I know what made Mozart tic
(Filed: 13/10/2004)

Mozart was obsessed with filthy verse and breaking wind - evidence,
says the composer James McConnel, that his hero was a fellow
Tourette's sufferer. He tells Robert Gore-Langton why music is his
medicine, too.

You could go quite a while without spotting anything untoward about
him. But sooner or later you become aware that James McConnel has a
bizarre affliction.

At one point, we are sitting in the composer's study in his
magnificent Norfolk rectory, rabbiting on about Mozart. Out of the
blue he does a strange facial twitch - a little one.

By midday lunch is ready. As I pass him the peas, he has a full-
blown twitch, jabs the air repeatedly with his finger, brushes his
face with his other hand, and lets out a brief snort. None of his
family - least of all his wife, the Country Life cartoonist Annie
Tempest - seems to notice this.

McConnel is what you might call Bohemian posh, and looks and sounds
like a hyperactive version of Hugh Grant. He has a background in
musicals but also composes for television and film.

His face, too, is about to become familiar as the presenter of a
documentary for Channel 4 called What Made Mozart Tic?, in which he
suggests that Mozart had Tourette's Syndrome. It's not a new theory.
But it is one which McConnel is in a unique position to argue
because he himself is a sufferer.

"It's horrible; of course, if you've got the swearing and spitting
kind of Tourette's [this affects about 20 per cent of sufferers].
But I haven't. I've got the more charming version, touch wood."

The only time McConnel doesn't twitch (put a gun to his head and you
could make him stop, he says, but only for so long) is when he's at
his piano, composing. In the program he argues that Mozart,
too, "self-medicated" by writing music.

"The self-medicating theory is that music is a replacement for the
twitching. With me it was subconscious. It wasn't until I was about
25 that someone pointed out that I wasn't twitching when I was at
the piano.

"I suspect Mozart didn't have physical jerks as much as me. But
there is definite evidence of his grimacing and feet-tapping.
"We also know a lot about his inability to rein in impulses, the
sudden boredom, his sense of mischief and his scatological
obsession, which all point to Tourette's. He even had a morbid fear
of the trumpet until he was nine. Seriously! He would lie down and
scream if he heard one."

The filthy, excrement-obsessed letters Mozart wrote provide a useful
starting point for McConnel.

"There's a very rare condition in Tourette's called coprographia -
the need to write down filth. We Touretters have filthy minds!
"When you write a song, as Mozart did, called Lick Out My Arsehole,
that in itself is not so shocking judged by the standards of his
day. But what is very odd and Touretty about it is that he set it to
the most gorgeous, sublime tune. It's Tourettishly inappropriate.
"My sense of humor is the same. I never know when to stop."

McConnel - like Mozart - passes wind a lot, staging elaborate wind-
breaking competitions with his daughter. "I love farting," he beams.
Because he suffers from obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) McConnel
takes half an hour to go through all his bedtime rituals - checking
lights, looking behind doors and so forth.

"When I am doing them I know it is completely barking," he
says. "But I can't not do it and feel comfortable. If I don't, the
house will burn down, the children will fry, there will be some
terrible calamity as a consequence. That's how it feels."

The same was apparently true for the young Mozart. "When he was a
child he had to do his bedtime rituals with his father, Leopold, and
if they weren't right he would do them all over again."

Although Tourette's wasn't recognized in Mozart's day, much has been
made of his constant childhood illnesses. These, apparently, could
have triggered Pandas (pediatric auto-immune neuro-psychiatric
disorder), which can lead to Tourette's. McConnel himself wasn't
diagnosed with Tourette's until 12 years ago - he's now 46. He can,
however, pinpoint the onset.

"I can remember the very instant I started twitching. It was during
the third verse of Hark the Herald Angels Sing at my school carol
service when I was six. It was a sniff and I didn't have a cold. I
started sniffing, which became permanent.

"Later, I heard a man and a woman having a row. She stormed off with
a loud 'huh' and the seeds of my OCD started then, because I started
copying that 'huh' obsessively. Huh, huh, huh, huh. I had to get it
just right."

McConnel believes the root of Mozart's Tourette's is to be found in
the music itself - something McConnel knows from his own experience
of composing.

"Tourette's is a constant battle between having a compulsion and
trying to control it, and that can translate into music. Mozart let
his music run off in chaotic directions but then always brought it
back under control.

"His interest in counterpoint and fugue - its unfashionable
complexity - appealed to his Touretty side. The music for me has
just so much happiness, for want of a better word. There's no
residual misery. You always come away from Mozart feeling better."
Scientific tests have proved the efficacy of Mozart in music
therapy: it is indeed deeply calming. Not that this stops his
greatest fan going about the house trilling, farting and twitching
like a dervish.

The family, however, clearly regard the condition with a sense of
humor; McConnel's e-mail name is McTwitch and there is a plate in
the kitchen inscribed: "Warning: mad twitcher on the loose."
I ask McConnel's wife, Annie, what it's like living with a one-man
tic-ing bomb. "It's his OCD that is the worst of it," she says. His
constant switching off the fax machine in the study drives her mad.
Or as she puts it, rather wittily: "James has Tourette's, whereas I
suffer from it."

It runs in the family. Their son Freddie, 12, is also classed as
having Tourette's. A member of Mensa, he was recently on Mastermind.
His specialist subject? Mozart.

• What Made Mozart Tic?, October 18, Channel 4, 8pm


Source:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?
xml=/arts/2004/10/13/bmoz12.xml&sSheet=/arts/2004/10/13/ixartleft.htm
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