"Informal music making is a source of pleasure for both players and listeners." -- Roger Kamien

Music Tonight’s penultimate Prom, 71, and everything is almost over. The concert was suitably emotional with Brahms’ Symphony No. 1 an epic sweep of a work, referencing both Beethoven and Bach making it a kind of musical footnote to the whole of this years’ concert series, and to what I’ve accomplished. I’m planning a conclusion or review in the next couple of days in which I’ll talk about what the Proms experience has meant to me.

For now, I'm looking at Sunday when there won’t be a new concert to listen to from The Albert and wonder what I'll be doing with myself. I’ve been following this routine since the end of July and I wouldn’t say I’ve been institutionalized but Monday night is going to be very strange indeed as I don’t plug my headphones into my DAB radio, settle on the balcony waiting for the end of In Tune on Radio 3 and the opening description of the upcoming concert.

Not institutionalized, more hopelessly addicted.

Luckily, I have my methadone. A full decade or longer ago in the remaindered book shop in St. John’s Precinct in Liverpool, I bought Roger Kamien’s Music: An Appreciation: Brief Edition, a three hundred page text book tracing the history of music with an explanation of everything from harmony to sound, pitch, dynamics and tone colour. It’s accompanied by three cds of examples to be played here and there to illustrate a point -- Louis Armstrong’s Hotter Than That and Wagner’s Prelude to Act III of Lohengrin demonstrating eloquently the sonic effects of various instrumental sounds.

It’s all written relatively simply and although I’m not sure there’s enough to provide a grasp of musical notation -- at least not to an extent that I could describe it back to you -- it will be exciting to discover where all of the music I’ve been listening to for the past six weeks fits together and the periods in which each composer was working marrying that up with my fragmented knowledge of art history. Even now as I flick through the book I’m oohing and aaghing as I realise how some of these things intermingle. This will be my way of weaning myself out of the concert ritual and possibly, eventually replacing it with something potentially just as addictive, and then, perhaps next Prom season I‘ll have a better idea of what I‘m listening to.

It was published in 1990 and features this rather brilliant illustrative photo (the caption for which is the title of this post) that reminds me of some of the filmed inserts from the Sesame Street of my childhood: