While I still get intermittent great pleasure from music (as evidenced by my occasional postings here) there has certainly been a tremendous decline from the days of my teens and early early twenties, when music was probably second only to literature and ideas in its importance for my life.
By music, I mostly mean "classical" music; but folk music and various types of popular music and jazz were also of considerable importance.
For instance; in terms of performance, I sang classical music; but instrumentally I played mainly folk music; and for a couple of years, the rhythm and blues or soul type of pop. I also composed a few short tunes or songs in these genres.
For this decade (approximately) I would think about music A Great Deal, would make great efforts to listen (whether to recordings; or live concerts, and especially operas); and when I listened - I would sit and do nothing else; giving the music my whole attention (sometimes - especially with opera - I would read a musical score while listening).
I was continually expanding my musical experience, wider and deeper; and by experiencing different performers of the same music. I studied the theory and history of music; and engaged in many analytic and critical discussions with people more technically-expert than myself.
At peak (aged around twenty) I would be singing-acting solo roles in Gilbert and Sullivan, singing in two classical music choirs - one small "chamber" choir, of which I was co-founder and still exists; and the other other a large and well-regarded city choir; and playing in folk clubs.
As well as listening to tens of hours of music per week, and reading books on the subject - all this in my spare time from being a medical student.
Indeed; it was mainly my own many technical deficiencies that blocked me from an even greater engagement with music.
But - as it was - I was looking to music for something much more than entertainment; something that could justly be termed "spiritual".
I sought, and sometimes experienced, a very profound sense of aesthetic and mystical consciousness.
However, over the past few decades, this interest and engagement has ebbed substantially: both fading and narrowing.
I am now compelled to acknowledge that I have for years been living off the musical capital of my early life; although I have greatly enriched my appreciation of a few aspects.
In some ways I regret this ebbing; but mostly not - because the value of music was related to its being an inner and spontaneous drive.
And also because it was not so much a decline in music; as that music was displaced as a focus.
Music first began to be displaced as my focus by its other and greater rival - literature, also dating from early teens. As a young man; if there was anything I spent more time upon than music, it was literature.
And when I myself began active and practical "literary" work - when I began to write and publish (mostly "essays" - i.e. non-fiction of many kinds), in my late twenties; then this increased engagement with the written word naturally expanded to take-up a good deal of what mental focus had been occupied by music.
Later on, the "spiritual" role of music in my life also began to be replaced; as I got more and more motivated to think and write about spiritual, philosophical, and eventually religious matters.
In other words; from middle age I became consciously and specifically motivated to engage directly with ultimate "existential" matters; matters that I had previously (in adolescence and my twenties) engaged with mainly secondarily - and mainly via music.
I think this explains why I am no longer driven to the kind of intense and serious engagement with music that characterized my early life.
I still respond strongly to some music, albeit much less frequently; and I do not seek out such experiences with hard efforts.
But music doesn't have the spiritual-primacy it once did.
