Adam Mars Jones

Following our ‘Music and Memory’ event, part of the launch of Granta 111: Going Back, we have been asking writers to choose five songs or pieces of music which are important to them, and which bring back particularly salient memories.

Adam Mars Jones

1. Illegal download: ‘Allegri Miserere’ (1630)

Extremely famous piece for unaccompanied choir, part of the liturgy for Ash Wednesday, which the Pope wanted to be his personal property, so manuscripts were carefully monitored and anyone attempting to copy them would be excommunicated. Then in 1770 along comes the piece of music software known as Mozart, fourteen years old, hears the piece (twice, admittedly) and writes it down faithfully from memory. It's published in London the next year. The first illegal download, two centuries before the internet.

2. Body memory: Josef Suk, ‘About Mother's Heart’ for piano, from the suite ‘About Mother’ (1907)

Suk married Dvorak's daughter Otilie, who died soon after giving birth to their son. The boy would never know his mother, but this piece is based on the memory of the sound he heard before he even had ears, the rhythm of her heartbeat.

3. Impossible memory: Heiner Goebbels, ‘Surrogate Cities’ part 1

Gradually through the orchestral texture, rising to dominance, come the elaborate vocal lines of the Jewish cantors of Berlin, destroyed by the Nazis but here restored to the memory of the city.

Adam Mars-Jones wrote about sight-reading and biking leathers for our Music Season