Tricks of memory
Agimmick or a bold feat of collective virtuosity? Opinions are divided, but there’s no doubt that the thrusting young players of the London-based Aurora Orchestra have guaranteed themselves a lot of media attention with the programme they have chosen for the Proms this summer as part of a theme in the festival on music and memory. Their programme includes two pieces – a new one called Smatter Hauler by the rising British composer Anna Meredith and an old one called the Pastoral symphony by a dead white male called Beethoven – that the whole orchestra will perform from memory.
It’s not a new trick. The same players, conducted by the intrepid Nicholas Collon, played Mozart’s Jupiter symphony from memory last summer. The Pastoral, however, is a much bigger beast: more movements, instruments, notes, drama ... and opportunities for things to go horribly, embarrassingly pear-shaped.
Undoubtedly the danger factor from the musical equivalent of dancing on a high wire, blindfolded, without a safety net will draw people to the concert. At a deeper level, however, it should also prompt us to consider two other muchcontested questions. How does the brain memorise music? And what’s the value of it?
All human beings, including those who claim to be ‘‘tone deaf’’, can memorise music, even if it’s only recognising the tune of Happy Birthday. Most of us have thousands of tunes locked in our brains. There is much evidence – for example from musicians working with people with amnesia, dementia or brain damage – to suggest that much-loved tunes can trigger deepseated recollections or emotions even when a person has lost all other forms of memory.
I have witnessed astonishing examples of that, including an eminent organist struck down with Alzheimer’s who couldn’t remember his own address yet could still deliver stupendously complex fugues from memory. For a magisterial compendium of jaw-dropping case studies in this area, read Oliver Sacks’s Musicophilia.
As you might expect, professional musicians tend to have particularly developed forms of musical memory. Many are blessed with ‘‘perfect pitch’’, meaning that their brains store an exact memory of any musical note. Not only can they identify the pitch, they can often say whether it is slightly sharp or flat (according to conventional western tuning). Nobody has satisfactorily explained this, although it’s notable that perfect pitch is far more common among children who speak oriental languages (where the pitch of a word determines meaning), than among western children.
It is also much more common among people who are born blind, which suggests that when our brains are deprived of one sense they compensate by strengthening the information flow from another.
That fits in with research suggesting that musicians’ brains (like those of London cabbies who have memorised ‘‘the knowledge’’ of 25,000 streets) are physically different from other people’s. As the neuroscientist Jessica Grahn explains in a fascinating article in the Proms prospectus, they have more ‘‘grey matter’’ in the hippocampus. That’s perhaps more evident in pop and jazz – where musicians regularly play whole gigs without printed music – than in the classical world. Nevertheless you often see conductors such as Simon Rattle directing complex symphonies from memory. Even more impressively – because they have to produce real sounds, not just waft their arms around – classical virtuosos are expected to play whole concertos or recitals from memory.
Not all do. Some believe that the stress of remembering the notes detracts from their main task: conveying the music’s meaning and emotion. Indeed, it’s ironic (given the Aurora’s choice of symphony) that Beethoven was one of many composers who was appalled when performers played his music from memory. The party trick done by Daniel Barenboim and other modern-day pianists of playing cycles of all of Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas from memory would have driven him into one of his notorious rages.
Other musicians, however, think that getting rid of the sheet music not only removes a visual barrier between performers and audience, but liberates musicians’ minds as well. The brain is no longer wasting energy on processing what the eye sees. It can concentrate on interpreting the music.
How will the Aurora players go about their task? Many musicians and even untrained music lovers could ‘‘play’’ the Pastoral in their heads – just as most art lovers could ‘‘visualise’’ the Mona Lisa without consulting a reproduction.
Humming the main themes in vaguely the right order, however, is a universe away from reproducing every note and expression mark of, say, the second violin part. That requires hours of repetition to develop a large-scale version of so-called ‘‘muscle memory’’.
The players will be assisted by crystalclear cues from Collon, a superb young conductor who will be constantly consulting his own mental map of the entire score – all 40 minutes of it.
It’s certainly achievable, but is it desirable? Will the performance be memorable only because it is from memory or because the ‘‘liberated’’ musicians reach new interpretative heights? That remains to be seen, but it should be an exciting night.
The danger factor from the musical equivalent of dancing on a high wire, blindfolded, without a safety net will draw people to the concert