Music and Memory
Friday 23rd January IAS Milburn House 11.00-2.00
The Memory Group will be holding a workshop and discussion session on Music and Memory,
following up its sessions on Memory and Theatre and Memory and Translation last term.
The session, which will begin with coffee and end with lunch, will combine a discussion of two
papers on Music and Memory by Dr Katherine Hambridge (Warwick) and Dr Oskar Cox Jensen (King’s
London, Music in London Project 1800-1850) with material circulated in advance. The second half of
the session will address some of the different ways of thinking about the relationship between music
and memory, with participants being encouraged to identify (and, if possible bring on CD) particular
pieces of music or songs that seem to them to capture or trigger a particular memory, or perhaps a
particular false memory. This is very much a discussion, the aim of which is to try to encourage
reflection on the different dimensions of interaction between music and Memory, and to be
entertained!
I will circulate Katherine’s paper at the end of week 2. And there are three papers on the website in
the restricted area (for which the password is ‘remember’).
Could people please let Tracy know if they are coming so that we can cater adequately – and
please come to what promises to be a very interesting discussion.
The following is no more than a prod!
Laura Barton, The Guardian 28.4. 2011
My parents headed back to Lancashire after the Easter weekend, and as they left I gave them a pile
of records for the journey home – Marcus Foster, Nathaniel Ratecliff, the new Felice Brothers among
them – supplies to spin out over the long road ahead.
I often think of how family car journeys are where our musical seeds are planted – songs sown while
you slept on the back seat, lines that stuck while you stared out at all the streetlights and the bus
stops and the rooftops passing by. Our car was always alive with cassettes – in the glove
compartment and the seat pockets, jumbled in the footwell of the passenger seat, and some filed,
surprisingly neatly, in a special plastic carrying case on the floor.
There were rock'n'roll compilations, offering everything from Bobby Vee's Rubber Ball to Frankie
Lymon and the Teenagers' Why Do Fools Fall in Love? There was a collection named Drive Time USA,
made up of such giddy American classics as the J Geils Band's Centrefold and John Mellencamp's Jack
and Diane.
At my Dad's behest, we would tune in to Sing Something Simple and Pick of the Pops and, to please
my mother, permit her to play at least one side of the Keith Richards album Talk Is Cheap. We would
listen to Steeleye Span and Fleetwood Mac, set off for Liverpool with Lou Reed, Richie Havens, or
Roxy Music on the stereo, head home listening to the Paul Simon collection Greatest Hits, Etc – each
journey a delicate balance between carsickness and singing along to Kodachrome.
Many of my fondest memories of family car journeys seem to involve Supertramp – the four of us
driving south somewhere, singing along to Give a Little Bit, or sitting in a drizzly Southport car park
watching the windscreen wipers sweep along in time to It's Raining Again. Later would come Kate
Bush's Hounds of Love, Peter Gabriel's So, Paul Simon's Graceland. And when the tape player broke,
we improvised: my brother knuckling the theme to BBC Test Match Cricket against the back seat
door while I danced along beside him.
The album I associate most persistently with our family car journeys came before all that: a strange
double cassette named All Aboard, and promised "24 Original All-Time Children's Favourites". This
was not some mild-mannered clutch of lullabies and nursery rhymes to sedate travelling children,
but a collection of tunes so thoroughly, Goonishly Technicolor that they imprinted for ever on your
young mind the most wonderful music and the most extraordinary pictures.
On those car journeys we revelled in the Gnu Song, the Bee Song, and the Hippopotamus Song, as
well as to Bernard Cribbins "heaving and complaining" his way through Right Said Fred, and Peter
Sellers and Sophia Loren flouncing and lusting through Goodness Gracious Me. There was Burl Ives
singing I Know An Old Lady, Dick James's blustering Robin Hood, and Buckingham Palace, written by
AA Milne and sung by Ann Stephens.
There were glimpses, too, beyond all the glorious mud and busy, busy bees, into an unsettling adult
world – the extraordinary sadness of Two Little Boys, as sung by Rolf Harris, and all the tragic
crumpled passion of Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West), as recounted by Benny Hill.
As I thought of my parents headed north with the stereo on, I tried to think what those family car
journey soundtracks have left with me — beyond a softness for milkmen, a weakness for the
hippopotamus and a curious fondness for driving in the rain. And I suppose that with the gentle
whirr and click of those early cassettes, there was planted in me the notion that in this short, sweet
life, there are few things more glorious than music on a car stereo, and that wherever you may be
going, you should always take a song with you.
Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium - "Who are we, if not a combination of
experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an
encyclopaedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be
constantly reshuffled and reordered in every conceivable way."