Recently, my Maxima, faithful companion of almost seventeen
years, gave up its mechanical ghost (escaping towards the heavens, like steam
from a radiator), and departed this life, hopefully for a better world.
Dialing back the horsepower expectations, for an era and
region in which it’s impossible to drive fast anyway, I settled on a sensible
Civic, which (as though through influence of its very name) I had always
associated with courteous drivers.
Being brand-new, it had various electronic doodads I wouldn’t touch with
a barge-pole, but my wife loves them, so I have her that car, and took on the
one she bought, used, a few years ago.
Even at that rate, it has a CD drive but no cassette drive (the old
Maxima was the other way around).
Which means that the vast library of language tapes and the like, which
I constructed piecemeal over years, and (dutifully) used to listen to on the
way to work and back, are now obsolescent. So instead I listen to sacred music -- Thomas Thallis,
Palestrina, William Byrd, Josquin des Prés. Quite a change.
Coincidentally, at work, I finally acquired a “green”
machine with an internet connection, and thus am able to listen to a wider
selection from the same genres (focussing on performances by the Hilliard
Ensemble, Kings Singers, Thallis Scholars, and such) through headphones while working on the “grey” machine.
There was a time, some years back, when I listened only to
such fare, for religious reasons.
Whereas now, simply because I like the music, it is beautiful and
soothing, and does not distract from driving or from Saving American Lives. It is good for tranquility. Also, it goes will with driving more
slowly, and with extending courtesy to others who wish to merge.
~
For an earlier meditation on such musical monoculture, try this:
Imagine, indeed, a world in which,
for a thousand years, music just was
the Goldberg Variations – no other music existed, nor had anyone an idea of
composing any new. The score was thus like the text of the Mass – you
didn’t meddle with it.
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