Musical Associations and Memory

[brogers70]

Does anybody else have seemingly hard-wired connections between specific pieces of music and random life events. I was just listening to a recording of Dowland's Lachrimae for viol consort and it took me back 55 years to a time when I was lying on my bed listening to it while reading "Tunnel in the Sky", a sci-fi novel by Heinlein as a teenager. I even recalled the feeling of the plastic cover of the LP I had borrowed from the library. Another example - once when I was 14 I was sitting on a couch, playing the last movement of a Sor sonata for guitar - my mother asked me to come wash the dishes. For decades I could not play or hear that piece without thinking "What about the dishes?" I expect lots of people have similar odd things tied to particular bits of music, but I don't know.

[essence]

I associate Brahms 4th symphony with Dostoevsky Crime and punishment, which I was reading at the time I first was listening. It seems to go together rather well...

Beethoven slow movement 5th concerto of course goes with Picnic at Hanging Rock and all the girls in it.

Kelly Rowland Kisses down low goes with....well, you know.

[ted]

Does anybody else have seemingly hard-wired connections between specific pieces of music and random life events. I was just listening to a recording of Dowland's Lachrimae for viol consort and it took me back 55 years to a time when I was lying on my bed listening to it while reading "Tunnel in the Sky", a sci-fi novel by Heinlein as a teenager. I even recalled the feeling of the plastic cover of the LP I had borrowed from the library. Another example - once when I was 14 I was sitting on a couch, playing the last movement of a Sor sonata for guitar - my mother asked me to come wash the dishes. For decades I could not play or hear that piece without thinking "What about the dishes?" I expect lots of people have similar odd things tied to particular bits of music, but I don't know.

Oh yes, all the time, I have thousands of these associations, direct and indirect, and my recorded improvisations, now approaching 900 hours, are a colossal, tangled spiderweb of images, real, imagined and dreamt. Like yours, they are often connected with simultaneous, irrelevant events. The function of memory in this process, especially at the unconscious level, amazes and perplexes me. The most striking example was when a fairly accurate quote from Chaminade popped up in an improvisation. I had never played it and had listened to it only two or three times many years before my listening to the improvisation.

I also get them the other way around, have done all my life, mainly when listening rather than playing. I'll be enjoying a deep listen when suddenly I see clearly people, rooms, places and events I have no conscious memory of experiencing. I haven't the faintest notion what that means; I am not asleep, they are waking visions.

Whatever they imply I encourage these things to the end of musical creation because I know they enrich my music.