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Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim Dixon is surely the exception when he complains about being subjected to "some skein of untiring facetiousness by filthy Mozart" and then "some Brahms rubbish," followed by "a violin sonata by some Teutonic bore." Unlucky him, we might think, at least for the Mozart. But that "some" is indicative: These are curses, not philistinism, taking names in vain as the cri de coeur of a man who spends his life being bored by other people, especially his employers.

But what about Vladimir Nabokov? In Speak, Memory, he wrote that music sounded to him "merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds.

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