I think whenever you have the scenario of other people enjoying a musical work (or an artwork) that you don’t enjoy, you can reduce the explanation to three possibilities: (1) Everyone else is under some kind of mass delusion and you’re sane (or stupid/smart) (2) Everyone else is correct and there’s something wrong with me or (3) there’s no objective “greatness” in music (or art or food etc.)
I think believing (1) is a symptom of extreme narcissism, and believing (2) is a symptom of low self esteem. But (3) is unsatisfactory and incomplete, although it leaves an opening to at least ask why we like certain things more than others, and why some people “like” differently than others. I don’t think you have to submit to a world in which everything is as good as everything else and no qualitative judgments are valid, but you have to accept that there are just limits to how much we will ever agree on what’s good. And there are interesting questions to study about how the human ear responds to certain sounds, and whether and how it can be “trained” to like things. And there’s actual research on all that stuff, and I’m not an expert in that field so I won’t try to get into it.
I will say this though—your article implies that you find initial, “untrained” impressions of a work more valid than opinions that come from repeated listen or even study. I feel like there’s a fallacy in this kind of thinking—the idea that there’s a pure essence of a piece, and of one’s reaction to it, that gets somehow contaminated by repeated listen or study—love at first sight or it’s not love. What if music doesn’t operate like this? What if it’s more like a coded message, and it can take several listens or even study to decode the message?
If a class of 5-year-olds found Hamlet “boring” we wouldn’t say “well, it must be so, because here is the pure honest reaction of unpretentious people who haven’t been told they’re ‘supposed to’ like this yet,” we’d say that the 5-year-olds haven’t acquired the language skills and life experiences to even understand the play and therefore can’t properly evaluate it.
I’m not saying you’re a musical 5-year-old—maybe you just don’t like the Great Fugue, and that’s fine. Personally, I think it’s an interesting piece of music. It’s not my favorite, but it’s striking, and worth listening to.
Most lovers of any artform eventually come to the conclusion that reasonable, well-educated people can differ about these things and that some of it is “taste,” by which we mean some hard-to-pin-down combination of emotions and experiences and ear structure and brain structure and who knows what else. Most classical music lovers consider Wagner a great composer, yet some can’t stand his music, etc. But let’s not dismiss the idea that it might take some work and/or knowledge and/or skill acquisition to understand what’s going on in some works of art.
I think whenever you have the scenario of other people enjoying a musical work (or an artwork) that you don’t enjoy, you can reduce the explanation to three possibilities: (1) Everyone else is under some kind of mass delusion and you’re sane (or stupid/smart) (2) Everyone else is correct and there’s something wrong with me or (3) there’s no objective “greatness” in music (or art or food etc.)
I think believing (1) is a symptom of extreme narcissism, and believing (2) is a symptom of low self esteem. But (3) is unsatisfactory and incomplete, although it leaves an opening to at least ask why we like certain things more than others, and why some people “like” differently than others. I don’t think you have to submit to a world in which everything is as good as everything else and no qualitative judgments are valid, but you have to accept that there are just limits to how much we will ever agree on what’s good. And there are interesting questions to study about how the human ear responds to certain sounds, and whether and how it can be “trained” to like things. And there’s actual research on all that stuff, and I’m not an expert in that field so I won’t try to get into it.
I will say this though—your article implies that you find initial, “untrained” impressions of a work more valid than opinions that come from repeated listen or even study. I feel like there’s a fallacy in this kind of thinking—the idea that there’s a pure essence of a piece, and of one’s reaction to it, that gets somehow contaminated by repeated listen or study—love at first sight or it’s not love. What if music doesn’t operate like this? What if it’s more like a coded message, and it can take several listens or even study to decode the message?
If a class of 5-year-olds found Hamlet “boring” we wouldn’t say “well, it must be so, because here is the pure honest reaction of unpretentious people who haven’t been told they’re ‘supposed to’ like this yet,” we’d say that the 5-year-olds haven’t acquired the language skills and life experiences to even understand the play and therefore can’t properly evaluate it.
I’m not saying you’re a musical 5-year-old—maybe you just don’t like the Great Fugue, and that’s fine. Personally, I think it’s an interesting piece of music. It’s not my favorite, but it’s striking, and worth listening to.
Most lovers of any artform eventually come to the conclusion that reasonable, well-educated people can differ about these things and that some of it is “taste,” by which we mean some hard-to-pin-down combination of emotions and experiences and ear structure and brain structure and who knows what else. Most classical music lovers consider Wagner a great composer, yet some can’t stand his music, etc. But let’s not dismiss the idea that it might take some work and/or knowledge and/or skill acquisition to understand what’s going on in some works of art.