Memory slips
In the months before my mother died, she had a series of remarkably vivid musical hallucinations. The music she was hearing was, for the most part, unidentifiable and inexplicable. I began to transcribe the songs and, where possible, seek them out. When I succeeded in identifying these there often was a connection to a salient event in her life. One of these, a mundane popular song, forms the source material for the final movement of Memory Slips.
As I pondered the profound yet inadvertent role that music played through the dementia that plagued the end of her life, I became fascinated with broader aspects of music and memory. Memory Slips expresses a number of these aspects.
The first movement is entitled Madeleine – referring to Prousts observation of what psychologists call ‘flashbulb memory’ – the ability to jar vivid and detailed memory form a sensory stimulus. For Proust it was a Madeleine cookie – but recent studies in autobiographical memory and nostalgia suggest that music is often an auditory version of the Madeleine.
The second movement is titled Leannan Sidhe and quotes an old Scottish folk melody. Leannan Sidhe is a Gaelic mythic fairy-demon who seduces a human lover in return for short and miserable but enormously inspired and creative life.
The third movement, Waltzing on the Tip of My Toungue refers to the common occurrence of a musical variant of the ‘tip of the tongue’ phenomenon, which William James – described as an inability to retrieve information combined with the utter frustration of knowing that the information is close at hand as a gap that is intensely active.
Musical instances of TOT – in which the name of a piece can not be returned upon hearing the music – or – more frustratingly – a snippet of sound is conjured but its continuation is elusive is a phenomenon that routinely erodes confidence in the reliability of my own memory.
Finally, the work turns to my mother’s hallucinated rendition of the 1940’s popular song, Cruising Down the River in a movement titled Auris Vermus, Latin for earworms – the common term used by music psychologists for the common annoyance of having a musical snippet immutably lodged in one’s consciousness. Brain activity while struggling to rid oneself of an obsessive earworm is similar, if not stronger, than when the music is actually heard rather than imagined. One falls victim to a song – often a despised song – seduced as if it was the Leannan Sidhe herself.
