Why Do You Listen To Music?

Why do you listen to music?

Or perhaps I should ask: why do you play music on a hi-fi, on headphones, on ear-phones, on the car radio?

For a long time, music was for something. Singing along, or dancing, or hauling up sails, or providing a rhythm for working or walking. Gregorian chant and later vocal church music was for instilling a mood in its listeners. Opera was entertainment, and the crowd used to turn up at all times, and talk. Wagner put an end to that. He turned the lights down so the ladies could not see each other's hats and lovers. At least that's the story.

Sly Stone said we should dance to the music. Some music is for dancing to, from Baroque bourees to Viennese waltzes, though Trance seems to be for standing in a packed space and making vertical gestures with your upraised arm. Rock and roll was for dancing, and virtuoso stuff some of that dancing could be.

For years, the BBC Light Programme (aka Radio 2) used to broadcast a thirty-minute programme called Music While You Work. It was on at 10:30 and 15:00, these being times when people were held to flag at the production lines, spinning jennies and account-book-filling. It was live, and consisted of upbeat dance music, but nothing too exciting. The myth says that productivity went up when it was on.

Music can enhance a mood. Next time you're on the Zandvoort - Amsterdam train, play Milestones soon after you leave Zaandvoort. As long as it's sunny.



Some music was to provide a background to a dinner or social occasion, so there would be no awkward silences. Telemann wrote four books of Tafelmusik and jolly pleasant stuff it is too.



Bach thought Telemann was pretty good, and they shared quite a few licks. Music stops the French saying un ange passe. It can also ease the sound of a noisy eater.

There isn't one experience that is listening to music. There are many.

Listening to orchestral music is about hearing all its nuances, the interactions between the various instruments, the way a theme is developed, varied, moved around... all that music analysis stuff. And then the end of Mahler's Second reaches inside you and brings out tears and profound astonishment.

Listening to Above and Beyond is about being absorbed in the music and the mood it creates. It's almost a kind of surrender: here I am, take care of my soul for the next couple of hours. Their 2019 Prague gig worked out like that.



Listening to jazz is about feeling the groove and the tunes and the solos. A lot like listening to Baroque: different groove, and there isn't as much soloing in Baroque. Dig the violin interplay on the D Minor Double Concerto. Listening to flamenco guitar is the same: feel the groove, hear the tunes and harmonies, marvel at the technique: all at once.

Listening to pop songs of whatever genre is about impact: the tune, the beat, the lyrics, the attitude. Later on, it's about the memories of the time we heard that music: where we were, how we were feeling, who we were with, what we were doing.

Professionals can listen in a very different way. They are listening for what the performers, or maybe the producer or the mixer or the composer, are doing. What's that sound and how did they get it? We should use that bap-ba-cha effect on one of our tunes. Darn, another drop-D tuning. Yeah, it's all being played on the upstroke, that's why it sounds like that. They missed the increase in volume on that sixteenth note that Fernyhough asks for. What about that D/F-diminished after the A minor 9? Oh no, the rest between those final chords is way too long. Professional listen because that's their business.

One reason to listen to music is to decide if we want to listen to it again. Because some music is closer to us. There is the music that we listen to often, and music that we listen to once and never again, and then music we may listen to once in a couple of years. We're looking for more music that we want to listen to again. I was always on the lookout for "train music", and when I found a good one, it stayed on the phone for months. I go through a month or so when I play Doo-Bop three or four times, and another month when it's Bob Dylan, or Corelli, that gets played.



I have music to get me going in the morning, and to fall asleep to at night. I write these with music playing, and sometimes when I need to focus on something tedious at work I will put on the headphones and play something that distracts the fifty per cent of my brain that isn't getting used by work. Train music is for blotting out the sound of the train and of people talking and coughing. It helped me concentrate on reading or whatever I was doing.

Every now and then, I will stop what I'm doing and listen to the music, wallow in it, and then go back to doing whatever I was doing. When I put the headphones on and play a track or an album over again, that's because I want the emotions it brings.

Music makes living easier. That's why I have it playing. And when it doesn't, I don't.