"Can you play Hotel California?"

I met someone the other day who said they couldn’t stand “new” music. I was about to launch into my own rationale—that all music was new once upon a time—when she said, “It’s the patterns that I connect to.” That, I could understand. She explained that she thrived on very loud, heavy music because that familiar, crashing, pounding soundscape gave her a total respite from thinking.

When sound becomes music, humans seem to need to feel the pattern behind it. When art first became abstract, it took a long time for people to accept what seemed like childlike or primitive offerings. Learning about the artist's journey and their intentions helped. Yet, for some people, what they don’t like to see or hear remains a serious matter.

A dislike of opera or country and western can be incredibly strong. It causes some people to claim they feel physically nauseous. They just hate it; there is nothing in it for them. This lack of something recognisable takes us right back to the heavy metal fan. Musical patterns feed into the brain, and perhaps there are as many types of musical patterns as there are types of brains!

It is believed that the earliest vocal musical enterprises were solo tunes. When polyphony arrived in the 10th century through experiments in improvisation, it sparked a hearing revolution by playing two or more different melodies at the same time. Formalising this idea naturally led toward the development of harmony. The fugue is a perfect example of a tightly managed musical form that developed over time, with Bach as its accepted master.

Other musical forms were intentionally crafted, presumably causing quite a dilemma of acceptance at the time. One wonderfully positive creation was opera, born by committee around 1600. This new form of dramatic creativity opened up an everlasting vein of sound and visual stimulation.

Skipping ahead to the twentieth century, serial music combined maths and sound to create a new form entirely unrelated to traditional diatonic harmony. Exponents of musique concrète recorded real-world sounds, like trains or footsteps, and manipulated them into electronic music. Meanwhile, minimalism built itself on the repetition of small phrases.

Music changes over time as people find new ways to create sounds. The invention of new instruments always opens up fresh possibilities. Would Bach have written piano sonatas? Beethoven would have certainly trashed the clavichord had the piano not been invented by his time!

Furthermore, what was once against the rules—and probably unpleasant to the ear—eventually became part of future musical styles. In the Medieval era, singing in parallel fifths was standard church music, but the Baroque era banned them. In early music, the augmented fourth interval was considered to be "from the Devil." Yet, by the 19th century, Hector Berlioz used it liberally to create a vivid sense of unease in his Symphonie Fantastique.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when I was at music college, our small circle of friends thrived on variety. We sought out the new and the avant-garde alongside early medieval music and Soft Machine. But we also loved Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Carole King, Laura Nyro, and David Bowie—artists telling tales in song that mirrored the tales of our own lives. What we detested was "middle of the road" music. Anything we felt was anodyne or reeking of musical conservatism was out.

This was the era when Bob Dylan was condemned as a traitor for stepping away from his politically stirring acoustic tracks. It was a prime example of breaking the creative patterns an audience expected. People had invested so much in Dylan that his conversion to the electric guitar caused a massive wave of “the shock of the new.”

In the 1990s, gigging could be tough because "original music" didn’t always go down well. The dreaded question, “Can you play Hotel California?” constantly hung in the air. Middle-aged musicians engaged in cover bands or blues bands, all knowing the same material and churning it out to happy crowds. New music was not welcome in this comfortable scene. Female singer-songwriters were tolerated, but usually only for a couple of those unfamiliar songs.

It was easy to feel anxious about the reaction to music we had spent ages creating, refining, and building into a performance. Often, it just wasn't what folk wanted to hear. They wanted standards from the familiar menu of a cover band—songs that stirred memories of special times. Lyrics came easily to the mind when they spoke to how somebody once felt in their heart. They could sing along. The repetition re-stirred old emotions, and that is what music was to them. New songs had no such ground to stand on. They carried no nostalgic connections, even if the words had just as much relevance as a standard cover.

Today, we are surrounded by endless musical choices. We can dabble in hip-hop or grime; meditate with Philip Glass or Hildegard von Bingen; take a retro trip with 70s rock; or pay an awful lot to see a Puccini opera or a stadium rock concert. We can use Classic FM or Radio 1 as a backdrop to life, go to a string quartet concert, select a playlist on YouTube, or attend the local choral society’s performance of Handel’s Messiah. We can visit London for the latest West End musical spectacular, or we can luxuriate at home like Inspector Morse with a good whiskey and endless LPs of Wagner.

Each choice represents a sound pattern that chimes uniquely with us. Because of this, we may not enjoy the random music played by others, and we often want to dodge their choices. In a world full of competing patterns, silence is a rare commodity.