I can't help myself

After seeing several recent books on brain plasticity, brain trauma, and musical abilities, I can understand how one can become so sensitive to music, to have abilities that are beyond what is common in other people. I seem to have a very good memory insofar as I seem to be able to remember entire large works of music and have been able to do this all my life.

It is not all that uncommon that people recall music, indeed, music seems to be tied to memory for most people to some extant. My parents seemed musical. Both liked music and it was played all the time, but neither studied music in any formal way. I seemed to have developed a preoccupation with music at quite an early age, and after having read Oliver Sach's book "Musicophilia" in which he emphasized those cases he knew as a neuroscientist where trauma had caused people with no developed acuity towards music to become suddenly obsessed with it, I have been wondering how my history has to do with the inclination. I seem to fit into the group where visual handicap leaves a large part of the temporal and visual cortex underused. I lost vision in my left eye at an early age and my acuity in the right one is only about a third normal. I am far from legally blind and any first year anatomy student knows that tracts from each eye lead to both lobes of the visual cortex. Still my musical acuity seems to be developed as it often is in blind people and I may have unused processor bandwidth, to barrow the metaphor from computers, that gets used in recalling music.

I have heard of musicians who have a better memory than I do, and I realize that I have been cheating somewhat in looking at scores and remembering the music that way. This inclines one to think more musicalogically, but often the impetus to analysis is driven by its memonic value. When I first started using pocket scores to help my memory as a high school student, I didn't have as good tonal memory as I do now. I couldn't sight sing parts, as I do now, and I didn't know much theory or even how to read transposed parts and odd clefs, like C-clef. I still struggle to read voice parts in the old clefs, as in the Bach Geselschaft edition, but what I was getting around to say is that performers have to read from the individual part. They have to count the rests and do not get the benefit of seeing all the other parts of the score. It takes great discipline to count and play a part correctly, all the more for chamber performers where there is no conductor. Still, someone has to have an overview, to see the forest for the trees. Of course a century or more ago, performance was the main access people had to music. You either learned to make music yourself or you did without. Now, recorded sound makes it possible for people like me to do everything in reverse, to learn about music from the top down, from a rich sample of music played on the radio years ago, and to dive into the details.

And it goes without saying that there are strong emotional ties in this passion. The people who know about modality in the way people think will say that there are most people who key on spoken or written word, hence the large number of people who find pleasure in reading; who find emotional depth in books and ideas. For me those hooks have always been musical and with particular pieces that carry connotation and history for me. Aesthetics seems to be based on subconscious archetypes of cycle that leads to forms. Memory is an essential part of the ability to perceive aesthetically and so you can't spoon-feed music appreciation by talking about form and style to people who have no memory for music. And you can't entice them with academic discussions of sonata-rondo form unless they have an emotional attachment to music that uses that form.

In some sense to write about music is always like preaching to the faithful; it doesn't really mean anything unless you have some essential abilities and experience. I might talk about particular pieces I know, even spur you to go listen to them, but I am talking myself blue in the face unless you have some basic capabilities, not the least of which is a developed memory.