The Spin Doctor Europadisc's Weekly Column

I have an earworm problem. A tune has become stuck in my head, and I haven’t been able to get rid of it for weeks. Neuroscientists have a grown-up name for this problem – Involuntary Musical Imagery (INMI) – but ‘earworm’ feels more appropriate. The tune seems to insinuate its way into one's mind, wriggling around while stubbornly resisting all attempts to evict it. On the other hand, the scientific acronym is arguably most fitting: INMI = in me.

My particular earworm is a well-known passage from a very famous late-Romantic piano concerto, which shall remain nameless. Clearly, it’s a work I’ve heard in the past, even though I’m not a great fan (which makes its presence more annoying – although whether I’d feel any better about the incessant loop of a piece I did admire is questionable). But how it appeared so suddenly I’m at a loss to say. For once, I can’t blame my boss’s habit of whistling aloud his own earworms, thereby implanting them in the minds of others, whistling being currently discouraged in the workplace according to Covid protocols. (How, I wonder, has virtuoso whistler Roger Whittaker fared during lockdown? And – drifting off at a slight tangent – can it really be true that a spike in Swiss Covid cases was traced to a yodelling contest?)

Perhaps I had briefly read about the composer in question – uploading dozens of sales notes each day, ranging from Kapsberger to Kagel and well beyond, is bound to have some effect on the brain – or caught sight of an album cover (see last week's column), or heard a snippet on the radio. In any event, I needed to take swift action to clear the unwanted earworm from my mind. Apparently, engaging in puzzles or reading can help to reduce such instances of involuntary cognition, so I have a go at Wordle, but it doesn’t take up enough time (I manage the puzzle in four attempts, which is, Wordle tells me, ‘great’) and the earworm is still there, niggling away at me, when I finish.

Reading, then: my bedside reading at the moment is Malcolm Bradbury’s vicious satire of 1970s campus life, The History Man. And, sure enough, while I’m reading the earworm retreats for a while, and I’m swept away by the academic politics of the (fictitious) University of Watermouth, simultaneously hilariously dated and bitingly timeless. Yet, within minutes of putting the novel down, the earworm again rears its nasty little head and I’m once again engulfed by waves of late-Romantic schmaltz.

More radical action is called for. I try some ‘high-brow’ listening to counter the all-pervading sentimentality, starting with Bach fugues and Machaut motets, before calling in the big guns: Webern cantatas and Schoenberg’s rarely-performed but strangely compelling expressionist ‘drama with music’, Die glückliche Hand. All are effective for a short while, but for all their hugely engaging and complex detail they lack the metric regularity and melodic predictability of the target, and therefore stand little chance of dislodging it.

Maybe I’ve been barking up the wrong tree? I try going to the opposite extreme, something even more predictable, repetitious and banal than the earworm itself. And so I start humming to myself the theme tune of the children’s TV programme, The Magic Roundabout, one of those Ur-earworms that gets implanted in the brain at a very early stage of development (in my case during the mid-1960)s. I have high hopes for this strategy, but it has one serious flaw: the theme (composed, I discover, by Alain Legrand) is simply too short and repetitious to be a genuine earworm, which needs to be just developed enough in its length and melodic variety to gain a serious foothold among the little grey cells.

And so, I’m back to square one. Until... A couple of days ago, I found myself humming a Beethoven piano concerto - no.3 in C minor, and specifically the finale. With its regular periodicity and sharply defined melodic profile (those biting semitones framing a falling diminished seventh), it’s classic earworm material (if a little different from such popular culture contenders as ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, ‘Bad Romance’ and any number of Christmas chart-toppers): simultaneously hummable and toe-tapping, as so many Beethoven finales are, without compromising their musical integrity.

And so, once again – I have an earworm problem. The only way to get rid of one, it seems, is to acquire another. At least the one I now have is a piece I unreservedly admire, and moreover in a performance I love (Gilels and Szell with the Vienna Philharmonic, live at the 1969 Salzburg Festival –just a few years after The Magic Roundabout began). Perhaps I need to invest (money and time) in more novels? For now, though, the last movement of Beethoven's C minor Concerto goes round and round my head. Well, it is a Rondo...