On music and memory
minerva42 posted something about how music (like smell for her) “brings back people and images and feelings”, and particularly assiduous beowabbit-stalkers might be interested in my comment, which I’m copying here:I don’t have that experience of smell, but I so have it with music! Scarborough Fair and especially Vangelis’ Opéra Sauvage, beautiful as they are and much as I love to listen to them, are the soundtrack of unrequited love for me and listening to them always puts me back in those two very different times in my life. Silly Wizard is the youth and optimism of college. Sea chanteys are optimism, too, but also strength and warmth and coming out to myself about my attraction to men. Disco reminds me of my sister and a particular time in our lives when we were kids (as I was just mentioning to cathijosephine at the pub tonight). Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” is completely suffused for me with complex feelings about my father and his life and death, because it was one of his favourite pieces, so I heard it all the time when I was growing up, and they played it at his memorial service. Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols fills me with the comfort and warmth of my (still very much alive and wonderful) mother’s mulled cider and the cheer and delight she filled the house with around Christmastime. And bluegrass and the Eagles’ “Journey of the Sorcerer” both mean sitting at home with her and Don and listening to good stuff on the radio together.