“Much Madness is Divinest Sense”

nd yet I still had so much music in my head, " lamented Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) near the end of his life (1). The French composer was frustrated by symptoms of an undiagnosed neurologic disorder that interfered with his ability to move, speak, or express creative ideas. Now labeled primary progressive aphasia-related illness, the disorder also marked the life and art of Anne Adams. A native of Canada, Adams was educated in the sciences and excelled in physics and chemistry, which she taught at the college level. During an interval from academe, she raised her four children then returned to the sciences at age 35 as a student of cell biology, professor, and researcher. At age 46, she left again, this time to nurse her son who had been injured in an automobile wreck. The injury resolved much faster than anyone expected, but Adams decided not to return to science but pursue other interests. A lover of music and the arts, she had dabbled with painting in her earlier years, mostly architectural drawing and watercolor in a classical style. Over the next few years, she became increasingly absorbed with art, devoting all her days to work in her studio. Her style and technique evolved rapidly, and she started experimenting, particularly with expression of sounds as visual forms. She interpreted musical scores and converted them to colorful images (Rondo alla Turquoise, Rhapsody in Blue). She became fascinated with the music of Mau-rice Ravel, particularly his one-movement orchestral piece Boléro. " Don't you think this theme has an insistent quality? " Ravel asked his friend Gustave Samazeuilh as he fi ngered the initial melody on the piano, " I'm going to try and repeat it a number of times without any development, gradually increasing the orchestra as best I can " (2). This he did. Two melodic themes were repeated eight times over 340 bars. Volume and instrumentation increased along with two alternating staccato bass lines. There was no key change until the 326th bar, when the piece accelerated into a collapsing fi nale (3). The result was haunting and infectious, an exercise in compulsion, some said perseveration. Ravel wrote this his best-known composition while on vacation in the south of France. He was 53. Though the musical scores were marred with spelling errors, he was not yet incapacitated by illness. The success of Boléro, which he had assessed as " a …