How I Treat Music

The majority of music was and still is written to accompany social activities: dancing, eating and conversation. Telemann has four volumes of Tafel Musik for dinner parties, and more Mozart was written as social accompaniment than his worshippers would want to admit. Handel's Water Music was one of a number of pieces (Telemann wrote a Wassermusik as well) written to accompany a royal trip on the river. It was a soundtrack, in today's terms. So was Handel's Music For The Royal Fireworks.

The music in an opera rarely stands on its own (so rarely that the bits that do are extracted for compilation albums) but is there to accompany, highlight and embellish the words and action. It plays the same role as music in a movie: reinforcing what can be seen, or hinting at something we can't see yet. Sometimes it is used ironically or to jar.

Some music was written for the composer's sponsors to play, to show off their skills, or for their own entertainment in playing it privately. (These days, contemporary jazz fulfils the role of music played mostly for the enjoyment of the musicians, because there is no audience.)

Some music was written for church services. Bach turned out over a hundred cantatas for just this purpose, and many composers wrote at least one Mass (until the twentieth century). Poulenc's best music is his religious works for voice choir.

Romantic music (Beethoven to the end of the nineteenth-century) was written for large audiences (by the standards of the time) to provide a roller-coaster emotional experience, at least for those who could keep up. One real cracker of a symphony could make an international reputation for a composer, maybe even set him up for life - if he kept his spending modest - and certainly put him in the running for a conducting or an academic post.

During WW2 the ever-meddling British Government found that workers flagged at around 10:30 in the morning and 3:00 in the afternoon. So they broadcast half-an-hour of brisk light music (a genre you can thank your lucky stars you have never heard) to pep everyone up. This blatant paternalistic manipulation went on until the end of September 1967. I mention this to separate it from the other use of music while working.

Modern music while you work relies on the home hi-fi and head-fi manufactured since the 1970-ish, and was driven by the spread of the personal computer. There's a reason for this: the more active your brain is used to being, the more content it is used to handling in a given moment, the easier it is to distract when there isn't enough content or activity to absorb it. Smart people doing routine things don't do well, because their brain is looking for something absorbing to do. At the other end, creative work needs the brain to be able to ruminate inside itself and not to be distracted by e.g. colleagues yammering away on conference calls. In both cases, the right kind of music (which varies from person to person) can act either to occupy the brain so the rest of you can do that boring thing, or can blank out the outside distractions and random thoughts so the brain can ruminate on subject. (I'm currently listening to The Avalanches Since I Left You and jolly good it is for that purpose too.)

Music is supposed to enhance our lives. Sometimes that happens because we listen to the music, and sometimes because we get lost in the music, and other times because it makes it easier to work, covers up awkward silences, is a pretty tune that adds to the scene, or lets us get into some serious emotional self-indulgence (Love Will Tear Us Apart on repeat after the partner walks away?). More than once, after leaving a job I should have left a few months earlier, I have felt a lightness of spirit and an urge to hum the march from Grand Prix.

Some music doesn't really accompany, it wants to be all you're thinking about: that's why it's called `Romantic' music. Use a Schumann symphony as background music and it won't do the job, but some Hottenterre flute pieces will do just fine. I wouldn't use John Coltrane as background either, though Eighties Miles does quite well. Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Ravel, Debussy and most twentieth-century composers keep poking and prodding for attention: listen to this chord, listen to this tune, bang! wasn't that loud. I wouldn't commend Schoenberg's Verklate Nacht as brain-ruminating music. Go back before around 1820 or so and a lot of the music is as much an accompaniment for life as any amount of EDM, Ambient, Jazz, Eighties Rock, Tamla Motown folk or anything else made after about 1960.

Music is there to do what we need it to do. I play what I need or want to listen to. Some mornings I will let a Jazzed playlist roll on for a couple of hours, other times I'll stand over my CD's unable to make a choice because I don't actually know what I want. Sometimes I want to hear it over the speakers, other times over the Sennheisers, and other times over the bluetooth WM1000's. Horses for courses, music for moments.