“The songs we know from childhood, the pieces we have played, the recordings we have listened to lodge themselves in the temporal lobe of the brain, where memory is stored and savored. Like the smell of Grandma’s kitchen, even a few notes of a song can conjure up cellular memories and bring us comfort. It might bring us back to our first kiss or a magical night around a campfire with a skyful of stars overhead or driving to our first day of college with our whole life before us.”
The above a quote from my forthcoming book The Humanitarian Musician. Today, on my 74th birthday, I’m feeling the truth of those musical memories so strongly. In the course of ten days teaching Level III, we learn some 45 pieces/ songs/ games and I have a story for each one. Sometimes it’s a memory of a kid I taught who sang that song as a solo in the Spring Concert, sometimes it evokes the place where I learned the piece, sometimes it calls up the people I sang side-by-side with. I often include telling these stories alongside teaching the material because I believe that personal touch enlarges the meaning of the activity. Even if it was my experience and not my students,’ their mirror neurons carry them into the particular memory that reminds them of the more universal one and the whole enterprise is touched with a sweet emotion.
Today was our 3-hour journey over 400 years from Gregorian Chant to Palestrina and all of it designed to illuminate how functional harmony grew step-by-step from an older modal style. But some of the pieces recalled those memories that brought me to the edge of tears once we began singing or playing them. There was Tristan’s Lament which I used to listen to in college on a treasured vinyl record, often lullabying me to sleep. There was Edi Beo which I played with my nephew and brother-in-law as processional music at my daughter’s wedding (now with a bittersweet tinge as she is newly divorced 17 years later). There is a short canon from the Requiem which I sang in Notre Dame with my college choir in my first trip to Europe that burst my world wide open in the best of ways. I could viscerally feel my 22-year-old self standing next to today’s 74-year-old-self and both of them bathing in the beauty together.
Alongside the brilliant backwards birthday movie my colleague James made, the lovely little gifts from many of the 90 students gathered here, an extraordinary birthday card (see photo below) made by one of my Thai Level III students, there was the great privilege of spending my birthday morning teaching and circling back to the above memories.
Now mid-afternoon, I will plunge into the (thankfully) small hotel pool and do my ritual one-lap-per-year review of my life, trying to remember something significant from each of the 74 (though a little sketchy on the first three!). At some 8 strokes per lap, it’s a bit of a challenge, but a good warm-up for my daily swims in the Michigan lakes coming up (where each year I do at least one swim of a thousand strokes—and yes, I count them while I swim.)
Maybe some songs will come up to accompany each year. Or not.