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Detail of an illustration by Richard Carlile of the Yeomanry attacking the meeting in St Peter’s Field, Manchester.

Why would a romance-loving writer like me set a story in the middle of a melee? My novel An Untitled Lady includes events around 16 August 1819 in Manchester, England, including a workers’ protest rally that ended with at least 15 people dead. It might seem odd to set a story about two people falling in love in the middle of that kind of trouble, but for me love helps people see things more clearly—including the outside world.

Romance is an adventurous, expansive genre: Romance readers absorb and accept new directions all the time. Vampires, zombies, Viking raiders, corporate raiders—we cheerfully read it all and more. Authors often include issues like post-traumatic stress, child abuse, addiction, bereavement and recovery. We don’t shy away from social unrest and other mayhem: The shelves are filled with love stories that include unruly crowds and striking violence, starting in the nineteenth century with Shirley by Charlotte Brontë, North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell and even War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. Gone with the Wind (1936) famously treats the Civil War, and both An Infamous Army by Georgette Heyer (1937) and Slightly Tempted (2003) by Mary Balogh include a retelling of the battles and aftermath of Waterloo. The melee in my book was dubbed “Peterloo,” a coinage based the rally’s location at St. Peter’s Field and Waterloo, that final, bloody battle of the recently ended Napoleonic wars.

It wasn’t that much of a stretch for me to think, “Why not Peterloo?”—although I did give it a pass on the first draft of the story. Something happened to me in 2009 that changed my mind.

Two things about me: I worked in newsrooms for more than two decades, and I now live just outside Washington, DC. From the first, I am confident that when I see or hear a news story, I can parse the language and know which are the pieces that are the news and which are the bloviating, link-baiting, and “needs confirmation” bits. From the second, I know that people protest in Washington every week, in numbers large and small, and for every reason—that’s what normal is, for DC.

In 2009, organizers connected to a group calling themselves the Tea Party announced they were coming to town. The news was full of it. Protests had been going on through the spring and summer in other towns, and organizers wanted to build that into a full-on protest event in the nation’s capital. A friend had seen a small one near Baltimore and said the rhetoric was high, as usual, but the emotion was higher. These people were on the way, they were red-faced angry, and at earlier protests some of them had brought guns.

Well. DC has plenty enough guns of its own; we sure didn’t need any more. Our town is home to a large number of people of color, and some of the words protesters and planners were using made me fear for their safety. Would there be guns going off in the Starbucks or the CVS around the corner from my office? Would there be guns going off on the Mall itself?

Each day in early September I read more worrisome news and speechifying about this next march. I was glad it was to be on a Saturday; I’d thought of maybe using a vacation day to stay home from work if it had been on a weekday. I checked with my friends to make sure their weekend plans didn’t include DC, something I had never done before.

And then the day came and— nothing. The march happened, an estimated 60-75,000 people showed up and made their dissatisfaction with the current political order known, and then went home. There were the usual skirmishes on the sidelines, never clear whether they were protest-driven or the usual peripheral shenanigans. It was just like every other big protest march. No guns.

I was gobsmacked. How could I have been so blind? Was I that prejudiced?

Apparently so. I went back to the news stories, and this time I found the same “might,” “could,” and “potentially” that resides in the text of every fear-inciting story about an event that hasn’t happened yet. I’d read the same words as always, but reached a different conclusion. And I’d acted on it, in my small way.

I did not like this new view of myself. I do not wish to be a person who could not see all sides. That day I’d been just an observer, but what if I had been in charge of DC security? Would the decisions I would have made then hurt or killed people?

Questions like those are how my story ideas start. I already knew about Peterloo from reading history, but I’d thought it too messy, too violent, to include in a love story. I’d read one romance novel that took place nearby, but it used only a second-hand report of the events to fuel a subplot.

Now, though, I had to use it, and because of its messiness. I had to tell a story that showed readers many different sides in a way they could not miss, which meant I first needed to see clearly many, many points of view.

I had a lot of help, in terms of research. Reporters were on the ground during the march, unusual at that time. They and other eyewitnesses wrote soon after for papers, pamphlets, and later for books. Records are available online from trials and civil proceedings that arose from the event.

Like today, their reports diverge from one another to a bewildering degree. In 2009 in DC, scribes reported the number of marchers as 60,000, 75,000, 1 million, even 1.2 million; most finally settled on 60–75,000. In 1819 in Manchester, estimates also varied, from 30,000 to 150,000, and also finally settled on 60–80,000—an astonishing figure at a time that lacked cell phones and the Internet, autobuses, or Porta Potties. And even now, reasonable people disagree on who was where on St. Peter’s Field, who slashed whom, and whether the slayings should rightly be called the Peterloo Massacre or the Battle of Peterloo.

In my story, we see through the eyes of manufactory owners and the weavers they are putting out of business, of lords and their tenants, and of one warehouse owner and a woman of unknown provenance. I set my couple right at the axis of the debate, trying to bridge the gaps between the classes. How better to explore the intimacies, the intricacies of our world than through stories of family?

For a romance, it was perfect.

Previously published February 2014

The post On the 200th Anniversary of Peterloo: Why I Put a Melee in a Romantic Novel appeared first on Nicky Penttila.

My goal is to have more than 100 by June 21, which is when I’m giving a talk at the Historical Novel Society conference called “Let’s have more stories of ladies of science.” I’m going to point people to the Wiki and ask them pretty please to write me (and everyone) more stories to read.

I’ve made 80-some entries so far, but they are mainly Western-tradition and in medicine or physical sciences, because that’s what my fiction is about lately.

Do you know other women scientists – especially those of other nationalities and under-represented groups – that you’d love to hear more stories about? Please join in and add them to the Wiki! The Fandom site makes it easy to join and to add pages, but if you’re not up for that, you could instead send me notes and links via the Wiki’s “message wall” chat forum, or ping me on Twitter at @nickypenttila. Let’s fire up those historical writers to tell our stories!

ps Near DC on Saturday, June 22? As part of the conference, the HNS is holding a public Readers Festival and book signing from 1-5 pm.

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My first flash fiction is part of this anthology! Now free as an ebook; print also available via Amazon. 

Solve a mermaid’s problem …
Step off the edge of a roof …
Dig up a grave at midnight …
Take advice from a fortune cookie …
Visit the last library …
Meet a bridge troll …
And more …

In one instant, like a bolt of lightning, a single impossible event changes a person’s life. And like the trace of lighting in the sky, each is unique and interesting.

These wildly different flash stories delight, astonish, scare, and inspire. Enjoy 64 delightfully eclectic tales. Like your flash fiction intriguing with a twist? Discover the diversity and check out “It Happened in a Flash”.

These stories are included:
Don’t Stop Believing – Joyce Sully
A Fresh Start – Troy Pennie
Nonsense – Katharina Gerlach
Fist-bump – Tuff Gartin
The Dare – Lexy Stanton
Unicorn – Ruth Sard
Queen of Swords – Moira K. Brennan
Liar, Liar – Barbara Lund
0—The Fool – Raven O’Fiernan
And Music Will Set You Free – Marya Miller
The Wisteria Princess – Nika Cantabile
Fair Folk – Hannetjie Joubert
D-A-V-E – Ken Bristow
Desperate Times – Rebecca W. Hansen
Nothing New – Alex F. Fayle
Art for the Cure – Connie Cockrell
Meltdown at Markin Four – Elizabeth McCleary
Touching the Edge – Ava Fairhall
Cowboy Heroes – Sallie Olson
Knighthood – Rachel Kovaciny
The Book Thief – Angela Wooldridge
Vengeance Never Undone – Dwayne Allemao
Home – Storm Weaver
Stronger – Oren Litwin
The Trouble With Aunt Flo … – Nina Hobson
Boxcar Revolution – Laura Wilson-Anderson
The Touch – Chaitali Gawade
The Last Library – Ky Moffet
Corrected Vision – Devlyn Dunne
Weather Report – Sylvie Granville
Awakening – Annais Ryder
Tacky – Timothy Couch
The Long, Concrete Ditch – R.C. Blatter
Write & Wrong – Charles Hoge
Magic Trick – Amberlyn Pryor
A Clean Home is a Happy Home – Dana Fischer
Waystation – Samantha Hulatt
Bad Day – Sarah Neuen
Reaching Consensus – VS Stark
The Hunted – J.L. Perry
The Wyrm Turns – Peg Fisher
Saveyour – Mike Lucas
Hunted – Eileen Mueller
The Rescue – Nicky Penttila
The Magic Threads – Kirsten Bolda
Girls Can’t be Knights – Ernesto I. Ramirez
Stilettos – Charlotte Henley Babb
The Proud Aide – Elaine S. Milner
Bloody Lucky – James Roecourt
Will the Real Captain Amazo Please Stand Up? – James Husum
Frozen in Time – Kent Pollard
Homebound – Heidi Ferguson
The One that Got Away – Lauren M. Catherine
A New Adventure – Janna Willard
Shattered – Kami Bataya
Twin Opportunities – Marie Dowd
Aimee Meets the Bridge Troll – Julia Mozingo
11th Hour – Eliza K. Gillham
The Return – Arlo Sharp
Into the Light – Rachel Hobbs
Spacebullies – Shana Bloom
Confucius Say – Michael Eldridge
Freebie – Holly Lisle
Now What? – Tom Vetter

Available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iTunes and more
Print book only available on Amazon.

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When we’re trying to help people who have troubles due to autism spectrum disorders, one of the first challenges is definition: What does “autism” mean?

“Autism was and is still currently defined by behaviors,” Dana Alliance member Barry Gordon said, as researchers haven’t yet found solid biomarkers or other internal signals to identify it. “Whenever you read about autism, you might want to dig into what definitions they go into,” he said during a recent discussion at the American Academy for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS) in Washington, DC.

Even definitions by behavior vary. For example, fellow presenter Daniel Geschwind said, problems with language used to be part of the diagnosis, but now doctors and other caregivers usually only count differences in social behavior and the presence of “repetitive-restrictive” behavior (like hand-flapping or always needing to do activities in the same order).

Geschwind, at University of California, Los Angeles, and others are seeking genetic markers that could point to people at risk for autism spectrum disorders (ASD). They have to look at a lot of data: “Autism risk is a combination, in the population, of rare and common variation, and that variation is different for each person.”

We can currently identify around 20 percent of genetic mutations that contribute to ASD risk, he said, but none of them account for more than a tiny fraction of cases: “The top 10 found in genome sequencing don’t account for more than 1 percent,” he said. In addition, these genes don’t just affect autism, but many other behaviors as well. “ASD is on a continuum with normal variation to some degree and overlaps with other neurodevelopmental disorders,” he said. Like a teeter-totter, enough genetic modifications may tip a person into spectrum behavior, shallowly or deeply. “If I have 100 cases of autism, I may have 100 different forms [of it],” he said.

So why bundle all these folks together? “I think it does make sense to have this umbrella term, at least at this point in the science,” said Janine LaSalle, of University of California, Davis. People on the spectrum share common social impairments, if varied, due to a shared range of brain changes. “Those same neural circuits are involved; there is some commonality,” she said. When we reach the stage with autism where we can say for sure what the causes are in each individual case, as we can with problems in other organs like the lungs, our definitions will surely sharpen.

LaSalle and others are investigating gene-environment interactions (epigenetics) that can increase or decrease the risk of problem behaviors. She focuses on our first environment: the womb, saying, “The 4-letter code [DNA] may only make sense when interpreted within the context of the maternal environment.”

So far, they’ve found that ovulation-inducing drugs and ultrasounds do not increase autism risk, but “if a mother gets rubella, it increases risk of autism 50 times over.” There’s not much of a risk of contracting rubella now in the US, but for mothers who didn’t get MMR vaccines as children, it may again be a risk for our next generations. (Many rigorously conducted scientific studies, including an epidemiological study of more than 14 million children, have failed to find a significant association between MMR vaccination or thimerosal and autism risk.) Besides rubella, significant risk factors include gestational diabetes, shorter time between births, maternal and paternal age, air pollution, some pesticides, and flame-retardant chemicals, she said.

Things that are known to be protective include taking prenatal vitamins, such as folic acid and iron (which also help avoid neural-tube defects), and breastfeeding. As a society, she said, we should “value that period before and just after pregnancy as the most important time.”

LaSalle is part of the MARBLES project, which recruits and follows pregnant women who already have a biological child diagnosed with ASD before and after their next child is born. The project aims to pinpoint genetic and environmental causes to help identify other children as young as possible who may be at risk.

Earlier is better, said fellow panelist Geraldine Dawson, of Duke University. The kinds of repetitive and non-social behavior we see in a child as young as two may be “the downstream effect of a child not paying attention to the physical world” for all that time, she said. Interventions to help children navigate their world at this age can result in large improvements in daily life – and great savings in reduced need for special services for a lifetime. One estimate, based on results of a study finished in 2012, estimated the savings at $19,000/year, or roughly $1.2 million in a lifetime. This and other studies use forms of an intensive, repetitive one-on-one training program often called naturalistic developmental behavioral interventions.

Other avenues to help the youngest children include coaching parents to devote extra time to providing extra social stimulation, such as rehearsing responses to faces. Further in the future, Duke is conducting clinical trials on the possible use of oxytocin, inflammation reducers, and even umbilical-cord blood to enhance social interaction skills.

In addition to their very first years, some children with ASD will need a lot of help transitioning into adult status, when they “age out” of many programs targeted to children. Starting these transitions when they are 12 and 13 really helps, she said. For example, preparing for and holding a part-time job in high school can help them practice social skills that can take all of us quite a while to learn.

The good news is that autism often comes with great strengths, LaSalle said: 60 percent of people diagnosed as being on the spectrum are found to be especially strong at some skill that average people find challenging. “There is so much heterogeneity in autism,” she said: It could refer to a person with no language, needing 24/7 care, or it could be the students on the spectrum that she sees thriving at Duke.

This program, held on October 4, was part of the Neuroscience and Society series, supported by AAAS and the Dana Foundation.

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For the second year, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts spent a weekend exploring the connections between music, the brain, and humanity. A piece of their ongoing “Sound Health” partnership, the events at the Center this past weekend focused on how important the arts are to children’s development, both experiencing art and practicing and producing it. (See also our report and KC videos from last year’s event.)

The idea partnership came up in conversations between NIH director Francis Collins and renowned soprano and Kennedy Center artistic advisor Renée Fleming, and they led the chorus of brain experts and musical prodigies starting with a conversation and concert on Friday. Collins also announced a new program that will soon offer $5 million in research grants to study the effects of the arts on the brain, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts.

All the Saturday events are available as webcasts—including a drumming circle led by Grateful Dead percussionist Mickey Hart! They are all worth a watch or two, with engaging scientists talking interspersed with great musicians performing. Together they add up to more than seven hours, so take your time. Many have small sections where the audience can participate; if you really want to get your rhythm on, jump down to the Interactive Drum Circle recording and have at it for a good 60 minutes.

Say It With Rhythm!

“There is a tremendously tight association between our auditory system and how we move in the world,” says neuroscientist Nina Kraus. Grateful Dead percussionist Mickey Hart and tabla master Zakir Hussein help her illustrate her points with sound; they also share stories of how they started playing music as children and what it means to them.

Rhythms that are pulse-based differ from those that are pattern-based, and are processed differently in the brain, Kraus says. Pulsed-based tasks are associated with fast-language-processing skills like recognizing syllables; pattern-based tasks engage slower processes, like hearing one voice in a noisy room. “It is the rhythm in speech that helps you fill in the gaps in noise,” she says. Drummers are especially good at this, and nearly all musicians are better than non-musicians. “Making music strengthens language.”

Then neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley describes how interactive video games could help children improve timing and accuracy, features in music that also are critical to understanding and producing language. Hart and Hussein don a virtual-reality helmet and gloves and play an experimental game that is being tested with children to see if it can improve their rhythm and response time.  “The future of AI is really to promote HI – human intelligence,” Gazzaley says. (In 2015, Gazzaley received a Society for Neuroscience Science Educator award, sponsored by the Dana Foundation.)

Take Note! Why Music Education Matters

This quick series of talks and discussions, coordinated by Kennedy Center Artistic Advisor at Large Renée Fleming, reviews the current state of music education in the US and offers stories and statistics from people teaching and coordinating programs in schools nationwide. “Anyone who’s had intensive music training before age 7, we can see that in a brain scan,” NIH director Francis Collins says at the outset. “That ability, in music, spills out in other areas,” especially language, he says. “It’s not just a nice thing to do.”

“When you have people in sync working together in order to sing… they are building their skills in collaboration, in creativity, in teamwork” says researcher, composer, and choir master Rollo Dilworth.

“I know that not every single one of my students will become a music major,” says presenter Melissa Salguero, who teaches at P.S. 48 Elementary School in the Bronx and won the 2018 Grammy Music Educator award. “I want them to become music lovers and supporters for their entire life. Because they’re the ones that are going to raise their voice when music programs are being cut all over the nation.”

The session opens and closes with performances by the Washington Performing Arts’ Children of the Gospel Choir.

Learning and Bonding to the Beat

Researcher Laurel Trainor starts with the young and goes younger: from social effects seen after babies are bounced on and off the beat to the effects of mothers singing lullabies before and after their children are born.

“Infants use synchronous movement to help learn to navigate their social world—and decide who to trust and who to befriend,” she says. Pro tip: Singing can keep an infant happier for twice as long as talking to them, Trainor says.

Music therapist Joanne Loewy describes sound and music therapies starting to be used in neonatal care units, and Emily Eagen and Dannie Palmer Wolf of the Carnegie Hall Lullaby Project describe their work helping mothers create personalized lullabies. Eagen walks us through a sample lullaby.

A quintet of musicians of the DC Youth Orchestra also performs, and chat a bit about their experience with music and school.

The Art of the Spark: Musical Creativity

“The brain is not an abstract idea,” says neurosurgeon and researcher Charles Limb. “It’s a physical object…  you can literally hold all someone’s thoughts, dreams, in your hand.” While scientists work to isolate the variables and find math and specifics to describe how our brains work, artists seek the truth in other ways. Still, he says, “I think that maybe this is where scientists and artists actually are speaking the same language… We’re both trying to reconstruct what it means to live on this planet, aesthetically or biologically, or some combination of both.”

Focusing on creativity, he describes what he’s seen when improvisational jazz masters and freestyle rappers have their brains scanned. Images of brain areas light up some when they listen to a lecture–but seem to crackle with light when they are creating. Joining Limb are music therapist Ed Roth, a percussionist, jazz piano prodigy Matthew Whitaker, Freestyle Love Supreme co-founder Anthony Veneziale, and Kennedy Center Artistic Director of Jazz Jason Moran, who play separately and together to help us hear Limb’s points.

Limb asks the players about being an artist, what it’s like to be in the “flow state,” how to freestyle rap—and invites us in the audience to bust out our first rhymes.

Interactive Rhythm Experience: Drums Along the Potomac

Grateful Dead percussionist Mickey Hart, supported by Jonathan Murray of FunDrum Rhythm Circles and  neuroscientist John Iversen, guides us through call-and-response games, lively performances, and an interactive demonstration. Kennedy Center set out 400 percussion instruments for people in the audience to play, but you can use whatever you have at home: Join in!

More on the Sound Health program:

NIH Sound Health page

Kennedy Center Sound Health page 

The post Sound Health: Shaping Our Children’s Lives Through Music Engagement appeared first on Nicky Penttila.

Engraving by Richard Carlile.

A protest march in 2009 inspired me to find stories of protest with women participants from earlier days. For my novel An Untitled Lady, I settled on events during the summer of 1819 leading into the Peterloo massacre, on 16 August, for many reasons. It’s well-known, partly because newspaper correspondents were eyewitnesses–and among those arrested on the day. We have a record of witness testimony from people up and down the social strata, given during the trials that followed the protest. Especially interesting was the fact that women took many parts: as planners, as marchers, and as part of the speeches on the main platform.

See for yourself: I’ve clipped out a couple of chapters from the novel that describe the day of the march. This section is deep into the story, so you won’t know all the characters as well as the book’s readers, but I think you can still get the flavor of the day.

The excerpt is too long for this blog format, so I set it up as a PDF and also as flowing text on Wattpad. I hope you enjoy it, and remember, “Ye are many – they are few.”

The post On the anniversary of Peterloo, a free read appeared first on Nicky Penttila.

published by Edward Moxon, first edition, 1832

Reporting and personal correspondence about the events of 16th August 1819 in Manchester led Percy Bysshe Shelley to write the poem “The Masque of Anarchy,” which some have called “the greatest political poem ever written in English” (from Holmes, 2003). In his book An Encyclopedia of Pacifism, Aldous Huxley describes the poem’s call to resist assault without fighting back, as “the method of non-violence,” one of the first such calls in English and perhaps an influence on protest organizers who came later, including Gandhi (from Huxley, 1937). [Warm up by listening to a reading of the poem on YouTube or audio by Alan Cox via British Library]

Shelley finished the poem in less than three weeks in 1819 and sent it to his friend Leigh Hunt, publisher of The Examiner, but Hunt did not immediately publish it, saying he “thought that the public at large had not become sufficiently discerning to do justice to the sincerity and kind-heartedness of the spirit that walked in this flaming robe of verse” (from Shelley, 1832). The poem was first published in 1832, the same year some of the political reforms Peterloo’s protesters sought were finally enacted. Here are a few stanzas; what do you think?

As I lay asleep in Italy
There came a voice from over the Sea,
And with great power it forth led me
To walk in the visions of Poesy.

I met Murder on the way—
He had a mask like Castlereagh—
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven blood-hounds followed him:

All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed them human hearts to chew
Which from his wide cloak he drew.

Next came Fraud, and he had on,
Like Eldon, an ermined gown;
His big tears, for he wept well,
Turned to mill-stones as they fell.

And the little children, who
Round his feet played to and fro,
Thinking every tear a gem,
Had their brains knocked out by them.

Clothed with the Bible, as with light,
And the shadows of the night,
Like Sidmouth, next, Hypocrisy
On a crocodile rode by.

And many more Destructions played
In this ghastly masquerade,
All disguised, even to the eyes,
Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies.

Last came Anarchy: he rode
On a white horse, splashed with blood;
He was pale even to the lips,
Like Death in the Apocalypse.

And he wore a kingly crown;
And in his grasp a sceptre shone;
On his brow this mark I saw—
‘I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW!’

[63 stanzas between]
[Mother Earth speaks the following lines]

‘Ye who suffer woes untold,
Or to feel, or to behold
Your lost country bought and sold
With a price of blood and gold –

‘Let a vast assembly be,
And with great solemnity
Declare with measured words that ye
Are, as God has made ye, free –

‘Be your strong and simple words
Keen to wound as sharpened swords,
And wide as targes let them be,
With their shade to cover ye.

‘Let the tyrants pour around
With a quick and startling sound,
Like the loosening of a sea,
Troops of armed emblazonry.

Let the charged artillery drive
Till the dead air seems alive
With the clash of clanging wheels,
And the tramp of horses’ heels.

‘Let the fixèd bayonet
Gleam with sharp desire to wet
Its bright point in English blood
Looking keen as one for food.

‘Let the horsemen’s scimitars
Wheel and flash, like sphereless stars
Thirsting to eclipse their burning
In a sea of death and mourning.

‘Stand ye calm and resolute,
Like a forest close and mute,
With folded arms and looks which are
Weapons of unvanquished war,

‘And let Panic, who outspeeds
The career of armèd steeds
Pass, a disregarded shade
Through your phalanx undismayed.

‘Let the laws of your own land,
Good or ill, between ye stand
Hand to hand, and foot to foot,
Arbiters of the dispute,

‘The old laws of England – they
Whose reverend heads with age are grey,
Children of a wiser day;
And whose solemn voice must be
Thine own echo – Liberty !

‘On those who first should violate
Such sacred heralds in their state
Rest the blood that must ensue,
And it will not rest on you.

‘And if then the tyrants dare
Let them ride among you there,
Slash, and stab, and maim, and hew, –
What they like, that let them do.

‘With folded arms and steady eyes,
And little fear, and less surprise,
Look upon them as they slay
Till their rage has died away. [passed]

‘Then they will return with shame
To the place from which they came,
And the blood thus shed will speak
In hot blushes on their cheek.

‘Every woman in the land
Will point at them as they stand –
They will hardly dare to greet
Their acquaintance in the street.

‘And the bold, true warriors
Who have hugged Danger in wars
Will turn to those who would be free,
Ashamed of such base company.

‘And that slaughter to the Nation
Shall steam up like inspiration,
Eloquent, oracular;
A volcano heard afar.

‘And these words shall then become
Like Oppression’s thundered doom
Ringing through each heart and brain,
Heard again – again – again -‘

Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number –
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you –
Ye are many – they are few.’

 Find the full poem at http://www.historyhome.co.uk/c-eight/distress/masque.htm (also has links for some of the less-known historical references).

Text in book-style: http://www.archive.org/stream/masqueanarchyap00huntgoog#page/n8/mode/2up

YouTube reading: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc7Al2HbIPQ

Audio at British Llibrary: http://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/poetryperformance/shelley/poem3/shelley3.html  [BL also has a page of audio, “Percy Bysshe Shelley read by Dominic West and Alan Cox”]

Sources:

Aldous Huxley, “Shelley” in An Encyclopedia of Pacifism, London. Chatto and Windus, in association with the Peace Pledge Union, 1937 (pp. 93–94).

Richard Holmes Shelley: The Pursuit. New York Review of Books. (2003 (1st ed. 1974)) p. 532. ISBN 1-59017-037-7. https://www.epub.pub/book/shelley-the-pursuit-by-holmes-richard

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1832). The Masque of Anarchy: A Poem, London. Edward Moxon. The above quote by Leigh Hunt is from the first page of the preface, page v. http://www.archive.org/stream/masqueanarchyap00huntgoog#page/n8/mode/2up

[First published 19 Feb 2014, links updated August 2017]

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(first published on dana.org)

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Kennedy Center for the Arts have teamed up to explore the connections among music, the brain, and human wellness. The idea for the “Sound Health” partnership came up in conversations between NIH director Francis Collins and renowned soprano and Kennedy Center artistic advisor Renée Fleming. In March NIH hosted a science workshop, where researchers shared what they know about sound and sense with Fleming and other musicians, scientists, and music therapists. This past weekend, they moved to the Kennedy Center for a shared performance with the National Symphony Orchestra and a day of talk and music-making for the general public.

Bone flute from Geissenklösterle, a cave in Germany. Photo by José-Manuel Benito Álvarez

“Music is a critical part in understanding how the brain works,” Collins said on Friday. It’s likely that early people made music before developing formal language—we’ve found  flutes that are more than 35,000 years old. “It’s critical to understanding” how the oldest circuits in our brains work, and it can add “new and stronger scientific basis” to the range of techniques that music therapists use to help people recover from stroke, trauma, chronic pain, and other maladies.

All the Saturday events except a kids’ movement workshop were recorded; I’m including them here. They are all worth a watch or two, with engaging scientists talking interspersed with great musicians performing. Together they add up to more than seven hours, so take your time! I’m listing them in the order of the day, but if you want the general overview, skip down to “The Future of Music and the Mind” (but that is the only one without a musical performance).

Music and Childhood Development

“Making sense of sound is very important for learning,” says Nina Kraus, Ph.D., of Northwestern University. It is “one of the most complex and computationally delicate things we ask our brains to do,” involving the cognitive, sensorimotor, and the reward networks, at least. “Music is the jackpot” both for discovering how our brains work and for training ourselves to be better learners, she said. “Music education should be a part of every child’s education,” not just because they’re making music but because it improves other school skills, too. Some skills sharpened through playing music, such as hearing a specific conversation in a crowded room of chatting people, will carry on through our lifetimes, even if we stopped playing or singing decades earlier. (See also her website, brainvolts.)

Kraus is joined by Amy, Anton, Duncan, and Lucy, musicians in the D.C. Youth Orchestra, who perform Telemann’s Concerto for four violins in G major and speak about what playing music means to them. As Duncan puts it, “Music brings you a gift.”

Breakthroughs with Music Therapy: Recovery, Resilience & Quality of Life

Music therapy is “a blending of both art and science, grounded in research,” said Sheri Robb, Ph.D., at Indiana University. “Through technological advances like brain imaging, and interdisciplinary research collaborations, we’re learning more about how and why music therapy interventions work.” Her talk is short, allowing time for a series of patients and their therapists to describe their experiences working to improve their health and daily lives. Between each group, musician Ben Folds improvises at the piano. This session was sold out, so I watched it via livestream, and their stories still made me cry twice, so be prepared.

The Future of Music and the Mind

Former US surgeon general Vivek Murthry, M.D., joined NIH’s Francis Collins and Kennedy Center’s Renée Fleming to talk about where we are and where we are going in studying music and wellness.

Why music neuroscience now? Advances in scientific tools allow us to “visualize” the brain, even as a person is playing music, Collins said. Scientists also have recognized that what music therapists “have been doing is pretty interesting to us,” especially how it can reach people who aren’t helped in other ways. “We are going to cure cancer along the way, but people with cancer [and others] are needing healing in many ways,” he said.

Fleming spoke of one personal finding after she spent two hours in an fMRI scanner singing and thinking about singing: It takes more energy for her to imagine singing than singing itself.

As surgeon general, Murthry traveled throughout the United States and found the country “has tremendous potential, but we are being held back by pain,” physical, mental, and emotional. We have to address the core health issue: emotional well-being, and “music is a powerful tool for promoting emotional well-being.” One treatment could be music. “Music and meditation both have the common effect of quieting the noise in our lives,” Murthry said. “We have a lot of noise in our lives.”

Collins also announced the start of a prospective study of long-term health and fitness that aims to enroll one million volunteers. We’ll write more about that when enrollment opens, this fall.

Creative Aging

“Making music is a strong driver of neural plasticity,” said Aniruddh Patel, Ph.D., one of the researchers in the new field of musical neuroscience. For example, when we listen to a beat, there is activation across our brain, in motor systems as well as our auditory ones. He reviewed research on rhythm, music’s effects on memory, and its lasting effect on hearing sound in noise. “We’re finally beginning to understand music’s biological power,” he said.

Joining him are Renée Fleming and the Different Strokes for Different Folks choir, made up of people who have used making music to recover from the effects of stroke. Choir members sing a song they wrote and also talk about their personal recovery journeys; the audience joined in for the last song—feel free to sing along.

Jazz, Creativity, and the Brain

“Humans are hard-wired not only to hear music, but to create music,” said Charles Limb, M.D., citing the aforementioned 35,000-year-old flutes. The first music was probably improvised, since language and writing were yet to be invented. It’s an everyday act to be creative, to solve problems and see patterns; it keeps our brains sharp. Limb argues that “artistic creativity is a neurologic product that can be examined using rigorous scientific methods,” which he applies, for one example, to musicians improvising on special piano keyboards while being scanned in a brain scanner (partly with a Dana Foundation grant). “There is so much here for scientists to learn” and share with people, Limb said.

Bassist and vocalist Esperanza Spalding and jazz pianist Vijay Iyer played together and separately, and joined Limb to describe how they create and to ask him questions, too. “It’s not about creating something new, but creating something true,” Iyer said. Spalding added, in improv “the mission is co-creating… you’re asking for the truth, onstage.” This was the most wide-ranging session, and a fitting end to the day.

More on Sound Health

• NIH Sound Health page
• Sound Health blog 

The post Sound Health: Music and the Mind appeared first on Nicky Penttila.

This year, organizers have invited everyone to create a piece for “The Peterloo Tapestry,” expressing their vision of what a planned permanent memorial should be. The plan is to erect such a monument by 2019, the bicentenary of the march. A news video by That’s Manchester shows some of the pieces.

The finished tapestry will be first shown in public during the reading of the names ceremony at 1 pm on 16th August, after the names are recited, near the protest spot. Find more event details on Facebook, where you can also keep up with all the doings of the Peterloo Memorial Campaign. Though I can’t attend this year, I expect some great photos from the events – and organizers say they have an even bigger event planned for 2017.

The events around Peterloo are the setting for the final act in An Untitled Lady.

More on Peterloo and on how I used it in my novel, An Untitled Lady:

Prelude to Peterloo: Reformers call for peaceable assembly – Text of the poster calling on people to march to Manchester in August 1819

Prelude to Peterloo: Reformers call a Meeting – Text of the newspaper announcement calling for a public meeting

Remembering Peterloo – While writing my sprawling romantic historical An Untitled Lady, I arranged to travel to Manchester, England, the week of 16 August 2010, the 190th anniversary of the big protest march I set at the heart of the story.

Getting the details right: Peterloo – How writers try to resolve conflicts in historical and eyewitness accounts. Includes photos of some of the banners people marched with

A Response to Peterloo – On Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “The Masque of Anarchy”

Why I put a melee in a romantic novel – It might seem odd to set a story about two people falling in love in the middle of the troubles that led to Peterloo, but for me love helps people see things more clearly—including the outside world.

Sources: Manchester 1819 – The main references I used when writing An Untitled Lady

Book-club guide for An Untitled Lady – Covers story and history

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