Brains are funny things
Jun. 5th, 2015 07:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficThe concert season is over for my choir, and so I've been feeling a little wistful and listening to recordings of old Dessoff concerts. I keep the recordings of everything we do--in fact, I have recordings all the way back to high school, though those are still on tape. As I've been in Dessoff for more than a decade, we are talking several days worth of music. And that's not even including the recordings of my a cappella group.
This spring, we sang Rossini's "Petite Messe Solonelle," which I sang in high school and haven't sung since. It's been more than fifteen years since I sang it, and well over a decade since I listened to it. But when we sat down to our first rehearsal, I could sing the fugue at full speed and full volume with almost no errors--I remembered it completely. There's something about the things you learn in high school--both the incredible number of repetitions as compared to what I do now (which is sometimes run it once then go) and the plasticity of the teenage brain. Those pieces are lodged in there. I can remember a snatch of music I heard at a concert when I was sixteen and have never been able to find since. I can sing the entirety of a song about fog I sang in middle school and haven't heard since.
But these concerts over the last decade? Some of the pieces I remember all the way through. Some I remember the conductor talking to us about the piece, but I don't remember the music. Some I only remember one eight bar section--the tricky part we rehearsed over and over--and the rest is a blank.
And then there's an entire concert I don't remember at all. If you played it for me, I'd tell you I'd never heard those pieces before, let alone performed them. Yet I'm sure if I looked for it, I'd find both the program to that concert and the music with my markings in it. Maybe it's just cause that concert is Monteverdi and Gabrieli, and if there's a period of music that speaks to me less than Italian Renaissance, I haven't found it. Or maybe I'm just getting old.
This spring, we sang Rossini's "Petite Messe Solonelle," which I sang in high school and haven't sung since. It's been more than fifteen years since I sang it, and well over a decade since I listened to it. But when we sat down to our first rehearsal, I could sing the fugue at full speed and full volume with almost no errors--I remembered it completely. There's something about the things you learn in high school--both the incredible number of repetitions as compared to what I do now (which is sometimes run it once then go) and the plasticity of the teenage brain. Those pieces are lodged in there. I can remember a snatch of music I heard at a concert when I was sixteen and have never been able to find since. I can sing the entirety of a song about fog I sang in middle school and haven't heard since.
But these concerts over the last decade? Some of the pieces I remember all the way through. Some I remember the conductor talking to us about the piece, but I don't remember the music. Some I only remember one eight bar section--the tricky part we rehearsed over and over--and the rest is a blank.
And then there's an entire concert I don't remember at all. If you played it for me, I'd tell you I'd never heard those pieces before, let alone performed them. Yet I'm sure if I looked for it, I'd find both the program to that concert and the music with my markings in it. Maybe it's just cause that concert is Monteverdi and Gabrieli, and if there's a period of music that speaks to me less than Italian Renaissance, I haven't found it. Or maybe I'm just getting old.