I was lying awake in the night, with music playing in my head as it usually does when I’m awake in the wee small hours. Sometimes I set the music going consciously, as for example when I’m ‘practising’ something I’m currently trying to learn or memorise. At other times, music plays in my head without my consciously choosing it. It may be music composed by someone else, or it can be fragments of music that spontaneously occur to me.
Last night, after a longish spell of ‘listening to’ music in the middle of the night, I started to wonder whether this kind of music is ‘live music’ or not.
‘Live music’ is generally defined as music played or sung in real time by a human or humans to an audience of humans who cherish the unique characteristics of the performance. That definition can’t be quite right, because a lot of musicians practise and play every day to an audience of none, but their music-making is still definitely ‘live’. So the audience doesn’t seem to be a necessary part of the equation. Certainly, the exchange of energy with an audience in a live performance is a special thing, but you can still make music without that exchange.
Definitions of live music place it in contrast to recorded music, which is a ‘mediated’ experience. We all know recordings can be great, but they invevitably lack the zing of music made once-only in front of you and possibly influenced by your being there.
In the case of music playing in your head, you seem to be both the musician and the listener. You feel as if you are playing the music. Therefore it is an unusual kind of live music. But you also just listen, sometimes unwillingly, to whatever is playing in your head. What does that make it? Maybe it is a kind of recorded music – if we agree that the brain is a recording device!
I don’t feel I can agree to that. The mind records in a special way. What it records may shift over time and is even likely to do so. The mind records the music which touches your feelings – or at least, records much more easily the music which touches your feelings – where a device is merely mechanical. And to some extent the mind records what your judgement values as good music; unless, vexingly, it gets stuck on some musical barbed wire, some catchy jingle which you would be happy to be rid of. And I’m not sure that I always feel more zing from music made once-only. Some of the old recordings – Casals, Horszowski, Gerhardt, Curzon, Hess, Klemperer, Barbirolli, Boris Ord – have been as zingful and as life-uplifting as anything I ever heard live. Serkin playing the cadenza from the 5th Brandenburg has delighted and sustained me for fifty years and shown no sign of losing its zinging line. So maybe a recording can still be a Zingspiel. And once in a while, music arrives in the inner ear with as much force as any aerial sound. Still! – what a thing it was to sit not five feet from Alfred Deller in the little fifteenth century church at Gawsworth and hear that extraordinary voice in all its colour and refinement. I have remembered it all my life.
What a great comment, Rob, thank you. I love your invention of the ‘Zingspiel’ – brilliant!
Something I have never consciously thought about. Thank you for expressing it for us.
Thank you Nan for your kind comment.
This interests me greatly as I experience something similar. I enjoy improvising and composing on the piano, and I often find a snatch of something I’ve written going on almost subconsciously in my head. It can happen in the day or night. The music repeats constantly, but it also changes every so often and sometimes into something better. I once described this as like having a broken pianola in your head. It does feel like I am both playing and listening, but also that somebody or something else is occasionally giving it a nudge in the right direction. Indeed I had to get rid of my ticking bedside clock because I found I was using that as a pulse to base these endless variations on – not a recipe for good sleep! How all this works and what it means is to me mysterious, but I am quite happy to have this weird and fascinating phenomenon in my life. Perhaps it is what Elgar meant when he said: “There is music in the air, and you just take as much as you need.”
How interesting, James. I liked your phrase, ‘somebody or something else is occasionally giving it a nudge in the right direction’. If only we had more insight into what that ‘somebody or something’ is! A kind of organising intelligence that we can’t consciously summon, but which follows its own timetable.