Music and Memory: EMS 15 October

[doversoul1]

3.00pm

Harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani and guests explore the role of shared memory in early music.
The cornet player Helen Roberts demonstrates 'divisions' in early music - the division of longer notes into shorter, fast-moving florid ornamentations. She explains how building up a memory bank of such divisions helps with improvisation.

Monks from Downside Abbey perform medieval music and describe how repetition of key melodic lines helps to memorise the Psalms

And Mahan investigates a 13th-century Greek medical manuscript from Wellcome's Library, where chants are used to help memorise the symptoms, causes and cure of various conditions.
Live from Wellcome Collection as part of Why Music? The Key to Memory, a weekend of events, concerts and discussions exploring the implications of music's unique capacity to be remembered

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b098gpgs

[ardcarp]

Good to hear Downside Abbey monks singing plainsong live on the programme. Divisions on the cornetto were interesting too. Ms Roberts was playing the top part of 4-part vocal pieces, the lower three being taken by the harpsichord. A chamber organ would have made the vocal lines clearer, I felt. Good to have a live programme, but the conversation was a bit stilted, and probably quite heavily scripted, which was a shame.

The genuinely 'Eastern' chant of the medical Ms was possibly the best bit of the programme...certainly the most unusual!