As a one-way trajectory, musical performance mimics time itself. With or without words, music has the power to evoke a moment, an era, a place, a person, an emotion. This playlist explores the way music helps us process time, not only shaping memories but also allowing us to interpret the past, become nostalgic, or even to forget.
Music and time
Music’s inextricability from time is emphasized in the opening piece by Pink Floyd called Time. It begins with an alarm clock, a wake-up call to the listener not to waste this precious commodity. Through changing textures, it ruminates on the way human perceptions of time evolve through the aging process.
Cultural memory
Music, through its style, performance or references, can embody a cultural or ancestral memory. This is well illustrated in Candomblé, in which a Brazilian-born singer, Rozalia de Souza, uses African and Afro-Cuban rhythms expressing connection with her past and present.
Links to the past and being remembered
JS Bach’s famous choral drawn from his cantata BWV 147 ‘Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben’ (Heart and Mouth and Deeds and Life) has become a signifier in a different way of connection to a musical tradition dating back to the 18th century. Innumerable works since then have drawn inspiration from it, recalling it both literally and indirectly. These include a realisation on one of the earliest Moog synthesizer recordings by Wendy Carlos.
The music of prayer, as in Bach’s Vergiss mein nicht (Forget me not), is laced throughout with pleas to be remembered, or at least not forgotten, by a deity.
Interestingly, the theme of being remembered also emerges strongly in love songs which, in similar language, frequently express fear of loss or abandonment. Examples of these include Nina Simone’s Ne me quitte pas (Don’t leave me), or the more upbeat Remember me, sung by Diana Ross, and Forget-me-nots by Patrice Rushen.
Nostalgia
Many songs, like Those Were the Days (Mary Hopkin), evoke nostalgia for what were perceived as good or better times. Likewise, Simon and Garfunkel’s So Long Frank Lloyd Wright conjures the poignancy of the duo’s break-up, while recalling the creativity and laughter of their earlier collaboration.
Musings about the past, memory and forgetting are heard in one of Debussy’s Ariettes oublieés (Forgotten songs) and also in the wordless Memory and Forgetting by the well-known film-music composer, Spearfisher.
In Song No.6 from Liquid Days: Forgetting, the minimalist composer, Philip Glass, uses his signature repetition technique as a metaphor for the passage of time itself, and it drives home the meaning of the words through micro-changes in patterns and stresses.
Break-ups and breakdowns
Much of the music of relationship break-ups and trying to forget emotional hurt and pain includes sentiments of anger and retribution, as in Dust My Broom by Elmore James. The phrase ‘Dust my broom’, although the subject of minor debate, means to leave and not come back. Sometimes, such music is an attempt to rationalise or come to terms with a bad or even toxic past as in Papa was a Rollin’ Stone (The Temptations) or River (Joni Mitchell).
The closing song in the playlist, Winter in America by Gil Scott-Heron, stands in a class of its own as a warning of a storm unfolding in real time. It contrasts a past he remembers when there were ‘four seasons’, to a sadder present where deteriorating social and political conditions presage a lasting winter in America.
Hey Jukebox
Listen to a playlist of the songs discussed in this blog on Spotify, or in the Museum on Tuesday afternoons from 2.30pm.
Lead image: Aron Visuals on Unsplash