A Miscellany Of Tasteful Music

Alex Ross touches on a subject dear to my heart. The heart of his argument rests here:

Once, these cultural untouchables were dismissed as charlatans – merchants of the "emperor’s new clothes", to employ a phrase that remains commonplace among unappreciative concertgoers. A New York Times editorial threw a "new clothes" insult at Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase when it showed in 1913. The same conceit was trotted out in 1946 by a commentator who perceived no difference between a Picasso and a child’s drawing. TS Eliot’s The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock was cited for its "incoherent banalities". These days, you would draw puzzled stares if you announced at a dinner party that Pollock is a crock. But if you said the same of John Cage, you might get no argument.

Explanations for the abiding resistance to musical modernism have proliferated, their multiplicity suggesting that none quite holds the key. One theory holds that a preference for simple tonality is wired into the human brain. Attempts to test this proposition have produced ambiguous results. For example, a couple of studies suggest that infants prefer consonant to dissonant intervals. Yet infants hear tonal music almost from the moment of birth, and so have been conditioned to accept it as "natural". Moreover, visual arts research demonstrates that children prefer representational images to abstract ones. The 327,000 people who came to see bleak late Mark Rothko works at Tate Modern in 2008 and 2009 overcame that inclination; the same can happen with music.

There’s also a sociological explanation: because concert audiences are essentially trapped in their seats for a set period, they tend to reject unfamiliar work more readily than do gallery visitors, who can move about freely, confronting strange images at their own pace. Yet if the style of presentation conditioned the response, one would expect that dance, theatre and movie audiences would show the same revulsion toward novel ideas.

There is truth to parts of this argument. The other problem is that few people are ever taught to appreciate sound as well as music. It leads listeners to a state of confusion. For my ears, The Hafler Trio, Xenakis, Hank Williams and Johann Sebastian Bach all sound wonderful. That is simply because I was exposed to a wide palette of music. Though parents will not doubt not heed any of this, it would do them well to expose their children to different genres, and get them to appreciate sounds in the same way one appreciates the beauty of a horizon.