Music, moments, memories

Music, moments, memories

Car journeys over the past couple of weeks have been spent in the immensely pleasurable company of

Jessica Hepburn

, reading her 2024 memoir, Save me from the Waves: An adventure from sea to summit. If like me, even reading about or looking at mountains gives you that shiver of joy, then I assure you, you will love this book. Or if mountains are not your bag, then it’s a hell of a musical education, as Jessica manages the extraordinary feat of listening to all 3,000 + episodes of the BBC radio show, Desert Island Discs. She also summits Everest, swims the English Channel and runs the London Marathon. Respect!

However, what’s lingering with me as I listen is the transcendent power of music. I think if I was to die for one principle it would be my belief down to the core of my core that that the ability to create and respond to art in any form is the essence of what makes us human. Not only that but that it’s so vitally important that humanity simply couldn’t survive without it.

Back in the distant past, one of the modules of my degree course I most enjoyed was ethnomusicology, which is defined by the Society for Ethnomusicology as: “the study of music in its social and cultural contexts.¹ Ethnomusicologists examine music as a social process in order to understand what music is and what it means to its practitioners and audiences”. I wasn’t very musically literate in terms of theory or performance, but I definitely got the social and cultural side of it (and being an archaeology nerd, got excited about flutes made from mammoth bones and the like). Music even in its earliest and most rudimentary forms creates patterns of behaviour in individuals and groups. It organises people. It provokes response, discussion and social connection. Think of all the different forms of social connection involved in a live performance: musician(s) on the stage, audience, all the people in the background who have made the performance happen, down to the cleaners who come in at the end of the show. Think of the layers upon layers of coded behaviour in the transaction between performer(s) and audience. Consider how culturally specific that can be. In Western culture the line between performer and audience tends to be quite clearly defined but that’s by no means universal. What is a cultural universal, however, is music itself.

An article in the journal Behavior and Social Issues (2021)² suggests that music is an intrinsic component of human and social evolution. It also makes a case for music’s importance in promoting social cooperation and empathy, considering that music as a shared experience can offer an outlet for the expression of emotion and a form of communication that transcends social and cultural barriers such as age, ethnicity, gender and so on.

This brings me to a little experiment I did in my classroom not long ago with my senior students. I opened the lesson with a question on the board: Do we have to understand the language of a song to understand what it’s about? And a second question: Do we have to understand the language to understand the emotion?

I then played them Maria Callas singing Pucini’s sublime Visi d’Arte from the opera, Tosca. I don’t speak Italian nor did my students, and none of them were familiar with Tosca, but as Maria’s glorious voice soared a profound silence fell. As I watched their expressions, the answer to my second question became obvious. They weren’t just understanding the emotion, they were feeling it.

When I asked what they thought it was about the response was spot on- heartbreak and loss. I like to think that Puccini, genius that he was, would be satisfied that his aria resonated so powerfully with a bunch of seventeen-year-olds in the West of Scotland.

In fact, I’ve loved using music in the classroom. We made playlists for Frankenstein. We made playlists for Macbeth. A classical playlist was always my go-to for calming a class down and getting them to focus on their writing. A popular homework task was to choose a song to share with the class and explain how its themes or emotions connected with the texts we were studying. My opener for second year poetry was Katy Perry’s Firework. I taught a whole unit on Bob Dylan. My friend Marianne will remember when we danced the kids down the corridor to David Bowie. There was a soundtrack for every Duke of Edinburgh expedition- Oliver H’s metal playlist remains the best motivator for canoeing up Loch Lomond in DofE history. Ever.

Music has always been able to open up a space in my life where magic can happen, and more importantly, shared. My brother and certain friends still ping each other tracks and tunes on Spotify and I love this. It speaks volumes.

So, listening to a book that references hundreds of episodes of Desert Island Discs has got me reflecting on what I would choose as my own soundtrack and how many of those tracks feature significantly in the lives of other people. What kind of music and artists would be on there? The list would genre hop all over the place and I know I’d have a task trying to cut it down to just eight tracks but I might just give it a go over the next few weeks. Or here’s a challenge:

· Music to dance for joy to

· Music to cry your heart out to

· Music to inspire an adventure

What would yours be? Why not let me know in the comments. Have fun!

1. https://www.ethnomusicology.org/page/AboutEthnomusicol

2. Rehfeldt RA, Tyndall I, Belisle J. Music as a Cultural Inheritance System: A Contextual-Behavioral Model of Symbolism, Meaning, and the Value of Music. Behav Soc Issues. 2021;30(1):749-773. doi: 10.1007/s42822-021-00084-w. Epub 2021 Dec 3. PMID: 38624997; PMCID: PMC8641538.