The love of music

Just listening to Desert Island Disks on BBC Radio 4 and I thought it was time I gave vent to a thought I have carried around for decades and that resides in the phrase, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Why do some people like some music that I think is not worthy? This week’s castaway was Sir Simon Rattle and whilst none of his choices were rubbish, some of them struck me as very ordinary pieces of music that I would never play twice. One piece was the sort where it seems to me that some of the instruments in the orchestra are a fraction of a second out of kilter with the rest of the orchestra!

Jazz, for example, is a complete mystery to me: the kind that they tend to play on the radio anyway and that old men bop along to. New Orleans Jazz, however, is a different story altogether.

Something that sparked this debate in my mind fairly recently was a programme on Radio 4 that invited people along to talk about a piece of music they couldn’t live without ... or something like that. One week that crumbly hippy Annie Nightingale was on and she chose a piece of music that I feel she cannot possibly like. She is a lot older than me, has never had much musical taste and now she claimed that this music that someone from the 60s or 70s who would wear a pin striped shirt and a waistcoat with jeans would listen to and pretend to like ... in his or her mid sixties.

Just a few thoughts

DW