How We Remember Music or in My Case Don't

[antongould]

I have just finished listening to the glory that, in my opinion, is Bruckner 7. As I was listening something I suppose terrible came to me - if someone had played me a snippet I could have said I know that but could not have identified it specifically, not even to Composer let alone Symphony or Movement!
Similarly if someone said hum a bit of Beethoven Paiano Concerto 1 - I couldn't yet, again, I love the piece.

And yet go to pop songs and say sing me a piece of any of a thousand inconsequential ditties and no bother.

I obviously am weird that goes without saying - I had no musical training of any kind ever and yet thinking further to the instrumental pop hits e.g. Telestar, Wonderful Land etc. I don't seem to remember those - so is it the words?

Of the few classical pieces of classical I can bring to mind there always seems to be a "hook" - William Tell, Aria from the Goldbergs, the Wedding March, Land of Hope and Glory etc.

I resign my poster's badge!

[french frank]

Well, I came over in that R3 musicality test as hugely unmusical and I too have a poor 'musical memory' as far as classical pieces are concerned. Yes, I know I know them but I can't name them. I start humming or whistling something but am stumped as to what it is most of the time. I can manage the rudiments of era and style but, um, apart from those darn warhorses ...

Yes, I resign my badge too!

[Lateralthinking1]

The classical music that I find easiest to identify has associations - something we performed at school, pieces that people I knew liked, things I heard in specific places that seemed to sum up the moment, commercials and film scores, etc. To this perhaps add a few that I discovered from listening to DID or watching the proms and then felt sufficiently moved to investigate further, including more of the composer himself. Why so few female classical composers by the way?

But I was mainly raised with the pop charts which culturally had a big significance in the eras of my younger years - perhaps bigger than before and since, given the wider media, explosion of genres, improvements in recording - with close links to identity and identification with others. That form of music was for many a parallel with football in being an easy social reference point. One thing that strikes me is the question of scale. It did seem a very large and diverse phenomenon but while it was diverse it wasn't large. 30 or 40 records at any time really only represent the surface, not that the variety could be questioned even now.

There is additionally that sort of NLP thing about which sense is most acute in a person. I have very much been on the hearing side of things so I have always picked up quickly on snippets of sound. Onslaughts of noise affect me more than many. I have to work harder on seeing things because I have a lot of internal thought. Music is alternative colour. Crucially, there were also numbers. Pop music is occasionally described as "the soundtrack to our lives". I used to write down the Top 30 from the age of seven - even now I could place most records from 1970 through to 1992 to a year, and a fair few to a season and even a month. Numbers were also a feature of the charts themselves and then, of course, there were often quite distinctive names and titles.

So it all became in a sense a sort of connecting grid between me the individual and others and the respective ages of people and eras. It was the way I thought and felt even more than how I thought and felt without it. It is as much a language or a science or a religion of thinking in that way as French or chemistry or Christianity. It is a personal geography as well as a diary with very detailed specific reference points. When the youth connection dropped out around 30, and there was less in the commercial mainstream that appealed, I sort of naturally went broader and deeper and listened to far more that was outside that grid. I'd see that change as a parallel to greater connection with a wider world and less with what was felt to be personally relevant.

And in those wider spaces of personal relations, and eras pre personal history, the numbers and the words and the titles fly around, are less easily remembered or even nailed down. I sort of do parts of decades now in my head rather than specific weeks in place and time. This suits me enough. At the same time, I see and see through things more regrettably. Greater awareness, often peculiarly with greater confusion, less impressionable, but impressions are funny things you know. We tend to think of them as a bit "head in the clouds" but you look at the impressionist painters and the paintings aren't just just splodge. There is a lot of fine detail there in the application. It is just a different vocabulary of thinking and feeling, another way of describing the house.

I am aware that numbers feature hugely in the titles of classical music and this, I think, is a stumbling block. I have no idea whether Mahler did a third, a fifth and a seventh or if he did what they were like. By contrast, I could pick out Copland's Fanfare For The Common Man in a moment. Ditto Jupiter from The Planets, A London Symphony by Vaughan Williams, and Morning by Grieg. Note there that I mention people, places, time. This is what the numbers in the titles of classical music lack and that has to impact on memory or the absence of it. Ask a carpenter. He knows his tools and could label them but can he say immediately on seeing a hundred screws the dimension of each? I doubt it unless he has a memory of a shop where some were bought.

Of course, there is also the attention to detail. I guess you get from music what you want. If you have immense enjoyment from having it in the background, great, but it may be that your greatest attention is more on life's fundamentals. I am learning more about gardening and I love it but I have to work hard on it because it isn't integral to my basic outlook or thinking or emotions. I did though show some interest in it before I ever came to music so it isn't the hardest work to me. It is just more in the forefront of my life. Actually I find it similar to approaching music genres that are not in my roots but about which I wish to learn more.

[Andrew Slater]

I don't think there's anything unusual about your musical memory. I find that repeated listening (say 5 or 6 times, sometimes as many as 10) is the only way a piece becomes lodged in my memory. Even then, I probably wouldn't be able to conjure up a 'new' piece at will. Then, at an unexpected moment it can pop into my head when I'm least expecting it.

I suspect that pop music is easily memorised purely because it is repeated so much.

(Perhaps this explains the R3 morning strategy which has been so vociferously condemned elsewhere .....)

You could try an experiment - listen to, say, the scherzo of Bruckner 7 5 or 6 times in succession. Even if you don't remember it within minutes, I bet it will pop into your head the next day.

In the end, does it matter?

[french frank]

In the end, does it matter?

Could save money on CDs

Things that have words are easy to remember, or which have a 'stanzaic' structure - but so much classical music doesn't.

[antongould]

In the end it probably doesn't matter I would agree but I find it interesting. Yes pop music is repeated but shame on shame I have just bought a pop CD and listened to it once - Lady Gould has decided she doesn't like it and I can only listen in the car! - and I can remember the tunes of at least 3 of the songs - they are not complex I admit - but by the "hook" of the words/title. Without imposing I would love to hear from a real musician - no disrespect to those who have already replied - as I read that Glenn Gould could immediately call to mind and play pieces by composers he hated and had heard only a couple of times at most. Mind you he loved Petula Clark and was probably note perfect on Downtown too!

[Andrew Slater]

Things that have words are easy to remember, or which have a 'stanzaic' structure - but so much classical music doesn't.

Try fitting 'See-saw-margery-daw' to the trumpet tune in the scherzo of Bruckner 7!

[antongould]

Can I just record a big thank you to Lateralthinking1 for his detailed, wonderful reply - I agree with almost everything you say and find the classical pieces by name as opposed to number particularly insightful - but was Fanfare For The Common Man coming back to me from Emmerson, Lake and Palmer or the Chicago Symphony?

[Serial_Apologist]

I guess compared to others so far on this thread, I was lucky to have been brought up in a family that loved classical music. I started memorising things like Johann Strauss waltz cycles, by age five being able to recall the themes in correct order. By seven I knew the Schumann Piano Concerto from start to finish in my head, and was some way on the way to being likewise with Mozart's B flat major Piano Concerto. Once one recalled the opening strains of the piece it was all go in my head; with the Mozart this was difficult to begin with, until I came up with a prompt, namely that the first three notes of the piece are a rise of a major third and a minor third, followed by a semitone drop.

From that point on I have gradually accumulated a mental repertoire of music from most periods of the classical lexicon; atonal pieces such as the Schoenberg piano concerto are more difficult to recall in entirety, but once one gets into a piece it is amazing how much better one can work out its structure from hearing it in ones head than listening on record - where for instance one can as it were stop and realise the relationship of "that" particular passage to what preceded and what comes later.

S-A

I really recommend getting to familiarise oneself with music in this way. It also has the benefit of helping me get to sleep. The next morning I am often able to recall at roughly what point in, say, the slow movement of Beethoven 7, I lulled myself off!

[Lateralthinking1]

Antongould

Thank you for your kind comments.

In 1971, I was attempting to learn to play the guitar at my junior school. One of the tunes we were given was "Lord of the Dance". Three years later, I was in a large choir of junior schools at Fairfield singing three of Copland's Old American Songs, one of which was "Simple Gifts" upon which "Lord of the Dance" was based. "Fanfare For The Common Man" was also performed during those concerts. In 1977, ELP were in the chart with "Fanfare For The Common Man". In the early 1980s, I bought Copland on record and I bought him on cd around 1990. In early 1993, I watched "Simple Gifts" being performed at Bill Clinton's inauguration on TV. I think sometimes people underestimate the positive impacts cross-cultural references had during those decades.

One thing I have wondered - and this gets alarmingly deep - I have a huge recall of music with lyrics and can replay songs in my head, even with the minutiae of the arrangements, to the extent that what is "in there" sometimes surprises me. I don't think that I could do it consciously. It happens naturally or not at all in silence. I also know that I couldn't sustain it for the duration of a piece that is longer than five minutes. The way I would describe it is that it is just like a recording except I don't exactly hear it as sound. It is somewhere between sound and silence and yet it is spot on in all of the specifics. Indeed, acutely so.

The only moments when I have ever heard music in my head as actual sound, and then ironically it has been much more elusive to pinpoint, and somewhat repetitive, one musical phrase over and again, is during the fortunately rare times of trauma. I mention this because I have also wondered how people experience music - particularly when it is internal and there is no music in the room - and if composers hear music more directly than I have described in their heads. I can even wake up with a new tune in my head - my own - and I have the detailed arrangement for it too. And it is never sound as such - but halfway between sound and silence like a recording in the muffled distance but peculiarly crystal clear in the detail almost like a heartbeat turned into an elaborate structure with fine lines and three dimensional - and then in a minute or two it has completely gone from memory. - Lat.

[Vile Consort]

I am amazed how quickly I can identify pieces - often within a couple of bars. Of course, I can't identify everything, and to be fair I have a better hit rate on the composer than the actual work. I get very frustrated on the occasions I hear a work and know exactly where it's going (down to the orchestration) but can't work out what it is. It's not that I have ever tried to memorize pieces, they just sink in.

Something else that happens is that, if I listen to a radio programme whilst driving, then subsequently hear it again, possibly months later, I will know exactly where I was when I first heard it at many points in the programme. The association fails to work the other way round - the place doesn't bring the programme to mind.

[Serial_Apologist]

Antongould

Thank you for your kind comments.

In 1971, I was attempting to learn to play the guitar at my junior school. One of the tunes we were given was "Lord of the Dance". Three years later, I was in a large choir of junior schools at Fairfield singing three of Copland's Old American Songs, one of which was "Simple Gifts" upon which "Lord of the Dance" was based. "Fanfare For The Common Man" was also performed during those concerts. In 1977, ELP were in the chart with "Fanfare For The Common Man". In the early 1980s, I bought Copland on record and I bought him on cd around 1990. In early 1993, I watched "Simple Gifts" being performed at Bill Clinton's inauguration on TV. I think sometimes people underestimate the positive impacts cross-cultural references had during those decades.

One thing I have wondered - and this gets alarmingly deep - I have a huge recall of music with lyrics and can replay songs in my head, even with the minutiae of the arrangements, to the extent that what is "in there" sometimes surprises me. I don't think that I could do it consciously. It happens naturally or not at all in silence. I also know that I couldn't sustain it for the duration of a piece that is longer than five minutes. The way I would describe it is that it is just like a recording except I don't exactly hear it as sound. It is somewhere between sound and silence and yet it is spot on in all of the specifics. Indeed, acutely so.

The only moments when I have ever heard music in my head as actual sound, and then ironically it has been much more elusive to pinpoint, and somewhat repetitive, one musical phrase over and again, is during the fortunately rare times of trauma. I mention this because I have also wondered how people experience music - particularly when it is internal and there is no music in the room - and if composers hear music more directly than I have described in their heads. I can even wake up with a new tune in my head - my own - and I have the detailed arrangement for it too. And it is never sound as such - but halfway between sound and silence like a recording in the muffled distance but peculiarly crystal clear in the detail almost like a heartbeat turned into an elaborate structure with fine lines and three dimensional - and then in a minute or two it has completely gone from memory. - Lat.

That's very interesting Lat. Do you have difficulty recalling sounds other than music too?

[Lateralthinking1]

Yes, I hadn't thought of it before, but I don't hear others' voices or other sounds in my head, although I can do so if if I put my mind to it consciously. In fact, I don't think until you said it just now that I have ever considered internally the sound of anything like the sea on the rocks or a household drill. l certainly don't have internal pictures - a mind's eye - although I've learnt how that can be done in the past few years. I don't picture people on the phone or the radio. I don't dream in pictures. There's also huge amounts of symbolism which I would find quite hard to describe. I suppose I make a lot of wordy connections.

If this sounds insular, I don't think it is in the way that it might be perceived. I actually feel an enormous amount for other people and indeed for places - but the way in which I think of them - it is all emotional association and memories of what has been heard rather than how things were said or how they looked as they were being said. I get strong impressions of people and the environment. Basically I only really see or hear who or what I am seeing or hearing at the time unless I'm alone when I recall it and assimilate it in the ways I've just expressed. I can't wander in my mind to the sounds and pictures of other people and places when I'm with specific others in specific places. I rarely do so when alone either. It is more feelings, thoughts, concepts.

There's a lot of what I would call mapping where others might have sights internally with the map as like a compass inside my head. If I think of the North York Moors, it is about happy feelings that I associate with the words. I can remember where I went and who I was with but I'm not seeing them. If I were to try to place them, I'd think of the upper part of my head as they are "North". Of course, if I see a picture of the Moors, I recognise it immediately. And I could tell you that we had breakfast in Whitby on Tuesday 11th and from memory what we both had to eat. I know when I was in the Lake District in August 1973, we waited for two hours in the Woolpack in Keswick to be served dinner and they played "Spanish Eyes" by Al Martino repeatedly.

I don't know whether this is particularly unusual or not. I've often thought I should be diagnosed with something but I speak so lucidly most of the time that it has never been offered. I'd be interested to read about others' experiences in this area.

[antongould]

Thanks S_A and Vile Consort - I must say I am very envious! Another quirk of the way I remember music and listen to it is if we come back to say Bruckner 7 when I start listening I know what is coming but not for more than say 30 seconds to a minute and definitely not in the next movement. But on pop CDs if I dare return to there my look ahead includes the next track and if I hear the trackx on the radio and it ends and the next track doesn't come I almost feel cheated!

[salymap]

If you are referring only to'classical' symphonies, anton, I still get mixed up with Haydn, and shock, horror, sometimes Mozart. I know the composer, and usually the country or origin, Czech, Russian,Spanish etc but not always the work.
However, I have a wonderful 'memory bank' of other works, Rossini overtures, Kodaly, Bartok, Berlioz works that I can silently sing through in my head. Don't worry about it,just enjoy the music you dolike.