Lately, besides furiously, desperately and mostly frustratedly househunting and trying to ruffle as few feathers as possible staying in a communal house with a wide variety of people (including two under-sixes), I’ve been doing a lot of work without sheet music, or aiming towards not using notes. This might be because I intend to be filmed doing it, for the showreel which is starting to come together; or because there never has been anything written down, in the case of material from bands I may be joining / forming where I’ve got demo recordings and if I’m lucky a list of chords; or it might be because I expect or hope to be gigging the relevant stuff within the foreseeable future in contexts where music stands are usually considered unprofessional (or just uncool).

And frankly, it’s making my head hurt. At least two days this week I have literally hit the apparent end of my ability to memorise stuff (mostly Irish ballads and drinking songs) and had to stop because I wasn’t actually taking in any more tunes. It’s demoralising.

There’s a story that writing was opposed by at least some classical philosophers, on the grounds that once people could as it were store knowledge outside themselves, they would no longer bother to remember and would become lazy and foolish. Perhaps all the more so when you can call up more or less any information at any time with your smartphone? It is noticeable that the people with repertoires of two, three, five hundred songs, all of which they can genuinely perform on request without going away and revising them, are in traditions where at most you might write down chords and lyrics, but generally you learn by ear and play by heart, and certainly you never have in front of a complete transcription that lets you play something without remembering any of it.

Then again, it’s still normal (though not as universal as it used to be) for classical concerto soloists to play without music. Opera singers, of course, don’t hold scores onstage. And one of the legendary English conductors of the early twentieth century – possibly Beecham – always used to conduct without a score, which implies memorising all the relevant aspects of pieces of music up to an hour long with hardly any repetition of material completely unchanged and perhaps as many as thirty different parts.

Well either way I don’t know how they do it. I have noticed the odd thing that something I’ve struggled with one day, I may actually be able to play – without first looking back at the dots – and with a better sense of the shape of it rather than just a succession of phrases the following day. So maybe there’s hope for those Irish pub gigs yet.