Deaf Dream Tracks

Illness destroyed my hearing in 2000. I wake in the mornings and random tunes play in my mind, as echoes from dreams and the past. Some melodies are old favourites. Others resurface, forgotten for decades. With the help of YouTube - watching players' movements - and reading music scores, I track them here to see what patterns emerge.

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Buried long-forgotten in my memory for decades, a minute from John Zorn's Spillane has resurfaced, and transports me to the hardboiled-noir mean streets of NYC.

✂️ Zorn Spillane

60 seconds · Clipped by James Kearney · Original video "John Zorn - Spillane (Full Album)" by Suzy Creamcheese

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Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. ?

The Dream Tracks keep coming, triggered on waking and by random associations, although I’m less compelled to note them nowadays. 

But one sequence has been playing over and over in a foreboding riff:

It nagged repeatedly. So once again I scour Beethoven’s 4th 5th and 3rd Piano Concertos to identify it - just as in July 2014! 

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Handel: Water Music (Lentement) - from 6:33

No posts for 8 months - has the music dried up? No, my dream tracks still keep coming and I note the new ones, but never got round to writing them up.

This track is an enchanting example of long-forgotten music bubbling up intact from the depths of memory. I can remember most of a pop classic like the Water Music, but the flowing Lentement and brass-burnished Bourrée were virtually drowned beyond recall, until they resurfaced one morning.

This clip (from 6:33) shows a vigorous swell, but as usual the performance I remember best is the English Concert’s - from one of my favourite 1980s Handel albums.

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Brahms: Symphony No. 1

‘Brahms 1 iv? da-da-daah 123, da-da-daah 123, etc′ 

I scribbled this blearily as I woke up, to help me identify the music later.

Noon: ‘da-da-daah 123′? What’s this - it doesn’t make sense! I scan the fourth movement’s stirring tunes in the score for similar rhythms, but nothing registers.

I start reading the third movement - and there it is of course, from 27:14 in this performance, even more rousing than I remember.

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Mahler: Symphony No. 5

I dream I am conducting this scherzo, while hovering in circles above the orchestra. But it is not going well. So I fly away, flinging explosive bathroom scales behind me to ward off pursuit.

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Shostakovich: Symphony No.10

Ta-ta-taa, ta-ta-taa! Woodwind cheep a banal rhythm and Shostakovich’s D-S-C-H motif over and over (the 10-second sequence from 1:08).

In an unnerving coincidence, I discover I woke to this tune on the anniversary of Dmitri’s death. Cue Stalinist/Soviet mind-control paranoia.

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Bartók: Concerto for Orchestra

Oratorical statements from the massed woodwind, punctuated by glissando bangs (from 20:43 to 21:13).

Locating this brief outburst in the score revived pungent memories of the Concerto’s other music, distracting me wonderfully until I located the right moment in the central Elegia.

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Mozart: Symphony No. 41

Harumph! Harumph! Harumph! *Mild questioning theme?* Harumph! Harumph! Harumph! Etc.

I was going to show a familiar performance for the video clip, such as Karl Bohm and the VPO, suave and upholstered, 

Then I glanced at Nikolaus Harnoncourt in YouTube’s ‘Mozart 41′ search results: his conducting was so vivid I could 'hear' the suspenseful pauses he inserted at the end of the ‘questioning theme.’ 

The rest of the movement appears equally distinctive in tempo and pacing. And so Mozart’s music takes on a new character, decades after I last heard it.

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Harangue the (Classical) DJ

I enjoy The Guardian's Harangue The DJ interviews, where various maestros of mixing 'empty the contents of their psychic record bags', even though I can't hear their selections(!) 

So I imagined emptying the dusty contents of mine, mostly classical tracks I last heard for real in the 20th Century.

The track I’ll be opening my next DJ set with

Gabriel Prokofiev - Concerto for Turntables and Orchestra: I never had a chance to experience this innovative pairing, but Gabriel’s granddad already has good form in dance music.

The track I always play to rescue a dancefloor

John Adams’ 80s classic The Chairman Dances has a deceptively understated start, but its body-popping repetitions and suave tango will sweep everyone back onto the floor.

The track that currently gets the most rewinds

My most frequent ear-worms are the sabre-clashes, smooches and heavy breathing from Tchaikovsky’s Romeo & Juliet Fantasy Overture.

The track I wish I’d signed to my label (if I had one)

Messiaen's gaudy, iridescent, feelgood Turangalîla Symphony: the end of Joie du Sang des Étoiles gives me so much gooseflesh, I start to honk and fly in V formation.

The track I’d play to show off my eclectic tastes

This section from Ligeti’s Musica Ricercata is as catchy as it is obscure.

The track I think has been unfairly slept on this year

Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty - asleep for 100 years...

The track that should have been a crossover hit

David Bedford’s Sun Paints Rainbows on the Vast Waves - scored for windband and wine bottles. Its glorious blazes and swells of sound swept me away on the first live hearing.

The track that got me out of bed this morning

As chance would have it, today’s Deaf Dream Track is Beethoven’s own ‘apotheosis of the dance’. 

The track I wish I’d never played

Never got the hang of Harrison Birtwistle’s compositions - more like a quarryful of grinding rocks.

The ideal festival track

Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring: demented, chilled out, mosh-pit brawls, sensual, frenzied and ecstatic.

The track I’d play at my auntie’s wedding

Another ‘80s classic (albeit 1880s) Johann Strauss’ Roses from South: schmaltz and sentiment for the late evening’s nuptial nostalgia.

The best track by my favourite new artist

I haven’t heard any new artist for 16 years, so I was going to omit this response. Then I recalled Stephen Malinowski, whose animated graphical scores reveal anew their music’s structure, tempi and counterpoint. 

Here’s his vision of the same Rite of Spring ‘festival’ track:

The track I’d play at sunset in Ibiza

Richard Strauss’ Im Abendrot - literally 'evening-red’, deep and tranquil. Although, not so much Ibizan chillout as the chilling awareness of our mortality.

The track I’d play at my funeral

Sibelius’ Symphony No. 6: the first 3 minutes should send the congregation out feeling more serene.

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Maurice Jarre: Lawrence of Arabia

A warm gust of the Desert Theme sweeps in, from distant memories of seeing this masterpiece in a restored director’s cut in 1989. 

I can discern Jarre’s famous tune in the video from violinists’ and cellists’ fingerings and the French Horns’ intakes of breath, but that’s all I remember of his score. The pounding timpani, trombones, muted trumpets, clarinet solos..? Their sounds are lost to the sands of time.

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Saint-Saëns & Mahler second movements

The second movement of Saint-Saëns’ Organ Symphony hurtles through my memory - until stopped in its tracks by the skipping bassoon which starts Mahler 9′s second movement. Mahler’s ländler ambles along, defusing Saint-Saen’s storms.

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Schubert: Symphony No. 8

I usually resented reverentially slow performances of the classics, but there’s no resisting this 1983 recording by the Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Giuseppe Sinopoli. 

So morbid and brooding, it spoiled me for all other interpretations, 

I woke to the first movement’s agonising crawl from the exposition to the development, the frozen paralysis of every drawn-out detail clearly preserved in my memory. 

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Beethoven: Symphony No. 6

Scene by the brook - the idyllic three minutes starting from 4:34. 

My memory has entangled this music’s flowing strands, repeatedly entwining the woodwind duets with the gently descending horn-calls first heard from 7:19. 

My version of the score has streamed by in an endless loop over the last fortnight, helping to calm my fears during a family bereavement.

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Kern/Hammerstein: Ol' Man River

Dat ol’ man river comes rollin’ along, from distant sources in my memory.

I learned the song from John McGlinn’s groundbreaking Show Boat recording, so I fished for Willard White’s renditions, assuming he had performed as Joe. 

But it goes to show how memories get as muddied as the Mississippi - I discover Bruce Hubbard took the role.

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Mahler: Symphony No. 2

I dream I am at a piano with soprano Kiri Te Kanawa and conductor Georg Solti. 

They rehearse ‘Urlicht’ from Mahler’s symphony, concentrating on the phrase ‘Der liebe Gott..’ even though it’s scored for the lower alto voice.

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Beethoven: Piano Concerto No.4

As I wake, I find I’ve sailed past the solo piano’s introduction, and serenely rise and fall on the swell of the the orchestra’s neverending modulations (from 0:20 to 2:45).

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The Bruckner Rhythm

BAA-baa ba-ba-ba BAA-baa ba-ba-ba BAA-baa ba-ba-ba BAA-baa ba-ba-ba Ad In-finitum...

The Bruckner Rhythm batters away in the background.

This rhythm lumbers along like a clanking conveyor belt in many of Bruckner’s indistinguishable symphonies - this section from the Fourth is typical, from 1:50.