Earworms

For a few months now I’ve been curating a playlist in my music application that I call earworms. It’s where I put those pieces of music that get stuck looping in my mind. At one point I was calling it lost+found, because every so often I can’t place the musical fragments floating in my mind.

For several of the tracks in the earworms list, it has taken me years to locate them. This happened with two that I remembered dad playing some Sunday mornings, blaring from his study. I ended up working my way through his CD collection, starting by the composers I considered most likely. One of the tracks was from Wagner’s Das Rheingold: “Verwandlungsmusik,”¹ from the second scene, with the Nibelungs hammering in their forge. Wagner called for 18 anvils and hammers to be used in that scene. Crazy man, Wagner.
The other track, which I had initially thought was from Guridi’s El Caserío, was indeed from Guridi, though from Diez Melodías Vascas².

The earworms playlist is more heterogenous than my other playlists. It’s not always the music that I expected that gets lodged in my mind.

Recently, I had been listening a lot to my friend Anthony’s³ latest album, On Modes. One morning I found I had a musical snippet looping in my mind. I was not sure it was Anthony’s, but I suspected it must be. It turned out to be from one of the tracks in On Modes; a track that I had not paid much attention to: Passacaglia.

There’s also music that gets stuck in my mind because of its genuine hummability, like Rosalía’s Candy⁴, which again, I had not considered initially as one of the best in her album Motomami, but which I do now.

It’s odd, how sometimes you second-guess your tastes and ideas, and if you let yourself drift a bit and be receptive, time puts things in their place.
The playlist populated by my subconscious.
It reminds me of type designer Kris Sowersby’s explanation of how he worked on his typefaces Untitled Sans and Untitled Serif, in a “no-mind kind of manner.”⁵