning repetitive themes She would fixate on strawberries and then it would be strawberry sunrises strawberry rainand strawberries streaming out of faucetsAlex recovered fully However Anne made a surprising decision not to return to her work dedicating herself instead to fulltime painting She was successful making quite a name for herselfSometime then she heard Maurice Ravels Boleacutero and became fascinated with it Fascination grew to obsession and one day she decided to paint the music On her giant canvas called Unravelling Boleacutero each vertical figure represented a bar of music its height signifying volume and colour representing the pitch of Adams favourite note within that barLike the music the theme repeats and builds the colour evolving from orange to a crescendo of pink like the key change before Boleacuteros dramatic finaleacute It was a precise intricate workA few years later her friends noticed that Anne was growing increasingly absentminded and was having difficulty recalling her vocabulary In time she completely lost her ability to speak Exactly as happened to Maurice Ravel her creative inspirations began to ebb although the urge to paint did not In her final years she is described sitting all day in front of a large blank canvas staringAnne Adams and Maurice Ravel are believed to have been suffering from the same neurodegenerative disease Primary Progressive Aphasia PPA The haunting music and vibrant art that emerged from them are now seen as the chilling early symptoms as PPA disabled the rational verbal parts of their brainsAround 2000 when Anne was diagnosed with PPA she was referred to Dr Bruce Miller at the University of California Miller had shown that some patients with PPA develop a passion for creating art Annes MRI scans from 1997 indicate that regions of her front brain involved in processing language had already begun to degenerateAs the rational logical verbal languageoriented sections of the brain begin to die a more primitive part of the brain that had been kept in check by the rational brain begins to stir This reptile brain as it is called is driven by basic instincts and repetitive actions such as those a sparrow uses to build a nestBolero is based on a single repeating melody swelling in orchestration Annes final works consisted of endlessly repeating themes culminating with her version of Bolero When I hear that mesmerising melody today the hair on my neck stands on endHere viewed from there C Y Gopinath in Bangkok throws unique light and shadows on Mumbai the city that raised him You can reach him at cygopigmailcom Send your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomCatch up on all the latest Mumbai news crime news current affairs and also a complete guide on Mumbai from food to things to do and events across the city here Also 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