Music to work by: June 2025

This month’s selection is curated for the busy brain — not for passive listening, but for real engagement. It’s for those of us who need music that moves, shifts, provokes and, crucially, helps us work.

As someone who discovered later in life that I have ADHD, a few things fell into place:

1. Why repetitive music (classical, rock, or otherwise) never quite worked for me.

2. Why I often need something noisy, busy or emotionally charged to really focus.

So, we’re starting June with pieces that hold your attention without hijacking it — music with a mind of its own.

🎻 Shostakovich: The String Quartets

If you’ve never tackled a full cycle of string quartets, June might be the time. Shostakovich wrote fifteen of them, spanning decades and listening to them is like following one person’s inner monologue over a lifetime. These works aren’t background music; they fidget, shift, brood, and question. They reflect private struggles under public pressure, intellectual unrest under emotional restraint. It’s music that paces the room while you work.

You’ll hear fragments that may sound oddly familiar - these quartets crop up in film and radio, particularly spy thrillers. (The BBC’s radio dramatisations of John le Carré’s Smiley novels used them to great effect.) There's over seven hours of music in the full set, which makes it perfect for deep-focus work or days when your brain just won't sit still.

And for those of us wired for detail and emotional layering — including those with ADHD, like me — these quartets offer stimulation without overwhelm. They invite you to follow, not zone out. It’s focus music for people who don’t do chill.

🌟 Holst: Hymn of Jesus

Most people know Holst for The Planets - and there are definite echoes of that in Hymn of Jesus - but this piece goes somewhere deeper and more transcendent. It opens in near silence, unfolding like a ritual. The choir begins in Latin, chanting ancient texts that gradually build into something luminous and defiant. It’s not religious in the narrow sense, but more an invocation of unity, joy, and reverence for what connects us.

This piece also taught me one of my most lasting lessons about diversity - not from a seminar or a strategy session, but in a cathedral. I was travelling with an orchestra to Gloucester to perform the Hymn of Jesus alongside the Huddersfield Choral Society. As the choir arrived, many were visibly older, some unsteady on their feet, and there was a certain quiet scepticism about how the rehearsal might go. It turns out, they were astonishing. When we hit the loud sections, they filled that cavernous space with a sound so full, so unified, that it has stayed with me ever since as a gold-standard choir.

That experience reframed something fundamental: inclusion isn't just about representation or access. It's about not making assumptions. It’s about recognising the power that lives in unexpected places - in age, experience, difference - and giving it space to shine. Hymn of Jesus gave them that space. And we all felt it.

💃 Bernstein: West Side Story Symphonic Suite

This is pure theatrical energy, translated into symphonic form. Bernstein’s suite captures all the rhythm, tension, and swagger of West Side Story without a single word being sung. What you get instead is the pulse and propulsion of the story through music alone — the anxiety, the romance, the simmering rage.

I've chosen a particularly special youth orchestra recording for this month’s version. There's something unfiltered about the way young musicians approach this score - they don’t apologise for its exuberance or its grit. And that's crucial, because this piece doesn’t work if it's played too politely. You need to feel the syncopation punch, the harmonies bite, and the chaos build — especially in the "Mambo!" section. (If you’ve ever heard a British amateur orchestra try to deliver that line with convincing Latin flair… we really embarrass ourselves through our embarrassment)

It’s also a useful antidote to tidy, efficient thinking. This suite disrupts - rhythmically, emotionally, structurally - and reminds you that not all stories resolve, and not all conflict is clean. That has its place in the working day too.

⚠️ Shostakovich: Symphony No. 11 “The Year 1905”

This symphony is more than music — it’s a memorial, a protest, and a political balancing act. Officially, it commemorates the massacre of peaceful demonstrators outside the Winter Palace in 1905. Shostakovich, then a child, was in the crowd with his father and lived through the chaos. The Tsar’s absence that day led to confusion, and ultimately the Cossacks opened fire — over a thousand men, women and children were killed.

Commissioned after Stalin’s death, this work was a dangerous undertaking. The authorities expected patriotic mourning; Shostakovich gave them that but he layered it with something else entirely. He drew deliberate, uncomfortable parallels with the Soviet crackdown in Hungary just months earlier. The music doesn’t depict gunfire, but you’ll hear the slow advance of oppression, the roar of tanks, and the devastation of state power unleashed.

My ultimate moment comes for me at the symphony’s climax - just as everything reaches its loudest and most violent point, Shostakovich gives the violins a rest. Rather than having us thrash away unheard for mere show, he lets us be silent. That to me is one of so many signs of his independent genius.

Use this music as you work, write, or wrestle with the world. Let it match your mood — or shift it. This isn’t background noise. It’s ballast.