Obsessive about the tonic

[kernelbogey]

I have an obsessive habit: if I have to turn a piece of music off in mid-flow - especially if I know the piece - I have to wait until the end of a phrase, preferably the return to the tonic. This happens most frequently when I have to get out of the car. Do others share this obsession? Or am I bonkers?

[vinteuil]

... you are not alone. Me too.

And I remember my delight as a teenager when reading a John Wyndham - I think The Midwich Cuckoos - when the central character calls on the scientist?/doctor? who is listening to Bach - and who shushes him until the end of the movement... something along the lines of 'I always like to let him finish his argument'.

I'm testing my memory here - I haven't looked at it for some forty-five years, but it made an impression...

[Serial_Apologist]

I have an obsessive habit: if I have to turn a piece of music off in mid-flow - especially if I know the piece - I have to wait until the end of a phrase, preferably the return to the tonic. This happens most frequently when I have to get out of the car. Do others share this obsession? Or am I bonkers?

What if the music is atonal???

[Stillhomewardbound]

You're no more bonkers than I am. To snap the radio off would be as if to snatch the instrument out of the musicians hands.

Oh, and I always make CDs are positioned the right way up when returning them to their cases.

[PatrickOD]

Didn't they tell a similar story about Haydn - a hanging dominant seventh? Anyway, I used it to make a point in a class .... one time long ago. If the music had been atonal, I'm afraid old Haydn would have already expired in his bed.

[Serial_Apologist]

Maybe that's why the advocates of Socialist Realist music in the Soviet Union were against atonal music: a vote would have been needed for a resolution?

[vinteuil]

Didn't they tell a similar story about Haydn - a hanging dominant seventh?.

... I thought that was a story about the young Mozart??

[PatrickOD]

vinteul, please don't complicate matters. I think I got away with it at the time.

[kernelbogey]

What if the music is atonal???

If I were listening to atonal music it certainly wouldn't be in the car....

[Angle]

... and if listening to a play, never mid-sentence, rarely mid-scene but always, the very second I hear the first hint of Barwick Green.

[Pilchardman]

I wait until I hear a seventh.

[ahinton]

Obsessive about the tonic? Only to the extent that I don't at all care for neat gin.

A lemon of an answer, I readily admit...