# You hear a piece of music for 1st time ...



## Enthusiast (Mar 5, 2016)

This is a sort of response to the thread started by Captainnumber36 on his criteria for assessing art.

You hear a piece of music for the first time. The composer – perhaps even the period – is unfamiliar to you. How do you decide

1.	Whether to listen all the way through?
2.	Whether it interests you enough to want to listen again?
3.	Whether you love it or hate it or somewhere between the two?

I often find first impressions misleading. Not only might my mood have too strong an influence on my experience but also – unless it is from a period that I know well – an initial liking often seems to turn out to be because there is not too much that is memorable. But, on the other hand, I can certainly hear ugliness on a first hearing! Ugliness is a word we use a lot on this forum. It means different things to different people – for some it is associated with discord or apparent chaos while for others it is more about some facile element, crassness, cheapness of gesture – but we all have a common habit of using it to reject stuff we feel we won’t like.

For me eventual love of a piece of music is about what it does to me. There is little point (to me) in always seeking new pieces and never settling down to enjoy the pieces I have spent time getting to know. I want music that rewards me many times. And if I go cold on it after, say, 10 enjoyable hearings I tend to think less of it. For example, I know that (for me) Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms etc. are great composers who each wrote many works that are giving me a lifetime of pleasure – to say nothing of their capacity to protect me from black moods! And I know that (for me) some other genuinely (for me) great composers – Berlioz and Vivaldi are two example of composers I revere but fit this category – are not as great. 

Of course, what one composer (or even the music of one era) does for me is not the same as what another does. They are not interchangeable and different music has different effects on me – but the music I think of as great all rewards me greatly and repeatedly. When it comes to more recent music the same applies but, of course, it can take a long time to arrive at the last stage. But the more I know the faster I can get there. So, there are modern composers who I love as much as the greats of earlier centuries – Bartok, certainly, Stravinsky, Britten etc. – and there are many others who I think of as being “nearly there”. With much contemporary music I have had less time and the “learning of the language” stage took longer. I also took a few (what turned out to be) wrong turns and spent time listening to music that seemed nice at first but quickly became unmemorable or boring. But composers who were very fresh in the 1950s and ‘60s are well settled in my mind and I am fairly certain of where they stand for me.

Sorry, that is an over-long first post for a thread. But what about you? What sort of evolution does a piece of music go through in your mind for you to arrive at an apparent certainty about its merit? Or maybe it doesn't both you? Maybe you always want to new?


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## Guest (Aug 15, 2018)

hmmmm 

I listen to a lot of new things fairly often in short bursts and I find attractive things about each of the new things I listen to. When I go back and spend a little bit of time listening to the music again and again I guess all that happens is I learn a little more about the aesthetic of the music and the intrinsic musicality of the composer and musicians. The first time I hear anything is like meeting someone for the first time and listening to the piece more is like getting to know that person better and becoming friends with them.

It is true that some people I used to be friends with but have kind of faded from my life, and that seems to be the case with some pieces of music and composers as well even if I got to know the music really well and really enjoyed spending a lot of time listening to it. But I'm not bothered by any of that, really, as there is a tonne of stuff out there that I haven't yet listened to and most of the time I just happen to like what I hear.


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## beetzart (Dec 30, 2009)

I remember in my teens when my school music teacher started to introduce me to Brahms and Mahler. Upon hearing the opening to Brahms' 1st Symphony I nearly left the classroom and went into orbit, same with the 4th movement of Mahler's 1st. Discovering great new music no matter what where or when is a marvellous thing, for me anyway. And the nicest thought of all is that even though I am 40 and have been listening to classical music for 30 years I know it still has so much more to give, somewhere. Probably already got the music on my hard drive and I haven't discovered it yet.


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## Larkenfield (Jun 5, 2017)

On hearing something new, I would add a number 4.) suspending _ judgment_ when hearing it for the first time, putting it off as long as humanly possible until the brain can somehow get itself wrapped around it, even if it takes years.


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## Clairvoyance Enough (Jul 25, 2014)

I find more and more that I can quickly tell if I'm capable of liking something within this particular window of my life, at least if "like" means that the music elicits a tangible feeling of stimulation. Many (actually most) of the pieces that I really love no longer do despite several year long breaks, and I think that's because a good percentage of that response is about novelty. I spent some time with RVW's symphonies a few weeks ago and discerned mentally that I "like" them, but felt no physical or adrenal response because my ears are just oversatured with the Romantic/neo-Romantic sound.

Whether I think Messiaen is better than every other piece I've loved before, I know that right now he's one of the only classical composers who sound different enough to actually produce a sensation in my body, and the moments that provide it for me did so the first time I heard them, as did the ones by William Schuman and a few others. There are other modern/contemporary composers I dislike but who I've probably listened to even more than composers I do like and it's just never yielded anything, so I've abandoned that the theory that repetitive listening without a good first impression can really work for me. I'm about 5 years into loving classical music and that's just never happened.

I trusted when I first got into it that I would have a love affair with all of the great composers and that repetition/focused listening could open anything that was genuinely good, but ultimately I find myself returning to all of the things I loved at first.

I still prefer Haydn's symphonies to Mozart's (even Beethoven's most of the time) because rhythmically they're more boisterous. I still think a lot of the Well Tempered Clavier is boring; I still think The Art of Fugue is the GOAT piece. Loved Wagner immediately, still don't really like Mahler or Bruckner except in moments. Love Debussy and Ravel on the surface but never really _fell in love _with them. Brahms is boring mostly. Love a lot of opera but still think there is something artificial, alien, and emotionally bereft in the actual sound of operatic singing.

I expected all of that stuff to eventually change and it never really did. Penderecki, Xenakis, and Ligeti didn't make good first impressions on me, but once the initial shock of the "ugliness" wore off I became attracted to it fairly quickly. Not realizing that at first I kept listening and listening to Webern, Schoenberg, and Alban Berg in the hopes for a similar turnaround with 12-tone music, but many years later it still hasn't happened.

I spent a lot of time learning that I'm an impatient listener, basically.


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## Enthusiast (Mar 5, 2016)

Clairvoyance Enough said:


> ..................
> I spent a lot of time learning that I'm an impatient listener, basically.


Your post left me wondering why you have worked at liking classical music so hard? You seem to have undertaken a fairly good survey but maybe classical music is not really meant to be a big thing in your life? Many of us get into classical music (or fail to get into it) as children. Children are, of course, hard wired to learn but they are also playful and reluctant to do things that they don't enjoy. A lot of people insist that deep undisturbed concentration - which must surely be accompanied by some sort of inner monologue (and therefore is not really undisturbed) - but I always find that a much more relaxed approach works better for me. Music expresses things that are not words and an overly "left brain" approach to it might aid analysis but not, I think, enjoyment.


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