Music and Memory

Music and Memory is the fourth publication in the UPM Book Series on Music Research. Music and memory are linked to each other in different ways and with different meanings. The physiological aspect of memory in its musical dimension, which has been discussed mostly outside of musicology, is only one part of it. Previous psychological research on musicality and its role for human development could raise public attention and has led us to new insights as well as to cultural misinterpretations.

These rather popular aspects have to be taken up and re-examined from the perspective of modern musicology, dance, and theatre studies, which include interdisciplinary approaches and detailed analytical studies in a wider context of the performing arts and their steadily changing sound environment.

The main focus might be the fact that music is in itself memory storage that depends on cultural codes. Musical and related emotional expressions, their common and their professional production and distribution services as means of social, ethnic, gender, and individual group memories. Thus, their preservation as part of the entire human memory is of urgent matter in today’s fast producing and fast sorting out world.

How do we situate musical memories in diverse societies? How do we deal with memorable music and musical memories? How do we adjust our steadily changing relationship to these musical memories and the subsequent change of cultural codes?

In this framework, music research can help to recommend cultural decisions in many fields such as music education, audiovisual technology, and social communication in various communities.

These various perspectives of the past and present development of local and/versus global performing arts, which are an important subject of all musicological studies, come into view in this volume. A wide range of different studies provided by fifteen authors in Music and Memory is arranged in the order of themes on fieldwork related issues, ethnomusicological analysis, physiological issues under different historical and educational viewpoints, composition techniques, and audio technology.