I work best in silence

I work best in silence

A strange discovery, hardly worthy of a blog post, you might think.

But despite the joys of free music on the internet, and despite our obsession with free, instant, brilliant music available 24/7; despite knowing that some of my best musical discoveries – Take That, Bruckner’s seventh symphony, Frank Field – have been made while I was writing, I have also re-discovered that I work best in silence.

Yes, you might think, that was fairly obvious for the close-focus line-...