Wordfest Presents Daniel Levitin

Wordfest Presents Daniel Levitin

Hosted by Erin Thrall

We've been eagerly awaiting Daniel J. Levitin's return to Calgary since he had to cancel his sold-out in-person show at the start of the pandemic in 2020. Lucky us – the best-selling neuroscientist, musician and author is returning this September with I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine. This mind-expanding conversation, hosted by Calgary musician and arts advocate Erin Thrall, includes a book signing and an audience Q&A for which you can submit questions in advance here. (If you’d like to read one of his New York Times bestsellers or his new book in advance of the show, you can order books for pick up at Shelf Life Books here.   

We are grateful to Penguin Random House Canada for making it possible to connect you with Daniel J. Levitin.

About I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine

For many years I have wondered why a bunch of frequencies organized into a piece of music has the ability, even without words, to make the listener cry and become emotional…I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine has some fascinating insights into this great phenomenon.” –Sir Paul McCartney

Neuroscientist and New York Times bestselling author of This Is Your Brain on Music Daniel J. Levitin reveals how the deep connections between music and the human brain can be harnessed for healing.

Music is perhaps one of humanity’s oldest medicines as well as its most universal: from China to the Ottoman Empire, Europe to Africa and pre-colonial South America, cultures have developed rich traditions for using sound and rhythm to ease suffering, spur healing, and calm the mind. Despite this history, musical therapy has long been considered the remit of ancient practice and alternative medicine, if not outright quackery and pseudoscience. In the last decade, however, an overwhelming body of scientific evidence has emerged that persuasively argues music can offer profoundly effective treatment for a whole host of ailments, from Alzheimer’s to PTSD, depression, pain, and cognitive injury. It is, in short, one of the most potent and remarkably promising new therapies available today.

A work of dazzling ideas, cutting-edge research, and joyful celebration of the human mind, I Heard There Was a Secret Chord explores the critical role music has played in human evolution, illuminating how the story of the human brain is inseparable from the creative enterprise of music that has bound cultures together throughout history. Music insinuates itself into our earliest memories; it is intimately connected to our emotional regulation and cognition; its shared rhythms and sounds are essential to our social behaviors. As neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin demonstrates in this mind-expanding follow-up to This Is Your Brain on Music – which revolutionized our understanding of the neuroscience of song – medical researchers are now finding that these same deep connections can be harnessed to create profound benefits for those both young and old.

About Daniel J. Levitin  

Daniel J. Levitin is the bestselling author of This Is Your Brain on Music, The World in Six Songs, The Organized Mind, Successful Aging, and the international bestseller A Field Guide to Lies. Levitin is James McGill Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Neuroscience and Music at McGill University, and Founding Dean of Minerva University in San Francisco. He is also a musician and composer who has worked with artists including Roseanne Cash, Sting, Stevie Wonder, Steely Dan, and Joni Mitchell, and has been awarded 17 gold and platinum records. He divides his time between Montreal and California.

About Host Erin Thrall

Erin Thrall is a Calgary-based singer, concert producer and advocate of the arts in education and healthcare. She has sung from an early age in various settings and holds degrees in voice performance from McGill’s Schulich School of Music and the Université de Montréal. Thrall became immersed in Quebec’s rich music scene as soloist and with ensembles such as the Studio de musique ancienne de Montréal and La Chapelle de Québec. She cofounded a multi-genre concert series at the historic Erskine & American Church in conjunction with the Musée des Beaux Arts de Montréal. Thrall has experienced and witnessed the profound healing aspects of music as well as the cost of ‘high-performance’ for many musicians. In recent years, she served as Outreach Director of the Instrumental Society of Calgary, bringing music into healthcare settings amidst the expanding conversation about music in medicine. With many others, Thrall embraces diversity, longstanding wisdom, and scientific discovery to revisit how, why, and where we make music. 

Be Curiouser

• The Ineluctable Logic of Gun Ownership. –The Atlantic
• When Joni Mitchell talks, the songwriting neuroscientist Daniel Levitin listens. –JoniMitchell.com
• How to stay calm when you know you’ll be stressed. –Ted Talk