Who Doesn’t Like Music? Nabokov, For Starters

In his memoir Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov reflected: “Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succes­sion of more or less irritating sounds.”

The furor over Lolita may have died down, but this confes­sion still has the power to shock. Did the man just say he doesn’t like music? That’s not a matter of preference, such as not caring for sports or pets; it’s a pathological condition.

Accordingly, it’s been given one of those Greek-derived diag­nostic labels that allow us to imagine we’ve established a scientific truth rather than merely invented a term: “musical anhedonia.”

And it gets worse: you might have “congenital amusia” (no laughing matter). That’s when, “despite the universality of music,” you find yourself in that “minority of individuals” who, accord­ing to The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Brain, “present with very specific musical deficits that cannot be attributed to a gen­eral auditory dysfunction, intellectual disability, or a lack of mu­sical exposure.”†

In other words, there are people who don’t get on with music even though they’re not deaf, stupid or ignorant.

Musical anhedonics are thought to account for up to 5 percent of the world’s population. (But how could neuroscientists pos­sibly know that? And if it’s true, that would be…erm…almost four hundred million people!)

The syndrome is often discussed in the same articles that pon­der the mysteries of autism. The subtext is that normal people feel and react in certain ways (e.g. laughing at the “right” mo­ments, getting chills when they hear “sublime” sounds), and that abnormal people—the autists, the anhedonics—don’t.

As someone who is “on the spectrum,” I do understand what it’s like to have a brain that functions differently from other peo­ple’s. Does this mean that something has “gone wrong” with me? Respect for neurodivergence is all very well, but not all differences are desirable. There is such a thing as a glitch on the human assembly line—glitches that result in serious problems like blindness, paralysis, missing limbs, intellectual impairment.

Yet I’m also mindful that notions of normalcy are used by dominant social groups to maintain control and to organize systems in ways that suit them. Historically, it’s a scarily short time ago that homosexuality was classified a disease and femi­nism was seen as a disorder that might require surgery. How judgmentally normative is a “normal” relationship with music?

Strikingly, a “musical anhedonic” who offered himself for study at Boston’s Northeastern University told one of the pro­fessors that admitting to not liking music was rather like coming out as gay. The “problem” was not his relationship with music per se, but his relationship with the normal people who couldn’t tolerate him being different. The researchers didn’t seem very interested in this social alarm bell. Instead, they used biomedical imaging to study the auditory regions of his cerebrum.

Another thing the researchers do is measure what happens to the tiny hairs on an anhedonic’s arm, noting when those der­mal filaments fail to respond as they should. I can’t help won­dering what would happen if you were someone who hadn’t yet discovered the music you could love. What if your soul was holding out for sub-Saharan Gnawa or ancient Tuscan dances, which you weren’t destined to hear until years later, and instead the researchers played you Bach and The Beatles and U2 and Charlie Parker and Van Halen and finally Whitney Houston, and then pronounced you as malfunctioning because your arm hairs didn’t budge during “I Will Always Love You”?

*

What intrigues me about musical anhedonia, and the 5 percent of the human population who supposedly suffer from it, is the possibility—indeed, the likelihood—that 5 percent is an under­estimate. I strongly suspect there are a lot more than four hun­dred million people out there who would rather opt out.

The analogy with coming out as gay is useful here. We know there are lots of homosexuals around, because faking one’s sex­uality is so difficult to sustain. Gay people who try to live as straights keep colliding with their desires, over and over, and those collisions have consequences, whereas the absence of a love for music can be much more easily managed. The music lovers assume you’re no different from them and, to keep the peace, you let them believe that. You learn to talk the talk of music-love.

In private, you’re free to do without the stuff, and doing without it doesn’t hurt. In public, you will often be assailed by those unwanted sounds, but, as one anhedonic put it (uncon­sciously echoing Nabokov), “music sits in an odd spot halfway between boring and distracting.”

Being bored or distracted is hardly hellish torture. You could cope with it all your life and never shed a tear or cause a scene.

*

The real problem, then, is other people.

In our society it is considered shameful not to appreciate music. By “our society,” I mean those who regard themselves as part of Culture, an amorphous elite anyone can join. In Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, noble Lorenzo mistrusts “the man that hath no music in himself,” the man who is not “moved with concord of sweet sounds,”  while Friedrich Nietzsche declared that “without music, life would be a mistake.”

Closer to our own age, Billy Joel described music as “an explosive expression of humanity. It’s something we are all touched by. No matter what culture you’re from, everyone loves music.”

The trouble with these declarations of art’s universal appeal is that they are made by artists, and they resonate with the people who already like art, or who trust Billy Joel to know an explosive expression of humanity when he sees one. The self-appointed elite speak for us all, and never hear the silence from those who don’t share their values.

How many humans feel that without music, life would be a mistake? Not as many as Friedrich, Will and Billy would like to think. A Melody Maker journalist once declared that listening to Björk was “as essential as breathing,” but biological and histori­cal evidence suggests that breathing is of unrivaled importance, followed by eating, drinking and sleeping.

*

I don’t doubt that for some listeners, music delivers profound, transcendent experiences. It does it for me, and probably for you, too.

But music is also tremendously overhyped. Every day, heaps and heaps of superlatives are shoveled onto it by people who, in truth, did not feel what their words tell you they felt. They heard a record/went to a concert and had a pleasant time, whereupon they tell you that their mind exploded into a million iridescent fragments, propelled around the cosmos on waves of dervish ec­stasy. Or they declare that they would rather gnaw off their own arm than have to listen to a certain song again. Really? Their own arm? Gnawed off? Music, even more than the visual arts or Literature, seems to give people a license to bullshit.

No journalist would dare to say that if you don’t love model trains, T. S. Eliot, jogging or Star Wars, you must be clinically dead. They feel free to say it about your failure to adore their favorite sounds.

This book will not add more hype to the landfill. Let’s look at the world as it really works. Music has its place, and for many people that place is small.

I’m not referring to the 5 percent, or whatever the number is, who are willing to let scientists study their arm hairs to es­tablish the severity of their musical anhedonia.

No, this is about the ordinary folks who wish the restaurant wouldn’t play music while they’re eating, the person who hates the way her flatmate switches the radio on as soon as she wakes up, the person who nods with feigned approval when his pals enthuse about a forthcoming concert that he has not the faint­est desire to attend, the tourists who return from an overseas adventure unable to recall anything they heard, the driver who has the car radio tuned to talk shows and the news, the rambler who explores the woods all day, feeling no need for any musi­cal accompaniment to that activity.

It’s about the unlucky souls who write in to online commu­nities like Mumsnet and Quora, shyly confessing that music does little or nothing for them, only to be shamed and over­whelmed by their music-worshipping peers who rave like a cho­rus of Lorenzos.

*

A lifetime of listening to how people relate to music has taught me that the love of music for its own sake is comparable to the love of cooking, gardening, antique furniture, animals, poetry and so on. Some people have it; a lot don’t.

And why should they? Our society’s sonic saturation is quite a recent development and may prove to be an abortive detour in human evolution. Our species managed to thrive through millions of years without multinational entertainment corpora­tions, YouTube and Spotify. In the distant past, there was simply a lot less music around. Music had its appointed role in rituals and ceremonies. It was an occasional treat, an occasional obliga­tion, a banquet once in a while; it was not a constant feed. Some people no doubt sang as they worked. Others were content with the rhythm of their carpentry, or walked to the well in silence, hearing only the tread of their feet on the earth and the sloshing of their bucket. Unaccompanied silence was normal.

Capitalism has changed that landscape. What were once lux­uries are now considered basics, what was once communal is now atomized, what was once functional is now a superfluous add-on, and what were once deliberate commitments are now barely noticed ephemera supplied through invisible pipelines from everywhere and nowhere. There’s a glut of artistic product. We have the fruits of our civilization coming out of our ears. It’s not even a matter of seeking them out anymore, of foraging for the good stuff. Art is in the air, plentiful as oxygen, and we are under pressure to inhale deeply.

*

Just because there’s an excess of art, however, doesn’t mean everyone is lovin’ it.

A few people love music, yes.

Others quite enjoy it in certain moods.

Others can take or leave it.

Others would rather leave it.

Yet everybody wants to be accepted as a member of society. And our society has decided that not caring for music is unac­ceptable.

How to get around that?

*

“I read this scary statistic from America,” Peter Gabriel told Roll­ing Stone in 1987, just after So had hit pay dirt, “that the average album is played 1.2 times. It’s an impulse buy, or something to impress a girlfriend, part of the artillery with which you an­nounce yourself to the world.”

For someone like Gabriel, an artist to the marrow, that statistic must indeed have been scary. But it is probably true. The major­ity of people have little use for music purely as an aesthetic prop­osition. But they do need to bond with their friends, colleagues, neighbors and anyone else who might require impressing.

Almost every product in the capitalist marketplace is adver­tised in the same way—by telling the purchaser that if they have this thing, they will appear to be a particular sort of person in the eyes of others (and thereby in their own eyes as well). Music is as much a part of this artillery as clothing, gadgets, decor, books, hairstyle and so on.

What happened to Peter Gabriel, when he finally hit the “big time” in America, was that his album So was selected by the then-dominant culture as an object that sophisticated, up-to-date people should own. So, So was bought by millions of people.

I’m confident that if I played each of those millions of people the first thirty seconds of the opening track, “Red Rain,” the vast majority of them would be stumped as to what album it was from, or even if they’d ever heard it before. They would rec­ognize “Sledgehammer” because it was programmed for “high rotation” on the radio and is still played on oldies stations today. This means that even if they haven’t played their own copy for years (which will almost certainly be the case), they will have heard it more recently at the supermarket or in the car or while having a pee in a restaurant loo.

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Excerpted from Listen: On Music, Sound and Us by Michel Faber © 2023 by Michel Faber, used with permission from HarperCollins/Hanover Square Press.