Daily Mail, August 2008
We all recognise the moment. Suddenly a song or a piece of music that we haven’t heard in decades comes on the radio, and immediately we’re transported back in time to a key moment in our lives when that melody happened to provide the accompaniment.
It doesn’t matter if we aren’t particularly musical. The effect is always the same. A few bars of a particular tune and an early meeting with a girl friend or boy friend is instantly back there on the inner screens of our lives with all its anticipations and joys. If we’re still together with that person we might think, “They’re playing our song”.
Or perhaps the music relates to something we did at school or in a club, is something our grandmothers used to sing, or was once the theme music to a television programme we used to watch. The music from Z-Cars will forever he associated with police cars for some people; the Elton John and Kiki Dee record Don’t Go Breaking My Heart with O-levels for others.
We all have our own triggers, those melodies that can bring tears or laughter, pride or excitement, and conjure up instant visions of faces and situations long entombed in what we thought were the closed vaults of our memories.
Golden oldies radio stations like Smooth FM and Radio Two have long been tapping into pop music’s memory lane, and doctors, as well as poets, have always known that there is much that can be therapeutic in music.
With this in mind a group of cognitive psychologists is now engaged in research, asking 3000 people from 69 countries to relate their recollections of Beatles’ songs, their aim being to help better understanding of the musical link between our pasts and our presents.
No doubt Yesterday will feature for more than a few respondents, along with memories of Beatlemania, first kisses, first babies and other fragments of autobiography. But the research being presented this week to the British Association Science Festival is no trivial nostalgia exercise.
We’ve all heard occasions when interviewees become suddenly emotional when choosing their records for Desert Island Discs. And those of us who’ve seen very elderly patients in old people’s homes suddenly emerge out of virtually semi-catatonic states to sing clearly and happily songs they learned nearly ninety years ago can’t help but be moved.
What memories are these songs evoking, we wonder, as we listen. What is the long forgotten world that is being recaptured through music?
Most memories unearthed, researchers say, are positive and happy—the colour of a girl’s dress, the smell of the bluebells, or the heat of sunshine suddenly reinvading the senses after decades. Whenever I hear Elgar’s Chanson de Matin I am nine again, running eagerly from the garden to the wireless in the kitchen to listen to the latest episode of Bunkle Butts In on Children’s Hour in 1950.
But music can invoke sadness, too, sometimes inexplicably. All my life I wondered why whenever I heard You Are My Sunshine tears came to my eyes. Musically I could see that the song’s jaunty tune ran counter to the message implied by its lyrics and the fear of loss in the line “please don’t take my sunshine away”. But that was no reason for it to upset me. It was only a song.
And then some years ago the BBC asked me to present a television programme about servicemen who’d been lost in World War II. As a prop I asked my mother if I might borrow my father’s wallet, which had been sent to her by the War Office after his body had been washed up in Brittany in 1944.
I’d always known about the wallet’s existence, but, for some reason, it wasn’t until the night before we filmed on the French beach where his body had been found that I fully examined its sea-stained contents. A few faded scribbled words were just legible on the reverse of a shopping list of children’s clothes he’d been asked to buy while he was away. They read “You Are My Sunshine”.
I was three when he was lost at sea in 1944. You Are My Sunshine was a huge wartime hit and my mother must have asked him to buy the sheet music for her when he was on his last visit home. The song, which would have been played all the time on the radio, would have provoked tears in our house after his death. Tears I was too young to understand, but which had been lying there, ready to be released and shared with her all my life.
But where does this uncanny link between music, memory and emotions come from? How can melody instantly retrieve long buried thoughts?
Today, while music is all around us, and its uses in entertainment and commercials clearly understood, opinions are divided as to its origins. Some think it may in a very primitive sense have pre-dated speech itself. Others, and I would agree with them, believe it developed alongside speech as a separate way of communicating.
In other words, music is a language of its own, created specifically for the conveyance and sharing of emotions, originally in a very primitive sense, now very sophisticatedly—even manipulatively.
Film makers have always understood this. It’s one thing for a romantic hero to tell the girl he loves her, but it becomes something much more emotional when a symphony orchestra swells behind him as he tells her.
Remember Kate Winslett and Leonardo di Caprio and that Celine Dion Titanic theme song. Without the music the film would have been a story about a big ship that sank. With the music it involved all of us, because, through Kate and Leo, it drew in our emotions.
Then again music can draw great crowds together, as we see on the Last Night Of The Proms, when the singing of Land Of Hope And Glory provokes tears of a, usually forgotten, national pride. And we all know what sobbing wrecks some grown men can become at football matches as they hear the off-key strains of You’ll Never Walk Alone.
But if music speaks so directly to our emotions, just a conscious glimpse into our own pasts quickly tells us how closely linked are memory and our emotion. Ponder any long ago event in our lives and we’ll recall exactly how we felt—be it anger, hurt, affection or whatever.
I believe music works in a slightly reverse way. It makes a shortcut to our emotions, which then throw up in crystal detail the incident which provoked those emotions—the girl, the night, the match. All we need is the right tunes as keys to unlock the mental doors to our pasts.
It’s well known that music helps the memories of small children. They learn and enjoy nursery rhymes as soon as they can speak, while studies have shown that material given to the mentally retarded is retained better if given to them in song rather than in a story.
Now in an age in which one person in five in the world will soon be over the age of sixty, failing memory is becoming an important and worrying problem for the most developed societies.
The idea of sitting around in an old folks home only coming alive for the singing of Yellow Submarine or When I’m Ninety Four might be a chilling prospect to those who still have their faculties.
But a better understanding of memory, and the way it links with music, might be one more vital step to making millions of lives happier and more fulfilling.
