One Hand Clapped & A Tree Fell...

Just been talking about the Christmas playlists we've all agreed to concoct for the day's festivities and lunch: the fairly obvious one of it's gotta be Christmas songs or anything starting with the initial 'C'. Which made us think of our own personal Desert Island Discs eight selections and ultimately - literally - our choices of music for our funerals [a bit morbid, that one]. On the choice of music for one's own send-off - which frankly seems pointless as one won't actually be around to hear any of it - I might opt for one of three things. Barber's "Adagio for Strings, Op. 11", to at least elicit genuine tears over something [the music] at the marking of my exit; anything by Einstürzende Neubauten to frankly scare the bejeezus out of any who would bother to to turn up to the event; or John Cage's 4'33": the diametrically opposed negation of the latter.

As to one's Desert Island Discs distillation, where to start? And when you do start, by God you keep adding and adding until you end up with "1001 Great Tunes To Hear Before You Die®". It's impossible, frankly, and so you then have to start curating on a more rational and pragmatic level: which eight would you be happiest to listen to day in day out, during your exile? My gut feeling is that the situation would turn into the worst case of ear-worm imaginable, and restricted to a painfully small eightfold palette. I can imagine that one's once-cherished music would rapidly become an instrument of torture, destroying that once dear relationship with music and tainting its associated memories with an overwhelming sense of loss. I could be wrong about that and I've no practical means of testing the idea, but the great thing about human memory is that we store all of our tunes in our heads, anyway. Music lives in the mind. So, my funeral tune? 4'33" by John Cage: four minutes, thirty-three seconds of silence; and I don't care who 'plays' it: I won't be around to notice what's not happening, anyway...