Andrew Statum

There's this one piano piece by Schumann that never fails to bring me to my knees. It's called "Eusebius" and its from his series of short piano pieces, "Carnaval." Anyway, that's not important. What is important, at least for this post, is my emotional memory that's connected with the piece.

I first came across the piece as part of this ridiculously expensive 5 CD compilation we had to buy for a Western Music class in college. I was going through the tracks, moving from medieval chants to baroque dances to classical symphonies when suddenly this little piece came on and I was floored. It's so delicate, like the musical equivalent of a whisper or a daisy petal. And then that whisper swells to such a dramatic pitch, as if the desperate voice is trying to assert itself by crying. But then, as suddenly as it swells, the voice is choked back to its initial whisper and finally disappears with a falling cadence into silence. The entire thing's over in under two minutes. The End.

(If you want, you can click here and you'll go to a page with a couple of Schumann pieces you can listen to, one of which, number 5 under "Detailed programme" is the one I'm talking about.)

I don't remember the specifics of the night I first listened to this thing, but I remember I was having a bad day. I think I had gotten into a fight with my girlfriend and I was feeling really low. And it was raining outside. In short, it was the perfect set of circumstances for me to respond strongly to a piece like this. But now, whenever I hear this song, my consciousness is transported immediately back to my dark little dorm room with the rain lashing the window and me brooding over the fight. Kind of like how Karin talks about how her unconscious muscle memory takes over when playing the piano, my emotional memory takes over when I hear this piece and then the rest of my consciousness follows suit.

So why is musical memory so strong? Why, when I hear a song, my emotions adjust accordingly? And why can I remember the tune to a song while I can't seem to remember the words? Is there a biological explanation for it? Is music encoded into memory in a fundamentally different way than, say, language? And why is it so strongly tied to emotions, like olfactory memory?