Feeling the shape of a tune

This one might be a bit weird, but maybe not. It will be of particular interest to those of you who play music, but there must be analogues in the lives of those who don't. It's about how we perceive and learn things.

The last three years have been for obvious reasons very, what shall I say, memorable? emotional? gripping? They are certainly not easily forgettable and they have been intense. Whatever, this intensity has left my brain and being in a very 'switched on' state. My siblings may have other words for the state but I'm sure they would be too polite to say. 

It does remind me of what is was like when I lived abroad for a couple of years. I found that being in a new and different environment was very healthy for me, simply because you felt like your switch had been turned from off to on. You had to observe and interpret and learn, which meant that every other part of your life moved up to that same positive state. I loved it. In some ways I love what is happening now, mortality notwithstanding, because it does make you see the world through more wide-open eyes. 

But the thing that I'm particularly thinking of here is learning music. To give context, I play Irish music and generally learn tunes by ear rather than from notation. Both methods are fairly common among Irish musicians. So it means if I hear a tune I like and I want to learn it, I have to attend to it in a particular way so that it can appear on my own fingers.

If it is in a session I will usually just shut my eyes and let the tune wash over me rather than trying to actively know some of its sequences. All Irish tunes are fairly straightforward (though not always - Kylebrack Rambler, I'm looking at you here) and they have a strong feel or flow to them. They also usually have a major key feel (positive, bouncy) or a minor key feel (more antsy, potentially more aggressive)

So if I hear a tune that I want to learn, it feels like I am first getting the shape of it, rather than the specifics. Does it go high to low, or vice versa? Does it have a particular closing phrase that is distinctive? Does it have some unusual turn that marks it out from other tunes?

I find this process, and in fact this entire human skill, to be remarkable. It feels like you are having an internal conversation with the tune and getting to know it through its shape. So while listening to it, the whole feel of it, emotionally and acoustically, is filling in a picture in your brain. And this is before you have even started to bring your fingers into the picture by trying to play it. 

Thinking about how my brain works (how our brains work) has become more and more interesting to me over these last couple of years, and I have also read some very interesting books on cognition and what we know about the things our brains can do, and how they let us see the world. One thing that seems clear to me is that our brains work most intensely and with the greatest range when our emotions are engaged. Don't get me started on Powerpoint presentations. But when there is something, such as an Irish session, that has for me such powerful and longstanding emotional resonance, it seems your brain can do quite remarkable things and you don't have to try to understand how it does it. 

There was a lovely scene in the TV version of Hilary Mantel's 'Wolf Hall' when Cromwell and his wife were lying in bed and she was deftly crocheting a piece. He said "Can you slow down and show me how you do that?" and she replied "If I slowed down I couldn't do it"

I know just what she meant