What is currently stuck in your head?

[jochanaan]

It would be interesting to know if music in one's head is heard with the original instruments or how one hums it to oneself. I discovered recently that there are two ways of doing this after having to prepare a rather difficult piece for a concert.
In my free time I would imagine it from beginning to end and by now I do agree with Schnabel that one hears the piece slightly ahead of one's actual performance. When I am playing, even practicing, I have this track going on but if I have to identify the sound, it is usually how I would hum it.
Any thoughts?
ZB

With me, it's always the instrumentation I'm familiar with.  But not necessarily as any particular performance, more like an ideal performance of my own imagining.  And I've found that after a big concert, the music I just played gets stuck in my head for days!

[zamyrabyrd]

I found this mental process can be compressed, for instance, speeding it up to twice the tempo but losing nothing in terms of real time. This became very useful to me in preparing pieces, imagining them away from the piano. Singing is more difficult. I don't know why.

Gyorgy Sandor said that during the WWII away from a piano, he kept up his musical repertoire by going through it in his mind.

Many years ago I read Arthur Rubinstein saying he can put a composition in his mind like placing an LP back on the turntable and could return to the same place he left off in case of an interruption. 

This got me thinking about such a fascinating subject. After all, music really does happen in one's mind because we put linear sounds in a certain order.

ZB

[amw]

Well, if I want to hear something specific like the Tschaikovky 1st Piano Concerto, I would turn it on in my head and hear the original instruments. But recently, I caught myself with pieces I play, sort of humming them in my mind but not hearing an actual piano sound.

With pieces I've learned, I often find myself hearing/feeling the hand movements necessary to execute them much more than the sound itself. I'm not actually moving my fingers (most of the time anyway) but my brain is rehearsing the signals it's going to give my fingers when the time comes for me to play it. If that makes sense.

I also like practicing on tables.

[zamyrabyrd]

Ha, when I first started piano at the age of 8, I would play my pieces on the sink while my mother brushed my hair. This just came naturally to me but she probably thought I was abnormal.
ZB

[jochanaan]

I think most of us who have played piano have practiced on available surfaces. 

[Ken B]

I think most of us who have played piano have practiced on available surfaces. 

So have I and I don't play any instrument. 

[king ubu]

"The Windmills of Your Mind", which is actually "Les moulins de mon cœur", which again borrows the two opening lines from Mozart's Sinfonia concertante KV 364 ... guess Natalie Dessay and Michel Legrand are to blame, but of course at the heart of it is Mozart's catchy melody.

[EigenUser]

Does anyone ever get a melody stuck in their head, and halfway through the phrase it morphs into another melody? Yesterday I had the opening of Schumann's Rhenish morph into "Oh, My Darling" several times.

[EigenUser]

Messiaen's Trois Petites Liturgies de la Presence Divine, beginning of 3rd mvt.

[Mookalafalas]

Does anyone ever get a melody stuck in their head, and halfway through the phrase it morphs into another melody?

  Constantly! My musical reproduction equipment is so poor I only know a couple of bars of any given song.  They're always merging into one another randomly--Beatles songs often end up as Christmas carols, for example.

[EigenUser]

  Constantly! My musical reproduction equipment is so poor I only know a couple of bars of any given song.  They're always merging into one another randomly--Beatles songs often end up as Christmas carols, for example.

Haha .

Recently I've had the adagio-finale of Mahler 9 morph into Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas. One of the themes is vaguely reminiscent of the Christmas song, and then it just takes over. People who've heard both probably know what I mean.

[Brian]

Does anyone ever get a melody stuck in their head, and halfway through the phrase it morphs into another melody?

All the time. Also, whenever my brain plays "La Marseillaise," it's on kazoos.

I'm very diligent about memorizing music. If you told me to start mentally playing back the Beethoven symphonies, I'd start with #1 right now and be finishing up #9 in a little over 5 hours. It's a gift I didn't realize other people did not have until I was an adult. Anyway, right now I'm trying to memorize Roussel's Bacchus et Ariane and it's a challenge because certain sections begin in the same ways. The result is an infinite loop where I keep getting to the middle and my brain loops it back to near the start.

[Jay F]

Does anyone ever get a melody stuck in their head, and halfway through the phrase it morphs into another melody? Yesterday I had the opening of Schumann's Rhenish morph into "Oh, My Darling" several times.

I do this constantly. I will report back the next time it happens. It's such an unconscious thing, I don't remember any examples.

This morning I woke up singing some solo piano tune. I wasn't sure what it was (Beethoven? Schubert?), but I picked the right thing as soon as I sat down at my computer. It was Chopin's "Raindrop" prelude. And now I am listening to Claudio Arrau play it on the midprice Philips CD (red tray) I bought in the 1980s.

[EigenUser]

For the past week or so, the 3rd movement of Messiaen's Trois Petites Liturgies has been stuck in my head (the part that alternates between chanting and that schmaltzy melody).

[pjme]

Yes , that is a good one! Messiaen knew how to create a catchy tune.
But I recently bought a 2cd box "Hommage to harpsichordist Zuzana Ruzickova", and now Martinu's concerto flutters aroud in my head like butterflies caught in a jar....
I do like it though.

[EigenUser]

But I recently bought a 2cd box "Hommage to harpsichordist Zuzana Ruzickova", and now Martinu's concerto flutters aroud in my head like butterflies caught in a jar....
I do like it though.

I should hear Martinu.

Yes , that is a good one! Messiaen knew how to create a catchy tune.

Oh my god -- his melodies always get stuck in my head. Especially the 5th movement of the Turangalila-Symphonie, the (similar) 10th movement of the Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant-Jesus (the one that sounds like a Mexican hat dance), the TPL, the 3rd movement of L'Ascencion, and even sections of Oiseaux Exotiques!

[North Star]

I should hear Martinu.

Yes.  If you haven't heard any, try the Nonet (no. 2), Double Concerto for Two String Orchestras, Piano & Timpani, Paraboles, Lidice, PC no. 4, the ballets, the folk cantatas, and Gilgamesh if you want something longer.

[aukhawk]

All the time. Also, whenever my brain plays "La Marseillaise," it's on kazoos.

Oh.  I really wish I hadn't read that ... 

[André]

Yes , that is a good one! Messiaen knew how to create a catchy tune.
But I recently bought a 2cd box "Hommage to harpsichordist Zuzana Ruzickova", and now Martinu's concerto flutters aroud in my head like butterflies caught in a jar....
I do like it though.

Composer Kalabis (mentioned on the jacket cover) was Ruzickova's husband, and a good composer at that. Check him out on Supraphon.

[André]

Since last week, the clarion voice and petulant yodeling of soprano Christina Deutekom circles above my head incessantly. I particularly fell for her rendering of Lipizzaner Kaizerin, a waltz by Carl Zeller.