I've had little time for culture today, but here's another of my little insights into the nature of the musical listening experience, to put alongside earlier postings of a similarly inconsequential sort such as this one.

My starting point is Solitaire (the electronic game that comes packaged with Windows), to which I am addicted. I'm not proud of this, nor am I desperately ashamed, and maybe "addicted" is a bit strong. I just find that from time to time I like to have a little session of Solitairing, and while doing this, I have made an interesting discovery. While playing Solitaire, I can actually listen, and listen properly, to classical music.

Contrast this with something like writing, even writing something as light in weight as this little piece. When I'm doing something like that, entire movements of volcanically wonderful music can go by without me paying any of it the smallest attention, and electrodes planted in my brain would, I am sure, prove this. But when I play Solitaire, the electrodes would be buzzing and swaying in time with even the gentlest and most unobtrusive music, such as the lesser little Beethoven piano sonata I listened to today, opus 14 no. 1.

Presumably this means that Solitaire has become automatic. I'm not getting any better at the game, not the way I play it, any more than some old man out jogging is getting any faster at long distance running. It's just that we like to do it, and from time to time I hear things from those who care for the elderly to the effect that my Solitaire inclinations are very probably good for me, rather than pointless. They keep the brain cells exercised, but without straining them too much. Solitairing means that my brain will last a little longer.

Nevertheless it is a very odd thing to watch myself placing a red ten on top of a black jack, while simultaneously appreciating the phrasing of the piano player in a piece of Beethoven. Asked to guess about such a thing, I would have said that the same part of the brain that plays Solitaire would be needed to listen to Beethoven. But, provided I play Solitaire in a suitably trancelike manner, it is not so. It is the Solitaire that "goes in one ear and out the other", rather than the music, even as my mouse hand continues to go through the proper Soliltaire motions. Odd.

UPDATE next day - August 27: I realise, thinking about it some more, that it goes further than this. Solitaire actually helps me to listen to classical music by being a substitute for concentration. One way to listen to classical music is ... to concentrate. This means preventing any other thoughts besides the music from entering your head. Solitaire does this automatically. It erects a mental barrier that stops me thinking about anything else, and thus I listen totally to the music. (That Solitaire puts me into a Solitaire trance obviously helps also.)

I noticed this just now. I had finished working on one of the postings above, and I decided to do a burst of Solitaire to recharge the batteries, or something, and immediately I started to listen to the music that I had on. Which previously I had been completely ignoring.

And what was that music? It was the final piece of the three Beethoven piano sonatas on the CD that I was also playing yesterday (Alfredo Perl on Arte Nova for those interested), and which I found on pause when I got up this morning. And whereas last night I had been paying close Solitaire-induced attention to Beethoven's Piano Sonatas No 9 in E major op. 14/1 and No. 10 in G major op. 14/2, this morning I had been ignoring Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 29 in B flat major op. 106, known as the "Hammerklavier", and the biggest, grandest and one of the most demanding (to player and listener alike) of the thirty two Beethoven piano sonatas. !!!