No Music Day: 2011
12 January 2011
Tomorrow is to be my personal and private No Music Day, well in fact most days in my life are no music days for me these days, as I have long since chosen not to have any means with which recorded music can be played in my home. But tomorrow is to be my No Music Day out of choice. It is the one that I chose some months ago, to be the day that I would attempt to focus my mind on certain topics and try and get whatever those thoughts might be down into my note book, but that is tomorrow, today is the first anniversary of the earthquake to hit Port-au-Prince in Haiti. More of that later.
As you may be aware, No Music Day was something that I launched publicly in 2005, with the website www.nomusicday.com. That No Music Day fell on the 21 November each year. And No Music Day was governed by a Five Year Plan. Thus the last of those No Music Days was on 21 November 2009.
Over those five years the idea of No Music Day attracted much media attention and in turn generated plenty public debate. There were many opportunities for me to explore in writing and interviews as to why I think we needed to have a No Music Day. It seemed that I had to explain several hundred times that it was not an anti music event, nor did I think that music used to be better than what it is now, and I did not have a problem with people choosing to listen to music where and however they wanted. And I did not think of other peoples listening habits as noise pollution. But, as I explained what seemed like several thousand times, No Music Day was a day we could use to think about our evolving relationship with music and what we want from it, instead of just accepting it.
People obviously wanted to know why I had chosen the 21 November to be No Music Day. And I would tell them that there was this lad I knew when I was a teenager, he was the drummer in a band called Saint Cecilia, they had a novelty record that got to number 12 in the charts, Leap Up And Down Wave Your Knickers In The Air produced by Jonathon King, they were the only band from Corby to ever have a hit. I thought it strange that a band should have a saint’s name as their band name. He told me that they had chosen the name because Saint Cecilia was the patron saint of music. It still didn’t make much sense to me then, but that was all back in 1971.
Over the decades, Saint Cecilia being the patron saint of music was one of those trivial facts that stayed in my mind. Thus when I started to wonder which day I should chose to have as a No Music Day, I thought it might be good to have it the day before Saint Cecilia’s Day, the day according the Catholic calendar, we celebrate and give thanks to God for having music. A sort of famine before the feast sort of thing. So I put Saint Cecilia into Google and discovered her saint’s day to be on the 22 November. Thus No Music Day would be on the 21st. Not that I wanted to give this No Music Day some sort of religious overtone you understand.
Back in 2005 before I had got the No Music Day website up, I had no real plans for what it should be. It had started in my imagination as a personal thing, something that I might just do on my own. But once I had written the statement that began:
ON NO MUSIC DAY
NO HYMNS WILL BE SUNG
NO RECORDS WILL BE PLAYED ON THE RADIO
I could not stop myself from wanting to get a website up, thus inviting others to join me in taking part in it. The statement got turned into one of my Penkiln Burn NOTICES and later a SCORE for The17
http://www.nomusicday.com/home.php
At around the same time as this I had been invited to do a billboard advert as an art piece in Liverpool. This billboard was at the entrance to one of the Mersey Tunnels. I used this opportunity to use the billboard to announce the launching of No Music Day. But I also liked the way that it linked into my memories of when I would drive through this tunnel with the radio on, this was back in the 70s or early 80s, and how the radio signal would fade and then fall silent as you entered the tunnel and then come back on when you drove out at the other end. Back then, I would have these fantasies when deep under the Mersey, that when I got out the tunnel at the other side, the music would not return and in fact all the music in the world would have disappeared. But as soon as we could have cassette players in cars or vans I have never been able to indulge in that fantasy in quite the same way.
Anyway back to the billboard, once it was done and up I thought it looked brilliant, even though I knew that the thousands who would drive past it for the month that is was up, would have no idea what it was about.