Ear-worms are dangerous things – those tunes that you carry around with you in your subconscious, often a single song or melody that gets unwittingly stuck in some ancient part of the brain; round and round it goes on a loop you can't control, accompanying you daily commute and your meetings at work, the first thing you hear in the morning and the last thing you hear at night. Sometimes, it's a pleasurable experience, as your prefrontal cortex dredges up a nostalgic pop song you forgotten for years, a Chopin Mazurka you've been trying to play, or a Mozart aria you wish you could sing.
But this week, my brain has been stuck with Mahler's sixth Symphony, after watching three shattering performances of the piece last week in Budapest with Ivan Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra. Fischer plays the piece both as existential tragedy and utterly convincing musical structure, and every detail of Mahler's vast symphony and the BFO's astonishing, insightful playing is now imprinted somewhere deep inside my brain. That's no bad thing: it's just that it's difficult to function in your daily life with fragments of Mahler's most singlemindedly tragic symphony - and above all its morbid maelstrom of a finale - as an accompaniment to supermarket shopping, seeing friends for dinner, or going to the post office. With most ear-worms, you're able to keep them on an abstract, unemotional level as a distant virtual soundtrack. But when the passages like the three gigantic climaxes of the finale of Mahler 6 come into your head, moments when Mahler seems to preparing you for a heroic peroration before throwing you off an emotional cliff, it's hard to ignore a nagging sense of the futility of life, the desperate, pointless struggle of our existence, and the devastating difference of dreams from reality.
Still, it could be worse, I guess: I once had a fortnight with Love is in the Air on constant repeat in my head – a great tune, but once you've gone through it about 3m times, its attraction wears off slightly. At least with the Mahler, I know I'm not going to get bored. Your favourite, and most annoying, ear-worms?
