A Sound Mind: How I Fell in Love with Classical Music (and Decided to Rewrite its Entire History)

By Paul Morley

For readers of Mozart in the Jungle and Year of Wonder, a new history of and guide to classical music.

Paul Morley made his name as a journalist covering the rock and pop of the 1970s and 1980s. But as his career progressed, he found himself drawn toward developing technologies, streaming platforms, and, increasingly, the music from the past that streaming services now made available. Suddenly able to access every piece Mozart or Bach had ever written and to curate playlists that worked with these musicians' themes across different performers, composers, and eras, he began to understand classical music in a whole new way and to believe that it was music at its most dramatic and revealing.
In A Sound Mind, Morley takes readers along on his journey into the history and future of classical music. His descriptions, explanations, and guidance make this seemingly arcane genre more friendly to listeners and show the music's power, depth, and timeless beauty. In Morley's capable hands, the history of the classical genre is shown to be the history of all music, with these long-ago pieces influencing everyone from jazz greats to punk rockers and the pop musicians of today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Nov 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9781635570250

Paul Morley

Paul Morley is a writer, broadcaster, and cultural critic who has covered music, art, and entertainment since the 1970s. A founding member of the electronic collective Art of Noise and a member of staff at the Royal Academy of Music, he is the author of a number of books about music including the bestselling The Age of Bowie and A Sound Mind: How I Fell in Love with Classical Music and Decided to Rewrite its Entire History. He collaborated with music icon Grace Jones on her memoir, I’ll Never Write My Memoirs, and his two most recent books are biographies of Bob Dylan, You Lose Yourself, You Reappear, and Tony Wilson of Factory Records, From Manchester With Love.

Book preview

A SOUND MIND

e.s.p.

OTHER BOOKS BY PAUL MORLEY

Ask: The Chatter of Pop

Nothing

Words and Music: A History of Pop in the Shape of a City

Joy Division: Piece by Piece: Writing About Joy Division 1977–2007

Joy Division: Fragments (with Christel Derenne)

The North (And Almost Everything In It)

Earthbound

I’ll Never Write My Memoirs by Grace Jones (with Paul Morley)

The Age of Bowie

The Awfully Big Adventure: Michael Jackson in the Afterlife

I am no connoisseur in art … nevertheless, works of art do exercise a powerful effect on me, especially those of literature and sculpture, less often of painting … [I] spend a long time before them trying to apprehend them in my own way, i.e. to explain to myself what their effect is due to. Wherever I cannot do this, as for instance with music, I am almost incapable of obtaining any pleasure. Some rationalistic, or perhaps analytic, turn of mind in me rebels against being moved by a thing without knowing why I am thus affected and what it is that affects me.

Sigmund Freud, ‘The Moses of Michelangelo’

Without music, life would be a mistake.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

For every discovery we need new sounds.

Anaïs Nin, In Favour of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays

Contents

Part One   The Question – Into the Unknown

Part Two   The Learning – What Brought Me Here

Part Three   The Beginning – To The Planets and Beyond

Part Four   The Playlist – A Few of My Favourite Things

Part Five   The Writing – Finding the Right Words

Part Six   1973, the Year When – A Playlist With Information; The Persistence of Memory

Part Seven   The String Quartet – In Four Parts

Part Eight   The Obscure – Changing Direction

Part Nine   The Piano – Light and Dark

Part Ten   The Answer – The Place Where the Story Stops

The Coda…   Sound Out of Sound – Music to Listen to While Reading a Book

Acknowledgements

Index

A Note on the Author

PART ONE

The Question – Into the Unknown

Musical notes by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart circa 1800: ‘Whence and how these ideas come I know not, nor can I force them.’

The plane took off. It was obviously about to happen, but the way the ground fell away from underneath me still seemed very sudden and somehow, discreetly, violent.

I hoped that everything was under control, that the experts in control of my immediate fate knew what they were doing and in general felt good about their life and completely confident about the maintenance of the machine they were piloting. The behaviour of the visible professional staff in the cabin was inevitably relatively serene verging on the indifferent, even when rules and regulations were routinely explained to ensure our safety, considering how we were now beginning to hurtle through the air and there would be much less between the passengers and certain death than there had been an hour ago.

The noisy roar and erratic rattle of the plane as it arrowed upwards, drawing attention to the precariousness of my position, needed dealing with. I was still holding my phone after switching it to airplane mode, and since I had turned fifty my phone had become more of a music player than anything else. In my lifetime I had gone from the near-spiritual or theatrical ritual of the record – patiently picking dust from my record player’s needle, dropping the stylus softly at the wobbly edge of a deeply black shiny record to connect with the groove, turning the disc over, filing all my albums in an order between thoughtful and chaotic – to a point where music was held inside some sort of space inside my phone that could be quickly connected to my mind. The twentieth-century record-playing ritual, filled with beloved gestures and pauses, hisses and clicks, had been replaced by a slick functionality closer to fastening your seat belt on a plane than preparing for lift-off into all space. Once the music was playing, though, it was still music, and if you had made the right choice, still magical.

Needing to focus my mind, to turn one set of thoughts into another, to push myself more into myself, I tucked some headphones into my ears and turned to the Tidal streaming app, which is more or less where my music collection now lives. Once, when it was vinyl, my music collection might have needed a large van to move. When it was on compact disc, it would still have needed a little planning to move, especially if I wanted to carry it all around with me. A music collection was now invisible, the abstract replacing the object, and relied on such vulnerable things as battery power and connectivity. A portability that had begun in the 1970s with the futuristic Sony Walkman from future-perfect Japan, where you carried music of your choice to be played as and when as you moved around, had rapidly extended over the next forty years, turning the Walkman into a quaint period piece. By 2020 you could just speak aloud, asking a gadget for a certain piece of music and out of nowhere it would appear somewhere between magically and mechanically. The next stage in portability would be where all music laid dormant inside your head and you thought it into action. Or music became so abstract it is beyond reach.

Before I boarded my plane, ready for moments when there was no wi-fi, I had downloaded a few albums – if that is what they are still called. To some extent, this small group of albums, randomly selected for hopefully temporary offline emergencies from a more consciously compiled list, was now my record collection, although I would regularly make changes to it. A quick scroll through what once would have been the automatic Dylan, Hendrix, Coltrane or Joy Division took me to what, at that moment, seemed the perfect sound, the perfect thinking, to fight off the churning, lightly menacing whine of the plane, and more significantly to take my mind off the loss of ground as the plane vibrated into the sky. There was a dull shudder as the plane was enveloped by churning cloud representing a basic struggle with mortality. The plane breaking into a devious shake can make a two-hour flight to the pleasures of Barcelona, which at the time were mostly taken for granted, momentarily seem like a death sentence.

I chose a performance of three cello sonatas written across time by a trio of German composers: Beethoven, born in 1770, Brahms, born in 1833, six years after Beethoven died, and Hindemith, born in 1895, two years before Brahms died, and living through the twentieth century until 1963, six years after I was born, the year the Beatles broke through. I am not sure it had ever been released as a record, and the two musicians playing the music, the cellist Alessio Pianelli and the pianist Mario Montore, did not seem particularly famous.

I’d fallen for the combination of composers, the raw, open balance between the glide of the cello and the flight of the piano, and how technical and emotional thinking about music and the mystique of enlightenment had been passed through history from one composer to another, this journey beginning with the contemplation and calculation of J. S. Bach, and backwards beyond into a mysterious musical equivalent of a before-the-Common Era epoch.

Beethoven’s Cello Sonata No. 4 shows how he was pulling away in 1815 from his early adoration of Mozart and Haydn into what became labelled as the ‘late period’ of his creative life. Original influences were shaken off, leaving his own internal urges and instincts for change as his greatest influence, a musical progress from pure imaginative efficiency to other-worldliness, compressed into his five works for cello and piano. The drama of Brahms’ Cello Sonata No. 1 generates an ethereal fusion of cello and piano that made me think of all the weird air – the nothing and something – around the plane I was in rather than the late nineteenth century.

Finally, in this trio, Hindemith, one of the accepted founders of musical modernism along with Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Bartók, who as part of his intellectual research into the sensation and structure of sound composed sonatas for all the major instruments. His Three Easy Pieces for cello and piano from 1938, titled as though they are teaching pieces, easily cope with being bracketed with Brahms and Beethoven.

The fiery, serene sonatas take me into the clouds, through some worrying turbulence, peaking out into level peace high in the sky, where you’re rapidly moving forward but don’t seem to be moving at all, when the nerves can level out as well – the plane flies on and my life continues, but for a short while, in those vulnerable moments as the flight began, if something had gone wrong, and the ground furiously grabbed us back, the last piece of music I would ever hear in my life might have been one of these intimately immense sonatas. Brahms and Hindemith imagining where J. S. Bach would have been after Beethoven, or Bartók. Beethoven inventing a new musical language, so it is said, but to my ears, under the circumstances, an uncanny demonstration of the relationship between time, space and mind, thinking and body, between sound and silence, between inside and outside, bliss and tension, temporary and permanent, motion and emotion and, ultimately, between life and death. Just what I needed as I accelerated towards 500 miles an hour.

All three, using just two instruments, pressing so much feeling, knowledge and purpose into musical structures veering between tradition and adventure, while they had the chance, searching for evidence, before the possibility of everything, like a piece of music, because all things must pass, ends.

After such journeys when fast jet travel combined with fast new ways of hearing music, when progress seemed to be running ahead of itself, I started to increasingly wonder what the last piece of music that I’d ever hear would actually be. The final piece of music, the last song, before I died, paying attention to the very end, which is what listening to music is about. Paying attention. Hopefully to a brand new world that you want to be part of, or perhaps deal with when it seems more a threat than a delight. Paying attention whether you seem to be paying attention or not. Paying attention whatever the time of day, or whatever the stage of your life.

All the music I had listened to, and thought about, written about, collected, analysed, discovered, loved, all that I had rejected and dismissed, once or twice danced to, played once or again and again, coming down, after all that, to this one, last piece – that would become in my life a complete full stop, or maybe a question mark, even an exclamation mark.

Or, and this of course all depended on what the song or piece was, which I began to think about more and more, the conclusion could be a little less definite. A comma, a semicolon, perhaps an asterisk, suggesting there might be more to come, a form of collaboration with eternity that this last music might help me understand. If the whole event of my death seemed particularly and unexpectedly ‘ironic’, in quotation marks, or if it felt perversely a little unfinished, oddly provisional, annoyingly premature, a dash—

What music would do the job, be the full stop, or the dash, connecting me with elsewhere, chosen with care, as part of a deliberate slowing-down ritual, a closing event, or an accident, because my death was? And if it was an accident, was the last music something I had chosen to play, before the accident, which I didn’t see coming, or something that I heard randomly, half watching a television show, or hearing something boom from a passing car, or while I was shopping in my local Co-Op? Would this piece be horribly commercial, sadly a slice of muzak, a charity choir crushing the life out of a favourite song or, terribly, something, the ultimate horror, by Phil Collins, definitely an experience to put inside scare quotes?

And if I could be in control, somehow establishing some isolation, a sanctuary, accepting the end was near and must not be interfered with by what the music critic in me had come to call the enemy – those with the affrontery to have different taste from me – how could I make sure that this last piece was something I chose? Something that I had prepared, as an event, after much consideration, a distillation of all of my musical loves, the sort of music I would be happy to have as my musical epitaph, something that made a little sense of the fact I had spent all of my working life judging, interpreting, celebrating, mythologising, hyping and listing music? The end of the trail of a life of music… And in choosing this piece, making my mind up that a certain musical selection was the one carrying me forth into an unknown, what kind of thinking and feeling would go into this decision?

To arrive at an answer, I needed to write a book, to explore once and for all what my thinking about music is, and along the way to help work out what that last music choice was; this very book, in fact, which becomes the story of how I worked out what I would be listening to in those final moments, and how the idea of what that music would be went through changes.

These changes were not just because I was going through changes, the sort of changes that tend to come as you helplessly – hopefully, given the alternative – drift closer to death, picking up pace, slipping out of the way, when you are perhaps twenty, or ten years from the moment to end all moments. They came about because music itself, at least in how it made it into my life, and how it made it into the wider world, was also going through changes, in terms of how it was distributed and made available, and just how much of it there now was. So much music that there seemed to be less and less care about what was played, less commitment to the idea of quality, as a route to the sublime, as if it was all the same, because it was all in the same place. The route to the sublime had become routine. Abundance had led to a diminishing of specialness.

Between the ages of fifty and sixty, the candidates for what that last piece could be had considerably expanded, because I was increasingly listening to music that spanned centuries. I wasn’t less committed or less caring faced with all this music; I was more so. I couldn’t help it. The ‘more music’ didn’t disconcert me, because, as a long-time professional writer about music, I could make some sense of it all, and work out where a lot of it had come from and how it was part of history, make decisions about what had become of it; what did challenge me perhaps was where it was all going and what it meant to the making of music. What was music becoming?

The ‘more – and more – music’, the onslaught, simply gave me more to think about, and this became the kind of thinking that I began putting into large playlists – ‘sonic sculptures’, I called them, consciously made as artworks, some of which contained so much assembled music that they could last for days, and which I imagined being released from inside their virtual storage centre and floating off into space, spectacular evidence of life on earth.

I imagined them as artworks in the way I had imagined music writing to be an art. When I started, there didn’t seem any other way of approaching it. Once writing about music became more polite or prosaic, and part of a social-media invasion and interruption of traditional rational thinking, it could seem that generating these playlists was the new form of writing about music. How you put together the playlists – even if just for yourself – expressed and explained your feelings about music. More than that, they were a musical act: you told stories, expressed emotions and created worlds through these playlists.

Previously, before music streaming, where all music was gathered in the one place because now it could be – if possibly on borrowed time, but then we all are – my music listening tended to be concentrated on music made, recorded and performed, coincidentally, or quite naturally enough, between the year I was born, 1957, and the beginning of the twenty-first century, as long as my life so far, the borrowed time, had lasted.

Before streaming, this music was limited to records and compact discs that I owned as objects, certain radio stations I listened to that had the time and inclination to feature my kind of music, and increasingly what repeats of Top of the Pops BBC Four showed, once they had edited out the actually evil presence of certain disc jockeys. (Pop music turned out to be a great cover not only for the occasional genius but also for the occasional psychopath.) The music I heard was heavily biased to that second half of the twentieth century, post-Presley, post-multitrack recording, post-seven-inch singles and post-albums-as-art. For a while, this was where my final piece was going to come from: music more or less made and released during my lifetime.

A love of jazz and the mental motoring and sensual seriousness of improvised music pushed me back deeper into the almighty tangle of the twentieth century, and an anti-herd fascination with the dismantled and dismantling sounds, risks and challenges of avant-garde music pushed me even further back to the beginning of the twentieth century, and the early murmurs, and anxieties, of modernism. In turn, that took me back to what I decided were definite sources of jazz and the conceptual avant-garde, in particular the artfully temporal and sacred secular French music written by Erik Satie, Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century.

I hesitantly dipped back further in time, to Beethoven, Brahms and Mozart. There were definitely a few candidates among this music, at the heart of many of my structured playlists, that were high up on the list of a last, personal musical ceremony. I found myself playing this French music, and what came immediately after from Germany and Russia, from Stravinsky, Webern, Hindemith and Shostakovich, as I sat on planes that were taking off, or landing. Just in case…

I was ready; speeding away from the planet, or descending towards it, when something might happen to bring about the end of my time, playing early twentieth-century music, made about a century ago, cautiously generating a private ceremony. For me, this is what music had come to. This is where it had taken me. I could not imagine a world where I didn’t make the sort of decision that led to me hearing Part I of Stravinsky’s Divertimento from Le Baiser de la fée as a plane streaks into the sky. The music matching the speed of the machine I’m on and then keeping up with the flow of the movement through the air, and then the skimming across clouds in splendid isolation and the aiming towards whatever next, making you feel that life has been worthwhile, because it is filled with such radiant, ridiculous things as this – the flying and the music, two different ways of travelling outside yourself.

And then, astonishingly, after all this thinking through sound, music that moves through you as you move through space, which makes you realise that the lack of words in classical music is not an obstacle to meaning but a release of possibilities, an opening up of sensation, not a limiting, you are around to touch the ground and renew acquaintance with the solid and the ongoing, hearing Martha Argerich and Alexandre Rabinovitch play Schumann’s Andante and Variations for two pianos in B-flat major.

This might not be rock ’n’ roll in the way we have been led to believe, full of obvious psyching up and freaking out, and associated rites of passage, and it comes from the long-lost nineteenth century, but it can make today’s world seem something else, and something amazing, even freaky, as if it was composed to be heard as you hit the ground strapped into a metal tube at a few hundred miles an hour surrounded by complete strangers midway through their own dizzying destinies. It would sound amazing right up to your very last moments, as you hit another sort of ground, an unbelievable underground, at a speed that, until it happens, you cannot even imagine.

Before finding this music, up until my fifties, the favourite possibilities for the final piece of music were settled around my teenage years, and the years I spent in my late teens and early twenties writing for the New Musical Express, where precocious alternative thinking about pop culture had smuggled itself into the mainstream. The sentimental years; the lost golden years you find yourself culturally compelled to repeat as you get older, however much you resist nostalgia, because the music has most vividly impressed itself upon your senses, and character, and of course your hairstyle and favourite style of trousers. The consolation of looking back to the music you listened to in your early years never fades away, and perhaps can recreate even right at the end equivalent feelings of hope and anticipation, of excitingly setting out on an adventure, not disappearing into the unrealistic unknown. It seems safe, and soothing, to play music that you loved as a twenty-year-old, as if nothing has changed in your life, your surroundings are still the same, and there is still everything to look forward to – the music says so, setting you up for what is to come, not showing you where you have been.

Also, as a rock critic who, I like to think, made a reputation in the late 1970s and early 1980s writing about Manchester punk, post-punk and what I called New Pop – odd, stylish, commercial kinky pop coming from the likes of Sparks, Bowie and Roxy Music, which now stretches electrically between the Human League and Billie Eilish – I found, as I got officially old, I was professionally expected to write about the same thing in different guises. All the anniversaries, rewindings, reunions, box sets, exhibitions, compilations and goodbyes for the rest of my life. It didn’t matter how inappropriate it was, or how much I might want to be writing about other things, newer music, other arts, I was, at least as a formal music writer, stuck in the past whether I liked it or not.

Forty years after I left the North, thirty-five years after I stopped writing for the NME – considering myself at twenty-six too old – I still often get thought of as a northern NME writer. I might not want to settle down writing a narrative of nostalgia, but it often turns out that is what is expected from me. That’s my job, that’s my lot. To every person their little cross. Nostalgia is tricky if what turned you on as a young person were violations of the norm. Pop, it turned out, was a great cover for those wishing to violate the norm, and so was writing about it, until it became just another profession, and mostly a new form of professional mourning.

In the 1980s, the rock writer, once part of a slightly manic but influential and initially experimental self-consciously literary, even philosophical cult, grew more ordinary and visible, and much less adventurous. The few became the many. What had been a rare thing became common, a conventional career like pop performing itself, a formalised, often quasi-academic method of organising, interpreting and rating a torrent of songs and performances. By the end of the twentieth century the internet landed, or just popped out of the air, and reality itself was disturbed, possibly permanently disrupted, while print journalism was made to look increasingly vulnerable on the inevitable path to empty offices, howling winds and tumbleweed. Commenting on your favourite music became less an esoteric profession and more an everyday hobby, a load of centreless, directionless chatter.

Post-internet, one of the first things that happened, because in the end writing about rock required secluded, geek-framed enthusiasm, no grown-up qualifications and only a minimal amount of truly useful knowledge, was that everyone had a chance to try their hand at writing about rock music from the privacy of their own keyboard. Everyone could become famous and some sort of instant social historian once social media dominated the internet, but before that, in the internet’s early days, before everyone was able to write and photograph the story of their lives, everyone could become a rock writer. In the early 1970s, there were scores of rock writers charged with giving contextual and critical shape to a new world, and there were five great ones. In the late 1970s and early 1980s there were a few hundred rock writers, and there were five great ones. By the 1990s there were thousands of rock writers, and five great ones. Being objective about it.

The internet was the end for anyone fancying writing about music in the way it had been written about after the method had been invented in the 1960s and consolidated in the 1970s, as something more ambitious and provocative than a convenient, practical consumer guide. It helped ensure that popular culture, once at the messy, furtive edge of things, became the mainstream. Everyone had an opinion, and even though it could be claimed there is nothing wrong with that, the disappointing thing was, the majority of those opinions were all the same and not particularly exceptional. Bestsellers’ charts had once been the place where the voice of the majority was seen and heard; critics were responsible for ensuring there was more to art and entertainment than the simply popular. Increasingly, populist opinions were broadcast as though they were interesting, revealing and insightful, as if they showed intrinsic, constructive critical merit, not merely a dreary display of likes and dislikes.

Once everyone had the opportunity to distribute their opinions and attitudes, and could endlessly record their taste and draw attention to their favourite music, movies or TV, through endless blogs, vlogs, podcasts and online music forums, they picked up the same conditions and neuroses that the great rock writers had, without the ideological energy and literary ambition – the addiction to telling people about your loves and hates, the excitement of telling people all about yourself when previously no one really wanted to know, the snobbish elevated high you can feel when you are first to spot a secret new trend, a hot new movement. The internet meant that there were now millions of rock writers covering, celebrating and hyping, and explaining popular culture in ways that were unimaginable when there were just a few. Millions of music critics, and five great ones, and one or two of those are the same as they were in the 1970s.

Nostalgic against my better instincts, I could never bring myself to accept that the most important thing in a music review after about 1995 was the number of stars you handed out or marks out of ten. The discriminating, provocative, disruptive moods of the critic were replaced by the bland four and five stars, or the merely angry and mostly staged one or two stars. I had always believed it was about finding the language and structure to explain how and what the music made you felt. Also, because of the new sharing world, whatever I could write about the things I liked to write about, there were hundreds of people lined up fully prepared to do the same or similar, quite reasonably considering they could do it better than me and quite happy to grade what they were writing about as if it was a product, a hotel room, a train journey or an exam.

For those born during and after the 1980s there was no other way; sightings of the other way must have seemed a little Edwardian, even though all generations were now more or less interested in the proliferating trends and currents of popular culture as it more or less redirected reality itself. Everyone could find what they wanted now, quickly and efficiently, guided by genial, anonymous calculations, by ever-increasing playlists, by a proliferation of genres that almost bureaucratically processed and filed music for driving, sleeping, motivating, studying, eating, chilling, isolation, concentrating, shopping, swapping, dancing, night-time, Thursday. It became a world that was looking for user-friendly tips and advice, not manifestos, essays and rants, a world of irregular uniformity and conglomerated mediocrity, where the idea of quality and meaning was quickly replaced by convenience.

You can find information and guidance within seconds without coming into contact with a 1970s-style mostly white, mostly male rock writer, their peculiar personal habits, the narcissistic certainty that they are right, their dubious, far-fetched claims, their insane, illogical prejudices, their arcane, mystifying theories, a deep fear of losing control of their precious canon, and their insatiable desire to use too many words. Note how the first two or three waves of rock writers between the early 1960s and the early 1980s acted as though they were changing the world and, to some extent, ruling it, even though they had little experience of life and other cultures outside of their bedroom, their favourite gig venues and their record collection. The breed of eager, inbred, self-obsessed, self-important, naive, unsophisticated, holier-than-thou, mock-disruptive white male entrepreneurs who founded Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Spotify, etc. shared many of the same introverted, defensively arrogant and immature, insular qualities of the early rock writers, their nerdy self-involvement, missionary zeal and self-righteous rebel gestures. They also thought they were agents of free expression and protest who were going to change the world, even run it. The big difference between them and the rock writers was that, scarily, they actually did.

The covering of music is all for the consumer now, the well-regulated customers, less for the nature and momentum, the wonderful warp and weave, of the culture, which ultimately has greater worth for the consumer and introduces them to better things and a wider, more varied selection. There is all the choice in the world, but less actual selective choosing than there used to be. At least, that’s what I tell myself, still with this need to write about music because, on and off, it’s something I have done since I was, well, a child. I had also become fascinated with how to write about music, and there was still plenty for me to find out about the practice and function.

I wasn’t going to stop just because so many others were now doing it and the wider point of it was far less specific, less unprecedented than it was when I started. I needed to find new routes, new material and see if there could still be a purpose in the way I understood it, something other than being part of the promotions industry or one faceless component in a collective flowing in one forced direction.

This book, then, is not just the story of a search to find out what might be the final piece of music I would ever listen to, or to analyse the effects of streaming on the form and content of music, but it is also a book about what it is, and how it is, to write about music, what the motivation is, and what the satisfactions are, after doing it for forty years. And how I found the material to continue writing about music in a different, non-rock field, where there are perhaps still only a few hundred practitioners – and only five great ones.

Writing about rock and pop is now far too crowded for me, and the way I write about rock, drawing attention to myself for a variety of reasons, on the hunt for deeper meanings and stranger patterns, tends to infuriate those now looking simply for plain, useful, matter-of-fact, best-of-year information, for playlists and more new music to hear, even if all it leads to is more new music to listen to, or, if you’ve had enough, less. For personal reasons, to keep my writing, and thinking, and music listening fresh, I needed some new things to write about, even as more writing about music also came with there being fewer places to experiment with writing about music. Especially experimenting with writing about music if you wanted to write about Stravinsky and Schumann rather than Post Malone and Dave, yet another winner of the Mercury Prize.

In the middle of all these changes to my personal, professional circumstances, new music – and therefore new things to write about – started to fall into my lap and into my ears, especially when I was holding my music-playing iPhone. I had access to a small proportion of all the music ever made, which even then was more music than you could ever really hear more than once in your life. Sometime around 2010, the floodgates really opened. There was still only a proportion of all the music ever made, but the amount of music instantly available in my life was hundreds, probably thousands, of times more than it had ever been. Apple was soon promising they were giving us 50 million songs. Like this was a good thing, like it made sense, like it was to be expected. Aren’t we lucky? But if, as the composer Mauricio Kagel once observed, finding an unexpected new piece of music you love listening to is the equivalent of getting some luck in your lives, is it possible for there to be too much luck? Should this sort of luck be compiled, processed and endlessly exposed in this way?

What came with all the music, all these millions of songs, a streaming, straightened-out deluge of good luck, was a collapsing of chronology, a collapsing of musical history, and the fulfilment of a promise once made by the philosopher-composer-teacher John Cage, where Duchamp meets Buddha, that eventually all music would exist at once. Cage was the son of an inventor and a Los Angeles Times society writer who believed that the primary act of musical performance was not making music but listening.

In 1965, at fifty-three, Cage had imagined the internet – the clear-thinking social prophet already fantasising about the glorious inevitability of such an operation – as something like a universal language, a universal culture and a universal common market. He anticipated instant television, instant newspapers, instant magazines and an instant telephone service; everybody linked to everybody everywhere at every moment. It seemed like a good idea at the time, or a good idea from the point of view of an intellectually curious, artistically busy, benevolent visionary who always valued good ideas and confidently believed this new world would all be about good ideas and positive, inclusive thinking. He did acknowledge there was also a possibility we would all become digital tourists overlapping each other in a state of terminal duplication. He wasn’t the sort of philosopher to anticipate the nastiness, the brainwashing and the crowds baying, and posing, for attention.

He was also influenced by something said by his friend, the Indian music teacher Gita Sarabhai, who he remarked came into his life ‘like an angel from India’, completely changing the reasons why he wrote music: ‘The purpose of music is to quiet and sober the mind, making it susceptible to divine influences.’ This makes more sense the older you get, and roughly speaking takes you away, a little bit, from Iggy and the Stooges, as divine as that can seem and closer to, say, utopian experimental composer Morton Feldman. This soft, quiet, acutely responsible music, closer to silence than sound, finding new connections between the mind and the body, can become a weapon in an actual attack on the commercialisation of everything, especially music; Cage could see before most others how in contemporary civilisation everything is standardised, and everything is repeated, if deviously disguised as something constantly different. For Cage forgetfulness became important, so that you would not always be trapped into only contemplating and consuming what you were told to think about and buy. You could break out of those patterns. You could find yourself, not the person that others, with ulterior motives, following your every move, were making you become.

To forget was to avoid being completely taken over by what others decided you should be preoccupied with. Art, Cage decided, could help us forget, at least occasionally, so that we could resist being pummelled by the same things again and again. It could remind us that there were other worlds, sensations and objects to think about, not only what was placed in front of us for our comfort, which ultimately made us all addicts, pushed into a coma of apparent awareness. ‘If art today didn’t help us forget,’ he noted, ‘we would be submerged, drowned under those avalanches of rigorously identical objects.’ The forgetfulness was actually a remembering – of ideas and energies that were not being controlled on your behalf, by forces narrowing and emptying your actual options even as it seemed you had all the choice you needed.

Once music had become so instant, so handy, some proposed that listening to music ceased to be an event, a special drama, and became simply another task, almost a duty, something to take for granted, not least because despite the amount of music just a touch or two away, it somehow didn’t take up any actual space in our lives. It all fitted into a small gadget that could then fit inside our pockets or be held permanently in our hands, becoming another digit. In there somewhere, if you wanted to find them, there were works of art – distinctive examples of divine and/or difficult music that could help you forget how music was being made so ordinary by being made so plentiful.

There had always been lots of music for those of my age, which you could hear on the radio, and on records in the 1960s and 1970s, and see on television, especially after the 1980s and the arrival of MTV, followed by hundreds of channels inheriting its agitated, zealous visual and haphazard philosophical logic, whether news or entertainment. But before technological advances and various forms of media expansion created a vast library, or heaven, or mess of almost all the music that had ever been recorded that could be accessed, certain music remained out of reach if it wasn’t being played on the radio or hadn’t recently been released on a record that you could buy in your local record shop. The availability of music was sectioned off, siphoned off, it was reduced by various practical issues to being only a certain amount, and only accessible to a certain extent.

At about the same time I started to seriously wonder about that last piece of music I would ever hear, my farewell song, at the same time as my existence as a rock critic was gravely threatened, all music, as far as the eye could see, the ear could hear, seemed to become available. You didn’t need to listen to it on the radio or buy it on disc; with a couple of pieces of equipment and a few subscriptions to certain remote but very accommodating companies nifty with their marketing, their informed, if automated, curating and their methods of processing coolness, you were able to have all of the music you could ever want.

Before this, the idea of hearing, say, some Mozart, let alone all of Mozart, seemed a difficult task, fraught with problems to do with what to play, and how to get hold of it. Once the streaming of music emerged, automatically dragging everything with it into the same place, he was now right in front of me. He was all mine. By accident more than intent, an entire of history of music was released into the world, as though for the first time – the release date of millions of pieces of music was always now. The music of Mozart was out now, all of the time.

All of music, a multitude of versions of all of Mozart, was suddenly easy to find. In one weekend, peculiarly trained to feel the need, feeling like a mountaineer abruptly faced with previously inaccessible new peaks to conquer, I could hear more or less everything Mozart had ever written. I could now speed through Mozart – the years he was alive, the years his music has been performed and recorded, by an endless supply of those who appreciate the sublime madness in the method – in a matter of days. It seemed churlish, even idiotic to ignore this sudden discovery of treasure and see what I made of it as both a listener to music and a writer about music. And to confirm the theory that in this new streaming setting all music exists at the same time; old music, previously hard to hear and assimilate, becomes new music. Everything is always new.

Old music becomes something new to write about, because in its new setting it has been rejuvenated and it comes to new life. For me, now, not just because of my age, but because I continue on a quest to find new sounds and new minds, there is Mozart as though it has only just happened. It is from history, from before my time, and therefore the time of pop, but it is now more part of the present than it has ever been. Can he still make sense during our troubled times, when things are in flux in a whole new way; can he still be relevant to those working out the role of music in clearing the way forward, of diagnosing cultural climate, of inspiring new thinking? Is it more than a mere accident of timing and technology that, wow, like the wizard some have always claimed he is, he makes this kind of abstract but persistent comeback?

The only problem I felt now that I was able to approach and pay attention to Mozart, as much as an inverse snobbery that had long dismissed him as irrelevant and old-fashioned, was a lingering inferiority complex – did I need somehow to have certain qualifications in order to understand and enjoy the music? Could I ever write about Mozart in the way I had written about the music I became an expert in covering, and, more importantly, would I ever be allowed to write anything at all about Mozart, especially in a country that had almost officially banned such intellectual and critical mobility? Should I keep my Mozart listening to myself, or was there still a reason, as a professional music writer, to pass on my experience, my new adventure, to use writing about a subject as I always had – in the first place, for me to discover, appreciate and to get my bearings?

I love and crave music of all sorts enough to be seduced by streamed music and all its information and take out subscriptions to all the streaming services, even as I am aware of its new, disorientating, overwhelming, even synthetic oddness, which one day will seem very natural, or be replaced as something old-fashioned, by something else even newer, odder and apparently, at least from a late twentieth-century point of view, less human. I realise that somehow music has become data, rather than knowledge, experience, emotion – but what data! As long as you can keep your wits about you and begin sifting all this data with prior knowledge of at least some music history.

When people ask me what I am listening to, expecting to hear from an alleged rock expert some new band or compelling discovery, the elusive latest happening, like the old days when such things mattered, or were made to matter, I now reply – I’m listening to Tidal, to Spotify and Apple, to YouTube Music, as though that is the one act, taking all music by whoever and whatever into its corporate body, its deadpan creative presence.

This made me think: what is all this music actually for, now that we appear to own it all, even if just virtually, in our own personal cloud, which fast becomes our own personal Jesus? Simply pleasure, nostalgia, consolation, relaxation, collection, sharing, completing the turning of the millions of songs into playlists that show off your signalled taste, hipness and discrimination, the sentimentally paraded trajectory of your life. Is all this gathering of musical material the creation of a vast library that might eventually sink under its own weight, or, really, its weightlessness – or something more, something that might be threatened by the very thing that is actually making music so easily accessible?

It’s all so easy to find, but it is harder to pay attention to, at least as a collective – individual attention perhaps, if you have the will and need, but collectively the latest new thing is now destined to remain inside its own world, however popular and rated never likely to make an impact beyond its place. Even the most popular of pop music seems essentially a niche activity, a segment of pop culture, a portion of distraction, rather than the top of the bill. The idea of a teenage audience, which originally was the momentum behind pop music, the way out of a dreary environment, a tense domestic situation, the weirdness of the mind, has evolved, and teenagers, which becomes an age span stretching between, say, ten and forty or fifty, maybe a few years beyond, have different ways of fighting free of immediate restrictions, of generating personal space and possible independence.

Do we lose that sense of the greater purpose of music – once it is set inside the flat, if relentless and very helpful, music services – as this other language, this alien presence taking on the unknown, defending us against all kinds of threats, danger and tension? Will this near-monstrous availability of music, the over-engineered tethering of everything into one place, lead to stronger, more innovative music, and more awareness of its deeper powers, or weaken and break it up into mere patterns of fun, a bland, near-perfunctory amenity increasingly adrift from any rooted, evolving artistic, cultural or social context, except when the idea of ‘rebellion’, or resistance – the transmission of cool – is merely part of an inherited game plan, an established formula?

As much as there is now all music ready for us to quickly find, there is also the fact that it can easily go missing – the power can be turned off, the machines lost or broken, the playlists become narrower and narrower, inevitably marginalising the loftier, higher thinking, the bolder music, instead favouring music that is more ingenious product design, more zesty, zoned soundtrack to celebrity, to TikTok doodling, than challenging, visionary, reality-changing, life-altering sonic poetry.

Does it now become cut off from creative regeneration and new developments – no more indisputable masterpieces, no more real shocks to the system, or ruptures to the history – and simply reside inside a permanently open, well-lit store, a zoo, a static museum, a series of relics, anniversaries and greatest hits targeting shrinking communities stuck inside ever-multiplying and narrower aesthetic alcoves? Rather than being released by the streaming services, does music lose its freedom, and its freedom to be obscure and outlying, and become caged? Some parts of the zoo are visited a lot more than others, which start to become a little unlooked-after, a little overgrown, even sad.

The great music, the great songs, the bright, persuasive togetherness achieved by musicians and composers finding new ways to turn old music into new music has always, like the best art, helped us adapt to new ideas, to fundamental change, encouraged us to keep our wits about us, prepare for love and death, supplying clues about how to defend ourselves from the damaging consequences of those environmental, emotional and existential changes that result from often unregulated technological and economic advancements.

Art is ultimately what helps us deal with the turbulent, sometimes toxic force of change; it explains it, predicts it, contains it, is a necessary antidote to the rampaging forces of those claiming power, dictating morals, reducing freedom, setting us apart and shredding truth and beauty. It is the most vital corrective alternative to the self-generating entrepreneurial energy that generally exploits technological change and natural disaster, mostly to make money and take control of our interests. It is a mysterious, at best uncontrollable form of opposition to those who use the developments in technology to herd us into obedient, pacified communities whose sole function is ultimately to consume and download and disappear into a kind of censored, gated territory of lifestyle ease, merciless entertainment and moral indifference, until there’s nothing left of what once seemed inviolably human.

At this point, in the middle of the sort of changes that will either end us or profoundly transform us, even replace us, there is an extraordinary, fast-evolving need for music, as an unclassifiable symbol of otherness and artistic endeavour, as a method of communicating thought about the vastness of the cosmos, the glory of love, the wonder of existence, the nature of our minds, the dreams of humans, which music is a mirror of, a maker of, beyond words and logic, and temporary, distracting societal pressure and overstimulating fashionable trends. As someone trained in the elastic, eccentric arts of rock criticism, where Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag, even J. G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick were as much an influence as Nik Cohn, Joan Didion, Richard Meltzer, Patti Smith and Lester Bangs, I still have these kind of thoughts, and they still seem important – but with the knowledge that they now are drowning in a world of instant ratings, Amazon reviews (no offence), perky spirit raising and scrappy, aggrieved, populist shouting.

Something about the fact that obscure, difficult music is now within easy reach – with a few touches on your phone and the ability to fund the many subscriptions – is fantastic, but it also makes me sad. It’s progress, and you can never deny that, unless you’re not thinking very deeply, but it’s also a regression, possibly even a betrayal of all that imagination and ambition that led to the music existing in the first place, something that makes you think about what happens if music goes missing. Put into one engineered space, as it is being, a pasted-together lump sum of all musical achievement, it can easily disappear. When the power is turned off, or the batteries run out, or the terms of agreement change, or it just becomes one big musical mountain where millions of thoughts become just the one. Something is stored there, but it might be forgotten what it is, or what the point of it is.

Because of YouTube Music, Apple, Tidal, Amazon and Spotify, I currently have the best, biggest collection of music I have ever had, enough to take me to the end of time, through dozens of lifetimes, but increasingly it only exists as a technological illusion, a playlist containing playlists containing virtual remnants of records stored in the suspiciously convenient make-believe clouds, a collective memory of something that is fast becoming vague and somehow even quiet, or the subject of mere gossip. It’s tantalising – hearing musically everything if you fancy it, and have the time, but knowing at any minute it could all be knocked down and taken away, my whole collection collapsing into the abyss. Here, but not here. Like me, I guess. Maybe this was how it was always meant to be, where it was all leading.

Perhaps, via streaming, music has only just begun. The streaming system is a protective vessel carrying music into the future, beyond whatever terribly unprecedented and life-threatening problems suddenly appear, where it will reconfigure itself in ways that will make the current streaming technology seem primitive. As always, to keep us sane, smart and positive in the middle of trying, relentlessly chaotic times where considered thought is taking a battering, music is going somewhere else, becoming something else, using whatever technology is available to fill our minds with the efforts, ingenuity and dreams of other hopeful minds. Even inside the machine, as the world falters, up in that mysterious cloud, pressed into a new kind of service, music keeps going. It keeps going for as long as we need it, not even stopping when we stop.

I can’t be sure when I started writing or when I started using Google, and I can’t pin down exactly when it was that I first thought about a final piece of music, the emergence of this anticipation, or apprehension, of my coming musical end, but slowly the idea started to grow on me. I suppose, as certain personal fixtures and fittings, certain faculties, started to shut down, it was something, an energy, or a nagging doubt, or a strange form of planning ahead, that was expanding and becoming something new. A part of me that was evolving, as I became intensely aware of how my life was leading to a very interesting climax. Once, despite the regular panic attacks, I didn’t really believe it was actually going to happen. Not to me. After all, I was so filled with music, which by its very nature is so filled with life, showing no signs, as it happens, of ever coming to an end.

A last piece of music was nothing that I would have thought about early on in my life, as part of how and why I was listening to music, as fan and critic, enthusiastic amateur becoming zealous professional, the sheer pleasure of it all becoming entangled with curiosity and analysis and the sense of making a map that I would never finish. Not least because I still kept setting myself challenges. Once one part of the map seemed complete, to my satisfaction, I set out to draw another part. There would always be new territories to explore.

These new thoughts formed sometime in that rapid acceleration between fifty and sixty, as it became increasingly clear that there was an insurmountable distance between my age now and when I was listening to music as a teenager and the pseudo-something twenty-something years that followed. My approach to what music is, and what it means to me, my own understanding of its history and its relationship to reality, and what was beyond reality, had entered a very different place. I couldn’t possibly have the same relationship with the music I had first loved as a kid, becoming a teenager, becoming a professional music journalist paid to have a form of expertise about the newest, brightest pop music.

Perhaps, in the end, I needed something new to write about, and something new to look forward to, even if what I was looking forward to was in fact the end of everything, or at least the end of me, and my musical taste, my musical story. I was needing a new country, or planet, a whole other history, to visit.

I was still writing professionally about music – and of course this tended to be rock and pop, in the old sense of ‘file under pop’, so that it could mean everything from Faust to Donny Hathaway, Autechre to Fiona Apple, Zappa to Abra, and was beginning to mean more obituaries – but mostly this writing was less and less for publications and more for the artists themselves. A certain amount of freedom was still allowed when you wrote liner notes, books and biographies commissioned by the artists, who were still looking for the kind of writing about music that once performed a function that could even be called creative and collaborative in terms of contributing to the context their music existed within. The sort of writing about music that helped musicians understand their own music more than a stark star rating or a capsule review ever did.

Streaming had begun to conceive of ways to nostalgically recreate the context of rock and pop music from the vinyl and compact-disc era – the idea of the new release as an event, sleeves, charts, photography, criticism, music-paper interviews, which is how your life and image as a musician could be measured and responded to – but essentially was responsible for its destruction, because it treated music as product, as content, not necessarily inspiration.

A certain momentum kept things going, up to a point, as if things were the same as the old days, but instead created a limbo. Music had been put into a new realm that was both dynamic and static. It had been changed, but it was not at all clear into what.

A true new context for popular music was not yet created and maybe it couldn’t be; the sites with robotic orderliness were an oddly retrospective muddle of the systems, schedules, styles, sequences and shapes of the lingering past, all piled into one place, and the new shapeless, timeless new world, which was its own context, separated from the outside world that once required and supplied the context – effectively, the meaning, which, whether you were bothered about that or not, created the overall cultural excitement that lifted rock, soul, pop above being simply about the music and, increasingly, the award ceremonies.

Streaming, I decided, once that other, outside-world stuff was eradicated, pulled everything down to being just about the music, and in making all music equal, whatever its style, or historical place, or genre, or commercialism, or obscurity, its position in the canon as classic, cult or hit, it all became the same. From the same place, from the same time.

Essentially, it was the beginning of a new musical era, and inheriting my own instincts about how to make sense of music as an art form and as a cultural energy, I felt that it gave me some new opportunities to write about music as a going concern, where the history wasn’t crashing into over-abundance and a tangled mass of timelines but entering an extraordinary, unprecedented transformation. The writer, I hoped, perhaps vainly, might still have a role in working out what all this would be, and what it could mean. The capacity for interpretation, courtesy of the vibrant imagination, hadn’t completely broken down, beaten back by all this automation and mediatisation, all this unstoppable assistance and relentless guidance. Here was a new kind of psychic space made up of music. The music was for sale, but in a completely new kind of way, and it was also on show in a completely new kind of way. It was part of a very different way of living that seemed to require a very different way of thinking.

Habits picked up in the 1970s and 1980s meant my writing as a critic for the Sunday Telegraph and as a columnist for the Observer Music Monthly in the first decade of the twenty-first century seemed a little preoccupied with where music, as an art form, entertainment and/or business, was heading now that there was so much of it, and the context had