One problem I have is that from time to time some tune comes into my head and sticks there, and I can't identify it. Now, if I listened mostly to standard repertoire, I could hum it to someone, and they could say, "Oh, that's the Silken Ladder overture". But I can usually be fairly sure it is by someone so obscure there is no chance that any friend of mine would even have heard of the composer, never mind be able to recognise the piece.
Very true, and often it's the way I realise I'm getting to know a piece, as long as I can identify it. If not, as you say, it's very frustrating
I'm sure there must be a smart phone app ;). If not, perhaps there's a gap in the market...
.. and at 99p per app sold, I guess that the lucky author stands to earn, ooh, maybe a £1,000, judging by CD sales!
If this happens to me and i really can't remember it after not-trying-to :)..., my "go-tos" at the moment are two:
(1) the "Peachnote sheet-music search" (Peachnote (http://www.peachnote.com/))
(2) The advanced search at RISM (http://opac.rism.info) (click "Erweiterte Suche", then select on the dropdown, mode "notenanfang mit transcriptionen"- hum sequence of notes, enter a moderate sequential selection from that sequence of notes (without accidentals), it will search its catalog of incipits to see if any of its manuscripts and early published editions more or less matches what I'm humming...)
(neither of these are anywhere near "comprehensive" nor should one go to them in the expectation that they will be- rather, they're (growing and in progress) tools for such things... (or in the 2nd case, an offshoot of another sort of tool- actually, in both cases, since Peachnote is not entirely or just a find-a-tune tool - more a very portable PDF displayer-- well, anyway.)
I've been trying for decades to identify some French carols that I recorded off TV (1983). Even my friends from France aren't familiar with some of them. Very frustrating...
Slightly off topic but there was an item on the Today programme on Radio 4 this morning which started that listening to unfamiliar music stimulated the areas of the brain connected with pleasure. Maybe it works even better with music by unsung composers? :)