Music can take us back in time, into our souls or just open us up to whole new worlds, writes MARIE MURRAY
‘YOU ARE the music while the music lasts,” said TS Eliot, and music lovers know that there is no more potent experience than inhabiting the music that we love.
But music is more than a sensory experience; it infuses and installs itself in our lives. It may shape our deepest remembrances triggering overwhelmingly potent reminders of times past. Forget Proust’s most famous involuntary childhood memory when he tasted those Madeleine crumbs, music lovers put auditory memory above gustatory memory or any other souvenir involontaire any day.
Music provides more than memory: through music we re-experience our former selves in the rawness of our first response to that memory’s refrain. It expresses what cannot be said and vibrates in memory what might not otherwise be recalled.
Music soundtracks our lives. It is what feeling sounds like. It weaves itself into our very souls. It is the speech of angels or, in the words of Beethoven, “the mediator between spiritual and sensual life”. Music lays down sensory and melodic memory patterns shaping our most significant experiences and providing reference points and markers that are important to us.
It is, as Oscar Wilde once said, “the art most nigh to tears and memory”. Music and memory are inextricably bound.
The universal language of music fashions national identity in signature sounds and formal anthems. No celebration or ceremony is complete without music. When we come to bury our dead, music expresses what we cannot say, recalls what we cannot express and mourns with us in ways we could not otherwise articulate.
While cognitive psychology has long been interested in how memories are encoded, stored and retrieved, and how we remember what we hear, new technological capacities to observe the brain in action have increased attention to music’s role in memory, especially sensory memory and episodic memory, or memories of significant events in our lives.
Music has the power to transport us back in time and to evoke memory so deeply that the memory is the music and the music is the memory. Because music and memory is not something that can just be written about, RTÉ Lyric FM in The Lyric Feature is addressing this issue in two significant Music and Memory programmes on Friday, July 8th, and July 15th at 7pm.
In these programmes, publisher Michael Gill talks about how a particular piece of music can trigger the memory of a specific place, person or event. From a cinema in Sutton to an opera house in Berlin; from the Shannon to the Loire to the Vltava; from Chopin in Cloughjordan to Haydn in Salzburg; from Bach in Dublin to Righini in New York, and with Benny Goodman in Clontarf rather than Carnegie Hall, these programmes link music with personal memories of places, people and performances at home and abroad.
To understand the psychology of music and memory, to tune in to and physically experience autobiographical memory in action, to live the reality of what has heretofore been but theory, these programmes will be music to the ears of all those who have ever been moved by the concord of sweet sound and memory.