Listening to The Shadows, Forty-Eight Years Later, and for the First Time

Like many guitarists in the early 1960s, Franco Fabbri started his career trying to copy the style of Hank B. Marvin, soloist of The Shadows. Marta García Quiñones doesn't play guitar and had few chances to listen to records by The Shadows until recently. Both authors have interests in listening models, music analysis, and cognitive and emotional responses to music. The paper was suggested by a listening experience by Fabbri, who one night, unable to sleep while travelling, listened for three hours (in shuffle mode, with headphones) to a large portion of his collection of mp3 files of Shadows' recordings. Probably due to his semi-hypnotic state, the experience struck deeply, as he shifted back to his teens, when he first listened to The Shadows and started playing their instrumental pieces. Then, Fabbri sent a brief report about that experience to García Quiñones, who was moved to ask questions about how that music was listened to in the early 1960s, and decided to listen to The Shadows (almost) for the first time. The paper is an expanded version of the correspondence that was initiated by that listening act. It tries to demonstrate that understanding any music event demands to unfold and reconstruct multiple layers of perceptual, emotional, analytic and performative experiences, present and past, which seem to be inscribed both in our bodies and in our minds.