Music is the food of work

Apologies to Will Shakespeare, but for me, music is the food of work (and life), but not love as such. I don't watch scheduled broadcast TV - for one thing, it's hard to do that whilst writing notes or sitting at the computer and concentrate properly on both, for another, I find the TV isn't conducive to thinking. Don't get me wrong, this isn't intellectual snobbery - I just can't think straight with a television switched on in the background - it seems to draw my attention far more than either the radio or a CD. So I listen to Classic FM - from when I get up at 5 am to the time I arrive at the office or the library (neither allow the accompaniment of the radio, alas), then again from the time I leave until about 8 pm in the evening. The fact that I prefer Classic FM to BBC Radio 3 will probably earn me some scowls or scorn - it's rather more populist or low-brow than R3. I happen to like it - it takes classical music seriously, without being too serious itself. Yes, it does often play the same piece over and over again - I got sick of the sound of Kennedy's first recording of Vivaldi's Four Seasons when it stayed in the Classic FM chart for months on end (but then I'm not as fond of violin music as I am of, say, piano or woodwind music). But they do play full length works during Nick Bailey's Evening Concerts (9 pm - midnight), and it's introduced me to dozens of composers and/or pieces to which I would never have otherwise listened - Gorecki's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, for example.

After 8 pm I tend to listen to CDs - Beethoven is one of my all time favourite composers - although Mozart's definitely grown on me over the last year or so (I'm very fond of his piano concertos, his woodwind works and his harp concertos), and I love listening to movie soundtracks: Master and Commander is on even as I type this... I've also got to confess to adoring Howard Shore's music for the 3 Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings films ! I actually got to hear the Lord of the Rings Symphony at the Royal Albert Hall last September - conducted by Howard and featuring the original recording artists. This was also my first experience of a live orchestra - and it nearly blew my mind ! I'm also very fond of Hans Zimmer's music for Gladiator and John Williams' music for lots of films (including the 3 Harry Potter films).

I confess, though, that quite often, the radio or a CD is on and I don't consciously listen to it - it acts as aural wallpaper whilst I read or write or type... I realise this will also lose me brownie points, but that's the way I work and listen, and I don't intend to apologise for it, because it's the way I work ! I do just sit and listen, however, if I go to a live concert - it would be discourteous to do otherwise, but it's definitely the case that music forms the background to much of my life, and I don't think it's doing me any harm not to consciously listen to it !