For that was how I came to see out of the corner of my eye that unmistakeable symbol, “ZAPPA”, on a poster amongst other posters clustered around a door. I jerked to a halt and exclaimed out loud, “Jesus!” The door turned out to be that of the HMV Picture House – which I didn’t even know existed – and the poster was advertising the upcoming tour date – which I didn’t even know was happening.

Zappa Plays Zappa: Tour de Frank came to Scotland on June 18th, and I am overjoyed to be able to say I was there. I have been a fan of Frank Zappa since my teenage years, when I got my hands on my Dad’s cassette of the album Apostrophe. I feel like his music infuses me, and that both his  compositions and his guitar improvisation have influenced how I play the saxophone and how I listen to all music. I cannot overestimate what Zappa means to me, and I say this not as a fan blinded by devotional infatuation, but just as a man acknowledging a huge and inescapable presence in his life.

Frank Zappa died in 1993, and this tour, which has been going on for a few years (off and on), is organized by his son Dweezil, who is a guitarist too, and leader of the band. It seems that he decided to dedicate himself to keeping his father’s music alive. One might question whether the music depends on such efforts for its survival, but I’m certainly not complaining. Perhaps it is true that Zappa’s music, while brilliant, was never very influential in either rock or classical music, because it awkwardly bestrode the two. He was dismissive and contemptuous of both musical worlds, an attitude born of his frustration in dealing with people in the business who never had music as their top priority. Partly because of this, he was always an outsider.

But judging from the reception Dweezil and his band received last month here in Scotland, his music continues to move and excite new generations. The crowd were raucous and loud and radiated pure joy. That’s certainly how I felt, never having been able to see Frank in concert, now hearing those songs rendered wonderfully by a band bursting with stupidly talented musicians.

Zappa made around sixty albums, and I love all of the twenty-five or so that I have, from all the eras of his career. But I am particularly fond of the version of the Mothers of Invention band he had in the early to mid 70s – which included George Duke, Ruth Underwood, Napoleon Murphy Brock, Chester Thompson, and Bruce and Tom Fowler – producing albums like Roxy & Elsewhere, One Size Fits All and Apostrophe.

The band had a warmth in sound and personality that is probably unmatched in Zappa’s output. It was one of those magic synergistic combinations of musicians: when you listen to those albums they seem capable of anything, and you love them. At that stage there was still a luxurious and fuzzy jazziness in his music, and the way they play those intricate pieces with relaxed discipline and a sense of humour is quite special.

The great thing about this concert, then, was that it was dominated by that stuff, and the general sound and personality of the band was very similar. Contributing most to this were percussionist Billy Hulting, who was very prominent on vibes and marimba, and insane multi-tasker Scheila Gonzalez, who did an amazing job on keyboards, sax and vocals, sometimes uncannily replicating the soaring sax and vocal lines of Napoleon Murphy Brock.

Here’s the set list:

Black Napkins
Magic Fingers
Wind Up Working In A Gas Station
Montana
Village of the Sun
Echidna’s Arf
Inca Roads
Pygmy Twylite
King Kong
Bamboozled By Love
Outside Now
Don’t Eat The Yellow Snow / St Alfonso’s Pancake Breakfast /
Father O’Blivion
Zomby Woof

Encores:

Peaches En Regalia
Bobby Brown Goes Down
Willie The Pimp

(thanks to Rob at Eine Kleine Nichtmusik)

This music is hard to play, so all of the musicians were top class. Each one was stunning in his or her own right. I have to mention lead singer Ben Thomas, who has a remarkable voice that doesn’t seem to quite fit his body; Pete Griffin on bass, somehow charmingly self-absorbed; Jamie Kime on guitar, who was inevitably eclipsed by Dweezil but when given the spotlight was revealed to be a beautiful player; Joe Travers on drums, whose power and stamina were awesome to behold; and of course Dweezil, who has become a great guitarist and graceful front-man.

Thanks to Paul, my companion at the gig and another long-time Zappa fan.

But one thing that has carried me through these last few months is my latest challenge. I’ve been learning a modern classical piece for solo saxophone, I Sleep At Waking by Ian Wilson. After all the jazz I wanted to tread some unfamiliar ground, to put my technique to the test, so a few months ago I asked my teacher for a through-composed piece in a modern style, and she made some suggestions, the most interesting of which was this damned thing I’m currently struggling with.*

It’s nearly five minutes long, it’s got lots and lots of notes (black page), no bar lines (therefore no time signatures), and no key (it’s atonal), and I have to play piano (softly), which is not really my forte. Partly for these reasons but for others too, it’s hard. It’s a classical grade eight piece, and now I’m thinking about actually going for the grade eight exam in 2009 or 2010, after some encouragement in that direction from my teacher. Eight is the top grade and I’d be quite well qualified to teach saxophone if I got it. But realistically I think it’ll take me two years to get up to scratch with the requisite sight-reading, my Achilles’ heel.

The piece didn’t strike me much one way or the other on the first few listens. In fact, it wasn’t until I started to play it that I grew to like it, and now, as I reach the half-way point months later (not very good progress for a two-page piece but I’m getting there) my affection is still growing. But this is slightly troubling. What is the point of such music? Is it for listeners or primarily just for musicians? If the former, can you expect people to make sense of it first time, or is it designed to be listened to over and over again? If the latter, then haven’t you left out what is essential about all good music, that it can speak to anyone who takes the time to listen?

As it happens I needn’t have agonized over it, because Laura, who is not a musician, liked it on first hearing and picked up on the emotional content; I had heard only a sterile exercise, which perhaps reveals my trepidation about trying to play it. And when first listening to anything I perhaps tend to want to hear some repetition, ostinato, metrical oddness, weird sounds, or simple soaring melodies. These are my hooks. But that’s obviously a laziness.

It’s a luminous piece of music, always seemingly on the edge of bliss and sadness, with a nice explosion of intensity in the middle, which is where I’m up to now. It’s the hardest part of the piece, so the next few days and weeks will be crucial.

*The piece can be found on the album Meeting Point, by saxophonist Gerard McChrystal

In my seat in the upper circle I waited for the first chord, which begins the piece in a strangely unassuming way, catching you unaware, as if the orchestra is picking up a performance midway through – which helps give it an eternal, cyclical quality. But when the performance started I was puzzled. I didn’t recognize it at all. I mean, yes, it’s an unassuming opening for sure, and I’d listened to it only twice in the days approaching the concert, but there would have been some spark of recognition even in the first few bars – wouldn’t there?

Shit. I was sure it must have been Messiaen, because when I was booking my seat on the website I’d clicked book now almost as soon as I’d seen his name, but because of my haste I hadn’t taken in who was performing it, and now I thought perhaps I’d read the title of the work wrongly. After all, I reasoned, I don’t know French and many of his works have similar themes, and therefore maybe similar names. On top of this I hadn’t bought a program. “Programs? Pah!” Well, as the music continued I quickly realised that I had certainly not heard it before, but the only thing I could do was sit back, watch and listen.

It lasted around 20-25 minutes and it was mesmerizing and exciting and organic. After buying a program at the interval – and I had to satisfy myself that it was an interval, and not just the end of the concert, by noting the people heading for the bar – I discovered that the main event was preceded with Tevot, a new work by Thomas Adès. Well, what a bonus. Now I’ve discovered a new composer.

I’m going to have to listen to Tevot again, because I can’t recall it in detail, but it was a powerful experience. I always wonder about the difference between listening at a concert and listening to a recording – and there is a huge difference – and in this case I am very happy that I was introduced to it this way. As I watched the players perform, a strange thing happened. The music was mainly strings at this point, a confusing, tense storm of a sound, and I began to see only the string-players’ hands, as if disembodied and riding on the waves of a dark sea. And because, if I remember correctly, the string players were not at all playing in unison but were divided into groups, it actually looked as it sounded, a battle of swelling and subsiding forces, the hands rising and falling in all kinds of directions, but smoothly and wave-like in overall effect. It was like some kind of alternative Mexican Wave.

Then later on, at some point in Illuminations, the same thing happened, and it was interesting to compare the experiences. This time it was not a swelling sea but a churning, choppy, angry sea, with hands being thrown all over the place by crashing waves.

There may not be any explicit connection between either piece of music and the sea, but in this case it serves as a useful metaphor, a way of describing and picturing the sound, of making sense of it.

As I say, I had listened to Illuminations a couple of times in preparation for the gig, and I couldn’t find any affection for it, except for the odd delicious chord or sonority here and there. On the whole I found it dull, disjointed and over-long. I was brought to the piece through getting to know two of Messiaen’s other works, the Quartet for the End of Time and the Turangalila Symphony. These are amazing, immediately ear-catching pieces, with serene beauty, fearsome monolithic harmonies and rhythms, and rich otherworldly sounds, as befitting the themes of religious ecstasy and love, as seen through Messiaen’s particular mystical lens. But Illuminations seemed to me to be a lesser child of these two pieces.

The good news is that the concert changed my mind. The bad news is that I can’t really say how or why. I think the dynamic subtleties really came out at the concert. The recording seemed quite flat, but at the concert the extremes of loud and soft were clear and essential.

That particular benefit was maybe to do with the acoustics of the Usher Hall. Although the sound might be a bit messy when there’s a lot going on, it’s nice and loud. It was much preferable to the performance of the Turangalila Symphony I saw in the vast Royal Festival Hall in London, where the sound was clean but quiet and the musicians were half a mile away.

The presence of a fidgeting man in front of me; an unidentified farter; several people who left noisily at the beginning of the last of the eleven movements, of a 65-minute piece of music; none of that spoiled it for me.

I have two reasons for the recent lack of blog action, and I mention them because they’re quite interesting (though I feel that neither will counteract the suspicion that if one takes four months off from work then one has time to write blog posts pretty frequently): I was preparing for my saxophone grade three jazz exam; and I’ve become addicted to Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/alistairrobinson/)

Last time I mentioned the sax exam in these pages, I had just committed to do it. I said at the time that I had opted to play All Blues, Autumn Leaves and Mopti, but I decided not long after to forget about Autumn Leaves and play Lady Be Good instead. It was a good mixture of styles. Starting off with the understated, yet relentless and bluesy, Miles tune; then into the lyrical, cutesy quirkiness of Gershwin; and rounding it all off with the big, ballsy expressive Don Cherry number (in which I think I was sounding like I was playing tenor rather than alto, and in my head I think I heard it played by a tenor man like Pharoah Sanders).

Well the exam has been and gone and I got the result earlier this week: 139 out of 150, which is classed as a distinction. I was certainly hoping for a distinction, but I reckoned I was right on the borderline at 130, and was prepared to settle for a merit. So I was pleasantly surprised. I think I’ll jump to grade five next, if I decide to continue down this route. Unfortunately the jazz grades stop at five with the ABRSM, while their traditional, “classical” grades go up to eight. Trinity Guildhall’s jazz grades go up eight, and they offer the option of performing a piece that you’ve composed yourself, so that might be the way to go.

Or I could just stick with the ABRSM and go classical. Well, just so long as I don’t have to play Flight of the Bumblebee.

The thought of going down the traditional route leads me to my latest endeavour in cultivating my musical taste-buds. I’m reading Musicophilia by celebrity neurologist Oliver Sacks, and I recently read Anthony Storr’s Music and the Mind. It’s clear that both of them are quite musically accomplished, and they write with authority on the music of Haydn, Chopin, Beethoven and so on. For them, the world of music is dominated by the pre-1900 stuff, and I’ve become eager to have another try at appreciating it. I love literature and art right through from the Renaissance, so why can’t I get on with the great music of those times?

So I’ve been listening to Beethoven’s sixth symphony and one of JS Bach’s violin concertos. Yes, I like them (the second movement of the violin concerto gets me pretty ecstatic), but I do tend to feel there’s something missing, at least for my own taste. Sacks confesses that, although he plays Chopin and understands music deeply, he finds the complex rhythms and syncopations of jazz and Latin music “confusing”, because he was brought up with mainly Western classical music. But those rhythms and syncopations are absolutely essential to my world of music, not to mention the jaggedness and dissonance of rock and modern straight music*. Unlike Sacks, I was brought up with Zappa, the Beatles, Hendrix and Ella Fitzgerald.

I’m really a twentieth century boy, and it seems very often that it’s only twentieth (and twenty-first) century music that can do it for me. Or at least music outside of the pre-1900 Western straight music tradition. Maybe the rhythms are just too simple for me, the tonality too dull? I can only go so long without a nice meaty chunk of 7/4 time, or a big splash of minor seconds.

Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t given up: I’ve got several Haydn symphonies to get through.

I’ve discovered the delights of Flickr, and spend my days refreshing my Flickr page to see if I’ve got any more comments on my photos. I’m desperate and pathetic: it must be a true addiction. A few of my pictures are littered over this post. Go see more at my Flickr photos

*Straight music: music that comes out of the continuous tradition of musical education and training in Europe and the Americas, centred around prestigious music schools and university music departments and grounded in a study of classics like Bach and Mozart, and in a study of counterpoint, classical harmony, cadences and so on, and which is written mainly for orchestras or ensembles of the traditional acoustic orchestral instruments.

Some call post-1900 straight music “modern classical” but that doesn’t really work, because “classical” is really a musico-historical term; and the alternative “serious music” suggests that jazz, for instance, is frivolous. I’ve been using “modern orchestral”, but in this era more than others composers are writing for smaller ensembles than orchestras and more unconventional instrumentations than are usually found in orchestras, so “orchestral” can’t be quite right.

So I’ve opted for “straight music,” although it, too, is hardly objective and accurate, revealing as it does the prejudice of the jazz world that came up with the term – some of which, however, is probably justified.

Last week I gratefully received, from my friendly postman, the book of tunes for the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music (ABRSM) Jazz saxophone grade 3 exam. Despite my doubts about jazz education – about its usefulness in producing spirited jazz players, and also about the usefulness for me in particular of an exclusive focus on jazz – I think I can still benefit from it hugely. What I want, and what it promises to give me, is an objective measure of progress; some structure and discipline; and goals.

And besides, the program is excellent, and seems to have been put together in the right spirit. Improvisation is the central skill being assessed, as well as one’s understanding – one’s feel for – the jazz idiom. I need to play three tunes in the exam, one from each of the three categories of Blues & Roots, Standards, and Contemporary, each of which with five to choose from. Here are my choices, respectively:

All Blues (Miles Davis)
Autumn Leaves (Joseph Kosma)
Mopti (Don Cherry)

All Blues has been a favourite of mine since I began discovering jazz, and will be familiar to many. It’s one of the tracks on the triple-platinum album Kind of Blue, the sublime co-creation of Miles, Julian Adderley, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb. Part of the beauty of All Blues to me is its extended, timeless, cyclical quality – a quality that requires a long track-length. On the album it’s 11 minutes and 33 seconds. The exam version is, of necessity, severely curtailed, but it contains enough of the essence of the original to make it worthwhile. I wonder how I’ll be marked in the exam if I quote Miles, John or Julian in my solo. Quite well, I imagine, as long as it’s a only a phrase or two. Jazz educators always stress the importance of listening. I can sing along to all those solos, so I know them pretty well, and if they heard evidence of that they would be more likely to mark me up than down, I think. (Of course, I’m an improviser at heart so I would want to incorporate any quotes in my own musical construction.)

Autumn Leaves has more chord changes than the others, which is why it’s a good choice: Chez, my teacher, suggested I introduce some variety. Who knows, maybe I’ll come to love it. It’s a nice tune.

Mopti – I’m very excited about playing this piece, which I’d never heard before. Last night I learned it by ear from memory, then realised I’d learned it in the wrong key, and so I then worked it out in the right one (E minor). Then I played it for a while before comparing it with the CD (the book comes with a CD). I had it just about right, and I found the rhythm quite easy to feel without thinking about it. It’s in 12/8 time, African-style. However, it starts off in a very nineteen-sixties free jazz style, with a Coltrane/Elvin Jones-like swirling intensity in free time. I’ll have to track down one of the real versions, because it’s an exciting, intense piece with an exquisitely satisfying melody. It reminds me of the South African pianist and composer Abdullah Ibrahim.

And there are no chord changes in the solo!

Well, it’s great to be able to play the kind of music I’ve always wanted to play. Not so long ago one associated music education, especially at the beginner level, with the playing of the most clichéd, childish, old-fashioned tunes. Now you can play Don Cherry, one of the originators of free jazz.

They have exams in February/March, and again in June/July. February feels far too soon, but let’s see how it goes.

Increasingly, many teachers of the humanities agree with the untutored opinion of their incoming students, that there is no such thing as a distinction between good and bad taste. But imagine someone saying the same thing about humor. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday recount one of the few recorded occasions when the young Mao Tse-tung burst into laughter: it was at the circus, when a tight-rope walker fell from the high wire to her death. Imagine a world in which people laughed only at others’ misfortunes. What would that world have in common with the world of Moliere’s Tartuffe, of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, or Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy? Nothing, save the fact of laughter. It would be a degenerate world, a world in which human kindness no longer found its endorsement in humor, in which one whole aspect of the human spirit would have become stunted and grotesque.

Imagine now a world in which people showed an interest only in Brillo boxes, in signed urinals, in crucifixes pickled in urine, or in objects similarly lifted from the debris of ordinary life and put on display with some kind of satirical intention — in other words, the increasingly standard fare of official modern art shows in Europe and America. What would such a world have in common with that of Duccio, Giotto, Velazquez, or even Cézanne? Of course, there would be the fact of putting objects on display, and the fact of our looking at them through aesthetic spectacles. But it would be a degenerate world, a world in which human aspirations no longer find their artistic expression, in which we no longer make for ourselves images of the ideal and the transcendent, but in which we study human debris in place of the human soul. It would be a world in which one whole aspect of the human spirit — the aesthetic — would have become stunted and grotesque.

(Read the full article to see this in context)

But I do have reservations. I also know that Scruton is a self-professed conservative, who sees twentieth century modernism as a destructive movement tied up with socialism, the enemy of common sense and decency (see his brilliant After Modernism). In the exerpt above it’s revealing that he says “even Cézanne.” So while Cézanne might sometimes be called the father of modernism, he escapes damnation. But only just.

UPDATE: Check out Scruton’s book on beauty, of which the quoted article was just a taster.

Obsession

I’ve been working in Edinburgh since March, and the main benefit has been that I’ve had time to practise the sax almost every day, for one or two hours. Some of you may remember my burning enthusiasm in March last year, which died because owing to awkward circumstances I couldn’t feed it. This time I’ve kept it well stoked. Soon after I took out my horn again I felt the familiar old obsessiveness begin to consume me, and part of me worried that it was just another example of starting something I couldn’t finish. But I’m pleased to say that the obsessiveness has been the sustained boost I’ve needed to get things going. Even if my enthusiasm sometimes declines, I know that I’ve now got the momentum to keep on going until it returns.

This happened recently.

I couldn’t really practise very much on our visit to Canada recently (watch this space for stuff on that amazing trip), and I seemed to be feeling my obsessiveness more when I thought about canoeing than when I thought about practising. Back in Edinburgh I couldn’t get back into my former mode. All I wanted to do was drink and smoke and read sci-fi and laze about. But I think there was more to it than simple laziness. At the beginning of the Canada trip I read Improvisation: It’s Nature and Practice in Music, by Derek Bailey, and I found it profoundly thought-provoking. I cannot follow Bailey all the way to his extreme ideological position, but there is much in what he and his interviewees say that I agree with and which I found inspiring, surprising and even unsettling. He calls into question some elements of my approach, and seems almost to be trying to expose music teaching, in both jazz and classical music, as a self-serving anti-musical conspiracy. I found this all very liberating, but perhaps too liberating. With some of my practise techniques called into question, I felt that my practising had lost some its value, that some of my work was pointless or counterproductive. Given all this maybe you can appreciate that I didn’t want to practise when I got back from holiday.

Incidentally, one very definite effect of reading that book was to turn me off the idea of studying composition, but there have been other reasons for that, including the complete nonresponsiveness of the Open College of the Arts, who advertise a three-step Composing Music program, one course per year, the aim of the third course being the production of a major piece of music, with the guidance of a personal tutor, who is a professional composer. I’m still considering it, but I reckon with a big keyboard and some books I could just teach myself.

Anyway, last week my sax obsession returned, after practising a new scale pattern. Sometimes it only takes a little thing like that to relight your fire.

And I’m happy to discover that I’ve got parallel obsessions (if that’s not an exaggeration or an impossibility): I’ve still got fires burning for canoeing and hillwalking. Maybe I’ve found a balance? I had a conversation about this a few years ago with my good friend Paul Keir. Agreeing that it’s not productive to always skip from one obsessive interest to the next, we came to the conclusion that what we needed in our lives was balance. I don’t know how much he would agree, but I think Paul has now managed to achieve a large measure of this balance in his life.

New Sax

Several weeks before leaving for Canada I bought a new sax, the culmination of weeks of increasingly intense GAS (Gear Acquisition Syndrome), the symptoms of which included drooling over pictures of the Cannonball Big Bell, the Keilwerth Shadow, Berg Larsen metal mouthpieces, and (the shame!) Rovner ligatures.

Now that I think about it, it was the new sax that initially took the edge off my obsession, because it took a lot of getting used to. I sounded worse for a while and it was very depressing, because I felt rather lost, not knowing if it was me or the instrument. As it turned out it was me, of course, a happy result given all the hard-earned cash I’d spent. It was an embouchure problem, which I’ve been fixing since, and now that I’ve got used to the instrument it’s really showing its worth, and I’ve gradually fallen in love with it. It’s a Yamaha 875 Custom, made around 2004. Very shiny.

I recorded a little piece when I was in Canada, with Laura’s-sister-Jeannie’s-husband-Richard, as I’m obliged to call him (it’s just “Richard” to most other people.) He’s a good musician and songwriter (and lead guitarist in the band Mr Completely), and he was able to accommodate my musical inadequacies. He put the drums in and played the keyboard, creating an eastern-sounding context within which I could improvise. The soloing is very basic, fragmented and far too tame, but I was pleased to hear that my tone is roughly what I’ve been aiming for. I’ll post it up here soon.

Lastly, thanks must go to my sax teacher Chez Taylor for the valuable guidance – just being able to spend time with an accomplished player of the same instrument is a wonderful experience; and most of all to Laura, for the endless encouragement – it really makes a difference.

Most of the time I merely mouth it in a whisper as it runs through my head, or else I hum it or whistle it. I said that I start singing when I wake up, but I’m usually already singing it before I become aware of it and before I’m fully awake. It goes back to my days at Sunday School when I was about 10 years old, and it’s been happening on and off since then.

Give me joy in my heart, keep me praising,
Give me joy in my heart, I pray,
Give me joy in my heart, keep me praising,
Keep me praising ’till the break of day.

Sing hosanna, sing hosanna,
Sing hosanna to the King of kings!
Sing hosanna, sing hosanna,
Sing hosanna to the King.

Give me peace in my heart, keep me praying,
Give me peace in my heart, I pray,
Give me peace in my heart, keep me praying,
Keep me praying ’till the end of day.

A local character called Dave Clark would come by with his guitar to lead the sing-song, which was the culmination of the session.

What is the psychology of this intrusive, recurring tune in my head? Perhaps it’s just the ultimate catchy song, and because I heard it and sang it, week after week, at a formative time in my mental development, it became a part of me. The melody is irritatingly childlike, with a kind of mindless, uninvolving jumpiness. It has this in common with many songs that I “can’t get out of my head”. I suppose it’s the same for other people.

It turns out that the Germans have a word for this. I have an ohrwurm – an earworm.

Songs such as the Village People’s YMCA, Los Del Rio’s Macarena, and the Baha Men’s Who Let The Dogs Out owe their success to their ability to create a “cognitive itch,” according to Professor James Kellaris, of the University of Cincinnati College of Business Administration.

“Certain songs have properties that are analogous to histamines that make our brain itch.”

“The only way to scratch a cognitive itch is to repeat the offending melody in our minds.”

(BBC News)

The simplest tunes – the easiest tunes to assimilate – are the ones that become earworms. Some say that listening to a tune in its entirety will make it go away. Mozart’s children would play on the piano below his room, and when they played incomplete scales he was compelled to rush down and complete them. So perhaps I need to seek out a performance of this song, or simply sing it myself in full.

Some think that the mind gets stuck in a phonological loop, which rehearses verbal information in a constant loop to prevent the decay of the information in storage. According to this theory, the best thing to do to get rid of the tune is to distract yourself so that natural decay can take place.

That doesn’t take account of my condition, in which it just keeps coming back no matter what I do, over a period – so far – of about twenty-five years. In fact, researchers seem to be unaware that this can happen. Here’s a definitive-sounding answer to the question How long am I likely to be infected with an earworm?

“An earworm episode can last anywhere from a few minutes to many days. Most people report episodes lasting from a few hours to an entire day; however, episodes lasting over a week are not uncommon.”
(Earworm FAQ page)

So what about brain science? I found a Guardian report, and this Science Daily report, from last year. They report on a study by researchers at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, called Musical Imagery: Sound of Silence Activates Auditory Cortex, published in the March 10, 2006 issue of Nature.

‘”We found,” says David Kraemer, a graduate student of cognitive science and the lead researcher on the Dartmouth study, “that the auditory cortex that is active when you’re actually listening to a song was reactivated when you just imagine hearing the song.”‘

And the auditory cortex keeps on singing when the sound stops. So a part of the brain that was thought only to handle sound perception actually reproduces its “normal” activity when there is no sound stimulus at all. It is “perception in reverse”.

But again, we find no mention of chronic earworms:

“Treated earworms go away in one day, untreated earworms in 24 hours.”

It seems that none of the scientists and researchers who are studying the phenomenon have encountered people, like me, with extremely long-lived earworms. And because mine is a special case, it will require a special cure. I do have the normal run-of-the-mill earworms as well, and I’m well aware that they can be got rid of through a mental effort, or with a replacement earworm. But what’s gonna shift this horrible hymn? On one site it says that lobotomy is known to work, but that it’s ill-advised because of the possible side-effects. I’ll say!

Well, it’s not the hottest area of psychological, let alone neurological, study at the moment, so all the unanswered questions will have to remain unanswered for quite a while I think. Here are some more links:

http://www.business.uc.edu/earworms/research
http://everything2.com/index.pl?node=earworm
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/12/health/psychology/12musi.html?ex=1278820800&en=6ad31758c7334d06&ei=5090&partner=rss
http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2005/03/why_you_cant_ge.html
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=499811
http://www.salon.com/books/review/2006/09/05/levitin/
http://philosophy.tamucc.edu/article.pl?sid=06/09/05/1219247&mode=thread

As Laura and Kris didn’t share our tastes, they were mystified, and demanded that he admit to liking something they had heard of. I joined in, pointing out that while I couldn’t do without the excitement of surprising, complex and weird music, I also enjoy Outkast, Marvin Gaye and the Beach Boys.

I wondered if he was being more honest – to himself and to others – than me. Or had I just lazily forgotten to continue cultivating my tastes? Or was Daniel perhaps a musical snob, as Laura was gently suggesting. Is musical snobbery bad? Is a fondess for this kind of music honest and ingenuous or is there always a contrarian mentality as part of it?

I’m the first to recognize if I’m becoming lazy with music. If I keep putting on the White Stripes instead of getting into that new John Zorn album, I know I’m just going over old, familiar, easy ground, rather than exploring and altering and improving myself. But I do believe that my increasing openness to soul, for example, is definitely a sign that my taste is maturing. The exquisite and deceptively simple songs of soul music are works of artistic greatness, all the more admirable because they are popular as well.

So even if one pursued an exploration of a certain kind of obscure difficult music with a contrarian motivation, that is, simply to position oneself against or different from others, it doesn’t really matter. Who cares why you get into something, as long as you gain some understanding and enjoyment from it. You may well develop a more mature attitude later down the line. I think this has been my trajectory.

As to whether musical snobbery is bad, well, snobbery is always bad and almost by definition cannot be justified: snobbery is always a presumption. Musical snobbery is the presumption that a kind of music is inferior because of its popularity. If musical snobbery were only the belief that some music is objectively better than others, then many people, including myself, would have to confess to being musical snobs. Stravinsky is superior to Black Lace, Neil Young is superior to Ronan Keating. This is not a matter of taste but of fact. But to dislike music because of its popularity is absurd. Hankering after the weird can be infantile.