[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. Robert, you wanna say your name?

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm just, ah, not yet. Let's just be quiet for a second. She's good! Who is this?

JAD: Well, okay. I feel like I should say Robert Krulwich is your name.

ROBERT: Yes, that's my name. Who is this person?

JAD: This is Juana Molina. This is one of my all-time favorite musicians of all time. It's worth saying all time twice, because she actually—she's in a special category for me. And, like, you know, more broadly, you know how, like, music is a really important part of Radiolab.

ROBERT: It is.

JAD: Right?

ROBERT: Yes.

JAD: I feel like this—this—the show is as much a musical expression of ideas as it is ...

ROBERT: Anything else.

JAD: Anything else. And so in this episode what I want to do is I want to basically present a couple of the musicians that have inspired the sound of this show, 'cause I love them, and also I feel like they are amazing and you perhaps will love them too. And also tell you a story.

ROBERT: Okay, but let's do this one now. This person.

JAD: So let me make space here.

JAD: Okay. So I spoke with her recently as she was in town to play a gig at this club called Le Poisson Rouge.

ROBERT: Le Poisson Rouge. The red fish.

JAD: Yep. And she told me her backstory. It's kind of interesting. She started out as a musician, taking piano lessons and guitar lessons, trying to be a performer. It wasn't really working out at that point, so she needed a job. And she wasn't really sure what to do, but she knew she was always good at impressions.

JUANA MOLINA: That's something I could always do. And it was easy for me just to impersonate characters. And then ...

JAD: People that you knew or just ...

JUANA MOLINA: People like stereotypes. Or, I don't know if it's stereotypes or archetypes. Both. I mean ...

JAD: That's interesting stuff.

JUANA MOLINA: Yeah. And then one day I was looking for a job that gave me enough money to play music. And I thought TV was the best option.

JAD: You went to TV to help pay for music?

JUANA MOLINA: Mm-hmm.

JAD: What she did was she went over to the local TV station, somehow convinced them to give her a job reporting fake news, sort of like The Daily Show. And eventually, she got her own show called Juana y sus Hermanas, which means Juana and her Sisters. It was sort of a comedy show.

JUANA MOLINA: It was just sketches.

JAD: How long did that go for?

JUANA MOLINA: Three years. At the beginning, it worked very well because I had money and I could pay my rent and my guitar lessons. But then I got big.

JAD: She became a huge hit.

JAD: Was it the kind of situation where you'd walk down the street and be recognized?

JUANA MOLINA: Yeah.

JAD: Much to her dismay, oddly. Suddenly she was an actress, not a musician. And as she puts it, her life got out of hand. But then she got pregnant.

JUANA MOLINA: I got pregnant and I needed to stay in bed. And so I had time to think about my life and realized that I had totally missed my goal. It was just that I didn't want to miss it. I didn't want to die and not having done what I wanted to do.

JAD: So at the height of her popularity as an actress, she drops out.

JUANA MOLINA: Yeah, that's not what I wanted. I just wanted to be a musician.

JAD: So she starts playing in these little clubs, just her and her guitar. 

JAD: how did people respond?

JUANA MOLINA: Badly.

JAD: Didn't go so well. 

JUANA MOLINA: It was hell for several years.

JAD: She said she had terrible stage fright.

JAD: You're an actress. Wouldn't you be fine to be on stage?

JUANA MOLINA: It's not the same. You're acting. It's not you.

JAD: I suppose that's true, but I mean you're used to having ...

JUANA MOLINA: You don't suppose. You know. What I was doing is to impersonate people, and I was making fun of people. It was never myself, and it was horrible because it was—I don't know, I was just very scared.

JAD: So what she ended up doing was kind of going solo. You know, like, she tried to play with musicians.

JUANA MOLINA: And I didn't like anyone, and they didn't like what I was offering them either.

JAD: So essentially what she does now is she creates entire symphonies of just her. Just her, her guitar, some electronics and this looping box. She'll play a line, and then it'll loop and loop and loop, and then another line, and then a loop and loop, and they'll both be going. And then she'll add a third and a fourth and a fifth, and somewhere along the way—and this is what I love—as you're listening, you slip into this universe of Juana.

JUANA MOLINA: The thing by being on your own is that you can go deeper and deeper and deeper in your own universe and go further, further away or deeper, deeper, deeper inside.

JAD: You—when you loop yourself and you're in the middle of, like, let's say, an avalanche of one of these, singing and harmonizing, are they the same person?

JUANA MOLINA: I usually feel that the sounds tell me what to do with them. Every sound has its own behavior, at least for me. I'm just feeling like a driver of the sound.

ROBERT: It's so interesting. Like this, it feels like she's taking a bath in herself.

JUANA MOLINA: Little by little, my ridiculously small universe, it becomes huge. Anything that has a note or a rhythm, you can make music with.

JAD: Are you inspired more by a thought? Like I want to say something or ...

JUANA MOLINA: No.

JAD: No.

JUANA MOLINA: Never. There's absolutely nothing that I really want to say.

JAD: Really?

JUANA MOLINA: Really.

JAD: I mean, you have lyrics sometimes.

JUANA MOLINA: Most of the time.

JAD: So when a song pops into your head and you develop it, you're not thinking of a story, per se?

JUANA MOLINA: No, never.

JAD: But you put the story on afterwards. Why?

JUANA MOLINA: In order to be able to sing.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, "Un Dia": One day, one day, one day, one day.]

JAD: "Un Dia," the song. How did that—how did that happen?

JUANA MOLINA: I was warming up for a show and I started—I got bored and I started to play, di do di do di do di do, and it sounded like "one day." I wasn't saying one day, but it sounded like.

JAD: You didn't even have the words just yet.

JUANA MOLINA: No, but then when I was singing ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, "Un Dia": One day, one day, one day, one day.]

JUANA MOLINA: ... that just came out. "Un día voy a ser otra distinta." One day I will be someone different. So from that sentence, I could already have the whole song.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, "Un Dia": One day, one day, one day, one day.]

JUANA MOLINA: One day I will be someone different. I'll do everything I never dared to do before. I will live in the middle of the country and I will dance, dance, dance, and only dance. 

One day I will fix the back door and one day I will write songs with no lyrics so everybody just can imagine whatever they want.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, "Un Dia": One day, one day, one day, one day.]

JAD: Do you want to know something crazy? I heard that song, and I got the sense immediately of what it was without knowing the words. Just the sense of, like, a chant to your better self. You once called it like the chorus of one. Remember that?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: The thing you say to yourself when you're feeling really crappy. Well, I had that feeling from this song. So I got on her website, JuanaMolina.com, and the only fan letter I've ever written in my entire life I wrote to her. Just then, I said, "I love your music. I love this song, and can I remix it?"

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: And amazingly, her manager wrote me back and he said, “Totally, you can remix it.”

ROBERT: Really?

JAD: So I remixed the song.

ROBERT: Oh, my God! Was—was this guy—and was this guy in Buenos Aires or was—where was he?

JAD: No, it turns out he's just down the street. He was in New York.

ROBERT: Can we hear your version?

JAD: Yeah. How can I do that? Hold on. Okay, I've got it right here. Okay, so here it is. Here's a short excerpt from a remix that her manager was nice enough to let me do of her song, of Juana Molina's song, "Un Dia."

[Un Dia remix]

JAD: Okay, I want to thank Paul Dalen and Juana Molina. You can also go to JuanaMolina.com, check out her music. And I want to thank Michael Rayfield for some of the sounds used in that remix, as well as Stuart Dempsey for some of the music. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: And I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Stay tuned. We'll be back in a moment.

[LISTENER: My name is Joseph Thackert. I'm calling from Columbia, South Carolina. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

JAD: Okay. So Robert, you know that, like, talking about music in a way that's compelling can be kind of hard.

ROBERT: Very hard.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: Particularly the music you like.

JAD: Yeah, exactly! It's really hard to build a bridge. And so when people do it well, I just feel like you gotta give them props. And I just ran into a really great podcast that I think everyone should be listening to. It's called Meet the Composer. It's from Q2 Music, which is sort of the digital sister station of WQXR. And it's kind of what it sounds like. You know, every episode, they introduce you to one composer. But they do such a good job of seducing you into listening and maybe caring about music you wouldn't normally listen or care about, that I just thought, you know, I want to play some of their latest episode for you because they just focused on one of my favorite composers, a guy by the name of John Luther Adams.

ROBERT: Oh, the opera guy. John Adams?

JAD: No, no, no.

ROBERT: No?

JAD: This is John Luther Adams. Different John Adams than the other guy.

ROBERT: I've heard of John Quincy Adams, but he was a former president of the United States.

JAD: Yes. This John Adams is a composer who makes music that sort of conjures these wide open spaces that kind of invite you in, but also seem sort of indifferent to you and maybe might kill you? It has that kind of feeling to it. 

ROBERT: [laughs] I'm intrigued. Okay. So how does this begin? We're gonna meet this guy ...

JAD: It begins—so yeah, the documentary begins, and by the way, it's hosted by Nadia Sirota. It begins with John Luther Adams as a boy playing in a rock band.

NADIA SIROTA: Imagine 14-year-old John in a cover band in New Jersey. Opening for acts like Buffalo Springfield and playing predominantly ...

JOHN LUTHER ADAMS: The Three Bs.

NADIA SIROTA: Who are the Three Bs?

JOHN LUTHER ADAMS: The Beatles, The Beach Boys and the Byrds.

NADIA SIROTA: Okay!

JOHN LUTHER ADAMS: So we started out as cover bands. And I got bored with that, and so did my buddies. And over time, we started trying our hand at songwriting, and I was a big fan of Frank Zappa.

NADIA SIROTA: Frank Zappa, the teetotaling 1960s and '70s musician and polymath, with wildly eccentric tastes spanning from rock to jazz to European modernism.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Frank Zappa: Nothing gets me off as good as, you know, some contemporary classical pieces.]

JOHN LUTHER ADAMS: And on the back of Frank's early LPs there would always be this intriguing little quote, "The present day composer refuses to die." - Edgard Varèse. And my little rock and roll buddies and I would read that and scratch our heads and wonder, "Who is this Var-Easy guy?"

NADIA SIROTA: Right. [laughs]

JOHN LUTHER ADAMS: And one day my friend Dick Einhorn was rummaging through the record bins in a shop in the West Village and came across this album with this mad scientist on the cover with a great shock of electrostatic, graying hair and bushy eyebrows and stern countenance. And the title was "The Music of Edgard Varèse, Volume II." So he brought it home, and we quickly wore out the grooves. It just all sounds like a bunch of noise to me. We hear this—this desert, this ocean, this—these forbidding mountains of sound. And I remember thinking, "I'll never be able to know where I am in this. I don't know what to hang on to."

NADIA SIROTA: So your response to what is this music was just to immerse yourself?

JOHN LUTHER ADAMS: Give me more!

NADIA SIROTA: Yeah.

JOHN LUTHER ADAMS: Which has always been my response to any new experience. And I often encourage young musicians, especially young composers, you know, listen to everything you can get your ears on, especially the stuff you think you don't like. I started to realize, oh, okay, there's that repeated note on the oboe. And okay, that's a landmark. I can grab onto that. Oh, and here's this place where there's sort of a tattoo figure with the snare drums, and then these unison stabs in the rest of the percussion. Gradually, we began to learn how to listen to the forbidden deserts of Varèse.

NADIA SIROTA: Did that affect the music you guys were making?

JOHN LUTHER ADAMS: Oh, sure. It meant that the process that was already underway was just accelerated. We rapidly abandoned the one-four-five, chords and the backbeat and the four-bar phrases, and started discovering Cage and Feldman and then Caro and Pauline Oliveros and Ruth Crawford and on and on. So thank you, Frank Zappa.

JAD: I love that that was his response to music that, you know, can be defined as very alienating. I mean, Varèse is not easy stuff, but instead of just writing it off as ugly, he was like ...

ROBERT: Ugly how?

JAD: Exactly. So in any case, just to skip forward a little bit in the "Meet the Composer" hour from Q2, John Luther Adams goes off to school. He has a teacher named, I believe, it's James Tenney. It's one of his first big influences. But he goes off to school at CalArts, and right afterwards he meets one of his next big influences.

JOHN LUTHER ADAMS: I had just left CalArts. Hadn't yet gone to Alaska. And I would take long walks in the early morning and again at dusk. And I became captivated by this singer that I kept hearing deep in the woods, and I could never find the bird, but I couldn't get enough of the song. I started taking notes. The birds became my teacher after James Tenney, and the result was a series of pieces that I composed between 1974 and '79 called simply "songbirdsongs."

NADIA SIROTA: What was the translation process between hearing this bird song that you just couldn't get enough of and constructing a narrative?

JOHN LUTHER ADAMS: In working with the bird songs, I just try to take dictation. I try to listen carefully to the birds where they are as they're singing, and write down what I hear. I'm not interested in accuracy because if I were I'd just make a recording and play the recording. I'm interested in what gets lost in translation because, after all, this is music. This is perhaps a language that we will never understand.

JOHN LUTHER ADAMS: Also, there weren't very many field recordings available in those days, but there were some, and I decided, no, I'm not going to use them. I really wanted to hear them and to learn them for myself. That's actually very different from the way I work much of the time. Rather than working with very specific details of the music and then building a piece up, I usually sculpt away the whole field of sound. And I work with one big shape or image or color or atmosphere that I have in mind, that I can't quite hear but I want to hear. And try to hear that, sense that, write that down as clearly as I can, and then all the moment-to-moment details of the music follow.

JAD: We're listening to excerpts from an hour from Q2 Music from their fantastic series "Meet the Composer." This one is on the composer, one of my favorites, John Luther Adams. Now after the songbird piece, John is living in LA, and he gets kind of fed up.

JOHN LUTHER ADAMS: I hated Los Angeles. The whole time I was there I felt lost, and not in a good way. It was such an interesting contrast because it was one of the most explosive periods of my life in terms of discovery. But at the same time, there was this kind of inner gnawing, I just felt lost in the freeways and all that sprawl, that city that seemed to just go on forever. It made me long for home, which I never felt that I had because we moved all the time and I'd grown up here and there in equally homogeneous suburban surroundings. So there was this deep inarticulate hunger to find a place to which I might belong.

NADIA SIROTA: The place where Adams belonged, it turns out, was off the grid in wild, open spaces.

JOHN LUTHER ADAMS: I went north in the summer of 1975. So I was 22 that summer, 

and from the moment I arrived I knew I'd found home.

NADIA SIROTA: Hmm. When you showed up in Alaska, what did you see, what did you hear that made you feel like you knew you were home?

JOHN LUTHER ADAMS: Oh, where to begin? It all really starts in the summer of 1975 when I first canoed across Admiralty Island, went into Glacier Bay, hiked on the tundra of Denali. Eventually made my way to the Brooks Range, to the Arctic. You know there was, and still is, in those places, a sense of openness and space and possibility, as well as danger. These are big places in which we feel very, very small, and we realize that we're insignificant and the place doesn't care if we are there or not. And the weather or the bear or the river can rise up at any moment and snuff me out. And, you know, I find a certain reassurance, a certain profound comfort in that. I was trying to reconnect with the larger, older world that we still inhabit, but that we—that we forget. And Alaska allowed me to feel like I was the only person in that place.

JOHN LUTHER ADAMS: So in the summer of 1977, I visited the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and we flew over the crest of the Brooks Range and out onto the coastal plain, the Arctic coastal plain. And there in the distance was the ice, and—and of course, the sun. Even in midsummer, the sun doesn't get very high on the horizon. So there's this incredible deep, warm, saturated light, and the colors and the shadows and everything just stands out. And then you go out on the tundra and you lose all sense of scale. I remember one evening with a buddy, we were just so excited to be alive and out in that Arctic evening light. And we saw this white rock out across the tundra, and it was this odd-looking thing. I said, "Well, why don't we walk over there? Why don't we hike to that rock?" And we hiked and we hiked, and of course the tundra is not easy to walk on. But we kept walking, we kept walking and, you know, the rock didn't get any closer. So we kept walking. And then suddenly we stopped because the rock flew away.

NADIA SIROTA: Wow.

JOHN LUTHER ADAMS: The rock was a snowy owl sitting on the tundra. And it could have been a 12-foot outcropping of white stone. You just—you lose yourself in that place, in that light and in that endless space, and that's what I want in music.

NADIA SIROTA: That's so beautiful.

JAD: You know what I think about when I hear his work? I remember when I first encountered Looney Tunes, and the way that they're like, doom, doom, doom, doom, has a sort of an inherent meaning to it. It feels like falling.

ROBERT: It's the music of action. Falling, bumping.

JAD: Bumping, tiptoeing, bonking. All of these things have a kind of musical expression that feels almost like a physical language that we came into the world with and never had to learn. And when I went to music school, it was so difficult and dense because suddenly I was thrust into this world of contemporary classical composition, and it was all about understanding the rigor of serial 12-tone composition, which is like, you create these little mathematical systems that guide your choices. And I was like, "I don't know what this has to do with music. I don't understand this." And then you hear it and you're like, my ear can't pick up on it. I feel lost. You feel like you're literally in the forest. But then I encountered composers like John Luther Adams, where it wasn't about that at all. Something more primal. It was about like the movement of bodies, you know masses of sound that sort of crescendoed, decrescendoed waves.

JOHN LUTHER ADAMS: Yeah, I do think of sounds, of musical forms and events as forces, as natural elements in some way. And it may sound ridiculously grandiose, or laughably naive, but I've always imagined that I might be able to work in a space that's just outside of culture. Of course, it's patently absurd. There's no way that we work outside of culture, and these days, so many cultures. And yet, as my friend Barry Lopez, the writer, says, landscape is the culture that contains all human cultures. And I believe that everything we do, everything we think,  everything we think we create, everything we are derives from the world that we inhabit. Our language, our music, our minds, everything is shaped by this incredibly complex and wondrous world that we inhabit. So ultimately, this nature-culture, dichotomy in a way, doesn't exist. But it's been a useful conceit for me to feel that I'm after something that is not part of a musical tradition, it's not specifically cultural. It's somehow more elemental.

NADIA SIROTA: Where does music come from? How does a composer take an assignment like, write an eleven-minute piece for string quartet, and translate those instructions into a concept, into notes, into a score? For composer John Luther Adams, it seems almost like the transformation happens in his sleep.

JOHN LUTHER ADAMS: I try to resist composing for as long as I can. I really want to get at something essential before I start manipulating notes, pushing things around. I try to hold things in my mind's ear as long as I can. It's maybe an inefficient way to work, but it has worked for me. I find that if I'm trying to remember, trying to hear something that I can't quite name, it focuses my attention in a certain way. And then I finally start composing when I can't not compose, and I have to write it down.

NADIA SIROTA: I'm thinking about, like, the way that we are discovering how memory in the brain works. And every time you remember something, you're actually recreating a story.

JOHN LUTHER ADAMS: Yes.

NADIA SIROTA: So I really like that you have an idea, and you are continually remembering it. So basically you're making a lot of mental xeroxes of it over and over again until it becomes something which is so steeped in your brain stuff, that it is a piece.

JOHN LUTHER ADAMS: Exactly. So night after night, when I lie down to go to sleep, I'm imagining this group of instruments in this particular space, and what they might sound like, and how they might move through the space physically and through the musical space of the piece. And it's repetitive. I'm doing it every night. At a certain point, I lose it and I drift off to sleep.

JAD: That nocturnal composition process is apparently what happened with John Luther Adams' most recent, most famous piece. This is a piece I literally tried to copy during our recent Apocalyptical Tour—and it just won him the Pulitzer Prize. Apparently, John was spending some time near the Pacific Ocean, and he would fall asleep to the sound of ocean waves and it seeped into his dreams. And what emerged when he finally started to compose was this orchestral piece for three orchestras, actually. It's called "Become Ocean." And what happens in the piece is that over the course of about 40 minutes, all three orchestras form these massive swells of sound, like, these three huge crescendos, like massive tsunamis coming and crashing over you. In talking about the title of the piece, "Become Ocean," John Luther Adams said, "Life on this earth first emerged from the sea. As the polar ice melts and sea levels rise, we humans find ourselves facing the prospect that once again we may quite literally become ocean."

JOHN LUTHER ADAMS: Ah, well ...

JAD: Here he is in conversation with WQXR's. Helga Davis.

JOHN LUTHER ADAMS: This is a global warming piece. And I would say everything that I do these days is in some way addressing the state of the world and the delicate and precarious position of we human animals in the world. And yet I will also, out of the other side of my mouth, insist that it has absolutely nothing to do with current events or politics or activism. And that music must stand on its own as music. And I like to believe that we can have it both ways.

ROBERT: It is very, very outdoors.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: And it’s without—it seems like it doesn't have people in it at all. It has just ...

JAD: Openness.

ROBERT: Yeah. You're floating on the surface. If you're there at all.

JAD: One of the many reasons you should go to iTunes and download Q2s "Meet the Composers Hour" with John Luther Adams is that they play this unreleased track of his string quartet called "The Wind in High Places," which is just beautiful. Go to Radiolab.org. We will link you to more information about "Meet the Composers." I highly recommend this podcast. Thank you so much Nadia Sirota, Alex Overton and Thea Challener and Alex Ambrose for allowing us to play some excerpts. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Stay tuned.

[LISTENER: This is Amy Lantinga from Boston, Massachusetts. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: All right. This is Radiolab. And coming up, a story about—two stories, actually.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: The story of a composer and an artist intersecting in the weirdest way possible in one piece of music across space and time. Are you with me?

ROBERT: No. Because musicians always know instrumentation.

JAD: No this is different! Dif-fer-ent! It's not the same thing. It's not like a piece of music.

ROBERT: So I'm not listening to a lady who's gonna play a song.

JAD: Yeah, I know what you're thinking. I know what you're thinking.

ROBERT: Okay. Well, if this is so good maybe we should just listen to it.

JAD: Let's listen to it. The first story begins in the early 1980s in Vancouver, British Columbia, with a woman named Anne Adams, who is a brilliant cell biologist.

ROBERT ADAMS: Oh, yes. Anne was highly articulate.

JAD: That's her husband, Robert Adams.

ROBERT ADAMS: You know, extremely capable with language. She did cancer research. She actually developed a cell line.

JAD: Really?

ROBERT ADAMS: That I believe still exists.

JAD: Wow.

ROBERT ADAMS: So she was very sharp.

JAD: As a scientist, she was a natural. But then rather suddenly at the age of 46, Anne kind of does a 180.

ROBERT ADAMS: Something happened in '86 which changed the course of her life.

JAD: It all started when their third son, Alex, gets into a really bad car accident.

ROBERT ADAMS: And we were told that he would probably never ever walk again.

JAD: Anne decides she's gonna take some time off to help him recover. And he does, he does learn to walk again. But while at home, she just decides to quit. To quit science and become a painter.

ROBERT ADAMS: Yeah. Anne made up her mind then and there that she was gonna take up art full time.

JAD: Had she ever painted before?

ROBERT ADAMS: Well, she did a fair amount of it when she was in high school.

JAD: Which was a very long time ago, so the whole thing struck him as kind out of the blue. But he rolled with it, and within a short period of time, she had converted a room in their house into a studio. And she was painting ...

ROBERT ADAMS: Houses and buildings, little churches.

JAD: Simple at first. But then after that ...

ROBERT ADAMS: Brightly colored versions of what you see when you look down the barrel of a microscope.

JAD: You know, cells, bacteria. After that ...

ROBERT ADAMS: Strawberries.

JAD: A series of paintings involving these blazing red strawberries.

ROBERT ADAMS: For instance, a water faucet, and out of it would be coming a stream of strawberries. There was things called "Strawberry Universe," where the strawberries had rings around them like Saturn and so on. And I think there was something like 35 or 36 strawberry paintings.

JAD: Wow!

Male voice: But then she would switch to something else, and she would work all day long.

JAD: 10 hours a day, making these paintings that got bigger and bigger and more abstract. And there were times, he says, when he was like ...

ROBERT ADAMS: Wow! [laughs]

JAD: Because for someone who hadn't painted since high school, she was suddenly ...

ROBERT ADAMS: So prolific. And it's entirely possible that something was happening to her even then.

JAD: Way below the surface. I mean, on the surface, she was just painting and it was working. People were buying the paintings, she was having solo shows, she was becoming a successful artist. But then in 1994 ...

ROBERT ADAMS: She decided—I don't know what gave her this idea. I never knew what gave her any of her ideas, but she decided she was going to do ...

JAD: A painting of—well, this ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, "Boléro"]

ROBERT ADAMS: Boléro.

JAD:  Boléro.

ROBERT ADAMS: Yes. Yeah, Boléro.

JAD: Robert says he's not quite sure how it happened, but at some point that year, Anne heard this famous piece by Maurice Ravel, became obsessed, couldn't stop listening to it, then playing it on the piano, then deconstructing it, mapping every pitch and the melody and the bass to a color.

ROBERT ADAMS: Here's one page that isn't very long.

JAD: This is from her notes.

ROBERT ADAMS: She's got A, silver, A flat, copper, B, leaf green, B flat, metallic green.

JAD: Eventually, the painting ...

ROBERT ADAMS: It was quite a large work. Two panels side by side, very electric colors.

JAD: A blizzard of symbols and triangles. Little tooth-type things with marks on them that all mean something, and rectangles and marching ...

ROBERT ADAMS: Back and forth across the first panel. There was a triangle in the bottom of each one of the rectangles. And the height of the rectangle represented the loudness.

JAD: It's an incredibly obsessive translation of the music into visual language. And just like the melody in Boléro, the symbols repeat and repeat and repeat, obsessively getting bigger and bigger and bigger until, at the very end of the second panel, things unravel.

ROBERT ADAMS: By the way, her title for the painting was "Unraveling Boléro."

JAD: And here's where things start to get a little spooky ...

ROBERT ADAMS: Anne did this at a time when she knew nothing about Ravel.

JAD: She called her piece Unraveling Boléro having no idea that that's exactly what would happen to Ravel right after he wrote Boléro. Which brings us to story number two.

JAD: Well, okay. Should we jump in?

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: Yeah, please.

JAD: This is Arbie Orenstein.

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: Professor of music at The Aaron Copeland School of Music at Queen's College.

JAD: He's written about Ravel, performed Ravel, talked to anyone who ever knew Ravel.

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: He kind of is a—what shall I say, a kind of a living presence inside my head.

JAD: So, okay. Maurice Ravel is a composer. Obviously, one of the greats.

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: Born in 1875. Papa was an engineer. Mother was from an old Basque family.

JAD: As in she was Spanish?

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: Yes.

JAD: Which is why some of his music, like Boléro, does sound a bit Spanish. In any case, mom encourages him to study music. He goes off to Paris in the 1890s, meets Claude Debussy. And together they sort of invent this style of music which we now call Impressionism, which was this kind of ...

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: Free floating, almost dreamlike, sensuous. A lot of colors.

JAD: Very flowery. 

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: Yes.

JAD: But then, like Anne, Ravel makes a kind of shift ...

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: 1928.

JAD: ... when he was 53, about the same age Anne was when she did the painting.

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: Ravel is having an absolutely phenomenal year.

JAD: Just toured the United States, performed for thousands.

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: He's at the zenith of his creativity.

JAD: And he's back in France at a beach house.

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: Wearing a pink bathing suit.

JAD: And the story goes, right before he steps out onto the beach, this melody swoops into his head. He runs over to the piano ...

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: Takes his index finger, and he goes, da, da-da-dee-da-dee-da-dun-dun-da. (in the tune of Boléro). There it was.

JAD: It just came to him fully formed?

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: Well, he—I don't know if he played the whole melody, but he at least started it off.

JAD: But here's the shift: when he sat down to flesh the whole thing out, instead of developing the melody, making it super flowery like his other stuff, he decided, no, I'm not gonna do that. I'm gonna take this melody and repeat it again and again and again. And then again some more. And then some more.

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: The theme never changes one note.

JAD: The only thing that does change is the orchestration, which grows around the melody.

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: Very slowly.

JAD: Bit by bit, it gets bigger, bigger ...

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: More accompaniment, more instruments play the melody.

JAD: But the melody itself, for 340 bars, never varies. To the point, he says, where the performers ...

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: They're ready to see a psychiatrist by the time they're done playing this piece. And Ravel at the first performance in Paris, some woman screamed out, "He's crazy!"

JAD: Which turned out to be, well, not exactly true, but in the neighborhood. Six years after he wrote Boléro—this is 1933—Ravel begins to forget words. He'd always been forgetful, so no one really noticed at first, but then one day at dinner he grabs the knife by the wrong side.

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: And he doesn't realize it.

JAD: And he continues to try to eat ...

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: Holding the sharp side of the knife and trying to cut with the handle.

JAD: Then he visits a friend. Leaves ...

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: Not two hours go by. Knock on the door. It's Ravel again. He didn't remember that he'd been there before. 

JAD: Just two hours earlier ...

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: Eventually ...

JAD: By 1935 ...

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: He could not write anymore.

JAD: Or speak. His language had evaporated. Arbie says there are documents where you can see Ravel desperately trying to relearn the alphabet.

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: A. A. A. A. Over and over again.

JAD: Wow.

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: B. B. With a kind of a shaking hand. Very small. It's very, very painful to see.

ROBERT ADAMS: Whatever it was that was wrong was getting worse.

JAD: Here's the weird symmetry: just like Ravel, six years after finishing her Boléro ...

ROBERT ADAMS: By 2000, I would say.

JAD: ... Anne also begins to forget words.

ROBERT ADAMS: She would try to say things and couldn't. She would try to find words and couldn't. 

[ARCHIVE CLIP, researcher: So how are you today?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Anne Adams: Fine. [laughs]

JAD: Eventually, Anne ends up at the University of California-San Francisco.

ROBERT ADAMS: And this was in 2002. And they gave her a bunch of tests.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, researcher: Can you tell me your full name, please?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Anne Adams: Anne Teresa Adams.]

JAD: There's a video of one of these tests, and in it you can see Anne sitting at a table in a black sweater, gray hair, glasses, very composed.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, researcher: And can you tell me your address?]

JAD: Like someone who's used to knowing the answers to questions that people ask her.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Anne Adams: 4—um. 23.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, researcher: Which town?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Anne Adams: Um, which town?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, researcher: Mm-hmm.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Anne Adams: Vancouver.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, researcher: Great.]

BRUCE MILLER: By the time that Anne had come to see us, her communication abilities were markedly diminished.

JAD: That's Dr. Bruce Miller. He's a neurologist. He runs the memory and aging center at UCSF. BRUCE MILLER: Example, we asked her to describe a ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, researcher: Okay, Anne. I'd like you to take a look at this picture.]

BRUCE MILLER: Very complex, rich picture with ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, researcher: Take your time.]

BRUCE MILLER: ... children with a kite, with a sailboat on the ocean.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, researcher: And please tell me what you see. And if you can, please try to speak in sentences.]

BRUCE MILLER: Anne would be able to say single words with no grammar. She'd go, "Sailboat ..."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Anne Adams: Tree.]

BRUCE MILLER: "Boy ..."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Anne Adams: Um …] 

BRUCE MILLER: "Water ..."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Anne Adams: People.]

BRUCE MILLER: "Kite ..."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Anne Adams: Kite. Flag.]

BRUCE MILLER: And that four or five words would come out over about a minute's time. She was very frustrated.

JAD: Both Anne Adams and Maurice Ravel were unraveling in the exact same way at the exact same speed to the same soundtrack, you might say, but just roughly 60 years apart.

BRUCE MILLER: We think he and Anne down to the very molecular process had the exact same disease.

JAD: And he thinks Boléro, the music and then the painting, in both their cases was the first symptom of that disease. This takes a couple steps to explain, so bear with me. But to start, the disease is called ...

JONAH LEHRER: Frontotemporal dementia.

JAD: That's Jonah Lehrer, author, regular on our show.

John: And it begins when spindly cells in your frontal cortex ...

JAD: This part kind of right above your forehead ... 

JONAH LEHRER: ... start to wither and die. And so your frontal cortex is pockmarked with sometimes visible holes.

JAD: We know this about Anne from tests and brain scans. We suspect it about Ravel because, according to Arbie, just before he died ...

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: On December 28, 1937 …

JAD: A French surgeon opened up his skull and saw ...

ARBIE ORENSTEIN: That one of the lobes of the two lobes of the brain had sunk.

JAD: Because it was disintegrating. Now in both their cases, the part of the brain, the part of their cortex that got hit was on the left, which is the part that does a lot of things: memory ...

JONAH LEHRER: Recalling memories, finding memories.

JAD: And most importantly for our story, it governs language.

JONAH LEHRER: What happens is, as the frontal cortex starts to fall apart, you lose the ability to access language.

JAD: Now here's the thing about losing language. Our brains, according to Bruce, are basically a series of circuits that are all tightly connected. And when a dominant circuit like language turns on, it's basically wired to turn a bunch of other circuits off, to basically go "Shh" to other parts of the brain.

BRUCE MILLER: We have this constant dance where one circuit or many circuits turn on, and then they're obligatorily turning off other circuits.

JAD: So language acts as a kind of break on other things the brain could be doing, like daydreaming, thinking in images and pictures. But when the language is no longer there to hold things back, often what can happen is that those other parts, like, say, the visual parts, can just rush forward, and suddenly the mind is flooded with images.

JONAH LEHRER: That all of a sudden people have these rich, rich, intense sensations. The world is so beautiful, and they need to express it.

BRUCE MILLER: This is very common. We see a number of patients who become visually obsessed from every possible walk of life. Investment bankers who have never been interested in art before.

JONAH LEHRER: Never even walked into an art museum.
BRUCE MILLER: All of a sudden, they decide, at the age of 55, to move into a loft ...

JAD: Become an artist.

JONAH LEHRER: One of the first glimmers of their illness is this insatiable need to create.

BRUCE MILLER: That's right.

JAD: How many of these cases have you seen?

BRUCE MILLER: 50, 60?

JAD: Whoa!

BRUCE MILLER: It manifests itself in as many different kinds of art as there are people.

JAD: But at the end of the day, what all these people have in common is that this explosion of creativity in their heads, well, it's not a free-flowing loosey-goosey kind of creativity. It's quite mechanical.

BRUCE MILLER: The repetition, the obsession.

JAD: They get stuck in a kind of loop, taking one thing and just doing it again and again.

JONAH LEHRER: Like an Anne Adams painting.

JAD: Or like Boléro.

BRUCE MILLER: This drive to repeat happens very early in the course of this illness. 

JAD: So, he says, what can seem like a simple creative choice to repeat a melody may actually be driven by a condition that you won't even know you have for six years.

BRUCE MILLER: We think that this had something to do with the very unusual, rhythmic, repetitive sorts of music that Ravel produced.

JAD: And why the repetition? Where does it come from?

BRUCE MILLER: I think this is the release of ...

JAD: Bruce says we don't really know, but he offered up a theory which I find fascinating, which may get to the root of creative obsession of any kind. He says there might be several parts of the brain that are held back by the language circuit, and one of them is this very ancient part of our brains.

BRUCE MILLER: The basal ganglia, the part of the brain we move with.

JAD: You can call it our reptile brain. This is the part of us that governs, you know, basic behaviors like eating, running.

BRUCE MILLER: Motor programs that we do repetitively every day.

JAD: That's all it does. It sends commands saying, "Move, move, eat, eat, run, run." Birds and snakes get by with basically just this part of the brain. It keeps them alive. Now normally, he thinks, the language part of us ...

BRUCE MILLER: Inhibits these habits, these repetitive motor programs that ...

JAD: When the language part is not there to do the shushing, these motor commands filter up too. So imagine you're one of these people. Your mind is suddenly flooded with pictures, maybe sounds, and it's also flooded with these kinetic, repetitive instructions: move, move, move, do it again. And in the early stages of the illness, you still have enough brain to make sense of it all.

BRUCE MILLER: There's still a lot of cortex that is still available to act upon this desire to repeat.

JAD: And so you get art that is obsessive and repetitive, yes, but also beautiful and abstract, like "Unraveling Boléro." But then as the disease progresses and more of that front human-y part fades away ...

BRUCE MILLER: The repetition becomes much simpler.

JAD: And not creative at all. Into the latter stages of a disease, he says, you'll often see patients ...

BRUCE MILLER: Pouring water into a cup a hundred times in a day, squishing ants over and over again. The complexity of the behaviors are diminishing as we're losing these parts of the brain that make us so human.

JAD: Sort of what you see in Anne's work. Her paintings start simple, explode into abstraction and then get simple again. But what's unusual, compared to the other patients, is that she kept painting almost all the way to the end.

ROBERT ADAMS: Until literally, it was not possible for her to hold and direct a brush or a pen.

JAD: That's her husband Robert again.

BRUCE MILLER: Anne became progressively paralyzed on the right side of her body.

ROBERT ADAMS: She lost the ability to paint in 2005, early. And that—that was sad.

JAD: Towards the end, he says, he would go into her studio ...

ROBERT ADAMS: And I would see her there ...

JAD: In front of a blank canvas.

ROBERT ADAMS: And she wouldn't be doing anything. She would just be looking at it. And I'd come back a couple of hours later and she still wouldn't have done anything. She had lost the ability to do the art.

JAD: But she hadn't lost the drive, And that to me is one of the beautiful parts of Anne's story, that the drive to create can be as primal as the drive to eat, that even after she couldn't move, could barely swallow, she still sat there trying.

ROBERT ADAMS: She had gone downhill so far by that time that—that she was hardly recognizable as herself.

JAD: At some point in the disease—and you can see this in that early tape—painting was all she had left.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Anne Adams: I don't have the—the memories of this.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, researcher: Okay.]

JAD: Painting had become literally all she was. 

[ARCHIVE CLIP, researcher: Can you tell me what your job is? Or are you still working?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Anne Adams: I do art.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, researcher: Great.]

JAD: She died in 2007?

ROBERT ADAMS: Yes, in January of 2007.

JAD: Thanks to Robert Adams, Bruce Miller at the University of California-San Francisco and Arbie Orenstein at Queen's College. I'm Jad Abumrad. Robert will be back with me next podcast. See you then.

[LISTENER: Hey guys, here's the credits. Okay! Hi. This is Kaylee Sakai, a Radiolab listener from Seattle, Washington. Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Thanks, guys. Bye!]

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