# Acquired Taste...



## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

Which piece(s) or genre(s) of music do you now like and/or admire, somewhat to your surprise, since you used to loathe/ look down on/ fail to see the point of 'such stuff'?

It would be great to find out, and even better if you could provide a little self-analysis too. Why didn't you like it to start off with, and what do you see in it now? 

My own primary example would be songs for soprano opera singers; in my youth, I dismissed it as warbling or screaming. Now, I can get behind my reaction and hear the notes, and the beauty.


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## bigshot (Nov 22, 2011)

I haven't "learned to love" something I hate. But I have "learned to understand and appreciate" a lot of types of music I didn't have my head wrapped around yet. Is that what you're asking?

When I "hate" something, it's because it's lacking something important. I usually don't need to make compromises for stuff like that. There's too much music that isn't lacking anything to occupy myself with.


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## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

I am sorry if I oversimplified. 
Okay:- What types of music did you learn to understand and appreciate, that you didn't have your head wrapped around yet?


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## Taggart (Feb 14, 2013)

I don't usually like "modern" (post 1750) music apart from folk oriented pieces - Greig and such like. My piano teacher insisted that I try some Satie and I found it not too distasteful. I think the experience of playing and analysing a piece teaches you much more about it than merely listening does. I don't think I could listen to such music, but I could enjoy playing it.


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## Ukko (Jun 4, 2010)

I think it is poor judgement to encourage _self-analysis_ here. The whippersnappers are prone to overindulge already.


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## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

Ah, but I didn't mean self-indulgent display of the whippersnappers' psyches.
I meant, analysis of their own reasons for not liking the music originally, and of the reasons why they think they have come to like it.

(I do wish someone would talk about the music, instead of the phrasing of the original post... )


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## MagneticGhost (Apr 7, 2013)

I didn't enjoy Wagner until 5 years ago. My point of entry was Parsifal.
I think it's like when I was younger if a prog rock album appealed instantly it probably wasn't going to stand the test of time. The best works are impenetrable at first and reveal more the more you listen. 
This is why I am always open to listen to music I have previously dismissed. 
A 40 minute album is one thing, a four hour opera another. This is why it took me so long to get Wagner. And like Ingenue, an antipathy towards warbling until my late 20s didn't help either.


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## Tristan (Jan 5, 2013)

I never cared much for string quartets until not long after discovering this site. I never hated them, but I considered them boring and was never interested in what I had heard of them. It was getting Tchaikovsky's set that made me become more interested, and from there I acquired Shostakovich's, Dvorák's, Mozart's, and most recently Beethoven's.


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## Feathers (Feb 18, 2013)

For me it is Shostakovich. Perhaps it was just a matter of my lack of maturity, but I just didn't find his music genuine at first. Now he is one of my favourite composers, not due to any specific piece but mostly due to time and changes to my personal taste and growth as a listener.


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## Guest (Jul 1, 2013)

My example is slightly different. I don't care for much of the music typically described as atonal - but when I heard Messiaen, I immediately connected with his works. It is the one exception to the rule. It hasn't helped me appreciate any other similar composers, but Messiaen just clicks with me.


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## TrevBus (Jun 6, 2013)

Well, I used to feel anything "atonal", "dissonant" or "serial" to be just noise. Now, to a very lesser degree, I still feel that way but have learned to appreciate and even enjoy most. Let's just say that it is a more agreeable and sophisticated(for lack of a better word) kind of "noise". There are even some "avant-garde" or "experimental" I rather like. Leonardo Balada as an example. Best way to put it I guess is my taste and listning habits have evolved. Maybe I just got older and wiser. Well, old for sure.


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## Cosmos (Jun 28, 2013)

I used to dislike baroque music, mostly because of the instrumentation (back then, I thought a lot of works sounded way to dated to be appreciated). But of course my opinion's turned around for the better, though I still cringe at the sound of the clavichord 

Now I don't "hate" any kind of music. I try to keep an open mind, and open ears, to everything. Of course, I still come across things that I dont' like, but I get to discover a lot of music that I do like, so it's worth it.

P.S. Except most rap and pop I have little to no tolerance for those genre


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## moody (Nov 5, 2011)

Hilltroll72 said:


> I think it is poor judgement to encourage _self-analysis_ here. The whippersnappers are prone to overindulge already.


Just what I was thinking,perhaps they should be banned.


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## moody (Nov 5, 2011)

Ingenue said:


> Ah, but I didn't mean self-indulgent display of the whippersnappers' psyches.
> I meant, analysis of their own reasons for not liking the music originally, and of the reasons why they think they have come to like it.
> 
> (I do wish someone would talk about the music, instead of the phrasing of the original post... )


All they'll say is wow it's awesome or I reely hate it !!


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## moody (Nov 5, 2011)

I used to dislike baroque music,so I thought I should give it a proper chance over a long period and then at the end of it---I decided I was right the first time.i


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## bigshot (Nov 22, 2011)

When I was starting out, I immediately grasped the Russians, Mozart Piano Concertos, Beethoven, etc... But Bach was something I just didn't get. I could tell that there was something there that I was missing, so I set it aside. Recently, I've been really getting into Bach. With a little experience I was able to put my feeble brain into that place of abstract, structural beauty that Bach inhabits. Still learning.


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## starry (Jun 2, 2009)

Everything is surely an acquired taste. But I don't see how you can be expected to acquire everything immediately, better to enjoy a few things at a time. So if I'm enjoying some other music then I can bide my time until I want to expand to something else. I think I've always had respect for all kinds of classical, though I only got into modern post-war classical in a big way from around 2007. Quite a few popular music genres I did have some disrespect for (like many here, it is more polarising I think), but from 2010 onwards I pushed those boundaries aside. It was just the time for me to do that, I needed to expand in a new direction. And I always listen for enjoyment/ediucation not to please somebody else or some group of people, and not really on the recommendation of others even, just whatever direction takes my fancy.


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## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

When I was nine I listened to Stravinskys violin concerto and thought it was the most disgusting thing I've ever heard in my life. A few months after that I read a book which had a section on Schoenberg and his development of serialism including an analysis of "A Survivor from Warsaw" which I then listened to and thought it was extremely exciting, powerful and emotional music. It was the first Schoenberg work I ever heard and my favourite to this day. The same book also had a section explaining Stravinsky's "Le Sacre du Primtemps" and looking at excerpts from a piano reduction and an explanation of bitonality and polytonality. I had a listen to it and loved it also. Soon enough I loved all Stravinsky just like I loved Schoenberg.


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## Manxfeeder (Oct 19, 2010)

Acquired tastes:

I came to classical hating the sound of violins, mostly because the old movies from the '30s and '40s had a lot of syrupy and scratchy violins, adding to that "music appreciation" concerts with our local orchestra with their scratchy violins played live. And wide vibrato on any instrument or the voice was repulsive. 

I also grew up in the Baptist church, and being a kid I associate organ diddling with sitting on a church bench, not being able to move, just being bored. 

I couldn't stand Tchaikovsky, I think because of all the Longines Symphonette commercials playing the Big Tune of the 6th Symphony as sappily as they could. 

So much for psychoanalysis. 

It took the HIP movement with clean string sounds and singers with little to no vibrato to get me back into the classical genre. After having not much to do with music at all for 15 years, I heard Gardiner's Messiah on the radio when it first came out sent me directly to the record store to pick it up - my first classical purchase since back when I was in college, and the hook has stayed in my jaw ever since. 

Now that I'm used to the genre, I actually like scratchy old recordings if they're good, like Furtwangler's. And Gennadi Rozhdestvensky's recording of Tchaikovsky's 6th turned me around, and now I actually like the composer. 

But some of the old prejudices are still around. Tastes I haven't acquired yet: I'm still not a fan of wide vibrato - why sing if you can't hear the words or discern the notes through all that warbling? And organ music doesn't do much for me, which is a shame, since I took organ lessons for five years.


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## CypressWillow (Apr 2, 2013)

I wouldn't admit this to anyone but you, but all through my 20's I just couldn't get into.....*ulp*.....Mozart! (Oh, the shame.) I knew that Chopin, my all-time hero, loved Mozart and Bach above all. So I wanted to love Mozart, but I just couldn't get his music. I was like the emperor in the film "Amadeus" - "Too many notes." I could almost _feel_ the music sliding past my ears like pleasant but indistinguishable notes.
Finally, and thanks be to all the gods of music, once I hit 30, something shifted. Mozart got "in" and I was never the same. When I look back to the time before the shift, I can only feel compassion for anyone who just can't "get" Mozart/Chopin/Bach - or whomever your holy trinity might be.


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## Borodin (Apr 8, 2013)

I don't really have acquired tastes, just acquired distastes. Am I the only one?


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

It took me quite a while to get into Baroque music, and I'm pretty sure it was because I wasn't hearing HIP recordings. There's a certain old-fashioned approach to, say, Bach's violin concertos or Handel's Water Music - the popular Baroque stuff I'd have heard before becoming properly interested in classical music generally - that to my ears has always sounded stodgy and somehow out of tune. This was an impression I had before I even knew there was such a thing as period-instrument performances, so this wasn't a prejudice about how it "should" sound. But when I started to hear such performances, I was struck immediately with the thought "ah! [it]that's[/i] what Baroque music sounds like!"
In fact these days I can enjoy those "stodgy" performances rather more too.


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## Weston (Jul 11, 2008)

I've had several instances of musical turnarounds.

Between the ages of 12 to 18 (this would have been shortly after the last ice age) I only loved classical and _hated_ rock or pop music, thinking it a giant step backward toward Neanderthal drum banging. But that was just the stuff on the radio. My first exposure to so called progressive rock was like having an entire new unknown world of wonders opened up to me. The impact was so powerful I all but abandoned classical for nearly 15 years.

I too hated the sound of soprano or any other vocal range of warbling. By the 1990s, having become a huge Beethoven fan, I needed to appreciate that style of bellyaching if I was going to enjoy the 9th symphony. So I played a mental game. As a big fan of synthesizers and other musical technologies, I just imagined in my head the warbling was some sort of amazing realistic synthesizer patch or a new type of theremin. From that moment on I could handle it without cringing. I'm glad, because now I have so much more awesome music to explore. However I still have trouble with some lieder and there is a certain excessive singing style left over from the late romantic that has made its way to recordings still giving me pause.

I still have trouble with screechy solo strings (cello being an exception somehow), so with chamber works I have to take a deep breath and set my nerves to enjoy. I have a bit of an easier time with piano trios, piano quartets and the like, than with strictly string quartets. Also the more instruments the easier to handle, so a quartet is easier on the ears than a trio, etc. This is probably because of growing up seeing films with big orchestral soundtracks. Also big orchestral fortissimos appealed to my testosterone driven but rock music deprived adolescent self. So, yes, the string quartet was an acquired taste. Again it was probably Beethoven who did the trick for me.

There are some tastes I still have not acquired. Pipe organ! The king of instruments? More like a raucous blurry windy noise to me. How in the world does one distinguish individual notes of something as complex as a Bach fugue on such a murky echoing overtone laden monstrosity? Also honking solo clarinet I still find annoying, so clarinet sonatas are difficult for me.


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## Ravndal (Jun 8, 2012)

I have hated several things. Especially the classic era. Though, recently it has changed.


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## Manxfeeder (Oct 19, 2010)

CypressWillow said:


> I wouldn't admit this to anyone but you, but all through my 20's I just couldn't get into.....*ulp*.....Mozart! (Oh, the shame.)


Shucks, I couldn't get into Mozart until three years ago. It's nice to be out of the Hall of Shame.


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## hreichgott (Dec 31, 2012)

There are a lot of genres that I was first exposed to only through bad performances. It took me some time to separate bad performance from bad composition and/or general dislike for the style. 

I don't think I'll ever be able to enjoy music that insults me personally, e.g. hip-hop music that trashes women, but I now enjoy hip-hop that has a more positive message, solid musical material and adept performers (Lauryn Hill, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis). A great performer is always a good advertisement for the style. Actually I got more into hip-hop this year after hearing a local guy rhyme a consistent 7 against 8 while varying the accents in keeping with the syllables


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## nightscape (Jun 22, 2013)

Opera is an ongoing struggle with me. Musicals as well. There's just something about singing stories that just doesn't interest me, and which I find comical for some reason. I've been listening to things in bits and pieces. For example, the first act of _Das Rheingold_ and enjoyed it. I've tried other parts of his Ring cycle, but it wears on me after a while. I do quite like _Tannhauser_. I like some of what I heard of Mozart's operas. The Philadelphia Orchestra is doing a semi-staged version of Strauss' _Salome_ next year, so maybe I'll try to convince myself to give it a try.


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## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

I suspect Starry is right; most music is an acquired taste. When I consider most of the music that I now like... even love... but disliked... or rather was indifferent to or unimpressed with... it wasn't that the music had changed or I suddenly underwent some grand shift in thinking. Rather, in most instances it was that my initial responses were based upon a limited exposure... and as I gave more effort to the work I discovered it was quite pleasurable.

By way of example, I am quite enamored of the Baroque... but for the longest time I avoided the French composers. From what I had initially heard I thought of them as too effete... to "frou-frou". But then a couple of years ago I began a major expansion of the Baroque music in my collection and I picked up a few discs by Rameau and Couperin and Lully... and I found that I loved them! I ended up delving even deeper... into Marin Marais, André Campra, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Michel Richard Delalande, Jean-Marie Leclair, etc... 

This is not to suggest than my opinion (or anyone else') will automatically change if only they put forth the effort... although I suppose one could be conditioned, in a Pavlovian manner, to like almost anything. Still, Moody admits to a continued dislike of the Baroque... even after putting forth some effort ... I still am not thrilled with Schoenberg (although I quite like Berg) and much of what might be loosely referred to as "atonal" music; I have little use for Xenakis, Stockhausen, and a great majority of the more avant-garde strains of "classical music", as well as rap/hip-hop, heavy metal, Justin Bieber and other such abominations.


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## korenbloem (Nov 5, 2012)

I don't hate any style, era or movement. I have discoverd great pieces in early music and allot great pieces in avantgarde. On the other hand, I found also allot of things... the words bored to death, doesn't even thouch the right angle for what I felt of the type of music.

This is also my experience in jazz, rock, pop etc.


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## starry (Jun 2, 2009)

I definitely think love for something is based on familiarity, you can like stuff but to truly love it you hear something more times and start to enjoy the details of it even more. Of course there could come a tipping point when you get slightly over-saturated with something and need to give it a break, maybe that's the point to try something completely different as a refreshing contrast.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

I'm pretty broad so there have been comparatively few things that I can describe as acquired tastes, in terms of instrumental music anyway. I suppose its more tough, or maybe outwardly tough, modern and contemporary things where harder to like in some ways, but some weren't. Eg. took me first listen of certain things to draw me in, but with other things its taken time. & I got to accept with some things, it just won't happen, but I focus on the gains I've made, and its been satisfying and rewarding process overall.

With music involving vocals, I am more hit and miss than purely instrumental, however I've had many gains there over the years too. Even with opera, which is my genre of least interest, my repertoire has expanded slowly. I am currently reassessing things, my listening is now more conservative than before, but I tested my comfort zone many times so I think I can rest on my laurels a bit? I am going back and back more now, and find the things I'd missed or not cared for before really fascinating, for example the extent to which Haydn and Mozart anticipated many of Beethoven's innovations by decades. I always liked them, but not as much as now, so its a matter of a quickening of interest in the older musics.


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## kfking (Mar 31, 2013)

Any classical music with solo vocals. I used to think the classical style of singing sounded cheesy but now I enjoy quite a few pieces with solo vocals in them.


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## Geo Dude (May 22, 2013)

There are several things I've taken time to grow into; string quartets, opera, choral and vocal music in general, but I think that the most important acquired taste has been the Classical period outside of Beethoven; it's also the one it took the longest to acquire. Much went into it, but I think that taking a few years off from classical music and mellowing out during that time had a lot do with it. Another thing that had a lot to do with it was getting recommendations from people thoroughly versed in period instrument performances, which add so much--for me, at least--that it is ridiculous. The end result of this is that the classical period is my new home base, something I never would have expected in the past.


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

In my full steam ahead teens, I was consuming just about anything modern or contemporary -- in retrospect some of what was consumed was past any good discrimination as to worth 

I tried "Neoclassical," ala Stravinsky, and it fell on then deaf ears, just did not get it. A handful of years later, knowing not to expect any 'modernist sensations,' and most importantly _by then having gained more familiarity with Classical (and baroque) era repertoire_, the second try had me understanding and appreciating -- with delight -- the same music which had 'made no sense' to me just a few years earlier.


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## Neo Romanza (May 7, 2013)

I came to classical as a serious listener later in my life but I have been listening to classical music or some form of it for as long as I can remember. One of the first classical composers I heard was Janacek and I was probably in my early teens (around 11 or 12). I then heard Ravel and honestly I didn't have the 'ear' for classical in the early days. It just sounded like one giant wash of instruments, but my appreciation, and love, of jazz music that lasted for a good 12 years helped me approach the music with at least a developed ear and an aptitude for harmonic complexity. The first composer that I seriously got into was Charles Ives, which I bought a Bernstein DG recording of his _Symphony No. 2_, _Central Park in the Dark_, and several other works and I really loved his style of composition. From here, I got into Bartok, but my love of his music didn't develop until months later when I re-listened to _Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta_ and _Concerto for Orchestra_ (Reiner/CSO performances) and it finally 'clicked' with me in a big way. From here, I stuck mainly to late-Romantics and 20th Century composers.

* This is more of my story with classical music but it demonstrates that through more exposure I 'acquired the taste' for this music.


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## Ravndal (Jun 8, 2012)

Some time ago I didn't like Baroque music. And I heard so much beautiful things about the baroque era, so I decided to like it. I listen to Gould's WTC Book 1 a couple hours a day for 2 weeks. Damn, it was tiring at the beginning - but suddenly I heard the beautiful melodies. I'm glad I did it that way.


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## clavichorder (May 2, 2011)

Some of my current favorite less known composers are acquired tastes as opposed to immediate loves. There was something intriguing about them and then I got hooked. W.F. Bach for example. 

But J.S. Bach may be the prime example for me right now. I was not initially blocked with his music, but ratings of others got in the way of giving in to a more full appreciation of his music. 

Brahms used to seem kind of colorless to me but now I have this appreciation of his darker style and its hard for me to imagine when I didn't like him, actually.

And these days, I can thoroughly enjoy any Haydn symphony and even find interest in many of the symphonies of his contemporaries that would have bored me previously.

Harder to explain is how I came into understanding 20th century sounds better. And how I came into dismissing them when initially I was not too bothered.


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## Garlic (May 3, 2013)

Mozart, Schubert and Brahms were tough for me at first. I heard pretty melodies but nothing to make me want to listen closer. Of course, when I did listen closer I came to love the music. I also had a big aversion to the late Romantic orchestral sound, so Mahler, Wagner etc was inaccessible to me. Early Schoenberg was my way into this music.

I remember as a teenager listening to Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue" over and over again, trying to "get into" jazz. It was a pretty dispiriting experience, I couldn't follow it at all and it made me feel ignorant. I got into jazz later, including Miles' later stuff, but had a blind spot about that album until fairly recently when I dug it out again and was blown away. Now I can't imagine how I could ever have disliked it.


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