Today is No Music Day
Muslims have Ramadan and Christians have Lent. Today, 21 November, music-lovers have No Music Day, their own time to fast and reflect on the value of what they are temporarily giving up. Like Ramadan and Lent, it is accompanied by a celebration - 22 November is St Cecilia’s Day, St Cecilia being the patron saint of music.
Some people, perhaps, will be offended by this comparison. How can giving up music for one day be anything like Ramadan or Lent? But these people are the ones who need No Music Day most. If you think giving up music for a day is a trivial sacrifice, you’re not listening properly in the first place. Which is exactly what No Music Day is trying to highlight.
First, the practical details. Giving up music for a day is harder than you might think if you’re going to take it at all seriously. Stay in, and you risk music infiltrating the walls courtesy of heathen neighbours not honouring your sacred day. You’ll also need to manage without radio or TV. Even Radio 4 has jingles, and everything on TV has a theme tune.
Go out, and music will assault you from all sides. It’s unlikely you’ll be able to venture into a shop (unless it’s an old-fashioned bookshop that doesn’t sell CDs and cappuccinos on the side), while the streets outside contain buskers poised to strike. Take a bus or a train and you risk encountering someone with their iPod on maximum volume. Even if you don’t have that to deal with, chances are a phone will suddenly inflict an unwanted little jaunty tune on you. Stick to quiet streets and a car will inevitably whizz past, stereo blaring; stick to housing estates and an ice-cream van will suddenly appear.
The obvious point here is that music is virtually inescapable, at least in towns and cities, to the point where it pollutes our lives, the way (other) noise and light does, and we can no longer hear the songs for the sound. Getting through No Music Day successfully is like spending a night in a remote part of the countryside and suddenly experiencing real darkness for the first time in years. Then you look up, and realise you can actually see the stars properly.
For anyone who loves music, “seeing the stars properly” feels more difficult by the year. Thanks to the internet, the world is now one big, free (legal or otherwise) record shop, with an almost infinite catalogue. This was supposed to be liberating, but it has taken away any sense that music is special, or that it is a privilege to listen to it. If you can find any music in the world on sites like MySpace, where is the incentive to spend more than a few minutes with any of it, properly listening?
Recently I started tuning into Last.FM, the online radio station that gives you a personalised playlist of music similar to music you’ve already told it you like. In theory, this should help a music fan discover new things. In practice it mostly just alerts you to how many people are making broadly similar stuff. Entering the name of an obscure Swedish band, Suburban Kids With Biblical Names - who make quirky, geeky, knowing pop that sounds a bit like Belle and Sebastian - simply revealed to me that there are many more quirky, geeky knowing pop bands from Scandinavia who sound a bit like Belle and Sebastian. An unusual band that I had felt privileged to discover when I stumbled across them a couple of years ago suddenly felt more ordinary.
It is a basic rule of life that, in order to appreciate having something, you need to have put in some effort to get it (or, as a song would put it, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone). Just as someone who has lived their entire life in luxury has no appreciation of the value of money, a generation for whom music is everywhere cannot possibly appreciate the value of music. So what do we do about this? Bill Drummond, the ex-KLF musician who founded No Music Day in 2005, began by putting strict limitations on the way he listened to music, picking a random letter from the alphabet once a year and listening only to music by people whose name began with that letter for the rest of that year. He later decided the problem was the dominance of recorded music itself (or perhaps just realised that spending an entire year listening to XTC wasn’t going to make him any happier) and that he was now only interested in music in a live setting - the only place to offer an experience that is special, unique, and not endlessly repeatable at the click of a mouse.
As for me, last week I decided to get rid of my entire music collection - thousands of CDs and records, dating back to my teens. A sudden cowardly attack of nostalgia resulted in two boxes still remaining in my house (the British Heart Foundation shop in Leith now has most of the rest; you’re very welcome to it) but I felt much better.
This year, too, I have found myself gravitating away from conventional gigs and concerts and, more and more, towards experimental music events like Scotland’s Kill Your Timid Notion and Instal festivals, which find music in the sound of exploding charcoal, or a tuba slowly filling with sand. Every time I see a performance like this - and they have often moved me in ways that pop songs haven’t done for years - I try to avoid finding out too much about the people involved. If I discover there are hundreds of other people making music by filling tubas with sand, and that they are all on MySpace, I will be back to square one. And a bit cross.
I am far from alone in this. The evidence is not just in growing audiences for events like Instal, but in the growing audiences for live music in general (witness the boom of music festivals in particular). It has often been suggested that live performance is thriving because more people are getting excited by music thanks to the easy availability of it. This could be true, but the reverse may also be true - that there is a growing disillusionment with the way the easy availability of music lessens its power, and that in going to a live performance people are trying to reconnect, consciously or unconsciously, with what makes music important.
If you recognise yourself in that last sentence, I can recommend the No Music Day experience. The odd thing is, it is not a day without music at all. Instead you’re likely to hear music everywhere: in the breeze, in your footsteps on the pavement, in the hum of the traffic, in the clacketyclack of a train on a track, in the rhythms of people’s conversation, even in the silence.
Andrew
