Earworms & Heartworms
I’m certainly not the first person to wonder how long before we just run out of new music. So I looked it up. Apparently the permutations of just one octave of eight notes can deliver 79 billion possible melodies. And if a hundred writers could each create one new melody a second, it would take them 248 years to run out of options. So we should be okay for a while.
In my early childhood, music reflected the mood of the time - the luxuries of peace and progress and hope. Three Blind Mice vied with the Bluebirds over Dover, some old man was a Dustman, Jesus was away in a manger, and all the Lovers were bewitched, bothered and bewildered - but All Things were generally Bright & Beautiful. Music oozed from school & Sunday-school, from random warbly relatives, and occasional scratchy outbursts from my dad’s old wind-up gramophone, but my favourite source was the constant ever-whistly transmission of the little bakelite kitchen wireless.
At three, I was taken to see Swan Lake at the Royal Ballet, which triggered a love for dramatic classical music for prancing & flouncing. Meanwhile, visits to the news cinemas brought the joy of Disney’s singing animals and dangerously soppy love-songs. The cinema also introduced the good old British rum-te-tumty tunes that accompanied the news stories, and then there was the ever-present dreary finale of the National Anthem - for which we had to stand still until the bitter end.
My young spongebrain absorbed and retained every word, every chord change, however age inappropriate. I would skip through the park singing “I'm wild again, big eyed again, a simpering, whimpering child again - be a witch, bothered and bewiddlered am I-eeeee …. Some enchan-ted evening You may see a stran-ger … I gotchu under my skeen, I gotchu deep in the harbour me .. “
We like harmony, we like rhythm, we like patterns, and we like a storyline. Music has a particular way of carving deep neural pathways, and not always by choice. From my teens, new and powerful pathways took hold, resonating with a nameless yearning, and establishing a whole feast of new neurological connections. Radio Luxembourg fed me the language of love & rejection, heartache, peer identity & revolution. Doris Day & Bing surrendered to Cliff, Elvis, the Beatles, Dusty, the Stones, Dylan and beyond ……
Certain harmonies and refrains somehow make a lightning strike of resonance with some inner tuning fork. Most of these intrusions are welcomed, subtly attaching themselves to a specific moment in our lives. Some become earworms, others heartworms. These days, I often fall prey to emotional tripwires - invariably in supermarkets, when my mind is occupied with the mundane, and my heart is unprepared, maybe dangling on my sleeve.
Yesterday, the kitchen radio was muttering the usual depressing litany of 6 o’clock news stories, when suddenly out rang an unlikely insertion, a powerful beacon from the past: Procul Harum’s Whiter Shade of Pale (on account of the passing of the singer thereof). And I at once brushed aside whatever menial task I was lost to, and rooted to the spot, I closed my eyes and let the music infuse this old heart with a big shot of my young and optimistic 1967 spirit, when we Skipped the Light Fandango and so much Life was waiting to be lived. I’m still humming along today.