(Music) (Applause)
(音乐) (掌声)
Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. It's a distinct privilege to be here.
非常感谢。(掌声) 谢谢。能在这里演出是我的荣幸。
A few weeks ago, I saw a video on YouTube of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords at the early stages of her recovery from one of those awful bullets. This one entered her left hemisphere, and knocked out her Broca's area, the speech center of her brain. And in this session, Gabby's working with a speech therapist, and she's struggling to produce some of the most basic words, and you can see her growing more and more devastated, until she ultimately breaks down into sobbing tears, and she starts sobbing wordlessly into the arms of her therapist. And after a few moments, her therapist tries a new tack, and they start singing together, and Gabby starts to sing through her tears, and you can hear her clearly able to enunciate the words to a song that describe the way she feels, and she sings, in one descending scale, she sings, "Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine." And it's a very powerful and poignant reminder of how the beauty of music has the ability to speak where words fail, in this case literally speak.
几个星期前,我在YouTube上看到一段视频 女性众议员Gabrielle Giffords 因为受伤而接受治疗 她受伤的原因是被子弹打中。 一颗打中她的左脑半球, 进入布洛克区,那是大脑的语言中枢区域。 在治疗初期, Gabby找一位语言治疗师 她要说简单的字也很困难 你可以看到 她感觉越来越绝望,到最后 她奔溃了,眼泪掉了下来 她在治疗师的怀抱中无言地呜咽 过了一会儿,治疗师尝试新的方法 他们一起唱起歌来 Gabby 唱起歌,就不哭了 可以听到她清晰的发音 这首歌的歌词正好描述了她的心情 她不停的唱,用下降的音调,不停唱着 "让它闪烁,让它闪烁,让它闪烁。" 这件事有力地提醒我们, 美妙的音乐可以表达的 是语言无法做到的,我指的是说话的语言。
Seeing this video of Gabby Giffords reminded me of the work of Dr. Gottfried Schlaug, one of the preeminent neuroscientists studying music and the brain at Harvard, and Schlaug is a proponent of a therapy called Melodic Intonation Therapy, which has become very popular in music therapy now. Schlaug found that his stroke victims who were aphasic, could not form sentences of three- or four-word sentences, but they could still sing the lyrics to a song, whether it was "Happy Birthday To You" or their favorite song by the Eagles or the Rolling Stones. And after 70 hours of intensive singing lessons, he found that the music was able to literally rewire the brains of his patients and create a homologous speech center in their right hemisphere to compensate for the left hemisphere's damage.
Gabby Giffords的视频让我想到 Gottfried Schlaug博士的研究 他是哈佛最德高望重的神经学家之一,研究音乐和大脑 Schlaug支持一个治疗方法 那就是旋律语调疗法,是现在很流行的音乐疗法。 Schlaug 发现他中风的病人失语了, 无法组成3个字或4个字的句子 但他们仍然能唱歌曲的歌词 可能是"祝您生日快乐" 或他们钟爱的老鹰乐队或滚石乐队的歌曲。 经过70小时密集的歌唱课程 他发现音乐真的可以在病人大脑中 建立新的连接,在右半脑中 建立类似语言中枢的区域 来弥补左半球的伤害
When I was 17, I visited Dr. Schlaug's lab, and in one afternoon he walked me through some of the leading research on music and the brain -- how musicians had fundamentally different brain structure than non-musicians, how music, and listening to music, could just light up the entire brain, from our prefrontal cortex all the way back to our cerebellum, how music was becoming a neuropsychiatric modality to help children with autism, to help people struggling with stress and anxiety and depression, how deeply Parkinsonian patients would find that their tremor and their gait would steady when they listened to music, and how late-stage Alzheimer's patients, whose dementia was so far progressed that they could no longer recognize their family, could still pick out a tune by Chopin at the piano that they had learned when they were children.
我 17 岁时,参观了 Schlaug 博士的实验室 那天下午,他给我简单介绍了在音乐和大脑方面 最领先的研究结果— — 音乐家和非音乐家 的大脑结构完全不同 音乐和聆听音乐是如何 开启我们整个脑部, 范围包括前额叶到小脑 音乐是如何应用到神经精神方法中 来帮助自闭症儿童,以及生活在 压力、焦虑、犹豫中的人 听音乐时,帕金森病患者会感到 抽搐减轻了,行走更稳定了 末期老人痴呆病人的痴呆程度发展到 他们无法认出自己的家人 可是却能够在感情上演奏萧邦的曲子 这是他们还是孩子时学习的曲子
But I had an ulterior motive of visiting Gottfried Schlaug, and it was this: that I was at a crossroads in my life, trying to choose between music and medicine. I had just completed my undergraduate, and I was working as a research assistant at the lab of Dennis Selkoe, studying Parkinson's disease at Harvard, and I had fallen in love with neuroscience. I wanted to become a surgeon. I wanted to become a doctor like Paul Farmer or Rick Hodes, these kind of fearless men who go into places like Haiti or Ethiopia and work with AIDS patients with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, or with children with disfiguring cancers. I wanted to become that kind of Red Cross doctor, that doctor without borders. On the other hand, I had played the violin my entire life.
我拜访Schlaug时,带着另一个的动机 那时 我正处于人生的十字路口, 需要在音乐和医学之间做出选择。 我刚刚完成了我的本科,开始工作 担任Dennis Selkoe的研究助理 他在哈佛研究帕金森症,我深爱神经科学 我想成为一名外科医生。 生像Paul Farmer或Rick Hodes那样的医生 他们是无畏的人,前往海地、埃塞俄比亚那样的地方 帮助得了抗药性肺结核的艾滋病人, 或是帮助 我想成为红十字会医生, 无国界医生 另一方面,我一生都在演奏小提琴
Music for me was more than a passion. It was obsession. It was oxygen. I was lucky enough to have studied at the Juilliard School in Manhattan, and to have played my debut with Zubin Mehta and the Israeli philharmonic orchestra in Tel Aviv, and it turned out that Gottfried Schlaug had studied as an organist at the Vienna Conservatory, but had given up his love for music to pursue a career in medicine. And that afternoon, I had to ask him, "How was it for you making that decision?"
激情不足以形容我对音乐的痴迷。 它是氧气。我非常幸运 在曼哈顿茱莉亚音乐学院学习 我的处女秀在特拉维夫,和祖宾 · 梅塔和和特拉维夫以色列爱乐乐团同台 其实Gottfried Schlaug 曾经在维也纳音乐学院学研究管风琴专业 但他放弃了对音乐的热爱,致力医学事业 那天下午,我不得不问他, "您是如何作出这个决定的?"
And he said that there were still times when he wished he could go back and play the organ the way he used to, and that for me, medical school could wait, but that the violin simply would not. And after two more years of studying music, I decided to shoot for the impossible before taking the MCAT and applying to medical school like a good Indian son to become the next Dr. Gupta. (Laughter) And I decided to shoot for the impossible and I took an audition for the esteemed Los Angeles Philharmonic. It was my first audition, and after three days of playing behind a screen in a trial week, I was offered the position. And it was a dream. It was a wild dream to perform in an orchestra, to perform in the iconic Walt Disney Concert Hall in an orchestra conducted now by the famous Gustavo Dudamel, but much more importantly to me to be surrounded by musicians and mentors that became my new family, my new musical home.
他说,有好几次,他希望自己能回去 像以前一样演奏管风琴 对我来说,医学院可以先等等 但小提琴不可以等 两年的音乐学习后,我决定 我要去考MCAT, 像是一个印度好孩子一样,申请医学院 要成为下一个古普塔博士。(笑声) 我决定挑战不可能的事 我报名了著名洛杉矶爱乐乐团的甄选。 这是我第一次甄选,在试演的礼拜 我在幕后演奏了三天,最后我得到了乐团的工作 那像一场梦。那是一个狂野的梦 在交响乐团演奏,在圣殿级的沃尔特 · 迪斯尼音乐厅演奏 由著名的Gustavo Dudamel指挥的乐团中演出, 更重要的是,围绕在我身边的是 即将成为我新的家人的音乐家和导师 我的音乐之家
But a year later, I met another musician who had also studied at Juilliard, one who profoundly helped me find my voice and shaped my identity as a musician. Nathaniel Ayers was a double bassist at Juilliard, but he suffered a series of psychotic episodes in his early 20s, was treated with thorazine at Bellevue, and ended up living homeless on the streets of Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles 30 years later. Nathaniel's story has become a beacon for homelessness and mental health advocacy throughout the United States, as told through the book and the movie "The Soloist," but I became his friend, and I became his violin teacher, and I told him that wherever he had his violin, and wherever I had mine, I would play a lesson with him.
但一年后,我遇到了另一位音乐家 他也曾就读茱莉亚,他帮助了我很多 帮我找到自己的琴声,和音乐家的个性 Nathaniel Ayers曾经在茱莉亚学习双重贝斯, 但是在他 20 岁出头时,他患上一系列精神问题 需要服用贝尔维,作为镇静剂治疗 此后的30年中,他在洛杉矶市中心 Skid Row 的街头无家可归 Nathaniel的故事已成为整个美国 帮助流浪者和精神健康运动的典型例子 在《独奏者》这本书和同名电影讲的就是他的故事 但我成了他的朋友,还是他的小提琴老师, 我告诉他,无论何处,只要他带着他的琴 我带着我的琴,我就会给他上课,
And on the many times I saw Nathaniel on Skid Row, I witnessed how music was able to bring him back from his very darkest moments, from what seemed to me in my untrained eye to be the beginnings of a schizophrenic episode. Playing for Nathaniel, the music took on a deeper meaning, because now it was about communication, a communication where words failed, a communication of a message that went deeper than words, that registered at a fundamentally primal level in Nathaniel's psyche, yet came as a true musical offering from me. I found myself growing outraged that someone like Nathaniel could have ever been homeless on Skid Row because of his mental illness, yet how many tens of thousands of others there were out there on Skid Row alone who had stories as tragic as his, but were never going to have a book or a movie made about them that got them off the streets? And at the very core of this crisis of mine, I felt somehow the life of music had chosen me, where somehow, perhaps possibly in a very naive sense, I felt what Skid Row really needed was somebody like Paul Farmer and not another classical musician playing on Bunker Hill.
很多次,我在Skid Row看到Nathaniel, 我亲眼目睹了音乐如何把他 从最黑暗的时期,拯救回来 那是在我这个没受训练的人看来 他像是精神分裂症的前期。 为Nathaniel的演奏,音乐有了更深一层的含义, 因为它像是沟通 这个沟通无法用语言传达, 信息比语言到达地更深层, 达到了Nathaniel的心灵中真我的层次 对我来说,也是音乐真正的馈赠 我发现自己对流浪者的现象越来越气愤, Nathaniel因为精神疾病无家可归, 像他一样,Skid Row里成千上百的人 独自流浪街头 他们之所以流浪,也有背后悲惨的故事, 但没能写成书,拍成电影 在我人生危机最急迫的时候, 我感到,音乐人生选择了我, 或许可能很天真的意义上来说, 我觉得Skid Row真正需要的是Paul Farmer那样的医生 而不是Bunker Hill的古典音乐家。
But in the end, it was Nathaniel who showed me that if I was truly passionate about change, if I wanted to make a difference, I already had the perfect instrument to do it, that music was the bridge that connected my world and his.
但最终,是Nathaniel告诉了我 我是否真的要转到另一个领域 如果我要选择换一条路,我已经有最好的工具帮助我 那就是音乐,连接着我和他世界的桥梁。
There's a beautiful quote by the Romantic German composer Robert Schumann, who said, "To send light into the darkness of men's hearts, such is the duty of the artist." And this is a particularly poignant quote because Schumann himself suffered from schizophrenia and died in asylum. And inspired by what I learned from Nathaniel, I started an organization on Skid Row of musicians called Street Symphony, bringing the light of music into the very darkest places, performing for the homeless and mentally ill at shelters and clinics on Skid Row, performing for combat veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder, and for the incarcerated and those labeled as criminally insane.
有一句美丽的名言 是德国浪漫派作曲家罗伯特·舒曼说的 “用光照亮人们内心的黑暗,” “这是艺术家的责任。” 其实这句名言的背后也有残酷的故事 因为舒曼自己受精神分裂症煎熬, 最后在庇护所去世 我从Nathaniel那里学到的东西驱使我 开始组建一个由Skid Row 流浪音乐家组成的组织 称为“街交响乐团”,为的是用音乐之光 照亮最黑暗的地方, 为Skid Row庇护所和诊所中的无家可归者和精神病人表演 为患有创伤后遗症的退伍老兵表演 为在监狱里服刑,为那些 有犯罪精神问题的人表演
After one of our events at the Patton State Hospital in San Bernardino, a woman walked up to us and she had tears streaming down her face, and she had a palsy, she was shaking, and she had this gorgeous smile, and she said that she had never heard classical music before, she didn't think she was going to like it, she had never heard a violin before, but that hearing this music was like hearing the sunshine, and that nobody ever came to visit them, and that for the first time in six years, when she heard us play, she stopped shaking without medication.
我们去圣贝纳迪诺巴顿州立医院表演 结束后,一名女子走到我们跟前 泪珠顺着她的脸留下来, 她患有麻痹症,会不停地在颤抖, 她笑得很灿烂,她告诉我们, 她之前从没通过古典音乐, 她觉得自己不会喜欢, 没有我们的话,她永远不会听到小提琴,但我们的音乐像是阳光一般, 之前从未有人来过,这是六年来的头一次 她听到我们的演奏,即使没有服药,她停止了颤抖。
Suddenly, what we're finding with these concerts, away from the stage, away from the footlights, out of the tuxedo tails, the musicians become the conduit for delivering the tremendous therapeutic benefits of music on the brain to an audience that would never have access to this room, would never have access to the kind of music that we make. Just as medicine serves to heal more than the building blocks of the body alone, the power and beauty of music transcends the "E" in the middle of our beloved acronym. Music transcends the aesthetic beauty alone. The synchrony of emotions that we experience when we hear an opera by Wagner, or a symphony by Brahms, or chamber music by Beethoven, compels us to remember our shared, common humanity, the deeply communal connected consciousness, the empathic consciousness that neuropsychiatrist Iain McGilchrist says is hard-wired into our brain's right hemisphere. And for those living in the most dehumanizing conditions of mental illness within homelessness and incarceration, the music and the beauty of music offers a chance for them to transcend the world around them, to remember that they still have the capacity to experience something beautiful and that humanity has not forgotten them. And the spark of that beauty, the spark of that humanity transforms into hope, and we know, whether we choose the path of music or of medicine, that's the very first thing we must instill within our communities, within our audiences, if we want to inspire healing from within.
突然间,我们找到了演奏会 舞台,灯光,燕尾服 音乐家成为强大的治疗渠道 把有利于治疗的音乐传送到 听众的大脑里 这些听众以前是不可能听到 我们演奏的这种音乐 这样的音乐就像良药 它的治愈效果不仅仅是修补身体 它的力量和美超越了“E” “E”是我们敬爱的人的首字母缩写中间的那个字母 音乐超越了单独的审美 听到瓦格纳的歌剧、勃拉姆斯的交响乐,或贝多芬的室内乐 会体验到步调一致的感情,· 这必定会唤起我们的记忆 那是我们共享的共通的人性, 互相紧密意识联结,和同情心 根据神经心理学家Iain McGilchrist,以上这些 在我们的右脑中是天生的 那些在最差的条件下生活的 患有精神疾病的流浪汉和监狱犯人 音乐和音乐的美 提供他们机会,看到他们世界以外的东西 让他们知道,他们任由能力体验 美妙的事物,社会没有遗忘他们 音乐的美,人性的美的火花 转化成希望 我们知道,无理论我们选择音乐事业, 或医学事业,首要一点是 我们渗透到我们的社区和观众中 这样才能启发从内而外治疗
I'd like to end with a quote by John Keats, the Romantic English poet, a very famous quote that I'm sure all of you know. Keats himself had also given up a career in medicine to pursue poetry, but he died when he was a year older than me. And Keats said, "Beauty is truth, and truth beauty. That is all ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know." (Music) (Applause)
我要用英国浪漫诗人约翰·济慈的一句名言 结束我的演讲 我相信你们都知道这句著名的名言 济慈当年同样放弃了医学事业 投生诗歌创作,但他去世的年纪,比我现在的年龄大一岁 济慈说,"美是真理,真相是美。 这是你们所知道的地球,和你们需要知道的全部。 (音乐) (掌声)