Music

One of my main musical interests is Early Music, especially English scared music and Gregorian Chant. I can’t explain why I have this, almost irrational, interest in English mass settings of the Elizabethan period, especially William Byrd. Although I am no longer a committed (or indeed uncommitted) Christian, I do still find there’s a strangely uplifting and meditative quality in the Latin Mass … I get a buzz from good liturgy; after all the Mass is essentially a piece of magic.

I have this sneaky suspicion that in a former reincarnation I was some kind of cleric, monk or chorister during Elizabethan/Tudor times. I suspect that somewhere along the way I have also been a Buddhist (probably Tibetan?) monk. Nearer than that I cannot get, and maybe shouldn’t get.

My practical musicianship is limited to having sung tenor, and later bass, in the school choir and having played the ‘cello (very badly) in the school orchestra. However I’ve always listened to music, although I have to be in the right mood, and these days the depression leaves me wanting quite much of the time.

My other musical interest is really in the rock music of my student years, the late 1960s and early ’70s: especially Pink Floyd, Yes, Caravan, Moody Blues and later Beatles.

Much of the rest of music, particularly mainstream classical, leaves me cold. Music goes to pot between Bach and the Beatles. Mozart, Haydn, opera, ballet, the modern minimalists, Rap, Reggae, most jazz and Country & Western are little more than so much pointless noise as far as I’m concerned; audio wallpaper at best. I was brought up with the mainstream classics, and of course it was assumed I would like them. I don’t. They aren’t interesting.

Despite that my interest and enjoyment of music is somewhat more catholic than the above might imply, as you’ll see from the links below, ranging as it does all the way from early music, through folk music, to the pop music of the 1960s and 1970s.

Zen Mischief

Some Other Music Sites of Interest

Eccentric looks at life through the thoughts of a retired working thinker