{"id":382,"date":"2015-10-09T13:30:48","date_gmt":"2015-10-09T13:30:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/?p=382"},"modified":"2025-06-25T11:48:06","modified_gmt":"2025-06-25T11:48:06","slug":"summer-of-71","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/summer-of-71\/","title":{"rendered":"Summer Of ’71"},"content":{"rendered":"

This morning I got into the car and was immediately transported back in time to Castle Toward<\/a> – July 1971 – Rimsky Korsakov’s Scheherazade – a little treasure chest full of memories of a dozen days spent in intensive learning of a couple of orchestral works chosen to expand our musical horizons and to provide an exciting and entertaining concert for all those family members and friends who turned up in Dunoon.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The music – although important – is not what I intend to discuss here though.\u00a0 I am back on one of my favourite subjects – memories.\u00a0 I have already spoken about the way in which music triggers specific memories in\u00a0Music Memories<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This is more of a follow up to\u00a0Selective Memory<\/a> – which commented on the way in which some things are remembered and others are discarded – sometimes without rhyme nor reason.\u00a0 The world that Scheherazade took me back to was not the “Arabian Nights”, but rather a few days one summer which have lots of things deeply rooted in my memory – at least they are ‘probably’ deeply rooted, since as I have commented on frequently it is difficult to distinguish between “real” memories and those that we have simply made up!!<\/p>\n

Although that particular box of memories is pretty full – I am also aware that what I remember is only a small part of the whole – I have absolutely NO memory, for instance, of what we ate – or even what the eating facilities were like.\u00a0 That has been completely wiped from my knowledge.\u00a0 On the other hand, and presumably because they were more “meaningful” in one way or another to me, I do remember some quite small details.<\/p>\n

One of the days there was an opportunity for some of the students to volunteer to conduct the orchestra – the chosen music was Brahms 1st Symphony (which was the “back-up” music if we had not been able to cope with the demands of the main programme).\u00a0 Most of the volunteers made a pretty good fist of it – but I can still remember our conductor – John Carewe – hiding behind one of the pillars in the rehearsal hall almost doubled up in laughter at the efforts of one (who shall remain nameless – partly because I cannot remember the name !!! – although I could identify the person by what instrument they played).<\/p>\n

This – and a whole host of other little memories – convince me that this was a “memorable” period for me.\u00a0 Yet, as I said, a lot has been lost from my recall – some bits are coming back as I write this – including some stuff that I hadn’t realised I had remembered – but I guess that I have recall about only a small percentage of the time we were there.\u00a0 Equally some things I ‘remember’ in great detail – other things are more of an “impression” than a “picture” – still bearing in mind that there is a level of “made-up-ness” about it all.<\/p>\n

There were, I guess, about seventy or eighty people involved – although even that number may be very wrong – and yet I could name just a few – I can picture a few more, but the names are not there – and there are even a small number that I know I remember, but I can’t picture or name them.\u00a0 Now – that is interesting in itself.\u00a0 Seems that I can remember some specific events I know that others were involved, but there are no clues in my memory as to who they were or what they looked like.<\/p>\n

The challenge – as ever – is to make a little bit of sense of this.\u00a0 The interesting bit is not that some things made a big enough impression to remain “vivid” even more than forty years later – no – it is why some ‘trivia’ has stuck whilst most (probably) has fallen into some black hole in my recollection.\u00a0 Yet – even as I write this, I am aware that more little pieces of the jigsaw are popping back – I have just remembered the surname of one of the cellists – but cannot decide on the correct forename!<\/p>\n

I remember – clearly – two of the three people who shared my section of the orchestra – not surprising in that they were both friends in other circumstances – but the third, who I only ever met as part of this event, is rather vague – perhaps I know a forename – but I am not even sure about that.\u00a0 So that is ‘explicable’ – but heading towards the inexplicable is why I should recall none of the “members of staff” – not even the tutor who looked after our sectional rehearsals.\u00a0 Apart from the conductor, every other ‘adult’ has been expunged from the record.<\/p>\n

I just hope that those that I tutored in later years remember a little bit more about me!!!<\/p>\n

I guess that the psychologists could offer some theories as to why there are these differences in my memories.\u00a0 To some extent it is ‘easy’ to say that we remember the things that are “important” to us – its just that “important” is a relative term in this scenario.\u00a0 There are so many little things that can make something “stand out” in our memories.\u00a0 Perhaps the most obvious is having “re-lived” particular things – either by telling others about it or just re-imagining it.<\/p>\n

One thing is for sure – this won’t be my last blog about the vagaries of memory – unless – that is – I forget to write another one….\ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This morning I got into the car and was immediately transported back in time to Castle Toward – July 1971 – Rimsky Korsakov’s Scheherazade – a little treasure chest full of memories of a dozen days spent in intensive learning of a couple of orchestral works chosen to expand our musical horizons and to provide … Continue reading “Summer Of ’71”<\/span><\/a><\/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-382","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\/382","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=382"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3100,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382\/revisions\/3100"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}