Chinua, professor at Bard College

Bard College used to be an undergraduate college of Columbia University. Most academics in Africa know of it because it is there that the great writer Chinua Achebe is a distinguished professor. Bard’s president Leon Botstein had the foresight and humanity to offer Achebe an academic place after an awful accident in the UK left him wheelchair bound.

A gracious and lucid man, Achebe remains one of Africa’s outstanding intellects. The former vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town Njabulo Ndebele is presently there and what good company he keeps.

Leon Botstein is my personal music hero. He plays the viola. He is the music director and principal conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra in New York and of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, the radio orchestra of Israel.

In 2004 he addressed the United Nations on ‘Why Music Matters’ as part of former Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s lecture series. For his contributions to music he has received the award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and Harvard University’s prestigious Centennial Award, as well as the Cross of Honor, First Class from the government of Austria.

He also holds the distinction of being the youngest college president in the USA, ever. Botstein speaks seven languages including Russian, as any real historian of music should!

Botstein is a music historian of great distinction. He serves on the board of George Soros’ philanthropic organisation in New York. He knows a great deal about brain science and music. His brother is head of Princeton’s genome centre. He is friends with the world’s leading scientists. At Bard College, an elite, small, private undergraduate college situated at Annandale up the Hudson River, they offer their students an opportunity to study music and brain science.

Bard has a distinguished and world-class Conservatory of Music that offers a 5 year long degree with a double-major, one of course being in music where students have an experience in studio instruction, ensemble, chamber music, the conservatory seminar in music, aural skills and history and then, the senior recital.

The most demanding double-major there is, is in biology, with a specialisation in biochemistry. Typical courses include the molecular biology of brain neurotransmitters and their specific biochemistries, including those that control arousal level in many parts of the brain, provide physical motivation, make us feel good like and control activity in brain areas connected with attention, learning and memory.

There are the excitatory chemicals that induce physical and mental arousal, heightens mood and forge the links between neurons that are the basis of learning and long-term memory. There are chemicals that modulate pain and reduce stress.

In sum, the brain and physiological processes implicated in music making, appreciation and interpretation is what conservatory students and makers of music must better understand. There is a compelling intellectual reason for this kind of double-major, for the theory, history and practise of music cannot be divorced from the biochemistry and the evolutionary biology of it and Bard professors understand the connection. In this they lead the field.

Bard is considered to be one of the leading liberal arts colleges in the United States of America. It received many refugees from Eastern Europe and especially Hungary, which explains perhaps the connection with George Soros, who is Hungarian-born.

Heinrich Blücher and his wife, the great political scientist Hannah Arendt, were members of staff there, as was the writer Toni Morrison. Bard’s alumnae reads like a who’s who of the United States’ arts, culture and entertainment world: Man Blake, Chevy Chase, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker (of Steely Dan), Lola Glandini (Sopranos), Gaby Hoffman and Jonathan Rosenbaum the film critic.

The famous biologist Harvey Bialy and the chief executive officer of the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc. are former students of Bard too. At Bard, excellence in the arts is the basis for drawing in excellence in the sciences, charting an all too rare intersection or crossing in knowledge systems, or ‘consilience’ as Edward Wilson once put it.

Here we are not looking at the reduction of the arts to biology or genetic determinism but rather teaching students what they are entitled to know, the very best of knowledge of how our bodies and brain work, our nature and emotions, our ability for aesthetic creation and our place in the universe, our capacity for arts, culture, language and music, the full repertoire of the human endowment.