Making It New

I've been doing a bit of an experiment over the last couple of weeks and it's proved surprisingly successful. The last time I tried to play the CDs from my collection of Tippett's symphonies on the stereo in the front room they were extremely uncooperative, to the point where I thought they'd been damaged just by being too old. I was aware, though, that the player itself might be to blame - this is the one we're thinking seriously, very seriously, of replacing. But the discs themselves didn't look too good on their surfaces.

So I thought I'd give them a go on the car stereo, just to see if they were worth saving. It also occurred to me that it would be interesting to try some rather radical sounds in the car. I tend, like most people, to think in terms of what makes good 'driving music' - I suppose U2 constitutes a fair sort of benchmark - and I'm pretty conservative in terms of what is likely to make it to the CD changer, though I'm highly eclectic in my tastes.

To my surprise the music has worked astonishingly well, and plays fine. I seem to be hearing it in new ways despite knowing it fairly well. The jazz influences on the 3rd Symphony jumped out at me today. I was hearing bits of Copland (of all people) in number two last week that had never registered before. And I've found myself inclined to play the stuff in the early morning when I'm usually not at all receptive to listening to music in the car. The 'fidgety' almost neurotic quality I tend to associate with Tippett's music (completely unfairly, it's just how I normally hear it) seems entirely right when I'm driving; no, it actually evaporates to be replaced by a sense of the assuredness of the music, that this is not in any way random, this is the way it has to be.

I suspect that if I heard the music in its real 'home', the concert hall, it would prove mind-blowing. But I'm not expecting the opportunity to make that happen will come any time soon.