that mysterious form of time

Last year sometime, my generally peaceful and petite mother shoved (literally) the book Sonata for Jukebox: Pop Music, Memory, and the Imagined Life by Geoffrey O'Brien into my hands, exclaiming, "You must read this," and then she said it again, as if I hadn't quite understood ... in fact, she required me to give it to my father as a Christmas present. She hasn't spoken to my father in seven years, barely speaks his name. She recently cut him out of all the old photos and gave me the rest. An exorcism perhaps, as music may be the only thing that remains that they cannot untangle their memories of each other from ... my father wouldn't go to a Springsteen concert for years after they split because it was too much of my mother. But such is the effect of music, and perhaps why this book is so extraordinary for those who find themselves in other parts of time when a familiar tune comes on the radio (or iPod or stream).

There has been quite a lot of research about how music enhances memory, but as O'Brien explains in his Introduction, "this is a book written in the presence of music." And by presence, he is examining "how one listener hears" and the "fragments" of memory that music produces. And that is what has always fascinated me, the produced memory, not the quality of it.

And if you grew up in a home constantly filled with music as I did, you know how powerful simply hearing the opening riff of a familiar tune can be. In fact, that I remember most songs by their opening four chords may be an entirely unique music memory, thanks to my father who would spend hours making mixed tapes, timing segues within nanoseconds of the song's opening note. Drop the needle ... click the tape recorder ... [some kind of expletive] .... pick up the needle ... rewind ... drop ... over and over. Each cut, perfectly aligned. I remember my mother vacuuming to White Man in Hammersmith Palais and then In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning in one sweep. And it's shared not only in common experience, but in musical lore, as well. I loved listening to my great-Aunt Virginia tell me how she bought "Standing-Room-Only" tickets to see Judy Garland at Carnegie Hall and how she sat in the aisle, clutching her skirt to her knees, weeping. Without even putting that CD on, just thinking about her memory of that event makes me feel a little choked up.

technologies of memory in the arts
screening the past
words from the front
the perfect mix