"Music is remarkably resistant to forgetting," says Steffen Herff, head of the Sydney Music, Mind and Body Laboratory at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. "Music memories often bring up details, including what you saw and how you felt, even decades after the event."
This was very evident when Herff and his team of researchers asked ABC Classic listeners to talk about the classical music they remembered from their childhood. They named childhood favorites such as "Peter and the Wolf," "Bolero" and Christmas classics such as the Nutcracker Suite.
Many recalled spending precious moments with loved ones, going to concerts, playing instruments with family or listening to records.
How stories can open up the musical world
People have referred to classics revealed through stories, such as
Petya and the Wolf by
Sergey Prokofiev, as a pass to the world of music. The story is told by a narrator who describes characters represented by musical instruments: the flute is
the bird, the strings are Petya and the three horns are the wolf.
Many famous artists have appeared as narrator, including Sean Connery, Barry Humphries, David Bowie, Miriam Margolis, and even Alice Cooper.
Dr. Herff is not surprised by the number of musical stories that live on in listeners' memories. He says stories and mental images in addition
to music can help recapture those memories and preserve them. Several viewers had vivid memories of tunes from radio and television programs. For example, one survey participant recognized the Wilhelm Tell Overture by
Gioacchino Rossini from the Bugs Bunny show in the early 1960s.
Another, however, recalled watching an octopus version of Edward Elgar's "Pomp and Circumstance" on Sesame Street. "I used to march around humming my own made-up lyrics, and then when my dad would come home from the treasury, I'd put the record on," he said.
Musical moments with loved ones
Emotions play a big role in creating and reconstructing a person's musical memories. That's why songs written and listened to in their younger years, when people are emotionally impressionable, can evoke a strong sense of nostalgia.
Musical memories associated with shared time together, such as playing or vacationing with parents or going to a concert for the first time, can be especially strong.
"These memories are very significant, and the memory system treats them with special attention," says Dr. Herff. Many of the survey participants had the same favorite pieces of classical music as their parents, siblings, distant relatives, teachers or friends.
For example, one participant still has memories of "Mendelssohn duets sung by my parents accompanied by my grandmother". Another often recalls how she jumped up from her seat when she heard the cannons in Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture during her first concert in London when she was five years old.
Some told how music from their childhood inspired them to take up playing instruments or singing as an adult.
Dr. Herff explains why these musical memories seem so vivid to viewers. According to him, memory for words, faces, sentences, and even pictures of objects can fade over time or because of the sheer number of new things that have to be memorized. But music, poetry and artistic drawings don't seem to be susceptible to such forgetting.
"It really emphasizes some of the wonderful qualities of art," he says. That's good news for parents hoping to instill a love of music in their children, like ABC Classic Drive host Vanessa Hughes.
"My daughter was simply enchanted by Prokofiev's 'Peter and the Wolf,' listening and dancing to the recorded narration I did for her," Vanessa shared. "This is some of the best music I hope she will keep and eventually share with the world."