Instead of a rant

I wanted to rant. About work, which takes up the best part of 11 hours a day and then gets into my head for the rest of the day and pushes the music out. About pressure - still wrong (drones OK though). About the blasted King, more specifically my inability to learn it. About the fact that I thought I hit record before playing the whistle twice through, but clearly didn't as it's not on the recorder.

Instead of which I am posting the third in my series of rambles on the subject of "why I listen to so much traditional music these days."

I've always had a very strong emotional, sometimes, even physical, reaction to music, and indeed, to sound in general. Very low rumbly sounds (a lorry engine left running in the street) make me feel anxious . Very high pitched sounds can make me feel pain. I get very uncomfortable listening to music that doesn't suit my mood and earphones piping music direct into my head is horribly intrusive. Music often makes me cry – and that’s everything from basic pop songs (the potency of cheap music) to grand opera (I can cry through the whole of La Traviata). Some music creates pictures in my  mind – so the second movement of Beethoven’s fourth is a lady in a blue silk dress against a hedge of dark green yews. Perhaps to protect myself against this onslaught of pictures, emotion and physical reaction I often listen to music only as a background – I turn it on and immediately tune out (I also manage this very successfully, and annoyingly, with the weather forecast most mornings). I can use music to block out other unwanted sounds, which is why I used to revise to music: I wasn't listening to it, I was using it to create a barrier against other noise, and the barrier itself I can somehow totally ignore.

The point is that music is, for me, a mystical, physical, spiritual sort of a thing. I've therefore always shied away from any form of musical theory, which I fear might spoil my enjoyment. Just as someone who has just fallen head over heels in love doesn't want to hear that actually it’s all just pheromones, hormones, serotonin and a genetic imperative to reproduce I don’t want to hear that it’s all down to minor keys or harmonic thirds.

Being a player of music – more seriously than the dabbling I've done in the past – has changed my relationship to it. I've needed to listen to it more attentively in order to remember tunes to play them, or even identify tunes I want to play. Reading music has helped me see the patterns that are there, which makes it easier to hear those patterns, because it sets up certain expectations. You know that a phrase is likely to be followed by something different, but we’ll then return to the first phrase, with a variation on the end. Careful listening allows me to pick out individual instruments, gracenotes, arrangements, and all of this adds to my enjoyment. I think I've mentioned here before that it’s a little like close reading in literature. I can read a well-written book over and over again because there are always so many layers I can be looking at: I don’t need to discard it the moment I know the plot – whodunit or whether the boy got the girl – because there is always so much more for me. Some books, and presumably some music, resist this repeated reading or listening, because there simply isn't enough material to work with.

So on the whole I think that playing an instrument has increased the ways in which I can interact with music, and therefore I can get more out of it. This has happened to traditional music because that’s what I play. I've actually not listened to much outside traditional music for a while, so it would be interesting to see if the effects covered any other genres. On the down side I can honestly say that I'm not moved to tears by any of the traditional music I've listened to since I began to play. Perhaps that’s the choice of tunes I've made, but  perhaps, after all, knowing how the illusion is created spoils it for us.