There is very little net benefit to learning to appreciate a new kind of music—there is abundant music in most genres, and one can easily fill one’s ears with whatever one can most readily enjoy, so you probably don’t get more total enjoyment from music by adding to your enjoyed genres.
That argument only works if we aren’t allowed to enjoy novelty.
We can still enjoy novelty! For instance, I have a near-perfect track record of liking show tunes. There’slots. I can get a steady supply of novelty, supplementing older musicals with the new ones that come out every year and the other sorts of music I like. I don’t need to learn to appreciate entire new genres to do it. Unless you mean that appreciating a new genre is a qualitatively different form of novelty? But then learning to appreciate the new genre is self-defeating. By the time you’ve learned to like it, you’ve already been exposed to lots of it and it’s no longer new.
Do you actually feel this aversion? Because it’s so… foreign to me. Learning to enjoy a new genre of music is always a fascinating discovery. I hear a curious snippet somewhere and go hmmm, gotta investigate deeper, then 24 hours later I’m swimming in the stuff, following connections, reading and listening… sort of like this (warning, that site is like crack for the right kind of person.)
It’s not an aversion. If I had nothing better to do, or had a terrible time finding anything new to listen to, I’d be okay with learning about and learning to appreciate classical music. But as it happens, new, immediately fun music enters my life at a pretty satisfactory rate. I added a new artist to my library just yesterday because my roommate played his CD in the car on the way to the grocery store and it sounded neat. There’s no reason for me to spend extra time on music that doesn’t promptly catch my ear, when I can just hit up friends for personalized recommendations, cruise Pandora, and keep up with the artists I already enjoy—unless I feel like succumbing to the status signals that make classical different from other music!
That argument only works if we aren’t allowed to enjoy novelty.
We can still enjoy novelty! For instance, I have a near-perfect track record of liking show tunes. There’s lots. I can get a steady supply of novelty, supplementing older musicals with the new ones that come out every year and the other sorts of music I like. I don’t need to learn to appreciate entire new genres to do it. Unless you mean that appreciating a new genre is a qualitatively different form of novelty? But then learning to appreciate the new genre is self-defeating. By the time you’ve learned to like it, you’ve already been exposed to lots of it and it’s no longer new.
Do you actually feel this aversion? Because it’s so… foreign to me. Learning to enjoy a new genre of music is always a fascinating discovery. I hear a curious snippet somewhere and go hmmm, gotta investigate deeper, then 24 hours later I’m swimming in the stuff, following connections, reading and listening… sort of like this (warning, that site is like crack for the right kind of person.)
It’s not an aversion. If I had nothing better to do, or had a terrible time finding anything new to listen to, I’d be okay with learning about and learning to appreciate classical music. But as it happens, new, immediately fun music enters my life at a pretty satisfactory rate. I added a new artist to my library just yesterday because my roommate played his CD in the car on the way to the grocery store and it sounded neat. There’s no reason for me to spend extra time on music that doesn’t promptly catch my ear, when I can just hit up friends for personalized recommendations, cruise Pandora, and keep up with the artists I already enjoy—unless I feel like succumbing to the status signals that make classical different from other music!