When I was ten years old, I asked my parents to buy me a guitar so that I could learn how to play. I had been given a vinyl recording of classical works transcribed for the guitar, performed by Andrés Segovia, and I decided that I would learn to play like him. I duly received a small guitar, with nylon strings suitable for a beginner, and I started going to weekly lessons to learn the basics of how to position the fingers of my left hand against the frets and how to use the fingers of my right hand to pluck the strings. In due course, I bought some music scores for guitar – works by Bach, Sor, Villa-Lobos, and Schubert simplified for those just starting to learn to play – and I was delighted when, after much practice and having overcome many mistakes, I was able to play a few bars.
I never achieved my goal of becoming as good as Segovia. There were, I now understand, three reasons for this failure. First, I did not practice often enough or long enough. After an initial burst of enthusiasm, my desire to learn how to play scales, read music, and improve my finger technique quickly diminished, and anyway was never able to compete with my duty to complete my homework and my desire to play sport. Second, my taste in music changed. For a while, I imagined that I could become as good a guitarist as Carlos Santana; then I lowered my expectations and decided that it would be sufficient to become merely a competent player, so long as I could write songs that were as good as Bob Dylan’s. I bought an acoustic guitar, with steel strings and a plectrum, and switched my attention from Baroque to Blues, but the results were not much better. The third and most important reason for my failure to become a great guitarist was my inability to distinguish sounds accurately. I have met people who can listen to a melody once and then play it, whereas I struggled to tune the strings of my guitar. Generally, I have no idea what key a song is in, nor can I judge the intervals between notes, nor do I really understand how the chord sequences work. Whether this is at root a physical problem – that the sensitivity of my ears is just not good enough – or, rather, the consequence of a lack of training of my sense of sound, I do not know. At some point, however, it became clear to me that I was never going to become a competent musician, let alone a great one.
Listening to music is, nonetheless, one of the great pleasures of my life. Not being able to play has not stopped me from enjoying the play of others. Music is not special in this respect: I enjoy looking at art without being able to draw or paint well; I enjoy watching sport without having played beyond a modest standard when I was younger; I enjoy eating good food without being much more than a competent cook. Life is full of experiences that give us pleasure without us being able to emulate in any meaningful way the manufacture of that experience: the enjoyment of creativity does not require the capacity for creativity, for which I am very thankful. My musical career was short and unillustrious, but it has never impeded my appreciation of music made by others.
A few years ago, I went to see Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier at Covent Garden. During one of the intervals, I struck up conversation with my neighbour, an Australian musician who played percussion for the Perth Symphony Orchestra. He was, he told me, on the trip of a lifetime, spending three weeks in Europe, visiting opera houses in Amsterdam, Paris, Milan, and London, to hear what he considered the best works performed by the best orchestras. I asked him whether he was able to enjoy the music from his seat in the Grand Tier, without imagining himself down in the pit ready to play. He said that at the start of each opera he could not help but think about the size of the orchestra and the way it was organised in the space, and the style and manner of the conductor, but that after a few minutes he managed to put aside his professional knowledge and enjoyed the thrill of the performance much like anyone else. I imagine this is also true of a talented chef eating at someone else’s restaurant, or a top sports player watching a game from the stands: to begin with there is period during which the work of others is judged with a detached and critical expertise, but if the food or the match is good, then even the most knowledgeable observer will be drawn in, to become just another enthralled spectator. The pleasure of being there, enjoying the performance of others, is the same moment for us all.
My taste in music has changed over the years. I still like classical guitar music, and I still listen to Santana and Dylan, but I have also learned to enjoy opera and jazz, neither of which had any appeal when I was a teenager. Listening to live music is the optimal form of music pleasure and, for someone like me who lives in a city with a wide and varied music scene, a frequent pleasure too. In addition, every day I listen to recorded music – usually in physical form, on compact discs, but sometimes music that has been digitized – which allows the modern listener the luxury of being able to hear almost anything they want, whenever they want, for as long as they want (and as loud as they want). The greater the range of choice, the easier for the listener to determine what they hear: if the music gets boring you simply change disc, change channel, or change station, for there is always something different, something better, if you are prepared to search for it.
That said, one of the most important ways in which music gives me pleasure is when it moves from the background soundtrack of my day into the foreground, that is, when I stop whatever else I am doing and just listen. Music has the power to change my pace, my mood, and my level of attention. When the only thing I am doing is listening to music, I hear the music differently, it affects me more deeply, and the rhythm of the music starts to structure the rhythm of my thoughts. Just as at night, when we sleep, our unconscious can engage in forms of dreamwork that our conscious does not allow during the day, so too when the only thing I am doing is listening to music then my mind is able to process thoughts and feelings that I would not otherwise have the energy or capacity to engage with. By temporarily dispensing with other physical and intellectual activities, concentrated attention to music allows our minds a freedom to roam that they otherwise rarely enjoy.
Some of this has to do with the mood of the music, but some has to do with the tempo. Most things in life have changed pace over the past two hundred years, in particular the speed with which information moves around the surface of the earth . In 1805, when Horatio Nelson defeated the French navy at the Battle of Trafalgar, it took 17 days for news of his victory to travel just over 1,000 miles to London. In 1865, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln was reported in London (just over 3,650 miles away) 13 days after the event. Today, we know what is happening in the major cities of the world almost instantaneously. By contrast, music is still played at much the same pace as it always was. Beethoven’s 16th String Quartet in F major (opus 135) takes around 25 minutes to complete and requires four people to play it, just as it did in 1826 when it was first written. The tempo of the music resists the process of acceleration that we associate as an essential feature of modernity.
It is true, of course, that different performers sometimes play the same scripted music at slightly different speeds. This is an important part of the reinterpretative act, and one of the reasons why live performance is so enthralling. Bob Dylan often changes the words of his songs, sometimes the tempo, and sometimes the style. On one of his studio albums – Planet Waves (1974) – he recorded the same song twice, but with very different speeds and moods. The same is true of classical music. I have two recordings of Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony: one lasts for just over 51 minutes and the other for just under 57 minutes. That’s a variance of around 10%, which suggests a healthy range of interpretative freedom for the conductor, especially since Shostakovich was well known for providing highly detailed instructions on his scores. Nonetheless, the important point to note is not that songs or symphonies never change in pace, rather it is that the direction of change is unconnected to other changes in modern life: my short 10th was recorded in 1967 whereas the long 10th was recorded in 2015. I have recently ordered a boxed set of the complete symphonies of Shostakovich, but until they arrive, I have no idea whether my third recording of the 10th will be the shortest, the longest, or somewhere in between. Knowing when the recording was made will not be predictive of the answer. Even as everything else in the world has speeded up, classical music performance has the power to slow us down, and that is one of the sources of its pleasure.
One good thing about music / When it hits you (You feel no pain) said Bob Marley, and who am I to disagree? Music can be analgesic, but it can also be a source of joy. In the morning, depending on how I feel (or how I want to feel) I might choose to play some choral music by Thomas Tallis or an album by The Clash; while I am reading, perhaps Morton Feldman or Esperanza Spalding; in the evening, Miles Davis or Bartók; or maybe Segovia or Santana; or maybe Dylan. So many choices, each of which allows me to cater for a particular mood. Music can console or challenge, it can be calming or energising, it is sometimes a stimulus to remembrance, and at other times it allows us to forget about today until tomorrow.
Most of the time, music plays in the background, whether I am reading, dealing with emails, cooking, or cleaning. But the best thing about music is when I make myself stop whatever else I might be doing, and just listen. Then it has the power to change the pace, the mode, and the content of my thoughts and feelings. Sometimes, I regret not being able to play like Segovia, but mostly I am simply happy that I can listen to him play; and when I do, the tempo of my life changes.