# the associative power of music



## Jaime77 (Jun 29, 2009)

You know that feeling you get when you hear music from another time and it takes you back there? It can often be a very moving thing indeed. Popular music in particular, maybe because of the lyrics, the over-playing it often gets and the ephemeral quality of it, usually makes a much bigger impression than classical. Do you find that? There are however some classical pieces and when I hear them I am totally back in a particular place and time with a particular mood. I generally find the experience to be quite magical. 

One such example is Durufle's Requiem. It brings me back to my uni years - going to choir practice on Monday nights... the old campus buildings lit up and the chill in the air mixed with the buzz of meeting others for musical performance and the sheer beauty of the sound we were creating - a kind of deep nostalgia only that it never goes away. It seems to go on and on. Hard to explain. 

Anyone got some similar experiences to share. They needn't be anything as romantic


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## emiellucifuge (May 26, 2009)

About 5 years ago I went through quite a long phase of depression and there was some music I would listen to every day as an escape. 

If i hear those songs i do get a sense of melancholy again and nostalgi posssibly.

And they were pop music.


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## Polednice (Sep 13, 2009)

emiellucifuge said:


> About 5 years ago I went through quite a long phase of depression and there was some music I would listen to every day as an escape.
> 
> If i hear those songs i do get a sense of melancholy again and nostalgi posssibly.
> 
> And they were pop music.


I can cite a similar experience. I have only ever listened to classical music, but there are particular pieces that take me back to a worse time in my life. Even though I was depressed, it was dark things like the emotional excess of Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony that... not so much made me feel better, but... I don't know. It's hard to describe, but I felt some kind of affinity with the music that meant I didn't feel as alone.

There are other pieces that send me back to other times and places, associated with different events and feelings; such as when I hear one of the first pieces of classical music I ever bought, or the music of the first live concert I ever attended etc.

While such experiences are moving, I find it much more enthralling when a piece of music puts me another time and place, with a different mood, but all of which I have never actually experienced personally - and, of course, if it makes it feel genuine; I'm not just talking about imagining some random scene, I mean being involuntarily carried to a completely different world.


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## Aramis (Mar 1, 2009)

Nah. Music usually takes me to places that I've never seen before.


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## Weston (Jul 11, 2008)

Unfortunately I sometimes have the opposite experience. I try to listen to music I enjoyed in my high school days trying to recapture youthful enthusiasm -- progressive rock epics usually -- and I often find they don't have quite the same impact. They don't seem as long or complicated or well recorded by today's standards. Yet nothing new has taken their place. 

It's a bit of a bummer. 

But sometimes they still do have the same impact. It may have something to do with how much stress I'm under or how much focus I can achieve.


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## emiellucifuge (May 26, 2009)

Yes Polednice you have described it better than I could


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## Jaime77 (Jun 29, 2009)

I think I understand what you mean, Polednice. I can't say that feeling happens much to me though. Most music doesn't transport me to the unfamiliar. If we are on the same ground, I'd say it is kind of like the unfamiliar familiar, like a place you don't know but feel totally at home in. That is something amazing that music can do. 

La Mer brings me back to a time when I had a bad toothache but still I love it.


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## Elgarian (Jul 30, 2008)

Polednice said:


> While such experiences are moving, I find it much more enthralling when a piece of music puts me another time and place, with a different mood, but all of which I have never actually experienced personally - and, of course, if it makes it feel genuine; I'm not just talking about imagining some random scene, I mean being involuntarily carried to a completely different world.


Yes, I find this too, and it always seems enormously valuable when it happens. Elgar can transport me to certain English landscapes, real or imagined - so can Vaughan Williams. Sibelius takes me to distant unvisited places with cold snow-laden skies. Wagner takes me into a vast world of myth, beyond ordinary time and ordinary space.

But then there's the transportation in _time_ to the era in which the music was composed. Listening to Lully, or Couperin or Charpentier takes me back to the Versailles of the baroque period - very French, and _very_ 17th/early 18th century. Massenet takes me back to late nineteenth-century Paris. Handel's cantatas conjure up Arcadian Italian landscapes of the early 18th century. This is the kind of time-shift that most affects me - that is, it's it's a way of _tasting_ history. But that said, I can't hear the opening passages of _Scheherezade_ without flashing back to remember my discovery of classical music at the age of 16 or so.


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## starry (Jun 2, 2009)

Most people grow up in their early life to popular music so that will be where their nostalgia is.

Music of whatever type normally relates to the style of the time it was composed, not sure if I could say it fully takes me there though. The past is a foreign land which we can't really fully understand I believe. We can sense some of the gracefulness of the classical, the order of the baroque, the passion of the later 19th century but it is still relatively distant. 'Romanticism' does lead to modernism so maybe some can more easily feel an affinity with that. Perhaps slow movements or pieces where the style might be less constricting to a modern audience and where some modern introspection might be deduced are the easiest ways into earlier styles.


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