What is your idea of hell?

No, we're not talking about $9-a-gallon gasoline, nor being exposed to endless political squabbling, nor getting stuck in a bumper-to-bumper, horn-honking traffic jam for hours.

We're talking about eternity here — and while some everyday frustrations may seem to go on forever, they really don't qualify.

All right — time is up. I'll tell you my idea of hell — and thanks for asking: It's a world without music.

That's what I fear most about power blackouts — not getting stuck in an elevator, not missing favorite shows on TV, not what doesn't happen inside your refrigerator. What I fear most is the deafening silence of no music.

I usually jump in my car and crank up the radio to whatever music I can find — yes, even rock or opera, neither one of which is a favorite flavor. (Grouch Marx's classic comment about opera: "Opera is, when someone gets stabbed, instead of bleeding, they sing.")

Other than opera, most classical music is quite enjoyable, and even soothing. Richard Wagner can be a bit bombastic, but even that would be preferable to no music at all. (Mark Twain once said, "Wagner's music is better than it sounds.")

There's a new book at local libraries, "The Rest Is Noise," by Alex Ross, a New York music critic. With the subtitle, "Listening to the Twentieth Century," it chronicles composers all the way from Richard Strauss to Duke Ellington and beyond.

Ross discusses at length the devotion to dissonance led by Strauss, and other composers who felt the basic 12-tone scale didn't permit quite the fingernails-on-the-blackboard sound they were seeking.

That search for noise-defined-as-music went on and on — even though Sergei Prokofiev, who never dabbled in dissonance, said, "There are still so many beautiful things to be said in C major."

Ross mentions the intriguing historical fact that the most recognized musical passage in history must be the first few notes to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.

Next to that, the best known must be from an obscure piece by Richard Strauss because those notes are used as the first musical passage of the soundtrack to the movie, "2001: A Space Odyssey."

For most of us, listening to our favorite music can be downright therapeutic. That may even be true for people whose musical tastes we don't share.

So many vocals today seem to be more like yelling than singing. (Must everything we do qualify for the tag "Xtreme"?) You can't really hear the lyrics to many songs, and considering what some of the words are saying, especially in rap and hip-hop, not understanding them is a blessing.

There's a reason that Baskin-Robbins has 31 flavors, and there are that many flavors of music, with no accounting for some tastes. A friend of mine even likes bagpipe music, which like rap and hip-hop hardly seems much of an an improvement over silence.

But that does provide my excuse for including this priceless quote from jazz saxophonist Al Cohn: "A gentleman is someone who knows how to play the bagpipes, and doesn't." (Somehow, I have the feeling that someone like Oscar Wilde must have said that about a century earlier.)

Music as therapy has found success even in some prisons, with Venezuela among the most innovative nations. The flip side is music-as-irritant, as one Northern California shopping mall discovered, when schmaltzy, Musak-type recordings were piped in and gangbangers dispersed, to avoid listening to it.

When it comes to music that lasts through history, do composers inspire their contemporaries? It would surely seem so.

It can be no coincidence that my favorite classical composers — Borodin, Tchaikovsky, Ravel and Dvorak — all lived from the mid-1800s to about 1900. There was no quest for dissonance with these guys.

Nor does it seem any coincidence that the composers of what could be described as "The Great American Songbook" — the Gershwins, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter and Richard Rodgers, to name just some — were contemporaries from the 1930s to the 1960s.

There's a whole new generation of singers discovering those songs because as we old codgers like to say, nobody writes songs like that anymore.

Evidently, it takes young singers to make old songs relevant to young listeners, but that does keep old songs alive — though there are some strange bedfellows.

Recently, an album was released of Johnny Cash songs done by rappers and it was approved by the Cash family.

Giving rap the benefit of a favorable definition, is music that we don't usually enjoy preferable to no music at all?

That's a close call — but happily, that's why we have recordings and radio stations that serve several different musical flavors. To some of us, almost any music beats a deafening silence.

— Chuck Thomas is a Star columnist whose column appears on the Opinion pages each Saturday. His e-mail address is star4cthomas@earthlink.net.