Are We Obligated to Like Good Music?

 

Are we obligated to like good music? Maybe this sounds like a silly question to you. Of course we should! If it’s good music, why wouldn’t we? The thought here is that good music is obvious and apparent. When we hear the piece, we instantly realize its power and have our heads laid low before its majesty. Hearing a transcendent piece of music is akin to experiencing a revelation from God.

I’ve noticed that many people have little patience when listening to music. While they may not necessarily believe the above attitude, they act like it. They judge music very quickly. They listen and let their first impression dominate their judgement. Many music critics do this as well.

David Stubbs, author of Fear of Music: Why People Get Rothko But Don’t Get Stockhausen,* points out that this attitude is rather pervasive. While those who scorn abstract visual arts are treated as philistines, it is acceptable to treat music one doesn’t understand as a joke rather than trying harder to listen and comprehend a piece. Controversial albums such as Self Portrait (Bob Dylan) and Metal Machine Music (Lou Reed) are not treated as artworks, even as bad artworks. Rather, the dominant narrative about them is that that they are anti-commercial ploys, deliberately poor albums made to spite the music industry and rabid fans.

Some of the reason for this attitude is the idea that music is a “Universal Language.” The thought goes that music transcends the barriers in communication that linguistic and cultural divisions have built up. Music, so the thought goes, breaks past all of this and can communicate to each person in a way we understand.

In reality, understanding any genre of music is very much like learning a whole new language. Some genres are similar and can be more easily stood. Like Romance languages that are quite similar to each other, we can draw links between blues, classic rock, punk (to some degree), and metal. Each has its own musical vocabulary, but there is a grammar and musical structure that is shared.

However, many times musical genres can seem very disparate from each other and are difficult to understand. Modernist classical music, free Jazz, and noise music are very different, even from their parent genres and take a lot of listen before one even begins to digest them. The above mentioned Metal Machine Music is an important milestone for noise based music. To someone not well versed in this music, it can seem like anarchic noise. To my ears (that have some minor grounding in noise), it sounds very atmospheric and calming.  Once one has achieved some fluency in the “language,” you can better hear how the pieces actually sound and the emotions and intent behind them. While Metal Machine Music and other pieces are genuinely great and powerful works, it is very understandable that one doesn’t understand or enjoy them right away. The true problem emerges when people are too quick to judge what they do not understand.

So are we obliged to like good music? I don’t think we should immediately be forced to like any piece that is supposedly good. We should have the proper patience to listen. We should put effort in to listen and understand the piece. Even if we never come to love the music, if we can appreciate a work’s merits and respect it, I think that is good enough. Loving music is a subjective enterprise. We come to love works through both objective and subjective qualities around its message, values, and its overall aesthetic, in addition to the headspace it occupies. Our obligation is to (eventually) come to appreciate a piece’s aesthetic qualities, or at least to try to. This obligation does not need to extend to love or admiration. That is for the individual to feel and decide for themselves.

 

*While I reference this book to make a point, it is probably not a very good source on the topic. If you are interested in why read the following review: http://rougesfoam.blogspot.com/2009/04/review-david-stubbs-fear-of-music-why.html

 

Acknowledgements: A special thanks goes to Robert Sanchez for significant amounts of editing help.