Music and struggling

[some guy]

There's a thing that I find perplexing. It seems, according to many different posts in many different threads, that listening to music, especially to classical music is an effort, sometimes a quite large effort. Classical music in this scenario is complex and intimidating, which makes its eventual conquering a quite praise-worthing endeavor!

If I'm making any effort at understanding any particular piece, however, I'm not aware of it. Not aware of it as effort, anyway. When I'm listening to music, the only non-musical thing I'm aware of is that I'm enjoying myself immensely. Listening to music is fun. If I hit some particular piece that I don't enjoy, then I just move on without thinking about it at all. No particular experience with any individual piece changes the general situation for me, which is that listening to music is fun.

I started listening around age nine, plus or minus, not counting the snippets of classical that littered Warner Bros cartoons or the classical ripoffs in movies that I saw (or heard from my room after bed time) on T.V. I didn't like every single piece. But that fact didn't mean anything to me. I liked listening to music. I never categorized things as being more or less difficult to understand, either. James comment awhile back that first hearings are like flirting--I hope I'm remembering that correctly: too lazy to find the original--did not chime with any experience that I've ever had.

I've been told, by composers as well, that I'm an exceptionally good listener. I dunno. I guess I resist that observation the same way I resist the idea that listening to music, especially difficult music, involves effort.

It involves pleasure. Period. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about individual pieces that I don't particularly like. They're not interesting to me, so I'm not interested in talking about them. In fact, I don't think I ever thought about pieces I don't like until I started participating in online forums. And I still find it hard to believe that talking about pieces people dislike is as alluring as it seems to actually be.

Maybe I should stop struggling with the idea! But I continue to view with a large degree of incredulity that listening to classical music is as difficult as people make it out to be. I didn't understand Carter's double concerto when I first heard it. In fact, it sounded the same wherever I set the needle down. (You remember that Columbia album?) I'd love to be able to hear that piece again as I first heard it. Oh well, the piece I love now is lovely, so.... But I never thought of it as "difficult," and my subsequent listens to it were not struggles. I suppose I was struggling, but it didn't seem like it to me. It was baffling but intriguing (perhaps intriguing because baffling) for awhile and then it was simply lovely. The end.

[Gurn Blanston]

Well put, some. This is exactly the reason I don't post in 'difficult' threads; I can't relate to it.    0:)

[Cato]

I've been told, by composers as well, that I'm an exceptionally good listener. I dunno. I guess I resist that observation the same way I resist the idea that listening to music, especially difficult music, involves effort.

It involves pleasure. Period. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about individual pieces that I don't particularly like. They're not interesting to me, so I'm not interested in talking about them. In fact, I don't think I ever thought about pieces I don't like until I started participating in online forums. And I still find it hard to believe that talking about pieces people dislike is as alluring as it seems to actually be.

I didn't understand Carter's double concerto when I first heard it. In fact, it sounded the same wherever I set the needle down. (You remember that Columbia album?) I'd love to be able to hear that piece again as I first heard it. Oh well, the piece I love now is lovely, so.... But I never thought of it as "difficult," and my subsequent listens to it were not struggles. I suppose I was struggling, but it didn't seem like it to me. It was baffling but intriguing (perhaps intriguing because baffling) for awhile and then it was simply lovely. The end.

Very nice comments!  I suspect for many people the "effort" (whether you use the term or not) is the sense of pleasure also found in completing puzzles or figuring out a mystery novel a chapter or two before the end, etc.  It is not a struggle in the sense of painful agony, but the fun struggle to complete a model airplane with 100 parts.

"Intriguing because baffling" - which explains why you bothered to hear it more than once! 

[ComposerOfAvantGarde]

Listening to music is an effort? Since when?

Music makes me happy =^_^=

And music is an effort to learn and compose....listening is the easy part! Apart from when conducting when I have to be double checking in getting the sound and clarity I want plus preparing what the next bar will sound like in my mind plus cueing and beating and shaping the music......but in the end, the listening is the easiest part of it. 

[Daverz]

Some music is "stinky cheese", and it can take effort to develop a taste for it.  Like a taste fo good beer, it can be worth it.

[ComposerOfAvantGarde]

Some music is "stinky cheese", and it can take effort to develop a taste for it.  Like a taste fo good beer, it can be worth it.

Haha, this is a nice analogy! And I feel this way as well....I haven't met a cheese I didn't like (however I do find some ways of preparing them a bit unappealing).

[Daverz]

Haha, this is a nice analogy! And I feel this way as well....I haven't met a cheese I didn't like (however I do find some ways of preparing them a bit unappealing).

The analogy is not mine, of course.  There was a website devoted to stinky cheese composers and compositions, but I can't find it at the moment.

...Found the site.  It was "smelly cheese" composers, linked here: http://www.kith.org/jimmosk/

[ComposerOfAvantGarde]

The analogy is not mine, of course.  There was a website devoted to stinky cheese composers and compositions, but I can't find it at the moment.

I don't know if I would like to find out what 'stinky cheese composers and compositions' are.   

[Mirror Image]

I think we must be allured by the music we first hear whether this allurement continues throughout the work depends on how receptive we are to the music.

[ComposerOfAvantGarde]

The analogy is not mine, of course.  There was a website devoted to stinky cheese composers and compositions, but I can't find it at the moment.

...Found the site.  It was "smelly cheese" composers, linked here: http://www.kith.org/jimmosk/

Oh wow that is one wonderful website! I really want to check out all of that music! :O

[San Antone]

There's a thing that I find perplexing. It seems, according to many different posts in many different threads, that listening to music, especially to classical music is an effort, sometimes a quite large effort. Classical music in this scenario is complex and intimidating, which makes its eventual conquering a quite praise-worthing endeavor!

If I'm making any effort at understanding any particular piece, however, I'm not aware of it. Not aware of it as effort, anyway. When I'm listening to music, the only non-musical thing I'm aware of is that I'm enjoying myself immensely. Listening to music is fun. If I hit some particular piece that I don't enjoy, then I just move on without thinking about it at all. No particular experience with any individual piece changes the general situation for me, which is that listening to music is fun.

I started listening around age nine, plus or minus, not counting the snippets of classical that littered Warner Bros cartoons or the classical ripoffs in movies that I saw (or heard from my room after bed time) on T.V. I didn't like every single piece. But that fact didn't mean anything to me. I liked listening to music. I never categorized things as being more or less difficult to understand, either. James comment awhile back that first hearings are like flirting--I hope I'm remembering that correctly: too lazy to find the original--did not chime with any experience that I've ever had.

I've been told, by composers as well, that I'm an exceptionally good listener. I dunno. I guess I resist that observation the same way I resist the idea that listening to music, especially difficult music, involves effort.

It involves pleasure. Period. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about individual pieces that I don't particularly like. They're not interesting to me, so I'm not interested in talking about them. In fact, I don't think I ever thought about pieces I don't like until I started participating in online forums. And I still find it hard to believe that talking about pieces people dislike is as alluring as it seems to actually be.

Maybe I should stop struggling with the idea! But I continue to view with a large degree of incredulity that listening to classical music is as difficult as people make it out to be. I didn't understand Carter's double concerto when I first heard it. In fact, it sounded the same wherever I set the needle down. (You remember that Columbia album?) I'd love to be able to hear that piece again as I first heard it. Oh well, the piece I love now is lovely, so.... But I never thought of it as "difficult," and my subsequent listens to it were not struggles. I suppose I was struggling, but it didn't seem like it to me. It was baffling but intriguing (perhaps intriguing because baffling) for awhile and then it was simply lovely. The end.

I could have written this; listening to music is easy:  Just hit play; enjoy.  Repeat.

[jochanaan]

Well-taken points, some guy. However, there are times when it's easy for me to listen with less than my full attention, and sometimes the music just doesn't hit me the same way until I let everything else go.  And for some folks, it can take a deliberate effort just to sit down and relax through a symphony by Mahler or Brian, or a Wagner opera.

[Elgarian]

I'm in a hurry with no time to respond properly, but I'd just like to say for the moment how much I enjoyed reading every single post in this thread.

(No struggling, either!)

[starrynight]

It seems, according to many different posts in many different threads, that listening to music, especially to classical music is an effort, sometimes a quite large effort.

Surely it isn't especially classical music?

And I'm not sure there's anything wrong making an effort with something, to understand and appreciate.  'Struggle' though suggests trying to like something under some imagined need rather than out of deep interest.

[Karl Henning]

Our noses aren't all the same (though here is possibly implied the old nurture-VS.-nature model).  I grew up with grated Parmesan cheese (put it like that, mine sounds like quite the eccentric upbringing).  When my wife and mom-in-law first came to the states, was their first experience of this culinary blessing — and they scorned it! "Dirty sock cheese" was their pet name for it for the first, oh, eight years of their life here in the States.

But now they like it fine.  They like it very well now, in fact.  Yet for eight years, they found it olfactorily repulsive.

I think there is a musical lesson in there.  Somewhere.

[some guy]

Well, I must say that the responses so far have certainly confirmed my suspicions. No way things can be that hard, can be that universally hard.

And I'd just like to add, for the record (there is a record being kept of all this, right?), that I really don't see the situation as either difficult OR easy. I'd like to clarify that I see the concept of difficulty (and hence its opposite, ease) as being equally impertinent, as in not pertaining.

Neither "easy" nor "hard" really capture the situation for me, and it was jochanaan's reference to sitting down and relaxing that alerted me to what I'd left out of the OP. Sitting down and relaxing is not congruent, for me, with listening to music, which is always and forever an active and engaged process. What I notice is that I never think of this activity as an effort, as in something that I engage in reluctantly. Since I do it for fun, like other people run marathons, I do it no matter how much energy has to be expended.

Anyway, I do understand the allure of talking about struggling. That makes for good narratives, after all. And, oddly enough, though I'm a writer, I have experienced this struggling thing with poetry and other literature. Very strange.

Karl, where did your wife and mom-in-law come from? I'm guessing it wasn't from Italy.

[Karl Henning]

Россия

[zamyrabyrd]

There's a thing that I find perplexing. It seems, according to many different posts in many different threads, that listening to music, especially to classical music is an effort, sometimes a quite large effort. Classical music in this scenario is complex and intimidating, which makes its eventual conquering a quite praise-worthing endeavor!
...I started listening around age nine, plus or minus, not counting the snippets of classical that littered Warner Bros cartoons or the classical ripoffs in movies that I saw (or heard from my room after bed time) on T.V. I didn't like every single piece. But that fact didn't mean anything to me. I liked listening to music.
I've been told, by composers as well, that I'm an exceptionally good listener. I dunno. I guess I resist that observation the same way I resist the idea that listening to music, especially difficult music, involves effort.

If one starts early enough or rather gets hooked like my accidentally discovering the last movement of Beethoven's 9th Symphony also in the darkness of my room with my small transistor radio, then the prognosis is good and one can appreciate music of evolving complexity over life's journey. It wasn't exactly a smooth ride for me either. I had trouble with JS Bach for many years until discovering his vocal music. My teachers presented his music wrongly, like some kind of mathematical exercise. It took me a while to get over that.

I was also more able to distinguish piano music better than orchestral since that was my first instrument. There were some bad habits from piano playing I had to get over when starting formal lessons in singing. I had no idea what legato was, shaping a tone, and how hard it is to phrase when you have only so much breath, not to mention the amount of energy needed to sustain high pitches. Assimilating this in turn helped my piano playing and gave a shot of adrenalin to my listening as well.

What bugs the H out of me, is having children not very interested in classical music although they had it constantly around them, unlike me at their ages going to the public library to seek out new music and borrowing LP's. What one gets for free is not necessarily what one appreciates...

[North Star]

My teachers presented his music wrongly, like some kind of mathematical exercise. It took me a while to get over that.
...
What bugs the H out of me, is having children not very interested in classical music although they had it constantly around them, unlike me at their ages going to the public library to seek out new music and borrowing LP's. What one gets for free is not necessarily what one appreciates...

Well perhaps your children need a while to get over it, too..

I was exposed to a fair bit of classical music my childhood as well (parents hadthe classical radio pretty much always on, when they're not playing CDs of opera recitals or violin music) and that definitely didn't make me want to explore more of it on my own until a few years later in mid-teens, and it took still more years to get rid of my allergy of vocal classical music.

[zamyrabyrd]

Well perhaps your children need a while to get over it, too..
I was exposed to a fair bit of classical music my childhood as well (parents hadthe classical radio pretty much always on, when they're not playing CDs of opera recitals or violin music) and that definitely didn't make me want to explore more of it on my own until a few years later in mid-teens, and it took still more years to get rid of my allergy of vocal classical music.

Some of my colleagues actually have children who excel in musical instruments. Lucky ducks! it depends on the amount of "anti" in the kids, which is not such a bad thing in itself because children should not be robots.