Why People Play Music

[stuart estell]

As for why I play music, it is very simple: if I don't, then I am not me.

 

I think that sums up my situation pretty well. Literally a moment doesn't pass in which something musical isn't passing through my head - it's a fundamental part of my being. If some sort of disaster befell me and I couldn't make music at all I know that I'd have to find and develop another creative outlet - painting, writing, making things, whatever...

[Robert Booth]

Interesting comment, Stuart, about the music in your head.

 

I can't recall a time when there was not some kind of music on the "mental sound track". It is just an integral part of my personality. My wife, an education researcher, maintains that the music is a pathology, and should be eliminated to make way for clearer, more organised focus and concentration. Convinced that those of us with the mental sound track are experiencing some form of ADD/ADHD, she feels that we radioheads are in need of medication to eliminate the distracting music.

I couldn't disagree more.

 

I wonder how many people have the music at all times, and if they feel that it is detrimental to their thought processes?

 

Do visual artists "see" combinations of pattern as part of their perceptive process?

Can these things be excised, and if they can, will the results be beneficial?

[JimLucas]

Can these things be excised,...

I believe they can, but it may require significant work. An old joke suggests that even with 3/4 of the brain removed it's still possible to play bluegrass.

[Woody]

I can't recall a time when there was not some kind of music on the "mental sound track". It is just an integral part of my personality.

 

It's the same for me, though I do wonder which came first - do I have the soundtrack in my head because I love and play music, or do I play music because it's running through my head and I need to let it out

 

 

My wife, an education researcher, maintains that the music is a pathology, and should be eliminated to make way for clearer, more organised focus and concentration. Convinced that those of us with the mental sound track are experiencing some form of ADD/ADHD, she feels that we radioheads are in need of medication to eliminate the distracting music.

 

Isn't it nice that there's all these nice people with all these nice drugs, willing to fix us and make our world a duller and less fulfilling place so that we can be like them.

 

 

I wonder how many people have the music at all times, and if they feel that it is detrimental to their thought processes?

 

Well I'm one and I have no idea whether it has a detrimental effect, nor do I care. I seem to have done OK educationally, professionally and emotionally and I feel that my life without this musical soundtrack would somehow be poorer.

 

I certainly think that it helps to relieve stress and, while I don't know what goes on in other peoples' heads, it does seem to me that my friends who don't play instruments or sing suffer from stress a lot more.

 

Can these things be excised, and if they can, will the results be beneficial?

 

I hope I never find out .................though as I've currently got "I want to break free" by Queen playing (complete with video!), maybe I'll take those drugs after all

 

- W

[stuart estell]

My wife, an education researcher, maintains that the music is a pathology, and should be eliminated to make way for clearer, more organised focus and concentration. Convinced that those of us with the mental sound track are experiencing some form of ADD/ADHD, she feels that we radioheads are in need of medication to eliminate the distracting music.

 

 

She might as well just give me a huge shot of morphine and have done with it! A mentally silent world isn't something I'm prepared to contemplate. And besides, I enjoy my somewhat scattergun thought processes. It's endlessly entertaining for me, though not necessarily for others

 

From a purely objective point of view she's probably right. But if it's a toss-up between being a focused and more organised member of society, and being mildly pathological, I'll keep my pathology, thanks

[Robin Madge]

I've always got a mental soundtrack going. It's usually a modified version of something that I've heard, with extra instruments or harmonies added in. I don't have to have heard it recently either.

Just at the moment it's "Glen Logie" by Shirley and Dolly Collins, which I last heard in the 80s, with extra bass and drums!

 

It has always been a useful thing to have available when I would otherwise be bored sitting there waiting for something. Sometimes I deliberatly decide what I want to listen to. Appointment at the doctor? Switch on a suitable mental recording, Leon Rossleson's "Pills, pills, pills" perhaps! It doesn't mean I remember all the words but I'm 99% OK on tunes.

 

Robin Madge

[JimLucas]

My wife, an education researcher, maintains that the music is a pathology, and should be eliminated to make way for clearer, more organised focus and concentration. Convinced that those of us with the mental sound track are experiencing some form of ADD/ADHD, she feels that we radioheads are in need of medication to eliminate the distracting music.

Isn't it nice that there's all these nice people with all these nice drugs, willing to fix us and make our world a duller and less fulfilling place so that we can be like them.

"Them" being the folks that then weld MP3 players -- or at least cell phones -- to their ears in order to get a 24/7 external soundtrack?

[Mark Evans]

"Them" being the folks that then weld MP3 players -- or at least cell phones -- to their ears in order to get a 24/7 external soundtrack?

 

 

More and more of my students are just such people. Music has been reduced to background noise they must constantly have with them so they are never alone. The concept of making music or being in an audience participating in the energy of music making, or just listening to a electroic reproduction of music and thinking about the music or enjoying what most people mistake as silence is becoming a rare thing with what I call the "bottom line generation."

 

I on the other hand cannot competently drive and listen to music, cannot abide eating and listening to music (restaurants drive me insane over this), or spend any time in a shop with music in the background. I'm forced to listen to it. Even on seeing a billboard sign with a slogan, say one from my youth in North Carolina for Lemon Tree Inn...oh lord I would have Neil Sadaka stuck in my head singing that infernal rendition. Why could it not have been Harry Belafonte?

Edited May 11, 2006 by Mark Evans

[stuart estell]

I on the other hand cannot competently drive and listen to music

 

That's an interesting point.

 

When I bought my new-old Land Rover in 2004, it didn't have a radio in it, being the primitive meccano-set kind of Land Rover. By the time I got round to thinking about having one fitted, three months or so later, I'd become very used to how nice it is to have space and quiet to think, with just the sound of the engine for company. And so, I decided to leave the truck as she is, and to this day, I still have no in-car entertainment at my disposable other than the sound of my own voice - or whatever's playing in my head...

Edited May 11, 2006 by stuart estell

[Dirge]

That's another matter all together. That's about interesting cars being absorbing to drive. You have better things to do than listen to the radio.

[Robert Booth]

Well, that mental stickiness that Mark talks about above can work for one, too. Since taking up concertina I have had to adjust the musics to fit the keyboard of the instrument. This has dragged up tunes that I knew in childhood that I had utterly forgotten. But, just as the psych types claim, there they are, only waiying for the time to come when I stumble across a suggestive melody, then out they jump. Old friends come to visit.

[John Wild]

I on the other hand cannot competently drive and listen to music,

 

I concur with that. Short journeys are OK, but on longer journeys if my car radio is on a music station, I find myself reaching for the off switch after up to an hour. Talk-based programs with some music tend to be OK.

And, I tend not to take along a supply of cassettes to play, though partly that may be down to memory.

 

- John Wild

[Animaterra]

I've been reading this topic and wondering how I can put into words why I sing and play music. I get all non-verbal when trying to explain the inexplicable. I think it was Victor Hugo who said,

 

"Music expresses what cannot be put into words,

and yet cannot remain unsaid"

 

For me the answer to the question of why I play music remains, how can I not?