{"id":329,"date":"2016-02-25T13:48:18","date_gmt":"2016-02-25T13:48:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/?p=329"},"modified":"2024-02-20T16:23:33","modified_gmt":"2024-02-20T16:23:33","slug":"why-a-madeleine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/why-a-madeleine\/","title":{"rendered":"Why A Madeleine!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Having written\u00a0A Different Sort Of Madeleine<\/a>\u00a0I realised that my readers (always assuming I have any….) will have been completely thrown by the fact that it was written on the assumption that I had earlier posted a piece about madeleines. It turns out that I must have dreamt it!!<\/p>\n

I guess that is a really good illustration of a “false” memory – I was pretty sure that I had written something in response to the current BBC Radio 3 Breakfast feature – but it seems that whilst I may have thought about doing so – I haven’t carried it through! A fairly exhaustive search amongst my notes has thrown up … nothing.<\/p>\n

Anyway – this post is to rectify that omission – although I may waffle on a bit about the ideas as well!!<\/p>\n

The Radio 3 feature is on “Music That Transforms” – they are looking for suggestions for pieces of music that take you back to a quite specific time and place. Since the feature started the title has sort of mutated – one of the presenters said one morning that they were looking for “a sort of musical madeleine” (and this is where I am starting to get a real feeling of deja vu – or deja write\/type as I can see myself doing this once before)<\/p>\n

I expect that many of my readers (perhaps that should be “my reader”!) will be familiar with the term madeleine – and may even be able to identify with its use in this context. I, on the other hand, was not – although as you can see from my current reading I have now rectified that.<\/p>\n

Very early in the book is\u00a0this passage<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And now I am sure I have written this already as I found the self same link last time…..<\/p>\n

Anyway – in the narrative the madeleine invokes a response that recalls the sights, sounds, smells of a past occasion. Of course, the cake itself was an integral part of that past time and place and it acted as a trigger. In the case of the Radio 3 feature the trigger is a piece of music – and there are many other things that can also have the same sort of effect. I have\u00a0already written<\/a>\u00a0about music that evokes memories for me. So this is not a new topic.<\/p>\n

Its interesting, although not that surprising as I think about it, that most of the entries in the playlist so far (perhaps all, I’m not sure) are what could be grouped under the heading “happy memories”!! I guess that people are much less interested (or motivated) to share the “madeleines” that invoke sadness, or worry, or trauma, or anything else that would be categorised as negative.<\/p>\n

There are certainly some pieces of music that “take me back” to moments in my life that were not so happy and one thing that is curious about that is that the ‘mood’ of the music is not always matched to the memory. Music which is intrinsically sad can nonetheless remind you of happy times – and vice versa. This, of course, creates a sort of tension between the conflicting emotions.<\/p>\n

So – there you are – an explanation of why the earlier post was called\u00a0A Different Sort Of Madeleine<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Having written\u00a0A Different Sort Of Madeleine\u00a0I realised that my readers (always assuming I have any….) will have been completely thrown by the fact that it was written on the assumption that I had earlier posted a piece about madeleines. It turns out that I must have dreamt it!!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[122],"tags":[79,97],"class_list":["post-329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ignorance","tag-cognition","tag-musical-theatre"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=329"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":330,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329\/revisions\/330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}