UNTROUBLED MUSICAL JUDGMENT OF A PERFORMING ORGANIST DURING EARLY EPILEPTIC SEIZURE OF THE RIGHT TEMPORAL-LOBE

The case of a professional musician with a right temporal lobe epileps y is presented. Whilst playing an organ concert (John Stanley's Volunt ary VIII, Op. 5), he suffered a complex partial seizure. The recorded concert performance (with the seizure) was analysed and compared with other available exercise records and with the composition. The musical analysis of the seizure-induced variations reveals that at the beginn ing of the seizure, the left hand started to become unprecise in time and deviated from the score, whereas the right hand remained faultless at this time. With increasing duration of the seizure discharge, the dissociation of both hands from the score increased but the right hand compensated for the errors of the left hand in a musically meaningful way, i.e. with the aim to compensate for the seizure-induced errors o f the left hand. The case illustrates untroubled musical judgement dur ing epileptic activity in the right temporal lobe at the beginning of the seizure: Whereas the temporal formation of the performance was mar kedly impaired, the ability of improvisation-in the sense of a 'perfec t musical solution' to errors of the left hand-remained intact. Copyri ght (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd.