Anyhow, we were playing and talking about the recent Robert Plant/Alison Krauss colaboration when he asked "Hey do you remember how to play [Led Zeppelin's] 'The Rain Song?'" Back in high school, this was one of my "wow, he's good" tunes. Everyone remembers the old trick - "if you learn the guitar, and want to get the girls, learn to play 'Stairway to Heaven' - gets them every time." And it was true - eventually you learn that a real (adult) musician never plays "Stairway" in public. Ever. Stop it now. But for me, "Stairway" was never enough. I learned to play a harder and what we considered an even better chick magnet tune - "The Rain Song" which requires a funky alternate tuning scheme.
Well, I confess I haven't even thought about that tune in at least 10 years much less heard it my Led Zep tapes are now so dusty and I wouldn't try to noodle my way around to find it in standard tuning but somehow, my ears clearly remember the intervals of the tuning well enough to figure out that it was (D-G-C-G-C-D). I know that my fingers remember the correct fingering - that's the muscle memory part of things - but I was really amazed at how well the ear retains enough to create what I would call "hand-ear-coordination" and I wonder how prevalent this has been studied. It's an interesting exercise now given that I have a much more developed ear for hearing complex chords that when I hear the tune, I can tell you that the starting chords are G5-GM7-G7-G13-G -Eb/G, but I actually didn't know that as I played.
I have the same issue with a couple of other tunes that I play on the guitar. I can play Jobim's "Wave" without identifying the chords even though I know that there are suspensions, 11ths, b5ths throughout. It's an interesting disconnect when I get together with other much more studied guitar players who can name and play these chords on cue not to mention transpose them in any key. My aural experience is that I know the chord as soon as I hear it but sometimes not before.
This goes back to a large number of coordinative skills from hand-eye (sightreading) to psychoacoustic (picking out various parts in a textured piece) that a musician must have. Since leaving the classical music world and becoming more of an improvisational musician, I've found that my listening and anticipatory skills have gotten much better and quicker. And the short term memory functions so well that I recognize and retain all the errors that I make despite plenty of the audience. It's essentially jazz skills that we're talking about here.
But back to "The Rain Song." The great thing is that I remembered the A, B, and C sections of the tune. I can't remember half the words to save my life - that's the other thing. My memory is much better with retaining the musical information than I can the lyrical content. I could sing you the correct vocal pitches that Robert Plant sang but I couldn't tell you the words to the tune which are in fact, quite beautiful.
It's interesting some times to note just how we are wired, isn't it?
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