Day One: 26 January 2017
I attended a funeral in the early morning, in a Catholic chapel. It was a traditional Requiem Mass, so there were several hymns involved. All of these except one were sung in a call-and-response manner, accompanied by an organ, with a lone soprano singing the verses, and the congregation singing the chorus sections. The last hymn, the recessional hymn, was sung by everyone all the way through. As is usual for hymns, they were slow and quiet in nature, and had one single line of melody, as this was not a professional choir.
This was live music, accompanied by a lone instrument. From my own feelings while singing, perhaps we use music as a means of consoling ourselves in grief – or perhaps music is simply a means of expressing grief? It’s been said that funerals are for the people who have been left behind, and seeing some people be able to express their grief through their music showed me that that might be true.
Day Two: 27 January 2017
Today I listened to some Einaudi pieces while working. Ludovico Einaudi is a modernist piano player who is famous for his arpeggios and minimalist outlook. Rather than taking the usual 20th century\modern approach of a thick texture and tight structure – the better to fit more contrasting chords in, perhaps – Einaudi has quite a loose structure, the better to show his long arpeggios and single melody line.
I enjoy Einaudi, so I have quite a lot of his work on CD. While streaming is becoming more and more popular, many people still hold on to their CD collections anyway, for a variety of reasons. Einaudi is relaxing, in my own opinion, and since I was trying to get back to work after a harrowing day the day before, I thought that listening to him would help.
Day Three: 29 January 2017
Today, I quickly stepped into a grocery shop on my way home, to pick up some cheese. The music playing was some quiet jazz, which I thought was an unusual choice for music in a shop, so I asked who the band were. The jazz was nothing out of the ordinary – a simple quartet with brass, strings, percussion and chordal, but I like jazz. The different melodies and the way they weave together to form a whole – with a texture which is sometimes very thick but never confusing - which is almost but not quite seamless is something which I find endlessly fascinating, and could listen to for hours.
When I asked about it, I was told that the people working in the shop take turns on providing music, so between that and the fact that one day I walked into this same shop and found them struggling with the music, I assume that the system works by having everyone come in and plug their iPods or MP3s into a central stereo.
Day Four: 30 January 2017
Today I was in a supermarket, stocking up (an actual supermarket chain, not the smaller chain from before), and the music playing sounded like some very generic contemporary pop music. I didn’t recognise it, but it sounded like most other songs of that genre – a single female singer over a fairly simple electronic backing. There weren’t many people in the supermarket at the same time I was, but I didn’t notice anybody listening to the music, or at least they weren’t doing it noticeably, which leads me to believe that the music was not put on for the shopper’s listening pleasure, but rather to fill a void. It makes sense – most supermarkets are housed in large warehouse like buildings, and there are no soft furnishings to soak up sounds. Rather than have there be a lot of noise confusingly coming from everywhere, the music seems to stand in as a kind acoustic soft furnishing, soaking up too much excess noise.
Keeping this journal has taught me that music is ever-present in our society, even if we are only aware of it on a subconscious level, as seems to be the case in most supermarkets; or if it is unusual in some way, as was my experience in the smaller grocery. The differences between the smaller shops and the larger ones are possibly emblematic of how music is viewed in our society – the supermarket uses music as something to potentially soothe and relax, while also using it to fill the void which would inevitably exist in a room roughly the size of a small warehouse which had no soft furnishings in it. The small shop, on the other hand, seems to take a more personal approach, perhaps realising that since its employees have to listen to the music for their entire shifts, it should be something they like.
Most of our music is of course electronic in nature these days, purely because most of us work in offices and other areas with no access to live music – live music is now something reserved for special occasions, if we can get to a concert, or find a pub which features bands. Because of this, live music is perhaps now becoming something of an event – it is used to commemorate somebody, as in the funeral, or to treat ourselves, as with the concerts. Due to the proliferation of mobile devices, however, music itself is more ubiquitous than ever, almost becoming a backdrop; the soundtrack to our own lives. In that sense, there is perhaps a danger that music is becoming something which we don’t pay attention to quite as much as we should.
Personal taste in music and practical taste evidently differ greatly when it comes to music. The hymns sung during the funeral are perhaps an exception to this, but in all three other instances which are recorded in this journal, the music has been different. It is interesting to note that in both cases where personal taste was informing the choice, quite niche music genres were in evidence – Einaudi in one case, jazz in the other – whereas when the music was designed to be inoffensive to the most amount of people, the music chosen was perhaps the blandest of them all. This is not to suggest that no one likes contemporary pop music (or that no one should like it), but simply to point out that pop music is perhaps made in a specific genre to be pop music, rather than becoming pop music because people listen to it.
