Music is an incredibly complex topic, and deserves not one but several instalments. In this posting, I shall revisit the theory of musical taste that I proposed in the previous posting and hopefully present it in a more cogent form.
In essence, I am proposing that musical discernment is, mostly, an acquired ability. By discernment I am conflating two different mental processes: the act of interpretation whereby we recognise the emotions the music conveys; and the act of evaluation whereby we decide whether we like a piece or not. These two processes interact in a complex way and so discernment is somewhat paradoxical. I say that musical discernment is ‘mostly’ an acquired ability because, in order to explain musical discernment, we must posit some kind of innate musical faculty.
To back up the idea of an innate musical understanding, we might consider the converse scenario. Suppose musical discernment was entirely learnt? Someone with no musical experience and no musical understanding whatsoever would be unable to tell a happy tune from a sad one, would fail to appreciate the suspense of a suspended chord and would be unable to tell when a tune has ended (because he would be unable to recognise the different tonalities of the dominant and tonic chords). In order to learn, such a musical naïf would require extra-musical cues. We could imagine someone telling the naïf, for instance, “This is a sad song!” enabling the naïf to recognise sad songs in the future by comparing them to this template.
Of course, such a process of explicit instruction does not occur in the real life. Perhaps then the extra-musical prompting is more subtle? Perhaps music is mimetic and we learn to recognise musical qualities by comparing musical patterns to our perceptions of real people. This is more or less the idea argued by Kivy (and discussed in the previous instalment). In Kivy’s view musical qualities that cannot be explained by his ‘contour theory’ must arise out of convention. But this begs the question of how such conventions arise.
The emotional difference between a major and minor chord, it seems to me, cannot be explained either through mimesis or convention. All in all, I think we must conclude that people possess some innate understanding of the rules of music. This innate musical understanding is analogous to Chomsky’s idea of a Universal Grammar, the genetic predisposition to learn language. Certainly, the way children learn the rules of music, almost by osmosis, is similar to the way they learn to speak. I cannot even speculate as to why people should possess such an innate understanding of music but I believe it must exist.
I should emphasize however that this innate musical faculty is, in all likelihood, highly rudimentary; it is only the foundation on which musical discernment is based. Taste in music develops when we decide to like particular works of music, and our liking for particular works conditions our appreciation of newly encountered works. Good taste in music is not uniform; there are connoisseurs of jazz, hip-hop, indie rock, Baroque music, reggae, opera, eighties heavy-metal… the list is endless. In all cases however, the taste of the person is determined by their decisions to like particular works during a formative phase in their life.
The decisions that inform a person’s initial taste in music are complex and individual. However, I believe, as I put it in the previous posting, that once a listener decides to like particular bands or composers, he or she perceives all music through a filter formed by memories of the underlying patterns and salient features of their first musical preferences. This means a person’s taste in music can be very narrow. In Auckland, we have, for instance, The Rock radio station, which only plays guitar rock from the eighties and nineties; the listeners to this station prefer the familiar to the novel. Modern pop music seems (to this listener at least) formulaic and predictable – but this is precisely why it appeals to its fans: it always sounds almost exactly like a song they already know and like. By contrast, we have bFM, which specialises in a fast-turnover of new song; unfortunately the listener may never hears a song often enough to overcome an initial resistance to the new. To develop one’s taste in music one must expose oneself to music that one does not immediately like and take the time to integrate its patterns into one’s mental library.
Incidentally, I would like to make the following observation. People often think that classical music is superior to popular music because it is more complex. I believe that, in fact, the musical discernment of a classical listener is often no more sophisticated than that of other music fans. The language of classical music is simply different to that of popular music. Although “Paranoid Android” by Radiohead is a rock song, it is far more complex, musically, than Puccini’s “Nessum Dorma”. (This is not to disparage Puccini but rather to say that people like “Nessum Dorma” for reasons other than its complexity.)
I seem to have avoided, again, talking about how emotions actually get into music! I would just like to say, in this respect, that musical taste is not simply a matter of pattern recognition. We like a song because we like the feelings it expresses. How a song expresses feelings remains a mystery to me.