Melody Resolvement
Do you think medieval peasants rolled off the straw mattress with last night’s lute tune playing in their head? When they did, what did they do? We’re so spoiled. We can have a dig through the CDs cluttering up our shelves, or click-click across the hard drive, and Bob’s yer uncle: melody resolvement. But before CDs; Mp3s; LPs — hell even wax cylinders — you would have had to actually go and find someone to play you whatever was stuck in you (or you could wait until it wears off, but that is unsatisfactory and boring)
Maybe that was a good way to become a popular neanderthal. You could come up with a totally awesome song (with particularly tuneful grunts and ugs and other stereotypical caveman noises) and infect everyone else in your local cave-system with the melody. In that way you carve out a nice little position at the top of the social heirarchy. All the hot cave-chicks hang around to hear you perform because they just can’t get your tune out of their heads. And we know what that leads to.
In general I find it completely fascinating how people’s methods of listening to stuff must’ve changed when they could buy recordings of stuff, as opposed to having to find someone to perform it. I know, I know, people played piano a lot more, blah blah. Practicing the piano transcription of a Brahms symphony for a month isn’t really the same as slapping a copy in the CD player and hitting play.
I would have found it pretty freakin’ hard to enjoy classical music in the same way as I do now without recordings. It takes so long to understand a piece. Twenty listenings is a pretty decent investment of time when listening to CDs, but with concerts it’d be an occupation. Of course, if you really did learn to play the piano transcription you’d probably understand it a hell of a lot more thoroughly. But it’d be a hell of lot harder to listen to the same breadth of material.