Welcome to the third edition of Laughing Stock. This week, Will Palmer (@willliampalmer) considers the power of music as muscle memory through the real and imagined lives of his grandfather and a viral ballerina.
In the 1960s, Marta C. Gonzalez stepped out onto a brightly lit stage in downtown Manhattan for the New York City Ballet Company. She cast a spell over her audience, rising and falling gracefully to Tchaikovsky’s much celebrated Swan Lake. Time stopped still as she floated, fairy-like, across the vinyl. Sixty years later, the Spanish ballerina’s grand performance was revisited in a viral video that spread across social media in November 2020. The clip shows Marta, now elderly and battling Alzheimer's, in a wheelchair wearing a pair of headphones as the ballet’s famous strings are played back to her. The music triggers a kind of muscle memory; her arms start to glide in motion with the music. She remembers everything: the routine, the rhythm, the dramatic crescendo of motion and melody, the feeling. She is no longer an elderly Alzheimer's patient in a care home, but centre stage as the first dancer for a renowned ballet company.
The viewer too, starts to imagine the same, as the clip is interspersed with black and white footage of a dancer we’re led to believe is Marta, mirroring the original piece from Swan Lake. This vision of grace and poise is only temporarily diminished when Marta asks for the volume to be turned up; a sign of her advanced years and increased frailty. The video is raw and emotional and moving, whoever edited it knows how to tug on the audience’s heartstrings. Its particular remarkability speaks of the power of music to activate muscle memory as Marta is transported back to another time and place. This is what music does to all of us.
These clips go viral on a regular basis: an Alzheimer’s or dementia patient listens to music and has the same kind of visceral reaction that Marta had to Swan Lake. Music has been regularly used in therapy for memory loss and brain degenerative diseases for a number of years now. The reasons why music can have such a profound effect on these patients are numerous. Firstly, when we learn the lyrics, beats and rhythms of a specific song, this is stored in our brain as ‘procedural memory,’ commonly referred to as ‘muscle memory.’ Our favourite tracks and albums become second nature to us, so these memories become associated with routine patterns and repetitive actions. Although diseases such as dementia and Alzheimer's slowly erode memories associated with people, places and events, they generally leave muscle memory untouched. Secondly and arguably more obviously, music is emotional. We associate the tracks, albums and artists we love (and even hate) to a plethora of feelings, triggering poignant recollections. These can be some of the ‘most powerful memories’ we have and so may remain strong among patients with dementia or Alzheimer’s.
Back in November, as I watched the clip of Marta on Twitter and sent it to a couple of friends, I thought of my Grandad, Clive. He’s 88, likes gardening, food and listening to the radio. He’s a proud Brummy and is always smiling. He’s short, hobbit-like even, with a full head of whispery grey hair (boding well for me and my fear of baldness in later life). He’s often quiet but always polite, and he will always be happy to see you when you visit, insisting that you are comfortable and sorted before he is. To put it plainly: he’s selfless.
Like Marta, Clive has dementia too. It started off around 10 years ago with simple forgetfulness: misremembering a couple of names, not knowing where his keys were, and being unsure of how the oven works. The disease, of course, got worse as his symptoms deteriorated; from walking out of the house and getting lost and disorientated, to developing increasingly mixed-up memories (such as believing he had fought in World War II, despite being 13 when it ended) to the worst of all: forgetting his family, and most heartbreakingly, his only son and primary carer, my Dad. Despite all of this, he remains a happy man and is still able to live independently. In some patients, later stage dementia can prompt depression and anxiety, but Clive, despite being unaware of the people around him and in all likelihood unaware of who he himself is, is blissfully content with life as he potters around in his bungalow. Now, beyond the obvious dementia connection, the viral clip of Marta got me thinking about Clive for one very clear reason: Elvis.
‘Can’t Help Falling In Love’ hit the UK in 1961 and became one of Elvis Presley’s instant classics. A quintessential love song; its lyrics and melody remain endearingly simple and timeless in a shifting and capricious world. The track was my Nan’s favourite song and as a result, became one of my Grandad’s favourites. By the time of the release of ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love,’ my grandparents were both comfortably in their mid-20s, married and with two children, but it eventually became the one song that became inexplicitly woven into the fabric of their marriage. Unfortunately, my Nan passed away in 2008 after battling both Parkinson’s and Lewy Body Dementia. They were married for nearly 53 years. Clive had become her primary caregiver in the years after she had been diagnosed, essentially entering into a 24 hour-a-day, 7-day-a-week job as he washed, dressed and fed her whilst her condition increasingly worsened. It was a labour of pure love for my Grandad.
After her death and even after his own dementia diagnosis, Clive would always be visibly upset if ‘Can’t Help Falling In Love’ started playing, wherever he was. One year, at a family wedding, the song started to play before dinner was served. Despite his declining capacity for memory, my Grandad was shaken by the music. He was teary-eyed and confused; it often took him a while to come round afterwards. However, his reaction would still comfort me. Of course it was sad to see him so upset, but it meant there was still some remnant of a connection to certain memories. It was the strongest type of memory that was forged around the love for his wife, but also sadness of her death and the way in which she died. This connection was still evident when my Dad played him the music of his childhood, as he recognised the jingle-jangle of George Formby’s ukulele, cheerfully singing and tapping along to ‘When I’m Cleaning Windows’ and ‘Our Sergeant Major’.
It was only a couple of years later before this was to all change. It was 2018 and the day of another family wedding. Everyone was in their seats and my cousin was about to go down the aisle, when a set of familiar chords and a swooning voice resonated from the speaker: ‘wise men say, only fools rush in…’ We all knew what to expect. In panic, I looked from my sisters to my parents to my Grandad, thinking I knew what was about to come, anticipating Clive’s typical melancholic reaction. However, this time there were no tears, no bewilderment, no sense of loss. My Grandad instead smiled at me blankly, totally unaware of the song being played. His connection to this song, to the bittersweet evocation its melody provoked, had been untethered; he no longer remembered.
That scene I painted for you at the start, of Marta C. Gonzalez performing in the 1960s, of a distinguished ballet company, of a heart-stopping performance in a glittering decade in an iconic city, may never have happened at all. Alastair Macaulay, a former New York Times dance critic, was researching Gonzalez’s past and found there were some discrepancies based on the short biography given by the organisation who released the clip. There is no one with Marta’s name who performed for the New York City Ballet, while the older footage spliced into the clip is not of Marta, but of the Russian dancer Uliana Lopatkina. The black and white performance wasn’t even of Swan Lake; it is believed to be of The Dying Swan, part of a larger body of work by French composer Camille Saint-Saëns.
Yet, none of this matters. This is the nature of memory and music: it is messy, it is complex, it is never perfect. Marta C. Gonzalez was obviously a ballet dancer at some point - just look at the passion and fluency in her recreated performance. She was there. You can see it in her poised movements; you can see it in her eyes and in her tears. Marta’s and my Grandad’s reactions happen to all of us. Specific musical pieces evoke memories, both imagined and real. The exact details of Marta’s life and career may have been lost and may never be fully known, but that takes nothing away from the sheer intensity of emotion on show. This is real for her and for all of us watching. My Grandad may have now forgotten Elvis and my Nan and his great love for her, but I’ll remember. I’ll remember imagined memories of a love story between two Brummies, of two 15 year olds meeting wind swept on a boat on a school trip to Jersey in the 1950s, all sound-tracked to The King, ‘take my hand, take my whole life too…’
Each week we will share some tracks that the contributers to Laughing Stock currently have on heavy rotation. You can follow the rolling playlist on Apple or Spotify.
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