Time sink!

Here is a rather cool website that helped me procrastinate for hours on end during last year when I was supposed to be writing (what? procrastination is an integral part of any worthwhile pursuit). It’s sort of a free-form interactive map of musical discovery based on how you’re feeling at the moment, which is a pretty good way to spend a few hours, I think.

I’ve found that, whenever I’m focusing my attention intensely on one particular area or genre of music, I’m gripped by the urge to listen to something completely different. When I was studying classical music and opera, I was a voracious consumer of 80s pop. Really, it wasn’t that uncommon. Very few people I knew in the music department seemed to spend their free time listening to the music they had spent so much time and money to understand. Then, of course, I moved to England to study 80s pop, and suddenly all I wanted to hear were lieder and sonatas (and arias, polonaises, mazurkas, fugues and, well, you get the idea). Lord knows what will happen when I finally start working on a PhD. Maybe I’ll study reggaeton and only listen to glockenspiel music. Now that would be intense.