Moments Remembered: Journeys at the Crossroads of Music and Memory

Mon 30 Sep, 2024

Jeremy Eichler, LPO Writer-in-Residence, introduces our 'Moments Remembered' 2024/25 season theme.

Is music the ultimate medium of memory?

Ever since the mythical poet Orpheus retrieved his beloved Eurydice from the underworld through the magical power of his song, music has been summoning souls, bridging time, and raising the dead. Its ability to trigger flights of memory is a phenomenon many people still experience: think, for instance, of the song that pops up on the car radio and, like Proust’s madeleine, instantly calls to mind a moment or experience that took place years or even decades earlier.

Yet as so many works presented across the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s 2024/25 season will illustrate, it is not just we who remember music. Music also remembers us. Music reflects the individuals and the societies that create it, capturing something essential about the era of its birth. When a composer in 1824 consciously or unconsciously distils worlds of thought, fantasy and emotion into a series of notes on a page, and then we hear those same notes realized in a performance two centuries later, we are hearing the past literally speaking in the present.

In this sense, music can fleetingly reorder the past, bring closer that which is distant, and confound the one-way linearity of time. In these very ways, music shares a profound affinity with memory itself. For memory by definition also challenges the pastness of the past and the objective distance of history; it also reorders time and flouts the forward march of the years. An event seared in memory from decades ago may haunt the mind with a power far greater than events that took place only yesterday. Indeed, while Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory, was said to be mother of all the Muses, one daughter may stand as first among equals. Memory resonates with the cadences, the revelations, the opacities and the poignancies of music.

But what exactly can music remember? How does it do so differently to other art forms? Whose stories are being recalled? Who is doing the remembering? And toward what ends are we being asked to recollect?

Over the course of its 2024/25 season, the LPO will explore these questions through no fewer than 15 programmes, a curated gallery of sonic memory. Some will represent iconic figures at the heart of the Western musical tradition (such as Haydn, Beethoven, Schoenberg, Britten, Strauss, Shostakovich and Prokofiev). Some carry forward lesser-known but essential 20th-century voices (Mieczysław Weinberg, Boris Lyatoshynsky, Julia Perry). And some are by living composers (György Kurtág, John Adams, Freya Waley-Cohen, Evan Williams, Dinuk Wijeratne), artists who ply their craft while looking both forward and back, creating memories of yesterday for the world of tomorrow.

Across this season we will find sonic bridges to the wartime past, the utopian past, the personal past, the national past, the literary past, the imagined past, the forgotten past, the obliterated past. Implicit in this journey is an awareness of memory’s complexity and contingency, beginning with Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’, a work whose original dedication to Napoleon was itself renounced with a fury that tore the composer’s manuscript paper. And the season ends with the cosmos-embracing euphoria of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, itself a Goethe-inspired memory of earlier Enlightenment dreams, etched at the dawn of the modern world.

Along the way, many of the works treat, implicitly or explicitly, the great ruptures of the 20th century, including extraordinary sonic monuments to the Second World War and the Holocaust. We may feel we already know these epochal events through history books. But the information accumulating on library shelves provides just one mode of access. The survivor Jean Améry once went as far as bitterly attacking what he saw as his own era’s tendency to publish books about the horrors of the Holocaust in order to forget those horrors with a clean conscience, to relegate a shocking and morally unassimilable past to ‘the cold storage of history’.

Music, on the other hand, possesses a unique and often underappreciated power to burn through history’s cold storage, to release its frozen stores of meaning and emotion. Its power may originate in the visceral immediacy of sound itself: sound surrounds us, penetrates our bodies, vibrates within us. Listening to a song, the critic John Berger once wrote, ‘we find ourselves inside a message.’ But music’s potency as a medium of cultural memory also flows from its mysterious capacity to bridge intellect and emotion; its ability to short-circuit the centuries by yoking ‘then’ and ‘now’ within a single performance; and its haunting way of expressing deep yet untranslatable truths that lie beyond the province of language. Thomas Mann called this last quality the ‘spoken unspokenness’ that belongs to music alone.

Each of the season’s works can and should be experienced on its own terms, but one hopes they will also add up to something greater than the sum of their parts. Listeners, in short, are being invited to consider music not only as aesthetic entertainment or even spiritual uplift – but as a unique witness to history and carrier of memory, a window onto humanity’s hopes, dreams and cataclysms. This approach can yield dividends all its own. Indeed, to listen with an awareness of music as an echo of past time opens the possibility of hearing so much more. Here, in essence, are the sounds of culture’s memory, resonating between and behind the notes.

Browse all Moments Remembered concerts in the LPO 2024/25 season

Jeremy Eichler is a critic and historian based at Tufts University, Massachusetts, as well as the LPO’s inaugural Writer-in-Residence. Portions of this essay were adapted from his award-winning book Time’s Echo: Music, Memory, and the Second World War, recently published in paperback (Faber, 2023).