Janice Galloway

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.

Janice Galloway

I noticed choosing these that I headed straight for what recalled commonplace or simple experience – what we reduce down to as we age and grow wiser. I have little time for histrionics or over-fancy. All of them are about kinds of love.

Kelly Cae Hogan as the Countess

1. W.A. Mozart: ‘Dove Sono’, The Countess’s aria from Act 3 of The Marriage of Figaro

Even without the words it’s beautiful and with them, it’s a torch song par excellence. What the countess remembers about her ‘happy’ days with her husband are simple and touching in the extreme: her memory is full of loss and the dying fall and echo of Mozart’s melodic line stress not only this, but the countess’s loneliness and innocence.

2. Lou Reed: ‘Perfect Day’

What’s recalled here is in no way extraordinary, in no way singular. Its catch is in the recollection of very simple moments adding to a ‘perfect day’ in their very simplicity. Perfection is a matter of perspective, not striving or over-reaching. ‘You’re going to reap what you sow’ repeated by the black girl backing choir adds a touch of gospel beauty.

3. Benjamin Britten: ‘The Foggy, Foggy Dew’ (arr Britten from traditional folk song)

A song that would be a torch song if the singer was a man who took himself too seriously, but the straightforwardness of what he recalls about his lost love, the directness with which he reveals his subsequent son, her loss from their lives and his training of the boy to follow his footsteps as a weaver with the best of paternal advice is moving every time I hear it. The story is more or less something that could happen to any working man or woman, and does: the memory of the whole related without false sentiment or theatrics, just relating what was and what is. Britten makes the simplest of arrangements to keep the song’s words to the fore. I love this song and I love what Britten does with it. A life – three lives – in three verses. Peter Peers singing it is priceless.

4. Benjamin Britten: from Winter Words, Op 52, ‘The Choirmaster’s Burial’

A memory within a memory, a remeniscence built on a related story from another person who himself is remembering the wishes of a long-dead choirmaster who merely wished a song to be sung over him at his funeral. The choirmaster both does not and does get his wish, and the memory of it, wrapped in sparkling, subtly meandering music, is just priceless. You can take the song at many levels – on one, it’s clearly untrue and a kind of fable of wish-fulfilment; at another, true by dint of natural (and heavenly) justice; at another, a myth. All choirmasters should be sung over. This song, related years after the true tale and most of its characters have faded, is a little English masterpiece and makes me weep every time.

5. Robert Burns: ‘John Anderson, my Jo’

To be at its best, this needs to be heard unaccompanied. It’s an old woman singing to her husband of many years who is still much loved. Her ‘Jo’ still – old Ayrshire for boyfriend or partner – he is still treasured and you feel he treasures her in return. The song comprises her memory of his face in youth and compares his face now. Then, they walked up the hill together, now they descend. ‘And hand in hand we’ll go/ And sleep thegither at the foot. John Anderson, my Jo’. Almost an opposite torch song – an enduring love of ordinary couple. The tune, refashioned by Burns from the traditional, is subtle and distinct, the range limited enough for a elderly person to easily sing.