Mozart in the E.R.

I have been listening to Mozart’s music as far back as I can recall. I was exposed to it soon after I was born. My mother, a singer and graduate of the Juilliard School of Music, and my father, a professional pianist and former music major at Columbia University, performed Mozart for me using their respective instruments. My earliest teacher, Alexander Goldfield from Hauppauge, Long Island (who currently resides in Aventura, Florida) would tell me that there was no music more beautiful than Mozart’s.

As a student of music, I performed Mozart constantly. I studied his operas, symphonies, and chamber music in great detail. When the movie “Amadeus” came out, I was thrilled to experience his music and witness a portrayal of his surroundings on the “big screen.” The scene where Mozart, as portrayed by the actor Tom Hulce, is trying to etch on paper music already composed in his mind while his kids are screaming in the background is particularly dear to me.

E.R. and Mozart: Working the streets of New York

To help support my luxurious student lifestyle while living in New York City, I often performed string trios and quartets “on the street” with some very gifted and now famous musicians. I would tell people I had “offices” on Columbus Avenue, Wall Street, and in “The (Greenwich) Village.” An open violin case served as our cash register. Quite often, we were in competition for prime real estate with fortunetellers and caricaturists. We mostly played music composed by Beethoven, Dvorak, Bach, Haydn, and Mozart, and we were usually very successful. After “work,” we would head to a nearby restaurant to divvy-up the stacks of crunched dollar bills and pounds of loose change. There were certain pieces of music we knew would always draw crowds and keep them enthralled. They were all composed by Mozart, not only his most famous piece, the Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, but any Mozart we played. In fact, there were evenings spent playing (as a trio) only one piece, over and over again -- Mozart’s late and profound Divertimento for Violin, Viola, and Cello in E-Flat, K.563. This is a true music connoisseur’s piece, and I doubt that most of our audience had ever heard it before. I never became tired of it, and to this day, it remains one of my favorites. Interestingly, we had volumes of music composed by Haydn, another equally gifted and prolific composer of the Classical period, but no matter how flashy or beautiful the Haydn was, we were never able to attract the huge crowds as we did when we played Mozart.

The famous Mozart experiment

In 1993, while still in medical school, I read a study in Nature about a group of college students who scored higher on a subset of an IQ test after listening to Mozart (1). I remember thinking to myself that, although I worshipped Mozart, the likelihood that his music made me or anybody else smarter was probably pretty small. Soon after the article appeared, an entire industry was spawned, and the term “The Mozart Effect” was trademarked. The owner of the trademark published a book bearing that title. It is a volume of 332 pages, only two and a half of which are devoted to the original UC Irvine study (2).

Mozart gets political

In 1998, inspired by the research, Governor Zell Miller from Georgia proclaimed (with Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” being played) that he would use $105,000 of the state's budget to provide classical music recordings to every new mother (3). Governor Don Sundquist of Tennessee joined the bandwagon, and soon all Tennessee newborns were being supplied with CDs (4). The State of Florida has since mandated that classical music be played at state-funded child care centers (5). An entire industry of books and recordings has developed, touting Mozart as a means to improve intelligence.

What did the original experiment show?

The original study, conducted by UC Irvine researchers Frances Rauscher, Gordon Shaw and Katherine Ky (1) consisted of a group of 36 students who were divided into three groups. The first group listened to Mozart's Sonata for Two Pianos in D, K.448, the second, to a relaxation tape, and the third, to silence. Immediately after the “treatment,” the students were given subsets of the Stanford - Binet test ("I.Q." test), and those who had listened to the Mozart scored higher on a portion of the exam which purportedly tests spatial/temporal reasoning. More specifically, the subjects performed better on tasks where they pictured a sheet of folded paper with a cutout and tried to predict the pattern that appeared when the paper was unfolded.

Has anyone attempted to reproduce the original findings?

Twenty published studies were conducted through 1999, attempting to either reproduce Rauscher's findings or find some relationship to Mozart and spatial/temporal reasoning. Most of them showed minimal, if any, improvement in test scores (6). A sobering article, written by Harvard psychologist Christopher Chabris and titled Prelude or requiem for the 'Mozart effect’? appeared in the August 26 issue of Nature. He combined and analyzed all the data from the previous studies and found that "exposure to ten minutes of Mozart's music does not seem to enhance general intelligence or reasoning, although it may exert a small improving effect on the ability to transform visual images." He then added, "However, this enhancement is essentially restricted to a single task, is one-quarter as large as that originally reported for a broader class of cognitive abilities, is not statistically significant (combined Z=1.14, P=0.26), and is smaller than the average variation of a single person's IQ-test performance... (6)” In the same issue of Nature, Kenneth M. Steele and fellow psychologists from Appalachian State University gave a synopsis of their most recent study (7, 8) which failed to show any improvement in tests of spatial reasoning given to subjects who had listened to the Mozart Sonata K.448. His conclusion was that "a requiem (for the Mozart Effect) may therefore be in order (8).” Since these articles in Nature were published, there has been no convincing study which definitively proves that Mozart's music can significantly boost any part of one's intelligence.

Music, Science, Research, and Business

It is remarkable how so much effort has been devoted to the proving or disproving of Rauscher's remarkably small and barely statistically significant study (1). This, however, is the nature of science and of research, and there are many ‘Mozart effects’ being scrutinized in virtually every medical specialty. The media and business industry took Rauscher's study and grossly exaggerated and distorted the findings, which Rauscher candidly admitted (3). Conscientious minds in the scientific community observed this and felt the need to sort out fact from fiction.

E.R.’s bottom coda:

So should research on the human effect of Mozart’s music continue? My humble opinion as a musician and physician is yes. As I alluded to in the opening of this chapter, I have observed that more people seem to be attracted to Mozart's music than any other classical composer. These were my observations from months of “street-playing” in New York City where our “subjects” represented many national and international cultures. Our listeners were not paid or credited college students tested in a laboratory. I don’t know why Mozart may have such universal appeal. Yes, Mozart’s music is sublime, but so is the music from the other composers we performed. In my opinion, the course of research may best be directed to understanding if there really is a universal appeal to Mozart’s music, and if there is, then why? One issue that does not seem to have been addressed in any of the studies was whether different performances of the Mozart’s Sonata K.563 elicited changes in intelligence. Perhaps the subjects thought that the recorded performance used in the studies was boring or uninspired and thus could not elicit meaningful results. Perhaps we attracted crowds while “street playing” because we unwittingly played Mozart with more gusto than when we played Haydn. I believe that scientific research of any Mozart-like effect should continue by studying the macro relationships of music on intelligence and behavior. Once we understand that, the rest may come molto legato.

We at E.R. Music are grateful to readers who inform us about new research being published involving music and human intelligence and behavior. We will review the studies and incorporate them into this chapter. Please join our mailing list if you would like to be kept informed of the latest developments.

Copyright 2008, E.R. Music, LLC

1. Rauscher, F.H., Shaw, G.L. & Ky, K.N. “Music and spatial task performance,” Nature 365, 611 (1993)

2. Campbell, “The Mozart Effect: Tapping the Power of Music to Heal the Body, Strengthen the Mind, and Unlock the Creative Spirit,” Harper Collins Publishers (1997)

3. Jones, Rochelle, “Mozart’s nice but doesn’t increase IQs,” 1999, http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/9908/25/mozart.iq/

4. The Memphis Flyer: City Reporter, January 7, 1999, http://www.memphisflyer.com/backissues/issue516/cr516.htm

5. BBC News: “Classical Music Good for Babies,’ August 17, 1999, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/422644.stm

6. Chabris, Christopher F, “Prelude or requiem for the ‘Mozart Effect’?,” Nature, 400, 26 August 1999, 826-827

7. Steele, K.M., Bass, K.E., Crook, M.D., “The Mystery of the Mozart Effect: Failure to Replicate,” American Psychological Society, Vol. 10, No. 4, July 1999

8. Steele, K.M, et al, Nature, 400, 26 August 1999, 827