…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.