Never let it be said that your editor does anything to egg on the frenzy of consumerism that grips the country at this time every year. Ah, consumerism! The leaden thread that runs through so much of what we do nowadays… and what would the person whose birth we celebrate have made of it all? Was Nicodemus a high net worth client? Was the Sermon on the Mount an ethics system offer? Was Golgotha a marketing strategy gone wrong? As for music in such a culture:

Your loved ones will take pleasure in this product from one of the UK’s most successful industries. The sounds have been sourced from a diversity of ethically-selected genres which contain no IM (Intellectually Modified) ingredients, and have been crafted to eliminate hazardous materials such as ideas, surprises, wit, dissonance, rhythmic irregularities, tonal architecture and triple time. They are blended entirely from conceptually and emotionally neutralised ingredients such as repetition, cliché, stereotypes …

And so on. Well, you get the idea. Not that Christmas in the editorial household is going to see Webern-playing, fugue-singing, species counterpoint-writing and Schenker-analysing between the turkey and the plum duff. But there is one item which we hope readers will bear in mind when they are looking for things to fill those dangling stockings. It is a book by Dr Oliver Sacks, the eminent neurologist and author (The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat), who is also an enthusiastic amateur musician.

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain enters a field which is becoming crowded with dubious theorists and earnest cerebellum-slicers, who either veer towards the wonkily mystical or lurch towards the dully physical when trying to explain music’s effect on our nervous system. We will not be drawn on where we would place those who proclaim that music can be magic; though perhaps they could enrol at Hogwarts? And there is a special circle of the Inferno reserved for folk who advocate teaching music just because it is supposed to have some handy social and academic side-effects.

It is apparent that musicality is confined to humanity; yet it is far from clear what evolutionary advantage could have been derived from the capacity to combine sounds into patterns, and then to appreciate the result, or even to invest it with some kind of meaning. Despite the fact that music is abstract, and devoid of what philosophers term propositions, it has an extraordinary capacity to affect us. A cynic might suggest that it has a drug-like quality. This is precisely why most philosophers tend to distrust it. Plato evidently found it moving, which is why he would have banned most of it from his ideal Republic: it impedes rather than assists the rational thought processes expected of Philosopher-Kings. In considering its effects, there is no answer to the question ‘why?’, even though boffins might be able to say ‘how’ after using technology to prod various parts of the brain.

In this, perhaps, the problem posed by music is the microcosm of that much greater ‘why?’ Some suggest that the answer to this question is never to ask it (as Lord Irvine said about the West Lothian Question; but look what’s happened there). Yet meaning is what we all seek: as humans, we are programmed to do so, and will not rest without some kind of reply. Music, as much as anything, both embodies and succours that restless craving. And if the answer to the big question is ‘Behold, I tell you a mystery’, then we may be as well satisfied by that as we are by our very similar response to the enigma of music.

A Merry Christmas to all our readers!

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