Seasonal Earworm Thoughts
I have on multiple occasions had conversations, when musicking in Germany, that went:
German person: Is there an English phrase equivalent to ‘Ohrwurm’?
Me: We say, ‘The Germans have a phrase that translates as ‘ear worm’
Everyone: chuckles
(It is only on looking it up to check my spelling that I discover that this is also what Germans call the insect the English call an earwig. Maybe everyone else knew that already.)
Anyway, I am thinking about earworms because I’m writing this the day after Rainbow Voices’ Winter Concert. As is so often the case, it is the day after a performance when the music I’ve spent the previous weeks preparing for it is particularly vivid in my head. I have a similar experience when delivering an arrangement: just at the point when I no longer need to process the music is exactly when it rings loudly in my inner ear.
So, there are a couple of observations here to make. One is that it suggests that a performance regime where you prepare a programme intensively, perform it once and then move on is kind of cognitively wasteful. I have long thought that the act of performance brings improvement to one’s performance that can’t be recreated in rehearsal, and suspect it is to do with the concentration-enhancing effects of the sympathetic nervous system. The vividness of the earworms the morning after a performance would therefore be symptoms of this extra deep learning.
This is why it makes sense to build in small, preparatory performances into your preparation process. Not just for the experience it offers at handling a specific set of challenges, but for the depth of musical learning you undergo in the sleep that follows it. It also suggests an approach to programme-planning that sees some music come through multiple performances, each helping it become both more secure and more rich for the next.
Of course, at Christmas, we’re going to be putting all of this music aside until next autumn, so there’s going to be some time before we have the chance to get this benefit. But given the relatively short time-frame for preparing seasonal repertoire, it makes practical sense to revisit some pieces, and it could be that our earworms give us some information about which ones might make the most of the post-performance learning we’ve done this year.
In my brain’s case, it is not at all interested in my own arrangement, done some years ago for another group, thrown in to the programme as a quick-to-learn stocking filler. It’s not particularly complex, and I already knew it pretty well, having workshopped it back then, and then also sung it in a different version with Magenta for a few years.
So it makes sense that my brain is much more focused this morning on running a new arrangement by our accompanist Sam Lewis, of which we gave the world premiere last night, on a constant loop. This one is rather more challenging, with quite a lot of words to get round, and the need to feel how the lyrical phrasing works both with and against the metre. I already had this on the radar as a possible repeat for next year, since he arranged it for us and it’s nice to get more than one performance out of that work. But having it as an earworm tells me that my brain isn’t done with the learning it can get out of it, so if we programme it again there are also cognitive benefits to gain. (For me, at least, but I’d be surprised if I were the only one for whom this is the case.)
One of the challenges of earworms as you head into the holidays is that they can stick around for an annoyingly long time if you’re not immediately starting work on new repertoire. Indeed, I’ll sometimes try and start something new before heading into a break to try and reclaim that bit of my brain – safe in the knowledge that the new music won’t be as internally insistent as that which I’ve prepared in depth and just performed.
So, I'll wish you all a peaceful festive season, both in your external circumstances, and - if you brain will let you after all your intensive musicking - your internal soundscape.
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