piper's maggot

MaryW commented on the word piper's maggot

Sometimes normal musical imagery crosses a line and becomes, so to speak, pathological, as when a certain fragment of music repeats itself incessantly, sometimes maddeningly, for days on end. These repetitions—often a short, well-defined phrase or theme of three of four bars—are apt to go on for hours or days, circling in the mind, before fading away. . . .

Many people are set off by the theme music of a film or television show or an advertisement. This is not coincidental, for such music is designed, in the terms of the music industry, to "hook" the listener, to be "atchy" or "sticky," to bore its way, like an earwig, into the ear or mind; hence the term "earworms"—though one might be inclined to call them "brainworms" instead.

Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (New York: Vintage Books, 2007), p. 41

Though the term "earworm" was first used in the 1980s (as a literal translation of the German Ohrwurm), the concept is far from new.

Id., p. 42.

Jeremy Scratcherd, a scholarly musician who has studied the folk genres of Northumberland and Scotland, informs me that

Examination of early folk music manuscripts reveals many examples of various tunes to which have been attributed the title "The piper's maggot." These were perceived to be tunes which got into the musician's head to irritate and gnaw at the sufferer—like a maggot in a decaying apple. . . . The "maggot" most probably appeared in the early 18th century. Interesting that despite the disparity of time the metaphor has remained much the same!

Id., endnote 13.

January 30, 2016