Leith on Life

Music is, bit by bit, vanishing from my life. This is a very great surprise to me, but I don’t imagine I’m alone. I remember my father, at about the age I am now, becoming tetchier and tetchier when we played music in the car: it was endured, just about, on the motorway but the moment that parallel parking, or similar, was involved it would be smartly turned off. My late uncle was even infuriated by music on television documentaries.

Now I’m going the same way. “Bird Dream of the Olympus Mons,” “Sugar Kane,” “Higher State of Consciousness”—even, God help me, “Creep,” “Sit Down” and “Vienna”— have at one time or another meant the world to me. I used to lie in the dark listening to the “Sanctus” from Fauré’s Requiem at ear-melting volume, over and over again.

And now? Meh. I go to gigs, now and again, and enjoy them. I hurl myself violently around in the last hour or two of any given wedding disco, as is obligatory in the presence of “Mr Brightside,” “More Than A Feeling” or, ahem, “The Birdie Song.” But when reading or writing—which is most of what I do when I’m awake—music is a distraction. Even driving the car, I’m now happiest either with Radio 4 or complete silence. Cooking, eating, walking: silence. Why would you have headphones in your ears as you walk down the street or travel on the tube?

We all know that we never feel as strongly about new pop music as we do about the stuff we grew up with. It’s the same with poetry. We never listen so intensely. Of course the mate-finding, soul-searching and tribal-bonding that is entwined with adolescent music consumption is part of that. But that’s not the whole story.

I had assumed that there’s a point at which, having first lost interest in pop music made after one was 22, one goes on to lose interest in pop music altogether and develops an ear for classical stuff. It’s what happened to a friend of mine, and it coincided with his giving up weed. He thought he’d lost interest in music altogether but then he heard some Sibelius on the radio and thought: “Hang on. This is the shit.” I gave up weed years ago and nothing like it happened to me. I lost interest in pop and—while I now find classical music easier on the ear—I find nothing on the ear easiest of all: silence is preferable.

There are, I suspect, “sciencey” reasons for this. Some studies have suggested, for instance, that as you age you become less good at filtering background from foreground noise, so that in your student days you’re completely jake with having an involved four-way discussion about WB Yeats with Led Zeppelin thundering in the background, whereas by your sixties you wish your children would shut that sodding racket off so you can hear yourself think.

But it’s more than that, too. I asked around a little. Someone suggested, enticingly, that music’s intimate involvement with mathematics might be somewhere in the mix: mathematical ability falls away sharply with age. But I wonder: as listeners, we engage with music’s maths at the level of pattern recognition rather than consciously parsing its abstract relations.

There’s the odd study out there. I was directed to a paper by Bonneville-Roussy et al called “Music Through The Ages,” which confirms that: “(a) the degree of importance attributed to music declines with age but... adults still consider music important, (b) young people listen to music significantly more often than do middle-aged adults.” Then again, I heard from a lecturer in music psychology who suspects research on this subject is often “biased by sample selection”: “I believe we remain as interested in music” throughout our lives, even if listening habits change. So maybe it is just me.

My attitude to this whole thing, anyway, is one not of pride at outgrowing pop music, but of mourning. I suspect my soul is that much more shrivelled as a result. We all know how powerful the effect of music on our perceptions of the world around us can be. The importance of movie soundtracks bears witness to that. Music frames experience; it elevates and dignifies it; and—by colouring it—also falsifies it in enjoyable and transporting ways. Without it, we enter a landscape of pure prose. Music is enchantment and without it, like Stevie Smith’s Frog Prince, we are disenchanted.