Memory seems to be a distinctive characteristic of the human being. If humans are to be considered distinguishable from other animals (Darwin, 1872; Edelman, 1992), memory is the essence of that distinction, and it is of special importance to the musician. It is impossible to escape from the fact that, without the practice and use of memory, music is literally unthinkable; it may be that the ‘music’ of animals is music free of thought and conscious memory (see Animal music). Since music is a temporal phenomenon, it relies completely on our ability to store and relate musical ‘information’. Human memory, however, is a profoundly mysterious entity over which individuals seem to have little conscious control. It can seem to be difficult, perhaps impossible, to decide not to remember something; and it is impossible to decide to remember something one believes one has forgotten.
Contemporary psychology normally identifies four different types of memory: recollection, recall, recognition and relearning (see also Psychology of music, §II, 4). Whereas recollection relies on cues (of which musical notation is an assemblage), recall is a totalizing act, and ‘eidetic’ or complete memory is a common experience of music among professionals, even though the memory of any perception, however ‘complete’, is not of course the same as the original perception itself. Recognition, whether cued or not, brings to us the belief that something is familiar (and this sense of familiarity may have a basis in experience or may — as in the case of the so-called ‘déjà vu’ — be in all likelihood illusory), whereas relearning, which is found to be easier than learning, rests on actual familiarity to build memory in yet a different way.
The human capacity for memory seems in effect limitless; this includes music just like other activities. Sigmund Freud wrote of ‘tunes that come into one's head … determined by … a train of thought which has a right to occupy one's mind’ (Strachey, 1973, p.138). We know this from everyday experience. Millions of human beings who do not think of themselves as musicians can nevertheless recognize or recall thousands of musical items, be they nursery songs, popular songs, film music, hymns and so on, and the power of music to trigger associations in the memory is legendary (see Nattiez, 1989).
Scientists have settled on a differentiation between short-term and long-term memory, which makes such obvious sense to individuals in their own experience that these terms have gone into everyday parlance. Endel Tulving in particular has posited a more technical, specialist distinction between procedural memory, or knowing about skills, and propositional or declarative memory, or knowing about knowledge (Mithen, 1996, p.231). In general, we have an individual sense of skill, but feel that knowledge often comes from outside our individual selves. Even memory for skills, however, is further categorized into the episodic, which concerns remembered individual action, and the semantic, which concerns remembering the world apart from the self. This division conforms well with the musical experience of many cultures, and seems to conform with what we know about human artistic evolution. All art seems to rely significantly on collective memory, something beyond purely individual psychological processes and experiences. Indeed Brǎiloiu, the Romanian ethnomusicologist who pioneered the investigation of so-called ‘primitive’ human music, argued that it was difficult to maintain that any one individual can be called the ‘creator’ of musical works, and this is as true of the musical performer as of the composer (1984).
The mnemonic helps us to summon up memories that we know we have. The rosary is a familiar example that is as self-evidently collective in its origins as it is individual in its present meaning. Musical notation is a device of this kind, offering a network of ‘cues’: the musical score is a metaphor that triggers one or another example of a ‘piece’ of music, an episode in our artistic life. Musicians are particularly interested in episodic memory and its connections to the semantic. Perhaps what is most striking is the precision of episodic memory. Precision is obvious in the case of, say, some star performer playing a virtuoso Romantic concerto; yet such precision ought to be no less obvious when we watch a slick popular music group on television miming so perfectly — and by definition ‘from memory’ — to a pre-recorded audio track (we usually forget that the ‘live’ performance is actually dubbed). Mnemonic devices are assumed to date from human pre-history, and in modern Western music go back at least as far as the famous Guidonian Hand of the 11th century. Nevertheless, mnemonics engage conscious thought and there is a price to be paid for them; there is ample testimony that musicians usually play or sing better when relying on their memory rather than ‘reading’ from notation of any kind. Conversely, there is growing evidence that using musical memory facilitates general memory (Storr, 1992, p.21), and Hanslick was probably wrong to argue (1854) that music has no ‘purpose’, since it seems increasingly likely that music played a special role at least in the development of cognitive fluidity founded upon episodic and semantic memory in our remote ancestors.
The capacity for memory clearly varies greatly, innately, and over the course of a human life. Considering the vast capacity for memory of any normal human being, enabling us for example to speak a language, individual differences in the capacity for musical memory may not be generally significant. As Edelman observed, ‘it is no surprise that different individuals have such different memories and that they use them in such different fashions’ (1992, p.104). There is however one clear distinction between those few who can accurately recall and recognize actual pitch (so-called Absolute pitch, and easily tested by comparing the frequency of a note named and sung with the frequency of some reference sound such as that of a tuning fork) and those many who cannot; it is not known whether this rare kind of musical memory is genetically determined, the result of childhood experience, or a combination of the two (Heaton, 1998), but experimental psychologists agree that it cannot be learnt by adults to any significant extent. It is generally thought that absolute pitch is a considerable advantage for performers and composers, since it offers a kind of clinical certainty in perceiving and in imagining music (a distinction discussed in Cook, 1992), although it is noted that people who cannot remember actual pitch are able to move more comfortably between different tuning standards and different musical cultures.
‘Learning’ is however the central element in musical memorization. Rarely, memorization can be instant, as when Mozart reputedly wrote down a complete, sophisticated polyphonic vocal piece he had heard only once; even if that story were not true, there are records of prodigious instant musical memory, and its possibility is beyond doubt. Rarely too, memorization is either impossible or nearly impossible, for pathological reasons. In the main, however, memorization relies on the process of habituation: hence the proverb ‘practice makes perfect’. Thus ‘relearning’ probably has a privileged role in music from among the four basic types of memory. Evidence of this is to be found in the fact that modern Western music has developed a large collective memory in the form of scales, arpeggios and similar routines that are used to ‘train’ the autonomic nervous system and its associated neural networks to ‘memorize’ basic patterns of notes in all keys, producing musicians whose memories are primed to find the familiar in music not previously encountered — not unlike the way in which musicians of the Indian classical tradition acquire a palette of rāgas enabling them to recognize and generate new but comprehensible pitch successions. One of the challenges of memorizing much post-tonal Western music is that such music may not refer to the collective memory of what is often and sensibly called the ‘common practice’ period.
It is useful to understand clearly how ‘playing’ a modern Western instrument, the keyboard being perhaps the simplest case, is nothing more or less than an act of choreography. The performer in fact memorizes a sequence of physical movements; this is equally true, if more intimately so and harder to observe, of the most basic form of music-making, human song. It seems to be an aspect of our condition that, when we observe playing or singing (as it were) out of context — for example by watching a video recording of a performance with the sound turned off — the sequence of movements appears to be of an astonishing variety, complexity and extent, far too varied, complex and long for us to be able to begin to comprehend how we are able to remember it. The listener's recollection of this performance, however, includes or need include not a single trace of that choreography, but exists in the abstract ‘language’ of music, as a purely mental image. It is this language which musicians believe lies at the heart of their ability typically to recall, perfectly, large amounts of music, and without which visual and tactile memory are, in isolation, relatively weak tools. If musical memory moves between these poles of the mental and the physical, different practices will lie at different relative distances from the poles. Some are so physically orientated that their notation records the required choreography or aspects of it (an example is lute tablature) rather than offering a symbolic picture of the resulting music such as staff notation provides. Staff notation emphasizes the factor of linked visual memory, which can be of real importance; an illustration of this is that a performer who has learnt a piece from memory can become subsequently confused if relearning the same piece from a different edition, in which the music appears at a different place on the page. In music of the oral tradition, on the other hand, there may be no repository of a musical culture at all other than that existing in the memories of living members of that culture, and it is presumed that the earliest human music was of this kind. Intermediate practices include jazz, often notated on a ‘lead-sheet’ which provides a harmonic and sometimes rhythmic map, to guide the player's or vocalist's memory of the melodic detail that will be appropriate to that number and produce a satisfying improvised ensemble.
There is clearly an intimate connection between memory and the aesthetics of music. We remember not merely music in its physical and mental representations, but also the degree of quality or value of music and music-making, which is again without doubt a function of both the collective and the individual. What we are to make of these particular memories is, however, a different matter. Philosophers and especially linguists in the 20th century occasionally tried to convey the limits of remembered human understanding by positing a Martian (e.g. Koestler, 1967), who differs from the human in not only being able to speak (sing, play and remember as a conscious being) but in being able to know how it speaks, a kind of knowledge that may lie beyond the destiny of our species.
E. Hanslick: Vom Musikalisch-Schönen: ein Beitrag zur Revision der Ästhetik der Tonkunst (Leipzig, 1854/R, 16/1966; Eng. trans. 1891/R, 1986, as On the Musically Beautiful: a Contribution towards the Revision of the Aesthetics of Music)
C. Darwin: The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (London, 1872)
A. Koestler: The Ghost in the Machine (London, 1967)
J. Strachey, ed. and trans.: S. Freud: Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (Harmondsworth, 1973) [Eng. trans. of Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse, Vienna, 1916–17]
C. Brǎiloiu: Problems of Ethnomusicology, ed. A.L. Lloyd (Cambridge, 1984)
J.-J. Nattiez: Proust musicien (Paris, 1984; Eng. trans., 1989)
N. Cook: Music, Imagination, and Culture (Oxford, 1992)
G. Edelman: Bright Earth, Brilliant Fire: on the Matter of the Mind (London, 1992)
A. Storr: Music and the Mind (London, 1992)
S. Mithen: The Prehistory of the Mind: a Search for the Origins of Art, Religion and Science (London, 1996)
P. Heaton, B. Hermelin and L. Pring: ‘Autism and Pitch Processing: a Precursor for Savant Musical Ability?’, Music Perception, xv (1998), 291–305
JONATHAN DUNSBY