Applebaum’s Representation of Aphasias: Sound, Gesture, and Musical Organization as Neural Mechanisms

Indianapolis, IN

Aphasia by Mark Applebaum utilizes musical organization of sound and gesture to give the audience an experience paralleling different types of the neurological disorder aphasia. Aphasia is a language communication disorder that impairs multiple facets of verbal and visual languages, including syntax, semantics, and motor control. The classical aphasias are characterized by lesions to the language centers of the brain: Broca’s area, Wernicke’s area, and the striate pathway between them. In this paper I focus on the two classical groups of aphasias and how they are represented within Applebaum’s 2010 composition. Aphasia is a piece for fixed audio and single performer, who is seated alone and gestures in a “kind of alien, preverbal, and rhythmicized sign language” concurrent with digital audio manipulations of the human voice. The physical gestures represent visual languages and the digital audio manipulations represent verbal languages. The audience’s paralleled experience with aphasia regarding language can be observed in the first section of the piece. Visually, rhythmic frequency of gestures begins to increase. Gestures originally able to be deciphered clearly begin to mix with one another and become difficult or impossible to read. In conjunction with this visual communication, verbal language is mixed into groups of gibberish syllables. To the audience, the audio may sound like words, but they cannot understand the meaning of the mimicked language even though repetition anchors the listener with a type of syntax. Both examples are reflections of Wernicke’s aphasia, a symptom of which is inability to understand communication inputs.