Over the past five years, St Cecilia’s feast day has taken new importance for a growing number of non-believers as Bill Drummond has called for a No Music Day ahead of the commemoration of the art form’s patron saint.

His thesis is there is too much music that is too readily available – and we are taking it for granted. So what better way to remind us of the art form’s importance than to deliberately do without listening to music for a whole day?

This year, one of Europe’s annual capitals of culture is on board for what could well be a fascinating social experiment. The whole of Linz, a city with a proud musical pedigree, is set to ban music on Saturday 21 November – not only will there be no gigs or radio airplay, cinemas will refrain from showing films with music soundtracks and churches will have to do without hymns. It is something even the NME might promote, judging from this piece here.

So will kids do without their MP3 players or those irritating mobile phones that play music (without headphones)? Will homebodies be happy to listen to speech-based radio? Will blue-collar workers maintain productivity without chart hits blaring out? Such questions only really apply if Austrians use music the same way we do here. And I for one won’t be getting involved, having had to do without tuneage due to the postal strike and forgetting to recharge my iPod (I will, though, work on more effective ways to encourage people to think more about what they confirm - and probably get irritated by piped chart pap in shopping centres).

This is the culmination of a five-year plan for the former KLF founder, but the guy that reputedly burnt a million quid has more to say about music’s omnipresence. He would like to ban it altogether and start again. Drummond reckons pop has reached the end of the road, enjoyed all the innovation possible until it can only regurgitate former motifs in slightly different forms.

As part of his 15 project, Drummond has been gathering choirs to attempt to replicate the first music, when cavemen and women gathered together to worldlessly emote their feelings. I don’t think we need to go that far. Thanks to social media, pop is becoming increasingly fractured, so nowadays any musical hegemony holds much less sway. That means we can return to a pre-Beatles tradition of musicians performing for more discrete audiences. That might be an online community with cultish tastes (Pitchfork-style indie) or in their owns locality.

That way, they can play the tunes that mean something to them and their peers – creating a new range of standards that in the north of England might range from The Beatles and The Who to The Stone Roses and Oasis. Then, like broadside writers celebrating local events and characters, they can pen their own tales. Actually, this has already happened and represents the early career path of Arctic Monkeys.

 Moreover, I would argue that Drummond’s is a particularly western-centric view. Pop is now rubbing up against ever more exotic music forms in productive ways, as with fusions between African styles and our own genres, notably in the realms of hip hop and electronica. To take a global view, the music that came out the continent to give us blues and jazz is now returning there in vastly different forms. I wonder if the likes of Blk Jcks realise things have come full circle?