January 15, 2023 • 39 mins
Dan and Brian speak with Susan Crane, a historian and scholar of communal and collective memories in this month’s episode of Lifetimes of Listening. Ntari Ali Gault’s story of the single “When Doves Cry”, Praise Zenenga’s reflections about performing African music in the United States with a multi-ethnic ensemble, and Sara Gulgas’s remembrance of attending an impromptu memorial gathering on the anniversary of John Lennon’s murder each demonstrate the power of an individual’s memory, and how music shaped a community in a particular moment. Music brings awe into ordinary moments, and makes a communal experience memorable.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
I learned to play sitting on my pack on the side of the road.
(00:15):
I came from a high school that had an amazing music program and I was in choir, orchestra
and marching bands.
So when I was growing up the first music that I was really like a big fan of was hip hop
especially from like the 90s.
Whenever I play music I like to be able to sing along with it.
I also am a performing artist, guitar player and singer.
I've performed all over the country many times, I've toured many times.
(00:47):
This is Lifetimes of Listening, the Arizona Musical Memory podcast, an outgrowth of the
Arizona Musical Memory Archive.
My name is Brian Moon.
I'm at the University of Arizona at the Fred Fox School of Music where I'm an associate
professor of practice in musicology and the general education coordinator.
And I'm Dan Cruz.
I'm an alum of the Fred Fox School of Music here at the U of A. I do research, lecturing
(01:12):
and documentary work all about music.
I'm also a part-time radio announcer for the U of A's NPR affiliated radio station.
Both Brian and I are here in Tucson, Arizona as we said connected with the U of A and the
Fred Fox School of Music.
So in brief, what is this podcast about?
Well, let's give you a sample.
It was a big party thrown for, it was a summer league basketball league.
(01:36):
So it was like thousands of people and then they put on When Doves Cry and the place went
crazy, just thousands of people all over the stands.
It wasn't just like what it made me feel like.
I saw thousands of people who felt the same exact way.
So that's just a brief clip of an interview that we're going to hear more of later on
as we look at musical memories today.
(01:57):
Our aim in this entire project, Lifetimes of Listening, is to document, record, archive
and study the musical memories that are such an important part of people's lives.
Now Brian and I are doing this by interviewing people from all walks of life and they tell
us about important musical memories that they have, things that may be tied to a place,
a period in their lives, their family, an important person or some other musical or
(02:22):
music centered experience or even a random event that has somehow gotten connected in
their mind or heart with music.
That's what it is.
It's Lifetimes of Listening, the Arizona Musical Memory Archive and Podcast.
Now I've got a musical memory to share that is of a communal nature and it was a very
(02:51):
unique experience for me Brian.
I think I'd mentioned it to you in the past.
My two kids who were now in their 40s when they were in college, around college age about
20, 22 years ago, became big fans of the band Fish, which is kind of for those of our generation,
it's kind of the Grateful Dead of the latter 20th century.
(03:12):
My kids followed Fish all over the country and while they were doing that they notified
us one point that my wife and I who are living here in Tucson should come up and see a Fish
concert that was taking place in Phoenix that they were going to be at as they're traveling
around the country.
So I had no clue what to expect from a Fish concert.
I'm a big music lover, have been to dozens if not hundreds of concerts in my life.
(03:34):
My wife and I went to the Fish show in Phoenix, Arizona and experienced something that I've
never experienced before, a sense of community, a sense of kind of a group dynamic that built
and grew and ebbed and flowed with the music, 20,000 or so people out of doors in a beautiful
venue on a beautiful evening with a feeling of connection to one another and the music
(03:58):
that made me realize now why my kids were following Fish all over the country, a real
communal musical experience for me.
How about you?
Do you have one to share?
So I have a lot of performing experience and part of I believe why I am the musician that
I am today is because of the way that I fell in love with making music with others.
(04:19):
I distinctly remember being a part of a choir on tour in France in college and singing a
baritone line with basses singing below me and a whole stack of choir singing above me
and feeling just in the middle of not only the choir and with all of those people in
this big experience but also just in the middle of this harmony in these big open cathedral
(04:45):
and these big spaces.
It was quite something else.
It's part of why I became a choir director and part of why I wanted to be a musician.
Great experiences these are.
It's communal musical experiences and it's what our episode is all about this time, right?
Yes and today we have a guest, Susan Crane, professor of history here at the University
(05:06):
of Arizona and a specialist in this area.
We talked with her recently at the University of Arizona's Fred Fox School of Music.
So I'm really excited today.
We have Susan Crane, a professor of history here at the University of Arizona and we've
(05:28):
asked her here because she's an expert in how an individual's memory relates to larger
collective and communal experiences and has done a lot of research on that but Dan and
I became aware of you through your humanity seminars on memories and the ways and the
history of memories but before we get into any of that I also want to put a plug for
(05:53):
your book that was just published in January which I ordered on Amazon today and the best
title for a history book ever, Nothing Happened, A History.
I look forward to reading it.
So I don't want to take us off topic but please tell us about yourself, Susan.
Well thank you so much.
I'm really pleased to be here.
Thank you for inviting me.
I'm always happy to talk about nothing because then I don't have to say anything but actually
(06:19):
I've been doing nothing for the past eight years and so I'm very pleased to have the
book out to finally show that I really did do nothing.
But the book looks at how nothing happened in the past because I'm interested in how
people choose to remember what they think is important to remember about the past.
(06:39):
So I am actually a historian of historical consciousness who happens to have a background
in German language, German history, and modern European studies so that's what I work on.
But I got interested in how people remembered or what they were remembering when they said
nothing happened because they're always remembering something even if it was boring or insignificant
(07:05):
or they didn't think anyone was going to remember it.
Because I've always been interested in how and when people choose to remember the past.
So my first book was about history museums in Germany.
Why did people create the first museum of national history in Germany?
What did they want to remember there?
So there's actually a link between memory and nothing.
And I've been teaching a course for many years that I also offered through the humanities
(07:29):
seminar and to undergraduates and it's called histories of memories.
And in that class we talk about what is collective memory and we talk about how there have been
sociologists, psychologists, and philosophers in the 20th century who are particularly interested
in how you have individual memory and it is yours but it ends up being dependent upon
(07:54):
other people, collectives, and it ends up being dependent on memory triggers, not necessarily
intact memories in your mind.
But you might hear something, and this is where I think music is going to be a logical
connection.
You might hear something, you might see something that triggers a memory.
But that memory itself you wouldn't even be able to recover unless you had other connections
(08:16):
in your mind back to where you first heard it or who you were with when you first heard
it.
And a lot of times it turns out if you really dig into it those memories stem from families.
So when you're growing up, when you're a little kid, there's a lot of memory impact.
Memories are shaped within families and shared within generations and generations within
(08:39):
families so parents and children, not as much as you'd think, turns out a lot between grandparents
and children ends up linking people further back into the past than they would have any
lived experience or lived memory of.
So I'm always intrigued by how people remember what they want to remember, what they don't
(09:00):
want to remember, and it comes back anyway.
But also the way that it's plural.
Collective memory is never singular.
You can't talk about the American memory of anything.
There's multiple collectives within any large entity like a nation, but also within a family.
So you personally belong to a whole bunch of different collectives, some of which are
(09:22):
defined through family, through generations, others of which might be who else heard the
music you heard or who else was at the performance you were at.
And those are multiple collectives that you share because you were there or because you
love that music.
So much of what you're talking about, Susan, is resonating with me because the musical
memories that we're going to share with you today, some recordings that Brian and I have
(09:42):
done, interviews we've done, are particularly powerful because they relate to music and
in this case because these three relate also to the sense that each of our interview subjects
relates to how it was a shared experience.
So is there anything in particular that you find about people remembering music that seems
relevant?
(10:03):
Why is it that people remember music, for example, so well?
Or why does a musical event in someone's early life, say their teenage years, resonate so
strongly?
There have been some scholars who've looked at precisely what age are you at the point
where you're most influenced by the music that you're listening to?
(10:23):
And it turns out, I'm not remembering the exact ages, but I want to say it's about the
age of 10 to about the age of 25.
So you said your teenage years.
Whatever music you loved at that age, you're going to love for life.
You might acquire some other ones later, but that is what you're really going to love.
It's a period in life when people are bonding with their peer group, right?
(10:44):
They're going through maturing changes, adolescence, young adulthood.
But it could also be where you have to blame your parents because whatever they were playing
and listening to, like in an earlier phase, pre-earbuds for everybody, you might have
been stuck hearing the music in the car or in the house that you end up getting stuck
with for life and you've got the earworms for life, but wasn't your favorite?
(11:05):
Yeah, you're going to be stuck with it for life.
So many of the musical memories in the archive, the interviews that we've done of students
often begin with, well, I remember this time listening to music with my parent in the car.
There's a theme of those, parent in the car memories.
Yeah, not surprised.
So it could be what you fall in love with, but it could also be what shapes what you
(11:26):
think music is to begin with.
My mom always had, it's now called K Mozart, but I forget what it was.
In Los Angeles, there was this all classical music station.
She loved listening to opera.
And don't judge me, I can't stand opera, but she loved it.
So I always associate opera with my mom, who I loved dearly.
(11:47):
So I got exposed to it.
I heard it a lot.
I didn't fall in love with it.
I still recognize those bits of music when I hear them later and I think of my mom.
So shall we share with Susan the three memories that we brought today?
Is this a good time to do that?
Let's listen to these memories.
So the first memory that we have is from Professor Ntari Gault.
(12:08):
He's a lecturer in the Africana Studies program.
I made his acquaintance when he came to work with the doctoral students here about how
best to present black folk music in concert.
Ntari is a poet and a novelist and a playwright and has a very compelling story about the
(12:34):
emergence of a particular single from a Prince album.
And I remember this single dropping with this.
So let's take a listen to his story.
I was going into my senior year of high school.
It was actually, I think it was like about June 17th, 1984.
And Prince was releasing the Purple Rain album and he had just released When Doves Cry.
(12:59):
It was a big party thrown for, it was a summer league basketball league.
So it was like thousands of people in this park, Martin Luther King Park on the east
side of Buffalo.
They were playing a lot of songs.
People were dancing and then they put on When Doves Cry and the place went crazy.
Just thousands of people all over the stands dancing.
(13:21):
So then they played the song about a half hour straight, back to back, no breaks.
And then finally the DJ, so he put on something by Run DMC and everyone started screaming,
booing and telling them to put that Prince song back on.
They played that song for the next hour and a half.
I left the party and they were still playing the song.
(13:42):
I don't know how long they played the song, but straight, I just never heard the ending
of the song because they just kept on looping it for the next hour and a half.
So two hours of Prince.
It could have gone longer than that, but I finally had to go home and so I left the party
the entire time.
I never saw it break.
(14:03):
I don't think it was the lyrics at that moment because most of us were hearing the song for
the very first time.
Everybody in that park and people were greeting each other and talking to each other and none
of us had ever seen anything like that before.
It wasn't just like what it made me feel like.
I saw thousands of people who felt the same exact way.
Your thoughts, Susan, in response to Natari's memory.
(14:26):
I'm smiling so big because I also remember when that song came out.
What strikes me about his memory is the way in which a collective is born in an instant.
I'm really surprised that the DJ is playing the song over and over and over again and
no one's protesting.
That's amazing.
(14:47):
They're protesting any change.
It's got to be that song.
In an instant, there's a collective that's born and I'm sure that all the people that
were there are going to remember it or will they?
It seems to have made such a huge impression on him and it's a moment in which he's in
a group and the group is excited and there's this energy.
(15:09):
Yet I wonder, you could ask somebody else who was there that night and they might go,
oh man, I can't stand Prince.
I wonder if later there could be things that happened later that changed the way that they
felt about it.
Let's assume they had good taste and are still fans of Prince.
Then there's other people for whom the resonance is in the sound right there and it's making
them move.
(15:29):
Wouldn't you think there'd also be body memory of that?
So then later when they hear the song, when I hear that song, I start moving.
One of the things that impressed me is when he commented that the song had just come out
so nobody knew the lyrics.
They're not responding and I'm the same sort of person.
I will hear a piece of music and I respond to the sound of the music and it may be five,
(15:54):
10, 20, 30 years later that I actually listen to the lyrics.
That seemed to be part of the shared experience here that they were responding to sound, to
chords, to chordal patterns, to rhythm, to the sonic quality of the sound.
Setting aside the whole issue of the lyrics, which would have been a completely different
experience had it been about the lyrics.
(16:16):
It's a relatively dark, a song about a relatively dark domestic violence and troubled marriage
and a whole bunch of other, I mean it's not a party song to replay on a loop for a bunch
of teenage basketball players.
The sound of it must be.
Yeah, I remember distinctly, so one of the things that was striking about Prince, he
(16:37):
was one of the first black rock R&B soul-ish artists to really emerge as a superstar about
the same time as Michael Jackson, but he had such a distinct sound.
I remember hearing him on the radio and just being immediately where he was like nothing
else.
Nothing sounded like him at that moment.
(16:59):
To my ear, now that's partly because I wasn't listening to all of the stuff that DJs were
listening to in the 70s of some of the best soul and funk artists until much later in
my life.
He emerged for the writ large mainstream so that when I heard him in rural southern Mississippi
(17:19):
at the same time, it just sounded incredibly distinct.
When I did the interview with Atari and heard him tell the story, I was amazed because I
knew exactly what he was talking about because I had had that same connection to the song
and I was not in a predominantly black basketball league when I heard it.
(17:48):
I was just hearing it on the radio in a very different way.
A song like that seems to me to have a very personal singular resonance for anybody who
hears it, but in this particular occasion because of the celebratory nature of the gathering,
the song did something to the group.
Susan, any other thoughts on that?
(18:08):
I'm also thinking about even if it wasn't just about this song, and it's hard for me
to move away from this song because I have memories I associate with that one, but if
you think about it more about was there one concert you went to where everything changed?
Was there one performance you went to that seemed to mark a moment?
Collective memories are often formed around a sense of it was like this before and then
(18:31):
it changed.
If there was a transitional moment or some kind of pivot where you think I kind of realized
something in that moment that things were going to be different, and sometimes I think
people have articulated that in response to a new song or a new kind of music or they
hear it for the first time and they think, wow, I've never heard anything quite like
(18:52):
that, then you do have a sense of change.
I think that could also be what he's picking up on in his memory of that event.
Let's listen to a second musical memory out of an interview that I did with the head of
Africana Studies here at the University of Arizona, Praise Zanenga, who I had met in
the context of a performance event some years before when I brought and hosted, helped to
(19:15):
host an event with a renowned African musician, came to town, and Praise was part of putting
that together as well.
So I knew Praise a little bit.
But he shares with us his own story of being in Tucson and becoming part of a musical group
that then he really had an imprint on in a very powerful way.
So let's listen to Praise's musical memory.
(19:36):
My name is Praise Zanenga.
I was born in Zimbabwe, yes, more in the rural areas, just outside the capital city of Harare.
I work as the director of the Africana Studies program here at the University of Arizona.
There was a marimba group that was doing acoustic marimba and they were playing the Zimbabwean
(20:00):
type of marimba.
And we had a group of people that had learned this style of music.
Our band is called The Key Ingredients of African Soul, which means the keys are based on the
marimba keys, of course, but it also has a double meaning, to say key elements, meaning
(20:23):
that we have people from all over the world who play with us.
We have people from Mexico.
We have people who are Native American, Africans, East Africans, West Africans, Southern Africans.
We have Europeans.
We also have an Asian in the band.
So we are all mixed.
(20:45):
We are the key ingredients, but focusing on African soul music, that was the goal, to
bring all those people together to unite them through music.
They somehow touched the human soul in a unique way, and I think that's why I insisted on
inserting that word soul in the name of our band.
(21:05):
So it's amazing that when we play here in Tucson at places like Monterey Court or when
we are downtown, people will come after the show and say, hey, this music is very healing.
I feel something.
I feel better.
I feel good.
We come to your shows because it's not just happy, happy music, but it's music that touches
(21:29):
the spirit, that touches the soul.
Some people just stop it saying it makes me happy.
So I guess it's a cure for depression.
Yes.
Praise Zeninga, his musical memory, key ingredients of African soul.
Susan, any reactions to that hearing?
Praise his story for the first time.
The way that he's talking about choosing a name for the group and then getting the kinds
(21:54):
of responses that he's getting, it sounds like there's the collective that's performed.
There's the collective that's energized in a moment that is ephemeral, and yet people
feel has such a profound impact that it's clearly going to stay.
So what intrigues me there is the ephemerality of performance versus the persistent memory
(22:18):
of it.
And without the other people who've shared that experience with them, without the connection
that's happened through the music, the collective wouldn't have formed and it wouldn't have
persisted.
It's fascinating to me that it's something so ephemeral and that it persists.
I often find myself trying to convey this to students and general audiences that music
(22:43):
does not exist anywhere.
It exists only in time and in a moment.
If you put it on a recording, it's already changed.
It's already something else.
If you put it in a piece of music, a piece of paper, it has already changed.
And as you adopt these other mediums, they are going to affect your experience of it
because music exists in time.
What really strikes me is the way that often people talk about memory as if, oh, I remember
(23:07):
it so clearly.
I remember it so vividly.
I remember that performance.
I remember how crazy the audience got.
I remember the beauty of the sound.
People will insist that they remember it perfectly.
We know that memories are not preserved intact.
They're never preserved intact.
And they get revised every time you remember, every time.
(23:30):
And so you're adding contexts of recall, of memory, to the memory every time you add.
So there's the time you told your friends about it.
There's the time you told your mom about it.
There's the time it came up in class.
There's the time three of you were sitting around at a bar 20 years later.
Those are very different memories of exactly the same thing.
The thing that sticks with me about Prez's story is this kind of overly popularized word,
(23:55):
the intentionality of it.
It seems as though he wanted to create a group over time that really touched people, that
had the word soul in it, that used instruments and people from around the world to do something
in particular, and that the response he's getting, to me, the most vivid actual memory
that he shares is somebody coming up and telling him how his music and his group's music affected
(24:19):
them.
But he's also drawing on traditions and traditions of music, and he knows what connections those
have fostered before.
And so in a sense, there's a reenactment going on.
And that's more what we talk about with historical consciousness, historical imagination and
recall.
We talk about reenactment.
But for you, for music and memory, I would think it's about performance.
(24:41):
So the intentionality is to perform in a way that connects to what you know the sound is
capable of or what you know the sound has produced before.
And it's more than the sound.
I guess my words are inadequate for it.
But you know what the performance of the music has created before.
And that's what you want to create again.
So there's a repetition that's based on music memory, body memory, lots of kinds of memories
(25:06):
coming together in a sound that gets not exactly played the exact same way every time, but
references it sufficiently that it generates the same kind of feelings again.
Dan, I also wondered if you had any connection to praise his story in part because as a percussionist
who studied drums and percussion in Africa and has worked with multiple African performers.
(25:31):
I was going to say, one other part of his longer interview that we don't hear in this
two minute, roughly two minute version is he reflects at some length on his upbringing
in Zimbabwe and the healing quality of music there.
So that seems to be very much a part of what he is all about.
And the African musicians that I have worked with, one in particular Bernard Woma who has
(25:52):
passed on unfortunately, had that same sort of spirit about him that this was about a
sense of pride in his people, his culture, his language, his music, and how that could
be brought into the world in a way that really made a difference for people.
And there was a similar experience.
If you heard Bernard Woma play, the energy and the vibrancy with which he performed brought
(26:16):
things out in people that you would have never expected before.
The ability to dance, the ability to laugh and be joyous in a musical setting that seems
to be in common with what praise is describing to us here.
It's really a miraculous thing to see.
Brian, do you want to introduce our third musical memory interview cut?
(26:36):
Professor Sarah Golius is a professor of musicology here in the Fred Fox School of Music.
She's a popular music scholar.
And I think of her as a Beatles scholar in part because she got a master's degree in
Liverpool from the institution that now gives literally a graduate degree in the Beatles
if you choose to obtain that.
(26:59):
But she's got this wonderful story about gathering at a John Lennon Memorial that I'd like to
share.
One of those memories is I was either a freshman or a sophomore in college.
And I went to, I got on a bus trip and it was December 8th and that's the anniversary
of John Lennon's death.
(27:20):
And as a huge Beatles fan and a John Lennon fan in particular, I wanted to at least once
make it out to Central Park in the Strawberry Fields area of New York City.
And so I got on a bus with my friend and my mom and we went and traveled to New York.
And so we were in the Strawberry Fields area of Central Park outside of the Dakota where
(27:42):
he was assassinated.
And there were just hundreds of people.
There were people with acoustic guitars, tambourines.
On the Strawberry Fields mosaic, people had placed flowers and posters and apples and
like any sort of symbol that you could possibly imagine.
And then people just started singing Beatles tunes and John Lennon tunes.
(28:07):
And of course everyone knew the words.
I had never experienced that before because obviously if you're in a concert setting,
you know that the people know the words and they're sort of singing it back to the artist
that's performing it.
But to not have the artist be there and to have it be more of this like memorial setting,
but it wasn't sad.
(28:27):
It was more of like a celebration of life.
All of these people, not just me, were impacted by the music, right?
And getting to the point of singing all of these lyrics together with the people playing.
The few people had acoustic guitars and people participating with like tambourine.
And it just didn't matter that we were all strangers in that moment because everyone
(28:50):
was there for a reason.
So that sounds like such an amazing story because I love the idea of people just spontaneously
coming together in common cause like that.
Obviously it was so meaningful to so many people.
As a scholar of collective memory, what strikes me immediately is this is about memorial and
anniversary.
Scholars in memory studies talk about sites of memory with a S-I-T-E.
(29:15):
It's a place, but it doesn't have to be literally the strawberry fields.
It can be anything that triggers a collective to recall something that they care about.
So in her case, it sounds like it was December 8th is the anniversary of a death that's being
commemorated.
And so people without having to plan it or send an invitation out on social media, they
(29:40):
all just seem to sort of gravitate to it.
And I've heard of similar things where people will visit cemeteries and they will visit
burial sites also on the anniversary of a birthday or on the anniversary of a death.
And they will find that they're not the only ones who are there, right?
Especially if it's a celebrity like Edgar Allan Poe or Emily Dickinson.
(30:03):
Apparently their grave sites are pilgrimage sites.
So there is an element of pilgrimage here.
And maybe this also ties into the previous interview too, thinking about the significance
of connections to the human soul and the human spirit and thinking about life, death, mortality,
health, wellbeing, all of those things coming together.
And then the common cause is through music and through this particular performer.
(30:26):
So there's the site of memory that's the anniversary.
There's the site of memory that is the enactment of memorial.
And they don't need a shrine and they don't need a sculpture of the person, but they have
a common site to visit because of a song lyric.
I love that.
The song lyric itself creates the site of memory and it's not the site of the performance.
(30:50):
It's what was evoked in the song lyric that becomes the site of memory.
So yeah, lots of layers of memory at work here.
One of the things that she mentions in her longer interview is one of the many songs
sung that day was happiness is a warm gun.
And of all the inappropriate things to sing at the site where John Lennon was assassinated.
(31:14):
And yet of all the things that he might really love that is done at the site where he was
assassinated.
Of all the songs he would have been for this.
Yes.
Yeah.
The irony of that.
It does bring up an odd memory for me.
I was fortunate enough to be living in Berlin in 1989 and 1990.
(31:34):
And so I was at the wall the day it was demolished officially, but took a long time to actually
demolish.
And I remember being really surprised that the German kids who had managed to climb up
on top of the wall that the day before they would have gotten shot for doing that.
But the ones that were up there on top of the wall were singing Beatles songs.
They were singing Beatles songs on the wall in English.
(31:55):
And I remember thinking, what has that got to do?
And I just didn't understand or appreciate at the time, but it was hugely significant
for them.
Speaking of memories, wow, that's fascinating because the only song I can hear with the
memory of that is Leonard Bernstein conducting the Beethoven's 9th Symphony.
(32:19):
That's the only place my musical brain goes there.
And I have no idea why that song is connected.
But anyway.
There's got to be something here about spontaneous combustion.
Yeah.
It happens, right?
But it's happening musically.
Human spiritual combustion, so to speak.
(32:40):
Yeah.
And that is fascinating.
And part of the reason why I had asked Dan if we could end with Sarah's story is because
the Beatles crept into the consciousness around the world for people that had no connection
to the Beatles as the cultural icons that we might have in the West, in Britain and
America or in Europe, might have associated with them.
(33:04):
But the songs, the prolific output of this group and the exposure that we've had to them
has made them sink into us in ways that make them pop out on the top of the Berlin Wall
or make them whistled around the world and played by street bands and performers around
(33:28):
the world.
And I can only guess that I've, to some degree, in talking with people for the interviews
for this and other folks I've spoken to, people have memories attached to things about the
Beatles as much as any artist.
The first time you saw the White Album, the first time you saw the Sgt.
Pepper's album, the first time you heard...
The first time I got a job interview in Tucson, Arizona.
(33:51):
What did I think of?
A Beatle had lived here.
Or the experience I had in class where I assumed that the 150 students in a pop music class
in front of me had all heard the Beatles and there was the one 18-year-old that had never
had that in their experience.
And I had to confront the reality that, and this would have been a while back, the moment
(34:17):
before the Beatles are streamed as widely as they were, but also just to reflect on
the fact that everyone's experience is not quite the same.
That was something that occurred to me one of my first years of teaching here 20 or 25
years or so ago where I just realized that...
Similar experience.
I had the first, and I've taught it several times, of course, in the history of rock and
(34:40):
roll.
And when a student came to my office hours one day, a 19-year-old young woman who came
and said, tell me about this Led Zeppelin thing.
I've never listened to them and I said, really?
Somebody actually has generationally such a different experience in terms of exposure
and music.
Of course, what she was hearing at her 15 to 18 to 20-year-old life is as meaningful
(35:05):
to her as Led Zeppelin and the Beatles were to me growing up in the 60s.
I've actually seen people walking around with Pink Floyd, the wall, emblems on their shirts
and I've asked them, that's so cool.
That's Pink Floyd.
Who?
No, I'm not kidding.
They just like the look of the shirt.
They just like the design.
(35:27):
Which is another kind of collective memory and way that music goes on.
Well, maybe it's salutary in a sense, which is to remind us why...
This is why collective memories are plural.
In other words, you can't assume even within a generation that everybody has the same exposure
to anything.
And that within popular culture that the same things that may be super popular at one given
(35:48):
time have had the same effect on everybody who was alive at that time.
It doesn't work that way.
Well, Susan Crane, professor of history at the University of Arizona, we thank you so
very much for your time and expertise and reflections on Lifetimes of Listening, the
Arizona Musical Memory Archive and podcast.
(36:08):
And thank you for being with us today.
It's my pleasure to be here.
Thanks for inviting me.
I am excited about our upcoming episodes of Lifetimes of Listening.
Our next episode will deal with musical memories relating to aging, death, loss, grief and
(36:34):
loneliness.
And we have two more experts coming in.
And I'm also excited because we'll be at South by Southwest with the University of Arizona's
Wonder House, where we'll speak with Mary Frances O'Connor, an associate professor of
psychology and an expert on grief and loss.
And Corey Floyd, a professor of communication here at the U of A, who's an expert on loneliness
(36:57):
and is known for his book, The Loneliness Cure.
So we'll be taking Lifetimes of Listening on the road.
And I'm looking forward to speaking with you there.
So how can you get involved in Lifetimes of Listening?
Well, you could visit our website.
It's at musicalmemories.music.arizona.edu.
(37:18):
On the website, you can listen to archived editions of the interviews that we've done
all about people's musical memories.
You can submit a musical memory of your own with a sound file, an essay, a poem, an illustration,
whatever works for you.
Just someone you know who might like to share their musical memory with us.
That's how to get involved.
(37:38):
I'm Dan Cruz.
And I'm Brian Moon.
And that's it for this episode.
It's Lifetimes of Listening, the Arizona Musical Memory Archive and Podcast.
The executive producer of Lifetimes of Listening, the Arizona Musical Memory Podcast is Brian
(38:02):
Moon.
The program is produced and edited by Dan Cruz.
The Lifetimes of Listening website was created by Cynthia Barlow, Principal Information Technology
Manager with the University of Arizona, Fred Fox School of Music.
Music is from zapsflat.com and from pixabay.com.
Special thanks to the Fred Fox School of Music for hosting our website and UA Marketing and
(38:26):
Communications for helping us launch this project, the archive, and this podcast series.
For more information and to get involved in our research, visit musicalmemories.music.arizona.edu.
This is Lifetimes of Listening, the Arizona Musical Memory Podcast.
I learned to play sitting on my pack on the side of the road.
(00:15):
I came from a high school that had an amazing music program and I was in choir, orchestra
and marching bands.
So when I was growing up the first music that I was really like a big fan of was hip hop
especially from like the 90s.
Whenever I play music I like to be able to sing along with it.
I also am a performing artist, guitar player and singer.
I've performed all over the country many times, I've toured many times.
(00:47):
This is Lifetimes of Listening, the Arizona Musical Memory podcast, an outgrowth of the
Arizona Musical Memory Archive.
My name is Brian Moon.
I'm at the University of Arizona at the Fred Fox School of Music where I'm an associate
professor of practice in musicology and the general education coordinator.
And I'm Dan Cruz.
I'm an alum of the Fred Fox School of Music here at the U of A. I do research, lecturing
(01:12):
and documentary work all about music.
I'm also a part-time radio announcer for the U of A's NPR affiliated radio station.
Both Brian and I are here in Tucson, Arizona as we said connected with the U of A and the
Fred Fox School of Music.
So in brief, what is this podcast about?
Well, let's give you a sample.
It was a big party thrown for, it was a summer league basketball league.
(01:36):
So it was like thousands of people and then they put on When Doves Cry and the place went
crazy, just thousands of people all over the stands.
It wasn't just like what it made me feel like.
I saw thousands of people who felt the same exact way.
So that's just a brief clip of an interview that we're going to hear more of later on
as we look at musical memories today.
(01:57):
Our aim in this entire project, Lifetimes of Listening, is to document, record, archive
and study the musical memories that are such an important part of people's lives.
Now Brian and I are doing this by interviewing people from all walks of life and they tell
us about important musical memories that they have, things that may be tied to a place,
a period in their lives, their family, an important person or some other musical or
(02:22):
music centered experience or even a random event that has somehow gotten connected in
their mind or heart with music.
That's what it is.
It's Lifetimes of Listening, the Arizona Musical Memory Archive and Podcast.
Now I've got a musical memory to share that is of a communal nature and it was a very
(02:51):
unique experience for me Brian.
I think I'd mentioned it to you in the past.
My two kids who were now in their 40s when they were in college, around college age about
20, 22 years ago, became big fans of the band Fish, which is kind of for those of our generation,
it's kind of the Grateful Dead of the latter 20th century.
(03:12):
My kids followed Fish all over the country and while they were doing that they notified
us one point that my wife and I who are living here in Tucson should come up and see a Fish
concert that was taking place in Phoenix that they were going to be at as they're traveling
around the country.
So I had no clue what to expect from a Fish concert.
I'm a big music lover, have been to dozens if not hundreds of concerts in my life.
(03:34):
My wife and I went to the Fish show in Phoenix, Arizona and experienced something that I've
never experienced before, a sense of community, a sense of kind of a group dynamic that built
and grew and ebbed and flowed with the music, 20,000 or so people out of doors in a beautiful
venue on a beautiful evening with a feeling of connection to one another and the music
(03:58):
that made me realize now why my kids were following Fish all over the country, a real
communal musical experience for me.
How about you?
Do you have one to share?
So I have a lot of performing experience and part of I believe why I am the musician that
I am today is because of the way that I fell in love with making music with others.
(04:19):
I distinctly remember being a part of a choir on tour in France in college and singing a
baritone line with basses singing below me and a whole stack of choir singing above me
and feeling just in the middle of not only the choir and with all of those people in
this big experience but also just in the middle of this harmony in these big open cathedral
(04:45):
and these big spaces.
It was quite something else.
It's part of why I became a choir director and part of why I wanted to be a musician.
Great experiences these are.
It's communal musical experiences and it's what our episode is all about this time, right?
Yes and today we have a guest, Susan Crane, professor of history here at the University
(05:06):
of Arizona and a specialist in this area.
We talked with her recently at the University of Arizona's Fred Fox School of Music.
So I'm really excited today.
We have Susan Crane, a professor of history here at the University of Arizona and we've
(05:28):
asked her here because she's an expert in how an individual's memory relates to larger
collective and communal experiences and has done a lot of research on that but Dan and
I became aware of you through your humanity seminars on memories and the ways and the
history of memories but before we get into any of that I also want to put a plug for
(05:53):
your book that was just published in January which I ordered on Amazon today and the best
title for a history book ever, Nothing Happened, A History.
I look forward to reading it.
So I don't want to take us off topic but please tell us about yourself, Susan.
Well thank you so much.
I'm really pleased to be here.
Thank you for inviting me.
I'm always happy to talk about nothing because then I don't have to say anything but actually
(06:19):
I've been doing nothing for the past eight years and so I'm very pleased to have the
book out to finally show that I really did do nothing.
But the book looks at how nothing happened in the past because I'm interested in how
people choose to remember what they think is important to remember about the past.
(06:39):
So I am actually a historian of historical consciousness who happens to have a background
in German language, German history, and modern European studies so that's what I work on.
But I got interested in how people remembered or what they were remembering when they said
nothing happened because they're always remembering something even if it was boring or insignificant
(07:05):
or they didn't think anyone was going to remember it.
Because I've always been interested in how and when people choose to remember the past.
So my first book was about history museums in Germany.
Why did people create the first museum of national history in Germany?
What did they want to remember there?
So there's actually a link between memory and nothing.
And I've been teaching a course for many years that I also offered through the humanities
(07:29):
seminar and to undergraduates and it's called histories of memories.
And in that class we talk about what is collective memory and we talk about how there have been
sociologists, psychologists, and philosophers in the 20th century who are particularly interested
in how you have individual memory and it is yours but it ends up being dependent upon
(07:54):
other people, collectives, and it ends up being dependent on memory triggers, not necessarily
intact memories in your mind.
But you might hear something, and this is where I think music is going to be a logical
connection.
You might hear something, you might see something that triggers a memory.
But that memory itself you wouldn't even be able to recover unless you had other connections
(08:16):
in your mind back to where you first heard it or who you were with when you first heard
it.
And a lot of times it turns out if you really dig into it those memories stem from families.
So when you're growing up, when you're a little kid, there's a lot of memory impact.
Memories are shaped within families and shared within generations and generations within
(08:39):
families so parents and children, not as much as you'd think, turns out a lot between grandparents
and children ends up linking people further back into the past than they would have any
lived experience or lived memory of.
So I'm always intrigued by how people remember what they want to remember, what they don't
(09:00):
want to remember, and it comes back anyway.
But also the way that it's plural.
Collective memory is never singular.
You can't talk about the American memory of anything.
There's multiple collectives within any large entity like a nation, but also within a family.
So you personally belong to a whole bunch of different collectives, some of which are
(09:22):
defined through family, through generations, others of which might be who else heard the
music you heard or who else was at the performance you were at.
And those are multiple collectives that you share because you were there or because you
love that music.
So much of what you're talking about, Susan, is resonating with me because the musical
memories that we're going to share with you today, some recordings that Brian and I have
(09:42):
done, interviews we've done, are particularly powerful because they relate to music and
in this case because these three relate also to the sense that each of our interview subjects
relates to how it was a shared experience.
So is there anything in particular that you find about people remembering music that seems
relevant?
(10:03):
Why is it that people remember music, for example, so well?
Or why does a musical event in someone's early life, say their teenage years, resonate so
strongly?
There have been some scholars who've looked at precisely what age are you at the point
where you're most influenced by the music that you're listening to?
(10:23):
And it turns out, I'm not remembering the exact ages, but I want to say it's about the
age of 10 to about the age of 25.
So you said your teenage years.
Whatever music you loved at that age, you're going to love for life.
You might acquire some other ones later, but that is what you're really going to love.
It's a period in life when people are bonding with their peer group, right?
(10:44):
They're going through maturing changes, adolescence, young adulthood.
But it could also be where you have to blame your parents because whatever they were playing
and listening to, like in an earlier phase, pre-earbuds for everybody, you might have
been stuck hearing the music in the car or in the house that you end up getting stuck
with for life and you've got the earworms for life, but wasn't your favorite?
(11:05):
Yeah, you're going to be stuck with it for life.
So many of the musical memories in the archive, the interviews that we've done of students
often begin with, well, I remember this time listening to music with my parent in the car.
There's a theme of those, parent in the car memories.
Yeah, not surprised.
So it could be what you fall in love with, but it could also be what shapes what you
(11:26):
think music is to begin with.
My mom always had, it's now called K Mozart, but I forget what it was.
In Los Angeles, there was this all classical music station.
She loved listening to opera.
And don't judge me, I can't stand opera, but she loved it.
So I always associate opera with my mom, who I loved dearly.
(11:47):
So I got exposed to it.
I heard it a lot.
I didn't fall in love with it.
I still recognize those bits of music when I hear them later and I think of my mom.
So shall we share with Susan the three memories that we brought today?
Is this a good time to do that?
Let's listen to these memories.
So the first memory that we have is from Professor Ntari Gault.
(12:08):
He's a lecturer in the Africana Studies program.
I made his acquaintance when he came to work with the doctoral students here about how
best to present black folk music in concert.
Ntari is a poet and a novelist and a playwright and has a very compelling story about the
(12:34):
emergence of a particular single from a Prince album.
And I remember this single dropping with this.
So let's take a listen to his story.
I was going into my senior year of high school.
It was actually, I think it was like about June 17th, 1984.
And Prince was releasing the Purple Rain album and he had just released When Doves Cry.
(12:59):
It was a big party thrown for, it was a summer league basketball league.
So it was like thousands of people in this park, Martin Luther King Park on the east
side of Buffalo.
They were playing a lot of songs.
People were dancing and then they put on When Doves Cry and the place went crazy.
Just thousands of people all over the stands dancing.
(13:21):
So then they played the song about a half hour straight, back to back, no breaks.
And then finally the DJ, so he put on something by Run DMC and everyone started screaming,
booing and telling them to put that Prince song back on.
They played that song for the next hour and a half.
I left the party and they were still playing the song.
(13:42):
I don't know how long they played the song, but straight, I just never heard the ending
of the song because they just kept on looping it for the next hour and a half.
So two hours of Prince.
It could have gone longer than that, but I finally had to go home and so I left the party
the entire time.
I never saw it break.
(14:03):
I don't think it was the lyrics at that moment because most of us were hearing the song for
the very first time.
Everybody in that park and people were greeting each other and talking to each other and none
of us had ever seen anything like that before.
It wasn't just like what it made me feel like.
I saw thousands of people who felt the same exact way.
Your thoughts, Susan, in response to Natari's memory.
(14:26):
I'm smiling so big because I also remember when that song came out.
What strikes me about his memory is the way in which a collective is born in an instant.
I'm really surprised that the DJ is playing the song over and over and over again and
no one's protesting.
That's amazing.
(14:47):
They're protesting any change.
It's got to be that song.
In an instant, there's a collective that's born and I'm sure that all the people that
were there are going to remember it or will they?
It seems to have made such a huge impression on him and it's a moment in which he's in
a group and the group is excited and there's this energy.
(15:09):
Yet I wonder, you could ask somebody else who was there that night and they might go,
oh man, I can't stand Prince.
I wonder if later there could be things that happened later that changed the way that they
felt about it.
Let's assume they had good taste and are still fans of Prince.
Then there's other people for whom the resonance is in the sound right there and it's making
them move.
(15:29):
Wouldn't you think there'd also be body memory of that?
So then later when they hear the song, when I hear that song, I start moving.
One of the things that impressed me is when he commented that the song had just come out
so nobody knew the lyrics.
They're not responding and I'm the same sort of person.
I will hear a piece of music and I respond to the sound of the music and it may be five,
(15:54):
10, 20, 30 years later that I actually listen to the lyrics.
That seemed to be part of the shared experience here that they were responding to sound, to
chords, to chordal patterns, to rhythm, to the sonic quality of the sound.
Setting aside the whole issue of the lyrics, which would have been a completely different
experience had it been about the lyrics.
(16:16):
It's a relatively dark, a song about a relatively dark domestic violence and troubled marriage
and a whole bunch of other, I mean it's not a party song to replay on a loop for a bunch
of teenage basketball players.
The sound of it must be.
Yeah, I remember distinctly, so one of the things that was striking about Prince, he
(16:37):
was one of the first black rock R&B soul-ish artists to really emerge as a superstar about
the same time as Michael Jackson, but he had such a distinct sound.
I remember hearing him on the radio and just being immediately where he was like nothing
else.
Nothing sounded like him at that moment.
(16:59):
To my ear, now that's partly because I wasn't listening to all of the stuff that DJs were
listening to in the 70s of some of the best soul and funk artists until much later in
my life.
He emerged for the writ large mainstream so that when I heard him in rural southern Mississippi
(17:19):
at the same time, it just sounded incredibly distinct.
When I did the interview with Atari and heard him tell the story, I was amazed because I
knew exactly what he was talking about because I had had that same connection to the song
and I was not in a predominantly black basketball league when I heard it.
(17:48):
I was just hearing it on the radio in a very different way.
A song like that seems to me to have a very personal singular resonance for anybody who
hears it, but in this particular occasion because of the celebratory nature of the gathering,
the song did something to the group.
Susan, any other thoughts on that?
(18:08):
I'm also thinking about even if it wasn't just about this song, and it's hard for me
to move away from this song because I have memories I associate with that one, but if
you think about it more about was there one concert you went to where everything changed?
Was there one performance you went to that seemed to mark a moment?
Collective memories are often formed around a sense of it was like this before and then
(18:31):
it changed.
If there was a transitional moment or some kind of pivot where you think I kind of realized
something in that moment that things were going to be different, and sometimes I think
people have articulated that in response to a new song or a new kind of music or they
hear it for the first time and they think, wow, I've never heard anything quite like
(18:52):
that, then you do have a sense of change.
I think that could also be what he's picking up on in his memory of that event.
Let's listen to a second musical memory out of an interview that I did with the head of
Africana Studies here at the University of Arizona, Praise Zanenga, who I had met in
the context of a performance event some years before when I brought and hosted, helped to
(19:15):
host an event with a renowned African musician, came to town, and Praise was part of putting
that together as well.
So I knew Praise a little bit.
But he shares with us his own story of being in Tucson and becoming part of a musical group
that then he really had an imprint on in a very powerful way.
So let's listen to Praise's musical memory.
(19:36):
My name is Praise Zanenga.
I was born in Zimbabwe, yes, more in the rural areas, just outside the capital city of Harare.
I work as the director of the Africana Studies program here at the University of Arizona.
There was a marimba group that was doing acoustic marimba and they were playing the Zimbabwean
(20:00):
type of marimba.
And we had a group of people that had learned this style of music.
Our band is called The Key Ingredients of African Soul, which means the keys are based on the
marimba keys, of course, but it also has a double meaning, to say key elements, meaning
(20:23):
that we have people from all over the world who play with us.
We have people from Mexico.
We have people who are Native American, Africans, East Africans, West Africans, Southern Africans.
We have Europeans.
We also have an Asian in the band.
So we are all mixed.
(20:45):
We are the key ingredients, but focusing on African soul music, that was the goal, to
bring all those people together to unite them through music.
They somehow touched the human soul in a unique way, and I think that's why I insisted on
inserting that word soul in the name of our band.
(21:05):
So it's amazing that when we play here in Tucson at places like Monterey Court or when
we are downtown, people will come after the show and say, hey, this music is very healing.
I feel something.
I feel better.
I feel good.
We come to your shows because it's not just happy, happy music, but it's music that touches
(21:29):
the spirit, that touches the soul.
Some people just stop it saying it makes me happy.
So I guess it's a cure for depression.
Yes.
Praise Zeninga, his musical memory, key ingredients of African soul.
Susan, any reactions to that hearing?
Praise his story for the first time.
The way that he's talking about choosing a name for the group and then getting the kinds
(21:54):
of responses that he's getting, it sounds like there's the collective that's performed.
There's the collective that's energized in a moment that is ephemeral, and yet people
feel has such a profound impact that it's clearly going to stay.
So what intrigues me there is the ephemerality of performance versus the persistent memory
(22:18):
of it.
And without the other people who've shared that experience with them, without the connection
that's happened through the music, the collective wouldn't have formed and it wouldn't have
persisted.
It's fascinating to me that it's something so ephemeral and that it persists.
I often find myself trying to convey this to students and general audiences that music
(22:43):
does not exist anywhere.
It exists only in time and in a moment.
If you put it on a recording, it's already changed.
It's already something else.
If you put it in a piece of music, a piece of paper, it has already changed.
And as you adopt these other mediums, they are going to affect your experience of it
because music exists in time.
What really strikes me is the way that often people talk about memory as if, oh, I remember
(23:07):
it so clearly.
I remember it so vividly.
I remember that performance.
I remember how crazy the audience got.
I remember the beauty of the sound.
People will insist that they remember it perfectly.
We know that memories are not preserved intact.
They're never preserved intact.
And they get revised every time you remember, every time.
(23:30):
And so you're adding contexts of recall, of memory, to the memory every time you add.
So there's the time you told your friends about it.
There's the time you told your mom about it.
There's the time it came up in class.
There's the time three of you were sitting around at a bar 20 years later.
Those are very different memories of exactly the same thing.
The thing that sticks with me about Prez's story is this kind of overly popularized word,
(23:55):
the intentionality of it.
It seems as though he wanted to create a group over time that really touched people, that
had the word soul in it, that used instruments and people from around the world to do something
in particular, and that the response he's getting, to me, the most vivid actual memory
that he shares is somebody coming up and telling him how his music and his group's music affected
(24:19):
them.
But he's also drawing on traditions and traditions of music, and he knows what connections those
have fostered before.
And so in a sense, there's a reenactment going on.
And that's more what we talk about with historical consciousness, historical imagination and
recall.
We talk about reenactment.
But for you, for music and memory, I would think it's about performance.
(24:41):
So the intentionality is to perform in a way that connects to what you know the sound is
capable of or what you know the sound has produced before.
And it's more than the sound.
I guess my words are inadequate for it.
But you know what the performance of the music has created before.
And that's what you want to create again.
So there's a repetition that's based on music memory, body memory, lots of kinds of memories
(25:06):
coming together in a sound that gets not exactly played the exact same way every time, but
references it sufficiently that it generates the same kind of feelings again.
Dan, I also wondered if you had any connection to praise his story in part because as a percussionist
who studied drums and percussion in Africa and has worked with multiple African performers.
(25:31):
I was going to say, one other part of his longer interview that we don't hear in this
two minute, roughly two minute version is he reflects at some length on his upbringing
in Zimbabwe and the healing quality of music there.
So that seems to be very much a part of what he is all about.
And the African musicians that I have worked with, one in particular Bernard Woma who has
(25:52):
passed on unfortunately, had that same sort of spirit about him that this was about a
sense of pride in his people, his culture, his language, his music, and how that could
be brought into the world in a way that really made a difference for people.
And there was a similar experience.
If you heard Bernard Woma play, the energy and the vibrancy with which he performed brought
(26:16):
things out in people that you would have never expected before.
The ability to dance, the ability to laugh and be joyous in a musical setting that seems
to be in common with what praise is describing to us here.
It's really a miraculous thing to see.
Brian, do you want to introduce our third musical memory interview cut?
(26:36):
Professor Sarah Golius is a professor of musicology here in the Fred Fox School of Music.
She's a popular music scholar.
And I think of her as a Beatles scholar in part because she got a master's degree in
Liverpool from the institution that now gives literally a graduate degree in the Beatles
if you choose to obtain that.
(26:59):
But she's got this wonderful story about gathering at a John Lennon Memorial that I'd like to
share.
One of those memories is I was either a freshman or a sophomore in college.
And I went to, I got on a bus trip and it was December 8th and that's the anniversary
of John Lennon's death.
(27:20):
And as a huge Beatles fan and a John Lennon fan in particular, I wanted to at least once
make it out to Central Park in the Strawberry Fields area of New York City.
And so I got on a bus with my friend and my mom and we went and traveled to New York.
And so we were in the Strawberry Fields area of Central Park outside of the Dakota where
(27:42):
he was assassinated.
And there were just hundreds of people.
There were people with acoustic guitars, tambourines.
On the Strawberry Fields mosaic, people had placed flowers and posters and apples and
like any sort of symbol that you could possibly imagine.
And then people just started singing Beatles tunes and John Lennon tunes.
(28:07):
And of course everyone knew the words.
I had never experienced that before because obviously if you're in a concert setting,
you know that the people know the words and they're sort of singing it back to the artist
that's performing it.
But to not have the artist be there and to have it be more of this like memorial setting,
but it wasn't sad.
(28:27):
It was more of like a celebration of life.
All of these people, not just me, were impacted by the music, right?
And getting to the point of singing all of these lyrics together with the people playing.
The few people had acoustic guitars and people participating with like tambourine.
And it just didn't matter that we were all strangers in that moment because everyone
(28:50):
was there for a reason.
So that sounds like such an amazing story because I love the idea of people just spontaneously
coming together in common cause like that.
Obviously it was so meaningful to so many people.
As a scholar of collective memory, what strikes me immediately is this is about memorial and
anniversary.
Scholars in memory studies talk about sites of memory with a S-I-T-E.
(29:15):
It's a place, but it doesn't have to be literally the strawberry fields.
It can be anything that triggers a collective to recall something that they care about.
So in her case, it sounds like it was December 8th is the anniversary of a death that's being
commemorated.
And so people without having to plan it or send an invitation out on social media, they
(29:40):
all just seem to sort of gravitate to it.
And I've heard of similar things where people will visit cemeteries and they will visit
burial sites also on the anniversary of a birthday or on the anniversary of a death.
And they will find that they're not the only ones who are there, right?
Especially if it's a celebrity like Edgar Allan Poe or Emily Dickinson.
(30:03):
Apparently their grave sites are pilgrimage sites.
So there is an element of pilgrimage here.
And maybe this also ties into the previous interview too, thinking about the significance
of connections to the human soul and the human spirit and thinking about life, death, mortality,
health, wellbeing, all of those things coming together.
And then the common cause is through music and through this particular performer.
(30:26):
So there's the site of memory that's the anniversary.
There's the site of memory that is the enactment of memorial.
And they don't need a shrine and they don't need a sculpture of the person, but they have
a common site to visit because of a song lyric.
I love that.
The song lyric itself creates the site of memory and it's not the site of the performance.
(30:50):
It's what was evoked in the song lyric that becomes the site of memory.
So yeah, lots of layers of memory at work here.
One of the things that she mentions in her longer interview is one of the many songs
sung that day was happiness is a warm gun.
And of all the inappropriate things to sing at the site where John Lennon was assassinated.
(31:14):
And yet of all the things that he might really love that is done at the site where he was
assassinated.
Of all the songs he would have been for this.
Yes.
Yeah.
The irony of that.
It does bring up an odd memory for me.
I was fortunate enough to be living in Berlin in 1989 and 1990.
(31:34):
And so I was at the wall the day it was demolished officially, but took a long time to actually
demolish.
And I remember being really surprised that the German kids who had managed to climb up
on top of the wall that the day before they would have gotten shot for doing that.
But the ones that were up there on top of the wall were singing Beatles songs.
They were singing Beatles songs on the wall in English.
(31:55):
And I remember thinking, what has that got to do?
And I just didn't understand or appreciate at the time, but it was hugely significant
for them.
Speaking of memories, wow, that's fascinating because the only song I can hear with the
memory of that is Leonard Bernstein conducting the Beethoven's 9th Symphony.
(32:19):
That's the only place my musical brain goes there.
And I have no idea why that song is connected.
But anyway.
There's got to be something here about spontaneous combustion.
Yeah.
It happens, right?
But it's happening musically.
Human spiritual combustion, so to speak.
(32:40):
Yeah.
And that is fascinating.
And part of the reason why I had asked Dan if we could end with Sarah's story is because
the Beatles crept into the consciousness around the world for people that had no connection
to the Beatles as the cultural icons that we might have in the West, in Britain and
America or in Europe, might have associated with them.
(33:04):
But the songs, the prolific output of this group and the exposure that we've had to them
has made them sink into us in ways that make them pop out on the top of the Berlin Wall
or make them whistled around the world and played by street bands and performers around
(33:28):
the world.
And I can only guess that I've, to some degree, in talking with people for the interviews
for this and other folks I've spoken to, people have memories attached to things about the
Beatles as much as any artist.
The first time you saw the White Album, the first time you saw the Sgt.
Pepper's album, the first time you heard...
The first time I got a job interview in Tucson, Arizona.
(33:51):
What did I think of?
A Beatle had lived here.
Or the experience I had in class where I assumed that the 150 students in a pop music class
in front of me had all heard the Beatles and there was the one 18-year-old that had never
had that in their experience.
And I had to confront the reality that, and this would have been a while back, the moment
(34:17):
before the Beatles are streamed as widely as they were, but also just to reflect on
the fact that everyone's experience is not quite the same.
That was something that occurred to me one of my first years of teaching here 20 or 25
years or so ago where I just realized that...
Similar experience.
I had the first, and I've taught it several times, of course, in the history of rock and
(34:40):
roll.
And when a student came to my office hours one day, a 19-year-old young woman who came
and said, tell me about this Led Zeppelin thing.
I've never listened to them and I said, really?
Somebody actually has generationally such a different experience in terms of exposure
and music.
Of course, what she was hearing at her 15 to 18 to 20-year-old life is as meaningful
(35:05):
to her as Led Zeppelin and the Beatles were to me growing up in the 60s.
I've actually seen people walking around with Pink Floyd, the wall, emblems on their shirts
and I've asked them, that's so cool.
That's Pink Floyd.
Who?
No, I'm not kidding.
They just like the look of the shirt.
They just like the design.
(35:27):
Which is another kind of collective memory and way that music goes on.
Well, maybe it's salutary in a sense, which is to remind us why...
This is why collective memories are plural.
In other words, you can't assume even within a generation that everybody has the same exposure
to anything.
And that within popular culture that the same things that may be super popular at one given
(35:48):
time have had the same effect on everybody who was alive at that time.
It doesn't work that way.
Well, Susan Crane, professor of history at the University of Arizona, we thank you so
very much for your time and expertise and reflections on Lifetimes of Listening, the
Arizona Musical Memory Archive and podcast.
(36:08):
And thank you for being with us today.
It's my pleasure to be here.
Thanks for inviting me.
I am excited about our upcoming episodes of Lifetimes of Listening.
Our next episode will deal with musical memories relating to aging, death, loss, grief and
(36:34):
loneliness.
And we have two more experts coming in.
And I'm also excited because we'll be at South by Southwest with the University of Arizona's
Wonder House, where we'll speak with Mary Frances O'Connor, an associate professor of
psychology and an expert on grief and loss.
And Corey Floyd, a professor of communication here at the U of A, who's an expert on loneliness
(36:57):
and is known for his book, The Loneliness Cure.
So we'll be taking Lifetimes of Listening on the road.
And I'm looking forward to speaking with you there.
So how can you get involved in Lifetimes of Listening?
Well, you could visit our website.
It's at musicalmemories.music.arizona.edu.
(37:18):
On the website, you can listen to archived editions of the interviews that we've done
all about people's musical memories.
You can submit a musical memory of your own with a sound file, an essay, a poem, an illustration,
whatever works for you.
Just someone you know who might like to share their musical memory with us.
That's how to get involved.
(37:38):
I'm Dan Cruz.
And I'm Brian Moon.
And that's it for this episode.
It's Lifetimes of Listening, the Arizona Musical Memory Archive and Podcast.
The executive producer of Lifetimes of Listening, the Arizona Musical Memory Podcast is Brian
(38:02):
Moon.
The program is produced and edited by Dan Cruz.
The Lifetimes of Listening website was created by Cynthia Barlow, Principal Information Technology
Manager with the University of Arizona, Fred Fox School of Music.
Music is from zapsflat.com and from pixabay.com.
Special thanks to the Fred Fox School of Music for hosting our website and UA Marketing and
(38:26):
Communications for helping us launch this project, the archive, and this podcast series.
For more information and to get involved in our research, visit musicalmemories.music.arizona.edu.
This is Lifetimes of Listening, the Arizona Musical Memory Podcast.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.
Two Guys, Five Rings: Matt, Bowen & The Olympics
Two Guys (Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers). Five Rings (you know, from the Olympics logo). One essential podcast for the 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics. Bowen Yang (SNL, Wicked) and Matt Rogers (Palm Royale, No Good Deed) of Las Culturistas are back for a second season of Two Guys, Five Rings, a collaboration with NBC Sports and iHeartRadio. In this 15-episode event, Bowen and Matt discuss the top storylines, obsess over Italian culture, and find out what really goes on in the Olympic Village.