ELF – Engelsk läsförståelse (HPVAR2019P4)

In the following text there are gaps which indicate that something has been left out. Look at the four alternatives that correspond to each gap and decide which one best fits the gap. Then mark your choice on your answer sheet.

Exercise

Loneliness is not good for long-distance runners, or anyone else who exercises regularly. That’s the conclusion suggested by an experiment showing that animals    1    better with stress hormones released by physical activity if they have company when they exercise.

Although exercise speeds the production of new brain cells, it also raises the level of the stress hormone corticosterone, which by itself has    2    effect. Since social contact helps to reduce stress in many animals, including humans, Elizabeth Gould and fellow psychologists at Princeton University asked whether social contact affects neuron development in rats after they exercise.

Some of the rats were housed in groups of three; the rest were housed alone. Half of each group were allowed a daily    3    on an exercise wheel, while the others got no exercise.

The researchers measured the levels of corticosterone in the rats’ blood twice a day, and after 12 days they measured neuronal development in the hippocampus, the seat of learning and memory in the brain. After exercise, corticosterone levels    4    by the same amount in the rats that had company as in the isolated rats. However, cell growth in the brains of the group that exercised was faster than in the sedentary rats, and fastest in the rats that exercised and had company.

According to Gould, this    5    the idea that social support helps to lessen the negative consequences of stress.

New Scientist

Lady Sings the Blues

A review of Billie Holiday: The Musician & the Myth by John Szwed

A recording from the 1950s captures Billie Holiday in conversation with some fellow musicians at a rehearsal. ‘I’m telling you,’ she says, ‘me and my old voice, it just go up a little bit and come down a little bit. It’s not legit.’ And she was right. With a vocal range barely stretching beyond an octave, she really could only go up and down ‘a little bit’, and she wouldn’t have lasted a day at any of the conservatories that trained aspiring singers in the ‘legit’ techniques of classical or operatic performance. Since Holiday was incapable of the vocal gymnastics displayed by the likes of Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald, her place in the first rank of jazz singers surely rests on other qualities. It’s in drawing those out that John Szwed’s book is at its most valuable.

The familiar view has it that what imbued Holiday’s singing with such power and profundity, despite the obvious limitations of her voice, was a kind of personal authenticity. What Szwed calls the ‘myth’ of Billie Holiday – the pastiche of tragedy that built up around her during the course of her career and that has been recycled ever since her death in 1959, at the age of forty-four – makes the very real pain of her often tortured existence the key to understanding her art. She lived the emotions she sang of, it has been claimed, and her years of addiction, abuse and exploitation by lovers, record companies and the police infuse her singing with a raw honesty that speaks to us from the depth of her soul. The impulse to attribute her music’s power to its autobiographical veracity has been too much for most of her life’s chroniclers on page and screen to resist.

Szwed, however, has the courage and imagination to question whether ‘real suffering’ is ‘necessary for great singing’ – even for great singing about suffering. A skilful singer can ‘simulate emotions by a catch in the throat, upper-register pyrotechnics, or vibrato’, he writes, and must be able to communicate a panoply of emotions by developing a ‘dramatic sensibility’. Singing, in other words, involves acting. And even if, as seems indisputable, Holiday did bring tremendous emotional intensity to bear on her singing, emotion does not automatically translate into great music. What can achieve that translation is a combination of taste and technique, two qualities that, Szwed argues, Holiday possessed in abundance. To think of Holiday as having ‘technique’ already takes us beyond the formula of technical limitations plus emotional sincerity that has governed so much discussion of her music, and Szwed pays Holiday a high compliment by focusing less on her authenticity than on her artistry. Her powers of rhythmic and melodic invention were legendary among the musicians she played with. Her spontaneous adaptations of well-known tunes, often necessitated by her need to compress a song’s range, were themselves improvisations of the highest standard, sometimes producing entirely new melodies.

Then there was her way with rhythm. ‘Lagging’, or playing behind the beat, was already a common device of jazz musicians when Holiday began recording in the 1930s, but the exceptionally pronounced delay she often used took her early accompanists by surprise. No less innovative was her approach to accenting and phrasing lyrics, often placing the stress in unexpected places and, Szwed suggests, adding an almost abstract dimension to words by employing them not only in their representational sense but also, through accentuation and modification, as pure sound that conveyed its own meanings. Emotion was indeed a hallmark of her singing, but it was through these sharply honed techniques and imaginative leaps that emotion was wrought into beautiful music.

This is a curious book, though. Billed as a biography on its dust jacket, in reality it’s anything but. Szwed feels obliged to tackle the ‘myth’ of Holiday in the first, and shorter, of the book’s two sections, but these chapters have a rather ragbag character, with little sense of narrative progression. It’s not at all clear why we’re given a vignette about the party antics of Woolworth heir Jimmy Donahue, or potted biographies of various other peripheral figures, when we’re told scarcely the basics about Holiday’s early years. It’s only when Szwed moves on to the ‘musician’ that the book comes into its own – though even then, what fascinates him seems to be less the musician than the voice.

Daniel Matlin, Literary Review