Earworms

Tim has an interesting post about "earworms," those annoying tunes that get stuck in your head.

For me, earworms tend to be just a few bars in length, but I get the whole thing (orchestration, dynamics, texts, you name it), and usually the key for me to get rid of it is to figure out what the piece is. Often times, I don't even need to listen to a recording to do it; I just remember how the piece goes on in the following few bars, and then my memory kicks in.

Unfortunately, it doesn't always work that way--particularly if it's a piece I don't know well enough. I once ended up having the bridge between movements of the Delius piano concerto stuck in my head for the better part of a month because the piano wasn't playing in the earworm fragment, and I couldn't remember where I heard the bridge.

Of course, when this topic came up between me and my voice teacher a few weeks back, she remarked, "only you would get Delius stuck in your head." Which may be true, given his not-very-well-known predilection for writing for baritone, and my being a baritone. . . .