A Ragtime Mind

Watching Bob Milne perform is like seeing the next step up in humanity’s progression, but realized in the form of a man you can engage in a friendly chat. He is the most phenomenal piano player I’ve seen or heard – for accuracy, speed, dexterity, emotion, sensitivity. His staples are ragtime and boogie-woogie, with a smattering of blues. He claims he never practices, but he plays some 250 gigs a year around the world. He owns no recordings or sheet music; he has no need for them because he can assimilate and reproduce any piece of music after hearing it once (putting him, perhaps, in a class with Mozart as far as that ability goes).

He was a French horn player in his late teens, but quit because the horn does require practice to keep the lips in form. So why doesn’t he play classical piano? He started out in honky-tonk bars in Detroit, playing what people wanted to hear and also trying to duplicate the speed and complexity of piano rolls – a supposedly impossible endeavor, since the rolls were reproduced by combining multiple players (Milne succeeded). Many say that ragtime is the most complex of all piano music. So maybe it’s the ultimate, continuing challenge.

But the simple fact that Milne was coming up to northeastern Pennsylvania – to Lycoming College, about which I knew zilch, though I live only fifty miles away – was not the clincher that drew me to hear him; it was the fact that his brain apparently functions like no one else’s. The neurologist who’s been studying him, Kerstin Bettermann from the Hershey Medical Center, would be giving a talk about his mind before he gave his concert.

Both Bettermann and Milne are delightful human beings, and Bettermann is an excellent presenter. Using functional MRI, she had documented the unique ways in which Milne’s brain works and proved that he can indeed do what he claims he’s been able to do all his life: hear, process and view three or four orchestral productions in his head at the same time.

For her testing, Bettermann had used Bach, Beethoven, Mendelssohn and one other that I can’t recall. As a control, she also tested an orchestral conductor who would likely have the closest sort of musical mind to Milne’s. She played them a specific rendition of each piece, then asked them to repeat them mentally while she timed their progress. She would interrupt randomly and ask them where they were in the score, checking their progress against the timing of the recording. The conductor, while able to visualize and accurately reproduce the unfolding of a single orchestral piece, could not manage two, much less three or four, as Milne clearly could.

And the differences in brain connectivity Bettermann discovered between the two were striking. She flashed schematics to show how the two brains had functioned under fMRI during the test. Milne used fewer neural connection systems, made more equal use of the two brain hemispheres, and mostly ignored (or suppressed) normal inhibitory feedback. With Milne’s internalization of music, there is apparently almost no “waste” brain activity – no neural searching, no misdirection.

Milne himself – quiet, charming and funny as hell in an offhand way – answered audience questions after Bettermann’s presentation, before his concert. Yes, he’s always had these abilities, and until his teens assumed everyone (or at least all musicians) did. No, he had no particular offsetting problems in other areas of schoolwork, though math bored him – “maybe because it was too easy” – and “I just hated social studies, what awful stuff.“

He has no interest in puzzles, is good enough at chess to beat three players simultaneously behind his back while playing the piano, but obviously doesn’t take any of this sort of thing seriously. Amateur players at festivals are nasty to him, probably because it all comes too easy for him.

When he sat down to play, Bettermann used a back-lit screen to highlight his hands, giving us a close-up yet bird’s eye view of something I didn’t expect I’d see again: a combination of delicious motion, fluidity and certainty. He talked to the audience casually while playing, explaining the elements of music with superb clarity. He gave little demonstrations of how to introduce different, overlapping time signatures into the same piece, playing them off against each other while his thumb – his thumb! – carried the melody. There seemed to be no effort involved in doing something that few alive could accomplish, no matter the time they might put into it.

Not long after the Lycoming evening, our local arts council was setting up its first Ultimate Musical Theater Weekend, in 2015, and we needed to fill a performer slot. Milne was the immediate choice. He arrived from Michigan in November, traveling with a trailer that he and his wife slept in. For his concert, he played a wide variety of ragtime, boogie and blues, some standards, some unknown to most of his audience. He interwove tunes, turned medleys into quiet explications of musical theory and technique. Playing at floor lever, rather than on a stage as at Lycoming, he seemed even more at living-room ease, in quiet rapport with his audience, chatting back and forth.

He played one piece at almost blinding speed (he’s equally effective with slow numbers) while maintaining crystalline clarity. An audience member asked how he could rampage through the music like that. "What, I didn’t play fast enough?” and, standing, he leaned sideways to play a few bars twice as fast.

I’ve nearly always found descriptions of a musician’s technique and effectiveness to fall flat, and I’m sure that’s been the case here. One of Milne’s caliber has to be experienced. Fortunately, there are entrancing videos of Milne online, especially those conducted at the Library of Congress.

During intermission, I was one of several who had the chance to chat with him as he fielded questions sitting in the back row. Does he have an overall eidetic memory? He doesn’t think so, hasn’t considered it that much. Does he think his rare mental and physical abilities are necessarily linked – that he couldn’t have one without the other? He answers with a sort of mental shrug. In general, he doesn’t seem to feel that such things are worth a great deal of bother.

Yet beyond his performance, there’s an immense amount to be learned from Milne. Because of his singular brain functioning, he raises interesting questions about art – what it is, how it’s produced, the relation between the mental (creative) and the physical (production).

Suppose we consider artistic creation as a continuum from abstract impulse to concrete realization:

• Can someone have the abstract impulse toward a particular form of artistic creation but not the physical ability to realize its execution? (Milne’s playing flows without clear distinction between the two. I love music but can’t master repetitive motion to play even the simplest instrument.)

Suppose we consider the production of art as a physical continuum from neural brain processes to bodily execution:

• Should we then say that art can legitimately be described in terms of science?
Also:

• Can we call someone an artist who can produce no external art?

• Can one have an “advanced” mental state – artistic or otherwise – but not be able to communicate it because it cannot be realized in action or not recognized by the individual in isolation?

• Conversely, can one have latent physical ability like Milne’s but not the internal creative impetus to produce art? There have been savants who could identify prime numbers up to nine digits long, yet their stunning (and incomprehensible) ability produced no external beauty or usefulness in the real world.

But, for the moment, forget all that and go visit Bob Milne at the Library of Congress.

by Derek Davis