It's been many, many years since I listened to the album, and I was keen to hear it again, partly for purely nostalgic reasons, but also to see just how reasonable, or otherwise, my taste in music had been. I was relieved to find it quite listenable, generally lacking in the somewhat foolish bombast the band went on to specialise in (though they come close in places.) The two tracks I had retained a pretty good memory of were the Greg Lake compositions - Take A Pebble and Lucky Man - not surprisingly, I suppose, since these are straight songs, as it were; although, interestingly, I had very little recall of the extended instrumental sections of Take A Pebble.
But what I'm leading up to, and found quite fascinating, is that when I finally played the album on getting back here, not having listened to it in Manchester, I realised that as soon as I heard the opening bars of a track I had instant, complete recall of what was coming next, despite having thought I had completely forgotten the material. This was especially true of the instrumental The Barbarian and Knife-edge, which I'd considered my favourite track as a kid. It was very strange to suddenly know exactly what was coming next, as if the material was emerging from some deep, deep part of my memory, entirely, mysteriously, weirdly intact.
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There's a piano in the lobby area of my dormitory. In the earlier weeks of the semester, I tried playing a Bach fugue I'd learned a couple of years ago. I'd forgotten most of it, and progress was halting beyond the first 20-30 seconds. I went back a few times, each time trying to play through more of it. It actually worked, which isn't all that strange when I consider it; but there was that weird sense of doing some kind of memory therapy or rehabilitation when I heard/felt the next passage I thought I couldn't remember being remembered.
Nice example. Is there some kind of muscle memory involved in this case?
Suffused with envy, by the way, that you can play Bach fugues at all!
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