I have always enjoyed Private Passions, the thinking man or woman's Desert Island Discs, in which the composer Michael Berkeley asks guests about their musical passions. I was very pleased to come across a copy of a book, anthologising guests' selections for all the series so far, and read it as I sat with my mother in hospital. There's now a new series and in today's programme David Gordon, Dean of Manchester medical school was interviewed. Gordon and Berkeley discussed the link between medicine and music, always interesting, and playing a Schoenberg arrangement of Johann Strauss the younger’s waltz Rosen aus dem Süden (Roses from the South), surprising for one hardly expects the austere and cerebral members of the Second Viennese School to trouble themselves with frivolous waltzes.
For the first time I can recall, a guest brought a scientific paper with him. Unfortunately the programme did not give any details, still less a citation, but the paper was about how important musical taste can be in forming relationships; that in itself is not surprising, everyone will remember the significance shared cultural tastes are in the early stages of relationships, and that is doubtless why patrons of internet dating sites go into such detail about their artistic, musical and literary favourites. The interesting thing about this research was that it demonstrated that these judgements were accurate: "observers were able to form consensual and accurate impressions on the basis of targets’ music preferences".
I believe this research to be the following paper:
Psychol Sci. 2006 Mar;17(3):236-42 Message in a ballad: the role of music preferences in interpersonal perception.
Rentfrow PJ, Gosling SD.
PDF here
What, I wonder, does my last.fm profile say about me?
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