…while you work

It’s been commonplace ever since the widespread dissemination of sound recording, followed by the rapid growth of broadcasting, to deplore ‘the appalling popularity of music’: its inevitable debasement, when available so easily, into something ordinary rather than special, repeatable rather than unique, cursory rather than concentrated, disposable rather than sacral. A background: ‘music while you work’ — or play, or relax, in factory or canteen or shop or home; which happy days seem now as lost down the river of time as dancing around the maypole since the advent of personal technology, locking equally the crushed rush-hour commuter with the solitary jogger into a private world of inner bliss, whether rock’n’rave or the rarified strains of a Haydn quartet or a Schubert song.

Puritanically, I held out for years against background music. Broadcasts were by their nature one-off, requiring one’s ardent adolescent life to be built around the marked-up pages of Radio Times; if you were away, or merely late, you missed it for ever. Even playing an LP needed planning and timing, appropriateness, a mood of exaltation and expectation; then religious concentration not to be interrupted by friend or phone.

I can’t reconstruct, decades later, how this juvenile severity began to crack, yield, supple up, in the end melt almost wholly away. It didn’t seem so sinful to use music originally written for diversion — to dance to, dine to, watch a passing procession, or as mere backdrop to chatter — when one had to do the ironing or fill in lots of report forms. The larger proportion of our musical legacy from the baroque, the rococo, even the classical period is exactly of this nature — frankly functional entertainment, ‘music as furniture’, part of the décor; Vivaldi and Telemann most obviously, but scarcely spurned by the Greats — the enormous divertimento output of Haydn then Mozart, Schubert’s endless sequences of dance music.