Richard Kogan is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York City; Co-Director of the Medical Center's Human Sexuality Program; and Artistic Director of the Weill Cornell Music and Medicine Program.Nevada Psychiatric Association, Course Syllabus, 18th Annual Psychopharmacology Update, p. 217.
Kogan is a concert pianist. He developed a series of lecture-recitals that explore the role of music in healing and the influence of psychological factors and medical conditions on the creative work of composers.
Life
Kogan is the son of a gastroenterologist from Elizabeth, New Jersey, and the second of five children. He began piano performances in 1961 at age 6. But the medical world was never far from family life; his father took the boy on medical rounds.PubMed listing His mother enrolled him at the Juilliard School of Music pre-college, where he studied piano with Nadia Reisenberg.
At Harvard University, where he majored in music and completed a pre-medical curriculum, Kogan formed a trio with his Juilliard friend Yo-Yo Ma and violinist Lynn Chang. After earning a bachelor's degree in 1977, he went to Harvard Medical School under a special five-year plan that enabled him to travel and perform concerts.
Kogan received his M.D. degree from Harvard Medical School in 1982. He completed a psychiatry residency and an academic fellowship at New York University.
In 2001 Kogan presented a symposium at the American Psychiatric Association on mental illness and musical creativity. The experience launched him on a new career. It convinced him that exploring composers' psyches made him a better interpreter of their scores, and that understanding the role of creativity in people's lives made him a better psychiatrist.
Kogan's role as artistic director of the Weill Cornell Music and Medicine Program has allowed him to enable medical students and physicians to pursue, as he has, both medicine and music without leaving either behind. Lloyd I. Sederer, "Music, Madness and Medicine: A Visit with Richard Kogan, M.D.", Huffington Post (posted April 27, 2011).
Music For his lecture-concerts, Kogan selects composers who had intrapsychic conflicts that affected their creative processes, and who wrote for the piano, so that he can illustrate his points with musical examples.
He often uses an anniversary as an occasion to examine a certain composer. In 2006 he explored Mozart's mind and music at the 250th anniversary of his birth. In 2007 he discussed Leonard Bernstein on the 50th anniversary of the world premiere of West Side Story. In 2010 he discussed Chopin on the bicentennial of his birth.
Asked whether it is possible to diagnose psychiatric conditions in deceased composers, Kogan said:
Kogan has said that many famous composers have had mental problems that seem to have both enriched and complicated their music, and certainly complicated their lives. Prominent among them are:
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827): His hearing loss and syphilis may have induced psychosis. "Richard Kogan, M.D., on the Trauma of Beethoven's Deafness", Menninger Mindscape, 2015.
Frédéric Chopin (1810–49): In self-imposed exile from his beloved occupied Poland; evidently experiencing tuberculosis that caused enervation, exhaustion, and a constant awareness of the shadow of death; and bedeviled by visual hallucinations (possibly produced by temporal lobe epilepsy), Chopin, according to Kogan, "not coinciden[tally] composed the most famous funeral march in history." Robin Roger, "Richard Kogan: 'Resilience Is a Skill, You Can Practice It'," Musical Toronto, May 20, 2015.
Robert Schumann (1810–56): Manic episodes in the course of his bipolar disorder brought periods of explosive creativity, but he died in a mental institution of self-starvation.
Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky (1840–93): As a closeted homosexual in czarist Russia, he was deeply depressed for many years and may have ended his life by suicide.
Scott Joplin (1867 or 1868 – 1917): the "King of Ragtime", born in the first generation of freeborn African-Americans after the Civil War. "When you listen to classic ragtime pieces and note the basic tension between the metrically rigid baselines and the captivating, syncopated melodic lines, you can almost hear it as the struggle and eventual triumph of freedom over slavery." By 1916, Joplin had tertiary syphilis and resulting insanity; In January 1917 he was admitted to a mental institution, where he soon died of syphilitic dementia at 49. Nick Zagorski, "Richard Kogan Explores the Mind of Ragtime King Scott Joplin", Psychiatric News, 8 April 2016.
George Gershwin (1898–1937) as a child would probably today have been diagnosed with conduct disorder and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. Late in his life, psychoanalysis could not relieve depression triggered by an undiagnosed brain tumor, which killed him at 38. Richard Kogan's presentation at the November 2016 Palm Springs, California, TEDMED Conference: "Can Music Heal What Meds Can't?" on the life, psychiatric symptomatology, and music of George Gershwin.
Some other composers' lives, though also marked by periods of mental illness, did not end quite so tragically. Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873–1943), following the disastrous premiere of his Symphony No. 1, experienced severe depression for three years that prevented him from composing. After his psychiatrist, Nikolai Dahl (an amateur musician), cured Rachmaninoff's creative block through hypnosis and psychotherapy, the composer produced his celebrated Piano Concerto No. 2, dedicated to Dahl. Dr. Richard Kogan, assisted by the Weill Cornell Music and Medicine Orchestra, discusses Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2. Natalie Timoshin, "Creativity and Mental Illness: Richard Kogan on Rachmaninoff", Psychiatric Times, 14 September 2016.
Kogan has said that, while writers and artists have mood disorders in greater proportion than the general population, mental illness is not a prerequisite for creativity. "There have been examples of great composers, such as Bach, Haydn, and Mendelssohn, who seem to have been relatively free of significant psychopathology."
Kogan, the director of a human-sexuality program, sees links between music and human sexuality:
While trained as a classical musician, Kogan has said he has "a deep appreciation for a wide variety of musical genres.... I am generally opposed to arbitrary stylistic distinctions. I agree with the viewpoint of Duke Ellington, who once said, 'There are only two kinds of music—good music and bad music. I like both kinds.'"
Kogan has said that he has had at least a dozen favorite composers, including Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Brahms, Debussy, Stravinsky, Bartók, and Shostakovich. "My favorite composer seems to be the one whose musical world I've been immersed in most deeply at any given time."
Resilience Psychological resilience is the ability to recover from traumatic events to such a degree that one's life returns to its pre-traumatic level of functioning. In Kogan’s view, music can foster the development of resilience.
Beethoven According to Kogan, Ludwig van Beethoven is an extraordinary example of resilience. When he discovered that he was going deaf, he considered suicide, but decided against it and "actually became a much greater composer after he became deaf.... he wasn't hearing the music written by his contemporaries like Haydn, with whom he had studied as a young man, so he was less under the influence of prevailing traditions, and he began to... conjure up sounds and forms that were different from anything anyone had composed".
Beethoven had experienced trauma early in life. His alcoholic father, as a music teacher, was brutal to him. Whenever Beethoven did not follow his instructions precisely, he would either threaten to beat him or actually do so. "And nothing infuriated his father more than when Beethoven would improvise, which the father considered to be an unacceptable act of rebellion." The desperately unhappy boy retreated into a world of music and fantasy: he practiced prodigiously, especially when his father was not around, and daydreamed that his father was not his actual father—that he was in fact the illegitimate son of King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia.
Isolated as a child, Beethoven became considerably more isolated when he went deaf. In some ways, the deafness worked to his advantage. Before he had been forced to give up public performances as one of the leading pianists of the age, he had been terribly frustrated by the pianos of his time, which were tiny instruments with very little resonance. Once he retreated into his silent world, he conjured up the sounds of the modern grand piano. His Appassionata Sonata was never performed in his lifetime. "[I]t makes no sense on pianos of his era", Kogan has said. "[In] the Sonata, you hear him channeling his rage; but the sound of the modern grand piano seemed to be almost essential to the expression of what he was trying to [convey].... Occasionally some 'authentic' person will try to [play it on a piano of his day], but it sounds really odd."
In the middle period of his life, Beethoven composed very dramatic music, full of heroism and nobility. Toward the end of his life—when he was completely deaf and almost completely isolated—"his music-making became much more intimate, lyrical, expressive. You get the feeling that the music that he was creating was his own way of connecting with the outside world, was a way of establishing some kind of intimacy that was otherwise lacking in his life. [I]n the piano sonatas that he wrote [toward the end of his life] he bares his soul... He's not expressing the kind of heaven-storming rage he expressed in the Appassionata. [Now] he is disclosing a lifetime of suffering, but it's tempered, I believe, by wisdom."
At the end of his life, Beethoven had a host of chronic illnesses, including cirrhosis of the liver, chronic renal failure, pancreatitis, and severe abdominal pain. But according to Kogan, this man, who desperately needed healing himself, "was trying to heal the world.... I'm not sure that there's been any piece of music... that's healed more worldwide trauma than the finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony... the Ode to Joy".
Chopin Another example of resilience Kogan cites is Frédéric Chopin, who lived out the entire, brief second half of his life in France, in self-imposed exile from his beloved Poland. The Russian Empire's suppression of Poland's November 1830 Uprising had thrown him into such despair that, in a notebook, he wondered how God, if He existed and was not Himself a Russian, could permit such a calamity. Chopin also poured his distress into compositions such as the Revolutionary Étude, which combines a sense of palpable loss with a sense of unvanquishable resistance. In that piece, 20-year-old Chopin showed his resilience by converting his anguish into inner healing through the truest expression of his feelings.
Amid the pain of exile from his beloved family and homeland, Chopin continued composing piano works in many genres, including pieces modeled on a Polish folk dance, the mazurka (named for Poland's Mazovia, Mazowsze, region), and on the stately aristocratic processional dance, the polonaise (named for Poland). He wrote them as a way of demonstrating the continuing vitality of a Poland that did not exist as a sovereign polity. With his more refined piano versions of uniquely Polish music, he made the world aware of his homeland's musical heritage while extending the reach of those forms.