Unexpected reactions to music

[EdgeleyRob]

Tried to listen on I player.
Had to give up as it was making me feel quite anxious to the point of feeling unwell.
This happens,albeit very rarely,with a few pieces but never before with Turangalila.
The last time it was Carmina Burana IIRC.
It's all very strange.
Anyone else sometimes have an extreme adverse reaction to music ?

Foulds: Three Mantras was brilliant btw

I should add that I often react OTT to a lot of my favourite music,I've mentioned this many times on here.
Sometimes I can't function for a short while after listening such is the effect of the music,but always in a good way,if that makes sense.
This Turangalila was something quite different.
I've listened to and enjoyed the Rattle recording many times without being aware of any extreme emotional pull.
I'm having difficulty putting this into words but as with Jayne's Mahler 6 experience,I was feeling dizzy and sick and could not continue listening,it just didn't feel right.
The power of music eh,how can it do this ?

[Roehre]

I should add that I often react OTT to a lot of my favourite music,I've mentioned this many times on here.
Sometimes I can't function for a short while after listening such is the effect of the music,but always in a good way,if that makes sense.
This Turangalila was something quite different.
I've listened to and enjoyed the Rattle recording many times without being aware of any extreme emotional pull.
I'm having difficulty putting this into words but as with Jayne's Mahler 6 experience,I was feeling dizzy and sick and could not continue listening,it just didn't feel right.
The power of music eh,how can it do this ?

That happens to me (with a whole variety of music - from the middle ages upto the present day, very small to very large forces involved) with some regularity too. In my experience this effect not necessarily coincides with "great" performances or recordings.
Is this your experience too, EG?

[EdgeleyRob]

That happens to me (with a whole variety of music - from the middle ages upto the present day, very small to very large forces involved) with some regularity too. In my experience this effect not necessarily coincides with "great" performances or recordings.
Is this your experience too, EG?

Hi Roehre.

Yes it's not necessarily the quality of the performance I think,it's the music itself

Extreme 'good' reactions happen very often,mostly with English music but this is not always the case.
It also happens with DSCH,Mendelssohn and increasingly Weinberg and Bach.

Extreme 'bad' reactions are very rare for me.
I tried to listen to a cd of Carmina Burana a couple of years ago.
From the first note I felt very uncomfortable,difficult to pin down why,maybe as if I was being shouted at,after a couple of minutes I had a splitting headache and had to switch it off.

And then there's Mahler.
A composer I love,but go through phases of being unable to listen,I'm in such a phase now.
It's as if I'm unable to breathe when listening,and yet I know that in the near future I will not be able to get enough of his music.

It must be something to do subconsciously with my state of mind at the time of listening I suppose,who knows ?

Analyse that !

Apologies,I seem to be rambling and hijacking the thread.

[kernelbogey]

From the Turangalila thread:

[...] Yes it's not necessarily the quality of the performance I think,it's the music itself[...]

Extreme 'good' reactions happen very often,mostly with English music[...]

Extreme 'bad' reactions are very rare for me[...]

I tried to listen to a cd of Carmina Burana a couple of years ago.... From the first note I felt very uncomfortable,difficult to pin down why,maybe as if I was being shouted at,after a couple of minutes I had a splitting headache and had to switch it off[...]

And then there's Mahler.... A composer I love,but go through phases of being unable to listen,I'm in such a phase now.
It's as if I'm unable to breathe when listening,and yet I know that in the near future I will not be able to get enough of his music[...]
It must be something to do subconsciously with my state of mind at the time of listening I suppose,who knows[...] ?
Analyse that...!

Apologies,I seem to be rambling and hijacking the thread.

I'm intrigued by these last few posts. I suggest a new thread, away from the Proms: 'Unexpected reactions to music'?

I have a related topic which I could include. I'm mentally, provisionally labelling it 'The musical desert': a recent, mostly voluntary - but partially unconsciously willed - refusal to listen to any music for several weeks.

[cloughie]

From the Turangalila thread:

I'm intrigued by these last few posts. I suggest a new thread, away from the Proms: 'Unexpected reactions to music'?

I have a related topic which I could include. I'm mentally, provisionally labelling it 'The musical desert': a recent, mostly voluntary - but partially unconsciously willed - refusal to listen to any music for several weeks.

I would link three things:
1 Those works that I would like to 'crack' but have not after years of thinking about and having a try at. Turangalila and Miles Davis' Bitches Brew are two such for me.
2 Those works which I used to like but don't want to listen to anymore.
3 As a choir member every now and again I feel I could do with a complete break from formal singing but fear I will miss it if I do.

[Beef Oven!]

To listen to and thoroughly take in!

What is it that you'd be thoroughly taking in? I suspect that in liking BB & T, I wouldn't be doing anything thoroughly, just listening and bloody enjoying it. What else are you doing? I want to know, so maybe I can have a go at it, too!!

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

... but really our ... mural activities are unique.

Ah! You've seen my wallpaper, then?

[Beef Oven!]

Amended to remove the Pink Floyd effect!

Michael Jackson, now?

[cloughie]

Unexpected reactions to music

Please will you transfer the appropriate items from the Turrang thread to this please.

[kernelbogey]

In my case I am curious about having wandered into a music-free desert recently. Various contingent stressors seem to underlie this. I found myself simply unwilling, over the last several months, to listen to music - I mean to listen with full attention - and even found it hard to have music on in the background. Another way of putting this is that I found, for a while, that music was simply too invasive of my psyche, which demanded to be left to itself in peace.

I don’t anyway listen to much Radio 4, have cut back on listening to news broadcasts - simply too depressing - so much of my life has been conducted over recent months in silence, other than when with others for some specific reason.

A major stressor has now been resolved and I find myself once more able to listen with enjoyment and to comment here on those experiences. So I believe my experience to be stress-related.

(Thanks to EdgeleyRob for starting the thread.)

[kernelbogey]

From the Turangalila thread:

Yes... as I've recounted here before, I had to leave the hall during a Mahler 6, here in Liverpool with Gerard Schwarz a few years ago. By the start of the finale, I felt sick and dizzy, with a piercing headache, and my heart was racing. I'd been unable to withdraw from an intense involvement with every note of the piece, but the andante, placed third, gave me little respite - that doomed yearning for something beyond was too much. So the intro to the finale felt overpoweringly dark and foreboding - in a terrible, personal way far beyond the music itself....

I left the hall and sat, gloomily, in the bar. The next day I regretted terribly not having witnessed the finale, the hammer blows, the vast waves of sound, the intensity of experience - I loved it the more deeply. Finally I faced the piece again, some seven years later in 2010, with Petrenko. I could scarcely make it to my seat, I was so faint, so nervous. But I got through it, oh yes. I rode with each wave of the finale's power, at one with the sweep of each peak, each flooding trough, at one with the rhythm of my heart, my breathing...

The piece is probably over for me now. But

Never mind
Never mind
I live the life
I left behind

(Leonard Cohen)

[jayne lee wilson]

In my case I am curious about having wandered into a music-free desert recently. Various contingent stressors seem to underlie this. I found myself simply unwilling, over the last several months, to listen to music - I mean to listen with full attention - and even found it hard to have music on in the background. Another way of putting this is that I found, for a while, that music was simply too invasive of my psyche, which demanded to be left to itself in peace.

I don’t anyway listen to much Radio 4, have cut back on listening to news broadcasts - simply too depressing - so much of my life has been conducted over recent months in silence, other than when with others for some specific reason.

A major stressor has now been resolved and I find myself once more able to listen with enjoyment and to comment here on those experiences. So I believe my experience to be stress-related.

(Thanks to EdgeleyRob for starting the thread.)

I can identify with much of this (although I'm too much of a current affairs junkie to leave that out...). With music, at times of deepest stress or pain, it can often seem either too happy or too sad... so sometimes, silence is the best music. Or at least, that "silence" which is composed of soft or distant sounds - the sea from two miles inland, cars on wet roads, the rumblings of docklands, wind and rain in trees...

[Keraulophone]

I have experienced similarly overwhelming emotional responses, but mainly in the opera house when witnessing one's own life and loves being reflected directly back from the stage, the end of Act 1 of Rosenkavalier being a case in point.

Otherwise, it may happen when actually performing certain pieces. Singing 'et cum Lazaro quondam paupere æternam habeas requiem', the last line of In Paradisum from the (Duruflé or Fauré) Requiem Mass, almost always gets me going, especially if it's commemorating someone I knew, such as our former Head Chorister Staff Sergeant Olaf Schmid, the bomb disposal expert killed shortly before he was due home from Afghanistan. Purcell's Hear my Prayer, O Lord, probably the surviving fragment of a longer piece (several blank pages follow in the m/s), lasts only around 2'30 but is of such plangency and searing intensity that it usually causes goosebumps at its cathartic climax on the massive discord of the penultimate bar.

(Although the opera experiences were 'unexpected reactions', emotional outpourings at funerals are, of course, to be expected, with or without music - so OT, I'm afraid!)

[Serial_Apologist]

In my case I am curious about having wandered into a music-free desert recently. Various contingent stressors seem to underlie this. I found myself simply unwilling, over the last several months, to listen to music - I mean to listen with full attention - and even found it hard to have music on in the background. Another way of putting this is that I found, for a while, that music was simply too invasive of my psyche, which demanded to be left to itself in peace.

I don’t anyway listen to much Radio 4, have cut back on listening to news broadcasts - simply too depressing - so much of my life has been conducted over recent months in silence, other than when with others for some specific reason.

A major stressor has now been resolved and I find myself once more able to listen with enjoyment and to comment here on those experiences. So I believe my experience to be stress-related.

(Thanks to EdgeleyRob for starting the thread.)

A bereavement, KB? I ask, having myself had this experience.

[kernelbogey]

A bereavement, KB? I ask, having myself had this experience.

In fact, not in this case, although you make a perfectly reasonable assumption. (My experience of bereavement in the past is a little different; and I know it can be a lonely place.)

A stressful situation - I will keep it private at present - but certainly involving a potential loss.

Music has power to connect us with deep feeling. Sometimes we don't want to be connected to it.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, having researched what she called the 'Stages of Bereavement', identified the common experience of denial - 'This cannot be happening to me'.

Speaking entirely personally of my 'Music Free Desert', I suspect that I couldn't tolerate being provoked by music, into direct confrontation with the depth of my fellings.

Oddly, in the past (and perhaps that's the clue) I have used music, e.g. Mahler 5, to connect with deep feeling in a more extreme manner than I other wise might have. (This needs more thought!)