How Accurate Are Those Iconic Musical Memories? by Thomas Wolf
Can you name two or three musical experiences that you remember as being extraordinary? Do you recall details like who was performing and where these events took place? If you were at a concert, can you describe the hall, where you were sitting, who you were with, and the reaction of the audience? What was so memorable?
If you can immediately come up with candidate events and describe them, congratulations. You are lucky. Your world has been enriched by these moments.
But how accurate are those memories? And does it matter?
Recently I was having dinner with some friends and talking about sports. The conversation turned to historic games in professional basketball and I mentioned my excitement in watching the fourth quarter on television of the famous game when Philadelphia’s star, Wilt Chamberlain, set the record for scoring in a single game with 100 points.
How could I remember watching the historical basketball game on television when Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points if the game was never televised and no video footage of it has even been located?
“You couldn’t have watched that game,” said one of my friends. “It was not televised and in fact there is no video footage that you could have seen later. The game was played in Hershey, Pennsylvania in 1962 and was not considered important enough for the network to send a television crew.”
“Now wait a minute,” I said with great certainty. “You have to be wrong. I have a clear memory of sitting on the couch with my brother, Andy, in front of our black and white TV set and rooting for Wilt in the fourth quarter. I remember our calling out to other players ‘Pass it to Wilt.’”
“Sorry,” said my friend (someone I should have realized was a basketball aficionado). “Couldn’t have happened.”
So certain was I that I was right that I placed a bet. It did not take long for my friend to ascertain from the internet that my recollection was faulty and I was subsequently forced to fork over several dollars. I was (and continue to be) amazed by this discovery of my errant memory since the images of that night are so clear and I can visualize the event. What is most amazing to me is that by 1962 my brother was away at college and he couldn’t have been with me. Yet I remember watching the game with him.
How could this be?
There are many kinds of memory but one of the most unreliable is something called “episodic memory.” Unlike memory for facts (semantic memory), episodic memory is the ability to recall and mentally re-experience specific episodes from one’s personal past. It often involves a subjective sense of time and includes a narrative structure (“I was on the couch, my brother sat beside me, we became excited as Wilt’s point score increased, the crowd was going crazy, we called out to the other players…” and so on). Episodic memory can be unreliable for several reasons. Certainly one reason is that it is often associated with powerful emotions that can distort reality. Another is that episodic memory is affected by subsequent events or learnings. Over time, I must obviously have internalized the reported events surrounding that night and somehow my memory erroneously placed me in front of a television set with my brother.
If subsequent events and other people’s opinions can alter memory, can this taint our recollection of great concerts? The answer is “of course.” When we hear what we think is a superb concert and the reviews afterwards are uniformly negative, our memory of that event may unconsciously shift (“maybe it wasn’t such a great concert now that I think about it”). So too, when we are present at a concert that is later deemed historic, our memory of it can become rose-colored. Episodic memory even allows us to witness an historic event—in my case, the famous basketball game—when such witnessing could never have occurred.
One of the great pleasures of music lovers is to recall concerts that are once-in-a-life-time experiences. I remember, for example, hearing Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana” performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra at the Academy of Music, probably sometime around 1960.
A memorable performance – Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra playing Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana.” Much of what shaped my memory of that concert was based on erroneous contextual information.
The opening strains of “O Fortuna” were extraordinary—it was like hearing something wonderfully weird and magnificently old and beautiful—music I believed at the time had been rediscovered and brought to life by Orff centuries after it had originally been sung in a monastery in Europe. And to top it off, I had always assumed that the experience was even more special because I had been present at the introduction of that music to American audiences.
For years, all these facts colored my memory of that night. I was there as history was being made…or so I remembered. But of course “Carmina Burana” is an original musical composition dating from the 1930s and while the text is medieval, the music is definitely twentieth century and has nothing to do with monasteries in the middle ages. By 1960, it was well established in the classical repertory. The first performance was on June 8, 1937 in Frankfort, Germany and it was first heard by audiences in America in San Francisco on January 10, 1954 (several years before it came to Philadelphia). While I still remember that concert fondly, somehow it does not quite send the same kind of shivers down my spine.
One of the great performances of Mussougsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” played by Sviatoslav Richter. For years, I knew only the orchestral version and hearing the original piano version was a revelation.
Not all memorable musical events have to come from attendance at concerts. I remember the first time my brother Andy (a pianist who would later study at the Curtis Institute of Music) and I heard the original piano version of Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” from a live performance recording by Sviatoslav Richter. We were in a log cabin in Maine on a damp foggy night playing the record on an old cheap Victrola. We were familiar with practically every note of the piece—but it was the orchestral transcription that we knew, which at the time was what American audiences mostly heard. The piano version (which we did not realize was the original and was far more popular at the time in the Soviet Union) had been unknown to us and hearing it was a revelation (it is still for me far more interesting and exciting than Ravel’s orchestral transcription). That recording continues to be special to me though I wonder whether it would have been such a knock-out at the time had we been familiar with the original piano version already.
Some musical memories are not so pleasant and the unhappy ones can become magnified because of their emotional content. When I was five years old, I went to a children’s concert at which a young girl (she couldn’t have been much older than me) played a movement of a violin concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra. I was completely mesmerized and when the piece came to an end (or so I thought), I started to clap. But it wasn’t the end…and I was mortified to be the only one clapping. I was convinced that I had ruined the young girl’s performance. As I remember, it was only a single clap and my small hands could not have produced much in the way of volume…but to me the sound rang out like a gunshot throughout the hall and it embarrasses me to this day. After the concert, when my mother asked how I liked the program, I said I was so ashamed of my clapping. She, who had been sitting beside me, claimed she had never noticed.
Our unreliable memories of musical events are only partly the result of faulty powers of recall. Another contributing factor is the aging process. Simply put, as we age, our tastes change, often markedly, and this can have an impact on our memories. A good friend and colleague, Gregor Benko, wrote to me recently about his changing relationship with the music of Gustav Mahler:
I listen to music now with 76-year-old ears and mind, and it is quite different from when I was in my twenties. I think many people make the same kind of journey and that affects their memories. One aspect of my particular case was my relationship to Mahler. Like many people, I fell under the composer’s spell decades ago and had a mystical experience, for example, hearing the end of the 9th symphony conducted by Bruno Walter, on a record. But then over time it became too much—musical life was over-saturated with Mahler. And for me there was so much more to music that I dropped away from Mahler, to the point where it has been several years since I wanted to ever hear any of Mahler’s music again, and I haven’t. Much the same way, as we age, our reactions and memories of specific performances change.
Tastes change over time: Norwegian flutist, Ørnulf Gulbransen, completely changed my preferences in Beethoven symphony performances.
As far as our changing tastes are concerned, not only may we come to dislike what we once valued but the opposite is also true—what we utterly hated may become things we now love. For me, at one time, conductor Otto Klemperer’s performances of Beethoven symphonies were the ultimate in perfection. I loved the pregnant meaning extracted from his slow tempi. When I listened to Arturo Toscanini conduct the same music, on the other hand, I was more than a little disappointed. “Why does Toscanini play the music so fast? He is missing all the beauty of the various voices,” I said to myself.
Then during one summer spent at the Marlboro Music Festival, I had an epiphany after a long conversation with the Norwegian flutist, Ørnulf Gulbransen. I had admired an extended solo he played in a variation of Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy where he seemed to slow down at the end of phrases with lovely rubatos at the same time that the orchestra was driving ahead. How was that possible since they were all clearly playing together? His explanation for how the feat was achieved—how to “ritard in time” as he put it—changed forever how I listened to Beethoven’s orchestral music and, in the process, it caused me to appreciate and admire Toscanini’s performances where expressiveness of the musical line was achieved in conjunction with exciting fast tempi. Perhaps this is also a major reason why I will never forget Gulbransen’s playing that day—it was one of those memorable performances that came with the bonus of the musical wisdom that accompanied it.
Clarinetist Harold Wright, soprano Benita Valente, and pianist Rudolf Serkin. I have no interest in listening to the recording of their live performance of Schubert’s “Shepherd on the Rock.” I was in the hall when they performed it at the Marlboro Music Festival and my memory of the live event is something I will always treasure.
A pernicious problem we sometimes encounter in cherishing our musical memories of great concerts is later having access to recordings of them. I know for example, that there exists a recording of a live performance from the Marlboro Festival of Schubert’s “Shepherd on the Rock,” sung by soprano Benita Valente with clarinetist Harold Wright and pianist Rudolf Serkin. I was at their concert and it was a revelation. Everyone in the hall felt it and the unrestrained audience reaction is a distinct part of my memories of that day. The excitement afterwards was palpable—people talked about the performance all summer long. I sensed that if I ever listened to the recording, my recollection might well never be the same and would in some way be diminished. That may partly be because of the special ambiance in the hall and the excitement of the moment—the fact that there were so many incredible musicians in the audience who were as bowled over as I was. But it may also be because what was extraordinary to me then may be less so now. As a result, listening to the recording is something I intend never to do.
Paradoxically, one’s response to a recording of a live concert can on rare occasions have the exact opposite effect to a mediocre recollection of the concert itself. The late Marc Johnson, esteemed cellist of the Vermeer Quartet, told me of an experience he had listening to a recording of a live concert on the radio in his car. He had just crossed over from New Hampshire into Maine and tuned in a classical music station. A Beethoven string quartet had just begun but Marc was too late to hear who was performing. As he was driving, he was quite struck by the beauty of the playing—so much so, that as he seemed to be getting out of range of the station, he pulled over to the side of the road to listen to the remainder of the piece and learn who was performing it. “I was astonished,” he told me later. “It was us—the Vermeer Quartet. I don’t remember that concert being especially remarkable but it sure sounded great.”
Does this mean that our musical recollections have no value—that memory is so unreliable and taste so malleable that the extraordinary moments we retain are worthless? Not at all. They matter a great deal just as, for some people, cherished memories of a first love or the birth of a child matter. They are touchpoints in what makes life worth living. Who cares how closely the feelings and impressions align with objective reality? Indeed, after a lifetime of wonderful experiences listening to music—moments that are etched in my brain—I have concluded that the accuracy of my memories is beside the point. These moments have greatly enriched my life and continue to do so whenever I recall them. I hope the same is true for you.