Musical Anhedonia - "I don't like music!"

 

Big Audio Dynamite’s 1986 hit ‘E=MC2’ begins with a spoken word intro that has always intrigued me. Someone mumbles something about playing a tune, and another voice, dismissive and sneering, answers “I don’t like music!” A sentiment like that stops you in your tracks and makes you think. I mean, who actually doesn’t like music?

Wassily Kandinsky, Impression III (Concert) 

Well, according to a study cited in a Michael Faber essay that I’ve just read, around 1 in 20 people do not actually like music. And when you give that statistic serious thought, that is a staggering number of people. I’m looking around my office now and there are around 60 people present. This raises the question, who are the 3 musical anhedonics - the term for someone who cannot derive pleasure from music - sitting in my midst?

The reason I has stumbled upon the Faber essay, was that I’d just reread one of Vladimir Nabokov’s short stories ‘Music’. All Nabokovians know that the writer didn’t actually like music. He had expounded on this in his wonderful autobiography Speak, Memory. Without fuss, and with the merest hint of apology, he analyses the problem. “Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds.”

That’s very much to the point, and other than a small aside, that ‘under certain emotional circumstances I can stand the spasms of a rich violin’ (I don’t image that Itzhak Perlman was aiming for ‘spasms’ when he began to bow), music is dismissed. Thus, when Nabokov actually entitles one of his stories ‘Music’ you are eager to glean more. 

Vladimir Nabokov, the unmusical lepidopterist 

‘Music’, as with so many of Nabokov’s short stories, is a dazzling vignette all about Victor, a luckless and loveless individual, and clearly a musical anhedonic. In the writer’s precise and honied prose, we learn of Victor’s late arrival at a salon, where the pianist Wolf is to perform. Victor clumsily finds his seat and Nabokov, taking Victor’s and our hand, elevates the prose, and relays what is being observed and, crucially, heard.  

A black forest of ascending notes, a slope, a gap, then a separate group of little trapezists in flight. Wolf had long, fair eyelashes; his translucent ears were of a delicate crimson hue; he struck the keys with extraordinary velocity and vigor and, in the lacquered depths of the open keyboard lid, the doubles of his hands were engaged in a ghostly, intricate, even somewhat clownish mimicry.

The guests are mocked, the music proceeds and Victor, unable to follow or appreciate the ‘barrier of sounds … high and impenetrable’, becomes bored. That is until he notices the presence of his ex-wife, a woman whom he is still deeply in love with. As the music continues, we learn the story of how Victor won and lost his wife. This seems - temporarily at least - to cause a shift in the way that Victor perceives the performance. 

Victor realized that the music, which before had seemed a narrow dungeon where, shackled together by the resonant sounds, they had been compelled to sit face-to-face some twenty feet apart, had actually been incredible bliss, a magic glass dome that had embraced and imprisoned him and her, had made it possible for him to breathe the same air as she; and now everything had been broken and scattered, she was disappearing through the door, Wolf had shut the piano, and the enchanting captivity could not be restored.

This much is clear. Victor can only appreciate the music through the prism of his wife and the misery wherein he is trapped - and perhaps only after the notes have ceased. There is still time for another salon guest to approach Victor and remark upon how our hapless anhedonic seemed bored and immune to the impact of the performance, only for Nabokov to skewer this man by indicating his own musical cluelessness through the ignorance of what it was that was being performed. 

Notwithstanding, that ‘the enchanting captivity could not be restored’ and, indeed, how that line conjures up something of Marcel Proust’s petite phrase from the Vinteuil Sonata, I don’t think we can say that Victor has enjoyed the music. Rather, he’s only found a solipsistic prism that has channelled his despair into something that carries an aesthetic weight. Is that then, perhaps, the rub? That the 1 in 20 think that they actually enjoy music, but what they are actually enjoying is music that chimes with their own experience? Music that ‘says something to me about my life’ to misquote Morrissey?

Gustav Klimt, Schubert at the Piano (1899) 

Not entirely. The waters here are too muddy. Music is the backdrop to almost everyone’s experience, and we do have a tendency to soundtrack our lives with it; and certainly in our adolescent years, when we are looking for the kind of songs that reflect back our own challenges.

Maybe a test can be found by asking potential anhedonics to evaluate those exceptionally rare pieces of music that come without baggage: to sit down in a quiet room and listen to Bach’s Goldberg Variations or the ‘Heiliger’ movement from Beethoven’s String Quartet No.15. These majestic works have the capacity to shut out the world, even - when listened amid utter stillness - the self. Indeed, part of me finds it hard to believe that Nabokov could listen to those pieces and feel so little. That said, he’s allowed his pass and we forgive him on the basis of what he could achieve with words (be damned, all those who dismiss him as a mere belletrist). He need feel no shame for his curious musical anhedonia.

And ‘shame’, for me, is the key to all of this. Shame is the barrier that prevents us from finding out who these musical anhedonics are. Who is going to actually admit to not liking music? Victor himself is embarrassed - even to himself - by his lack of understanding and pleasure. And it’s almost certain, that once you’ve weeded out a few provocateurs amongst your family and friend base, that nobody, outside of the confines of an anonymous questionnaire, is going to admit to disliking music. Give it a try though. Ask people around you if they are musical anhedonics, and see if you can discover the elusive 1 in 20.