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  • Music and Memory: An Introduction
  • Robert Pepperell
Music and Memory: An Introduction by Bob Snyder. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, U.S.A., 2000. 291 pp., illus. $30.00. ISBN: 0-262-69237-6.

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. com reveals only one other currently available title in the same area—by Jean Gabbert Harrell—which oddly is not cited 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 summarize the cognitive organization of memory and attention, e.g. the categorization 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 [End Page 335] 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 the reader is 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 while 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 centered) 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 were 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. [End Page 336]

Robert Pepperell
31 Brygwyn Rd., Newport, South Wales, NP20 4JV, U.K. E-mail: <pepperell@ntlworld.com>.
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