Music for Work

If like me you work in close proximity to colleagues who mutter to themselves, grunt over their (hourly) bag of crisps, or make inane telephone calls ... you probably already have invested in a pair of headphones and some CDs to play. But what constitutes good music for thinking to?

After weeding out most of the chill-out albums in my CD collection (too boring and repetitive), I have now ditched Cafe Del Mare for a more eclectic collection:

• Brian Eno - Ambient #4 - On Land
• Brian Eno - Ambient #1 - Music For Airports
• Steve Reich - Music for 18 Musicians
• Steve Reich - Variations for Winds, Strings and Keyboards
• Philip Glass - Jukebox
• Dave Brubeck - Gone with the Wind

I've been listening to Music for Airports and On Land since my teens in the mid-seventies: no matter how often I listen to them, they still stay fresh - you can ignore them 90% of the time, and then just catch the repeated phrase in a piece and go with the flow for a few minutes. Lovely if played reasonably softly (especially On Land, which really should be a film score for a wildlife film about quiet places).

Steve Reich is a different and more complex beast. The defining Steve Reich album is Music for 18 Musicians - one track long, 56 minutes of alternating mallet instruments, wind instruments, keyboards and voice. It's hypnotic. He's probably the best known minimalist composer. The sleeve notes for the Deutche Grammophon recording of Six Pianos and Variations suggest that his music is based on "slow transformations of miniscule motivic elements". He describes his style as resembling "pulling back a swing, releasing it slowly and observing it gradually come to rest ..." - when I listen to his music, I am reminded of the artist M.C. Escher.

Philip Glass - I find him good for short bursts (he always seems like a more up-front version of Reich to me) but I can't really focus on my work when I listen to him - too much insistence. If I'm coming out of my deep concentration period for a cup of coffee, Dave Brubeck's Georgia on Mind is perfect for contemplative study of the problem...