I was listening to Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells yesterday. The original recording, the one that came out in 1973 when I was 18. It brought back a few memories, as you'd expect. I hadn't listened to it for a while and rather enjoyed revisiting it. Later in the day I came across the BBC Concert Orchestra performing the same work. And, quite unexpectedly, I found myself with tears in my eyes.
Not because I was sad. That's the curious thing. The original had brought on a bit of nostalgia, but this was different. The orchestral performance was simply magnificent, and as it went on I became more and more affected by it. By the end I was quite overwhelmed. A 71-year-old man sitting there crying at Tubular Bells. I can think of worse ways to spend an afternoon.
It isn't the first time this has happened. Barber's Adagio for Strings has always had that effect on me. There's something about the way it builds, that extraordinary rising melody, which I find almost unbearably moving. Holst's Mars can do it too, although that's hardly what you'd call a tender piece of music. Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor, Orff's O Fortuna, even Led Zeppelin's Whole Lotta Love and The Battle of Evermore, although the last two don't affect me quite so profoundly. Not exactly a collection you'd expect to find together on a playlist entitled Music to Have a Good Cry To.
And there's Riverdance. Watching those dancers moving in perfect synchronisation, the rhythm and precision of it, can bring a lump to my throat and sometimes tears to my eyes. I initially wondered whether it was simply the spectacle of people doing something extraordinarily well together. But military marching doesn't affect me in the slightest, and I'm not particularly keen on choirs, despite my fondness for O Fortuna. So that explanation doesn't really survive examination. I can admire an impressive display of precision without being emotionally affected by it. Something else is going on, although I'm damned if I know precisely what.
I had Barber's Adagio played at my father's funeral. There's a temptation to assume that the piece moves me because it reminds me of his death, but that's getting things entirely the wrong way round. I chose it because it had always affected me so profoundly. I knew what it could do to me, and I wanted it played because it expressed something I couldn't find the words for. I didn't need grief to make the music moving. I needed the music to give expression to grief. It has an additional personal significance now, of course, but that came afterwards.
What I find so extraordinary about all this is that we're talking about sound. Vibrations in the air. People scraping horsehair across strings, blowing through bits of plumbing or hitting things with sticks. And somehow, when these activities are organised in a particular way, they can provoke an emotional reaction that I struggle to describe, let alone explain. Nothing has actually happened to me. I'm sitting comfortably in my own home, perfectly content with life, and suddenly I'm crying because an orchestra is playing particularly well. It's faintly absurd when you think about it.
Of course, there are psychological and neurological explanations. There's something called frisson, and aesthetic awe is another recognised phenomenon. We can talk about the brain's reward systems and musical anticipation. All very interesting, and I'm not dismissing any of it. I generally want to know why things happen. But I do wonder whether we're a little too enthusiastic about putting names to human experiences, as though identifying the mechanism accounts for the whole thing. Knowing how a violin produces a note doesn't tell me why that note, in that particular piece of music, moves me so profoundly.
And why do we associate tears so readily with unhappiness? Someone sees you crying and assumes something must be wrong. But why shouldn't beauty or sheer artistic brilliance bring tears to someone's eyes? I wasn't distressed listening to Tubular Bells. Quite the opposite. I was enjoying it enormously. The tears were part of that enjoyment. We seem perfectly comfortable with people laughing for pleasure, but crying for pleasure apparently requires an explanation.
I'm not suggesting everyone should dissolve into tears at the opening bars of Barber's Adagio, or that there's something missing in those who don't. What affects one person can leave another entirely cold. I'm simply struck by the extraordinary capacity we have to be overwhelmed by something that, in purely physical terms, amounts to a series of organised noises.
But what I keep coming back to is that orchestral performance of Tubular Bells. I've known the music for more than fifty years. The original recording took me back to being 18. The orchestra didn't take me anywhere in particular. It just moved me, there and then, and rather more than I was expecting. At 71, I find that quite reassuring. There's still plenty out there capable of taking me by surprise.
I don't particularly need to understand why an orchestra can reduce me to tears. I'm simply rather pleased that it still can.
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