I didn't grow up learning anything in particular
-- certainly very few of my music lessons took at all, which is why the last time I'd touched a musical instrument was during the Carter administration before I took up the ukulele in 2020.
But I've been singing along with records, the radio and such for over 60 years. THAT, I can do. I've never intentionally tried to memorize any of them that I can remember, but I've still managed to memorize hundreds of songs by accident, at least well enough to pass an oral exam if not a written one, so to speak.
Look, there's a pile of garbage in my head that got stuck in there by accident. I'd remove a third of it if I could, but you can't really forget something on purpose, can you?
If something's gonna be there, it might as well be things that I WANT to be there. THOSE, I can do something about.
My own experience observing dementia in way too many family members is that it's not entirely about forgetting things. It's about
losing control of what you remember. You could even describe some aspects of dementia as non-stop novelty for the sufferer, and non-stop suffering for their loved ones. I gotta tell ya, when your dad asks, "Hey, you're new here! What's your name?" the answer is NOT, "I'm your son, and I was just here 10 minutes ago. I just stepped out to talk to the doctor." He's certain he's never seen you before, and it just upsets him to have forgotten that he'd ever had any kids at all, much less you in particular.
There's no question that an ever-widening range of new experiences is an important part of exercising the mind, but the flipside of neuroplasticity is that if you don't have the ability to solidify some of the novelty into persistence, AT WILL, then you really don't have much at all. Experiencing new things. Remembering them. Calling them up at will. A healthy mind exhibits them all.
To put it another way, what turns "experiences" into Experience, is
memory. If you're not remembering things, are you actually learning them at all?
I'm going to assume that you're making a rhetorical point about being at one end of a practical spectrum of memorizing everything you play or memorizing nothing, but I'll conversationally push back with the observation that you've likely forgotten more about scales and modes than many of us can recall....except that you don't seem like a guy who's forgotten much of what you've ever heard or read.
Maybe it comes easily to you.
Back to my earlier point, I can remember garbage stuff with no effort whatsoever. The less important it is, the more easily I'll remember it forever and ever, whether I want to or not. LOL
Aside from the role and nature of memory in forging experience, there is also for me the notion of living with
intent. I've wasted an awful lot of my life bouncing from one thing to the next, driven by whatever vague impulse I'm feeling, or driven by circumstances where I lacked the wherewithall to shape my circumstances myself. I find that I like being at least a little in the driver's seat.
With music, here's the key. When I'm reading sheets, the music is outside me, and I'm straining to pull it in. It's true, but it's not how I FEEL. I
feel like the music is in me, and it's trying to get out, and the only way to reconcile the two is to actually learn the song well enough for it to actually BE inside me.
From there, I'm riding downhill. The hard part is done. Now I just need to keep building the skills to make it actually sound good.
Which is easier when the energy is moving in the right direction -- from INSIDE ME, out.
Here's the other thing. Everyone has a different road. Maybe going through the Beloff books, a page a day, one after the other, is exactly what you want. God bless the Beloffs and those books, but that's not my road. And yeah, I don't need to memorize every single song I'll ever play. Sometimes playing a fun song once in my life is enough.
But for some songs, playing then a THOUSAND times, TEN thousand times, won't be enough. Nothing could ever possibly be enough, so rather than only have them in me for the length of time I'm playing them, I'll invite a handful of 'em to LIVE in me.
I'll visualize playing them when I don't have an ukulele in my hands. I'll keep thinking about adding more riffs and chord extensions and inversions to make it sound even better. This handful of songs will be my life's work. The rest of them will just be fun, and that's okay too.
Fun's fun, and we all need fun, but sometimes I need to play for keeps, and the songs I want to play for keeps, I'll be memorizing.
More of an answer than anyone was likely looking for, but if you're gonna ask, even rhetorically, why anyone wants to keep a song in their heads, there's the
short version of my answer.
