Music Therapy
Touching a chord Shamik Bag http://cities.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=246019 Kolkata, July 14: Anny, his ‘little speechless boy’,writes British author Nick Hornby in his book 31 Songs, remains shrouded under a blanket of silence. Diagnosed as autistic, along with a taste for salt and vinegar crisps and peanut-butter sandwiches, Danny, writes the fascinated father, has grown a taste for music too, even coining a word for it: ‘goggo’. ‘And he seems to be developing tastes, too’, writes Hornby. ‘A couple of weeks ago, in the car, he listened quite happily not to his usual nursery rhymes but to Tapestry, but when the CD-changer switched to Louis Armstrong’s Hot Fives and Sevens, an outraged cry came from the back seat: ‘Goggo! Goggo!’ Louis Armstrong, the man who single-handedly created one of the most important musical idioms of the twentieth century, did not, apparently, create music. So we moved on to Nick Lowe instead, and he (Danny) was happy again.