Bowman was aware of some changes in his behavior patterns; it would have been absurd to expect anything else in the circumstances. He could no longer tolerate silence; except when he was sleeping, or talking over the circuit to Earth, he kept the ship's sound system running at almost painful loudness. / At first, needing the companionship of the human voice, he had listened to classical plays--especially the works of Shaw, Ibsen, and Shakespeare--or poetry readings from Discovery's enormous library of recorded sounds. The problems they dealt with, however, seemed so remote, or so easily resolved with a little common sense, that after a while he lost patience with them. / So he switched to opera--usually in Italian or German, so that he was not distracted even by the minimal intellectual content that most operas contained. This phase lasted for two weeks before he realized that the sound of all these superbly trained voices was only exacerbating his loneliness. But what finally ended this cycle was Verdi's Requiem Mass, which he had never heard performed on Earth. The "Dies Irae, " roaring with ominous appropriateness through the empty ship, left him completely shattered; and when the trumpets of Doomsday echoed from the heavens, he could endure no more. / Thereafter, he played only instrumental music. He started with the romantic composers, but shed them one by one as their emotional outpourings became too oppressive. Sibelius, Tchaikovsky, Berlioz, lasted a few weeks, Beethoven rather longer. He finally found peace, as so many others had done, in the abstract architecture of Bach, occasionally ornamented with Mozart. / And so Discovery drove on toward Saturn, as often as not pulsating with the cool music of the harpsichord, the frozen thoughts of a brain that had been dust for twice a hundred years. . Arthur C. Clarke
About This Quote

The quote explains that Bowman appeared to be losing his sense of decency and humanity as the years went by. As time passed, he also seemed to loose his mind. He was still thinking like a man, but he was no longer the same man. He was struggling with his loneliness and that is why he started listening to music.

However, the music didn't make him feel better. It only made him more lonely and thinking about it even more lonely. The quote also reveals that Bowman was playing music all the way to Saturn and during this journey he continued to play music almost all the time. I don't think we can know if Bowman was playing music or not as Jim Watson isn't very explicit about that part of his story.

However, I put my money on Bowman as he would have been playing music as a way of soothing himself from being lonely from being alone for so long from being left alone forever without anyone to talk to all alone in a small spaceship for so many years.

Source: 2001: A Space Odyssey

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