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Music and Memory: An Introduction

By Bob Snyder
The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. 2000.
291 pp. Illus. b/w. ISBN 0-262-69237-6, $30.00
Reviewed by: Robert Pepperell
School of Art. Media and Design
University of Wales College, Newport
Caerleon Campus
Newport NP18 3YH
pepperell@ntlworld.com

Since the temporal character of musical experience obviously implies memory one would expect a large volume of literature on the connections between them. Yet a quick scan of Amazon reveals only one other currently available title in the same area, by Jean Gabbert Harrell which, oddly, is not cited here in Bob Snyder's book. Even the extensive bibliography included with 'Music and Memory' reveals little material devoted explicitly to the analysis of musical memory, which indicates that this is relatively new territory. What the bibliography does reveal, however, is the clear intellectual ancestry of the ideas presented in this volume; namely the disciplines of cognitive psychology and cognitive linguistics. Thus the first part of the book sets out to summarise the cognitive organisation of memory and attention e.g. the categorisation of experience, the use of schema, short and long-term memory, and so on, with particular reference to the comprehension of music. The second part of the book then attempts to apply these cognitive tools to the analysis of various musical forms. In doing so Snyder wisely considers a wide range of musical forms, including non-western idioms such as Indonesian Gamelan, West African and North Indian Raga. There is comprehensive discussion of the many dimensions of musical structure such as melody, rhythm, pitch, tempo, intervals, etc. each with an attempted definition of its function often accompanied by diagrams or examples. The appendices are in themselves a rich source of data and include a fascinating list of listening examples, complete with publisher and catalogue number, a glossary of musical terms used in the book and the bibliography already mentioned.

Whether or not you are sympathetic to the precepts of cognitive psychology (and I, for one, am not) 'Music and Memory' will be a necessary point of call for anyone seriously interested in understanding how music affects the human listener (as I am). But whilst one cannot fault on its own terms the scholarship presented here I am unable to accept, as this book seems to suggest, that listening to music is a purely mental (or brain centred) experience. There is no discussion, for example, of the visceral or emotional response to remembered music or the corporeal pleasure (or displeasure) of repetition. It is as though music was not something we danced to, sang with, made love to or cried at. While one cannot expect an author, of course, to cover every aspect of a topic so immense as the one indicated by the title, it still seems strange to me that a subject so rich with physical resonance should be considered in so disembodied a manner. Given the book's dependence on the theories of cognitive psychology, however, such an omission becomes seemingly inevitable.

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