# stages of the development of taste



## science (Oct 14, 2010)

I am thinking of something like Piaget's model of the stages of cognitive development, or Kohlberg's model (influenced of course by Piaget) of the stages of moral development, albeit not focused so exclusively on children. 

In case it matters, for the purposes of this thread (as in so much discussion in the West), the model human being will be a straight white middle-class American male baby-boomer. 

The life cycle of this person will be: 

Born to a family in which mom stays home to take care of the kids, dad commutes to an office in town, baseball is played, a respectable (i.e. probably Episcopal, perhaps Lutheran, Presbyterian, or, in an appropriate part of the country, Catholic) church is attended, suburban public schools.... 

Road-trip vacations will have been taken: bears will have been fed in Yellowstone; the Grand Canyon will have been ogled. 

As a child, there will have been some music lessons, probably piano. Sinatra, Harry Belafonte, Leonard Bernstein, Fritz Reiner, and Toscanini will have been featured on the radio and the record player. 

As a teenager, there will have been a little rebellion, maybe some sex and drugs, maybe even a little rock and roll, reading the likes of Salinger and Kerouac and Mailer in revolt against the assigned (but also read) Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens, and Twain. In college, bebop will have been discovered, along with Joyce, Woolf, Sartre, and Garcia Marquez. The ideological temptations of the Cold War will be resisted via Orwell and Dostoyevsky. One will have supported the ideals of the Civil Rights Movement but not the disruptive means it pursued (later only one's support will be remembered), which will be blamed for the excesses of the segregationists' responses; one will have supported the Vietnam War in principle but not have been tempted to serve. (If one did serve, it will have been from an office, perhaps even in the Pentagon.) Despite an extended indulgence in the Stones and Floyd and Zeppelin, Glenn Gould and Van Cliburn will never be far from the turntable. 

Later, as a young adult, the recordings of Karajan will have been collected. By this time, the most famous works of Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms will have been well-known. Some operas will have been attended. 

But at some point one will realize that to bridge the gap between one's own square-straight-arrowed-bourgeoisness and the coolness one wishes to evince, a little avant-garde is necessary. Britten and Shostakovich will, retrospectively, have saved as a bridge to Schoenberg and maybe even Babbitt. If one is really well-connected culturally, one might even have heard Nono or Penderecki. All this, though, must remain a side-interest relative to the canon of one's grandparents' generation; to show that one is serious, Cage will be sacrificed. The minimalists will be a guilty pleasure, along with (if one is really "cool") jazz fusion and ECM's stuff. 

What a relief when the HIPPI guys come along, and one can be edgy again while listening to fresh sounding Bach and Beethoven. Later, it is a bit of an annoyance, yet satisfying, to (have to) learn about Renaissance composers; fortunately the repertoire also expands to include ever more obscure baroque, classical, and romantic composers. 

Is this about right? What corrections or improvements can be made? 

This is important because for someone my age, the generationally-challenged (being neither Boomer nor Millennial), all this can be held up as a kind of Platonic ideal, not one that we can properly strive for (due to chronological hinderances) but one against which we can judge ourselves, discovering our deficiencies. 

For a Millennial, everything must be completely different. As one emerged, in early adolescence, into consciousness, everything already existed, was available at a few keystrokes, was catalogued and sorted and ranked--all with a manifest arbitrariness, the lingering yet slowly-fading (decreasingly relevant) contingencies of a past that cannot really have been real (because that is how we all really feel about the past before our personal memories). 

In this condition, all assertion of taste is just a whimsy, a fun thing to do. Someone likes Thai food and someone else prefers Greek, who cares? It's like Tchaikovsky and Xenakis. 

Just trying to figure things out. What are the ideal biographies, the ideal developments of musical taste?


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## Enthusiast (Mar 5, 2016)

Wow, science! Is that your story? I do find it hard to relate to as I think English childhoods were and are very different. I also suspect that the internet will have changed things a lot, too, as people these days can make contact with ideas when they are ready instead of when they meet the right peer group. 

Anyway for me, growing up in Britain, the development was not so ordered. My parents loved music and literature. There was always music in our house and I devoured the classics from an early age. It must have been partly me because my brother didn't get nearly so obsessed with listening to music (he was much better at playing it though!). By the age of 13 I was going to the library every week and taking out records of music that was more modern than was available in our house (my parents liked Bartok, Stravinsky and Prokofiev well enough but their record collection didn't have so much of their music ... they did have a lot of Britten, though). I also discovered, and introduced my parents to, Mahler via the library. I got to know a lot of "modern" music - Shostakovich, Ravel, Tippett and Hindemith as well as those already mentioned - but didn't do much more than dip my toe in the water of more avant garde or recent composers like Peter Maxwell Davies and Henze. Performers were always important to me and Karajan was definitely not one who I sought out. I may have known a lot of music but I'm not sure that my "comprehension" of it in those days was very mature, certainly it wasn't consciously mature. I devoured it and it was an important part of my life. I think I had "good taste" but it seems to me, now, that my understanding was naive.

My obsession with music did tend to divide me from my friends and not to fit with my fairly rebellious nature. When I went to university I sank myself deeply into "progressive rock" and for a period of some ten years I hardly listened to classical music at all. I did get to know Cage and Stockhausen during this period as they were acceptable and interesting to rock fans. I still enjoy Stockhausen but am over Cage, I think. I also discovered bebop through the electronic jazz of Miles and Herbie (Hancock - not Karajan).

Rediscovering classical music involved starting again with the classics and it was some while before I was ready again for Bartok and Stravinsky. I knew they were good but felt they were not as good as the greats from the past. When I did rediscovered them I learned how wrong that was and I heard works - including many that I knew from my late childhood - afresh and with a much deeper appreciation. All this took 20 years, most of which I was living and working if developing countries (so I only had the music I brought with me - and there were no MP3s in those days).

More recently - perhaps in my mid-50s - I started wanting to explore contemporary music (like Carter and Boulez). Quite a lot of it was intriguing but unyielding. I didn't get it, really. But I did find Schoenberg much more enjoyable than I had previously and this began to open doors - or was it the other way round? Perhaps struggles with Boulez and Carter made Schoenberg easy and rewarding. I really hear Schoenberg's music as similar to the other greats of his time and am rarely conscious of his alleged atonality - something which once stood between me and his music - these days. Quite a bit of my exploration involved the more tonal contemporary composers - Adams, MacMillan and quite a few Scandinavians - but after some initial enjoyment their music started to bore me. At the same time I tried many of the less well known composers of the distant and recent past, finding some gems but often only music that was good but not as great as the music I already knew.

I'm still exploring - even in rock music (as my work life has often involved working alongside or managing young people). I don't think there is a pattern in my story and I can't really see a hierarchy of stages, just different period of my life and different roles for music during each of them. Music was always important to me and is increasingly so these days.


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## science (Oct 14, 2010)

That is nothing like my story! But your story is good. You're apparently a British Boomer. I suspect an upper-middle-class Europhile American would have a more similar experience to yours than I've realized.


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

Short story, easily told. As a child and youth (teen), I had access via the radio, records, books to all of the major arts via my mother's desire to expand her own mental/aesthetic horizons beyond her working-class, 2nd generation immigrant upbringing. So I experienced a wide array of music/art but decided early that I was completely free to pursue my own interests in the arts--be my own guide, find my own way. And so I have.


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## MarkW (Feb 16, 2015)

My parents believed in having a wide range of everything in the house (music and reading matter) and letti8ng each of us find what spoke to us and interested us. I drew the Classical straw.


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## science (Oct 14, 2010)

I did not intend or realize that this thread would be taken as a biographical sketch. My true story is too odd for belief: trailer-park ******* born and bred, cowboys on one side of the family and hillbillies on the other. Perhaps I somehow felt that I could ascend to the middle class, because I always had a curiosity about subjects like literature and classical music. When I was in 6th grade, I asked my music teacher to let me come in after school and listen to her Bach records, which I did entirely without comprehension. I started purchasing random Naxos cassette tapes when I had a little disposable income from my work in high school: Saint-Saens' piano trios is all I can remember. They all died a heat death in the back seat of my car. 

I didn't get much exposure to pop culture either, since it was Satanic and we were fundamentalists. I first heard Zeppelin on a video about backmasking - and liked what I heard. At home all I heard - all I was allowed to hear - was white Southern gospel. (Think Elvis's gospel albums, but of course we didn't listen to sinners like Elvis.) 

Everything blew apart in college. Good at math, I got a scholarship to an elite university and got above my raisin'. For example, I stopped being a young-earth creationist. I've been figuring things out since then, a little at a time, mostly through the luck of who I've happened to know. My exploration of classical music in particular has been a matter of throwing darts in the dark, sometimes hitting something. A few books did me a lot of good, but they of course can be overwhelming. The amazon "enshrinement game" and the talkclassical projects have been the biggest help to me.


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## Enthusiast (Mar 5, 2016)

science said:


> That is nothing like my story! But your story is good. You're apparently a British Boomer. I suspect an upper-middle-class Europhile American would have a more similar experience to yours than I've realized.


Well, yours is a much better story. I am not sure we were anything above a lower middle class family and the first para of your story reads a bit like my father's early life except he never got a scholarship but did benefit from the educational opportunities that opened up after WW2.


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## Varick (Apr 30, 2014)

My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low-grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. My mother was a fifteen-year-old French prostitute named Chloe with webbed feet. My father would womanize, he would drink, he would make outrageous claims, like he invented the question mark. Sometimes he would accuse chestnuts of being lazy. A sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament. My childhood was typical. Summers in Rangoon, luge lessons. In the spring we'd make meat helmets. If I was insolent, I was placed in a burlap bag and beaten with reeds. Pretty standard, really. At the age of twelve I received my first scribe. The rest is history.

V


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

^^^^So, just ordinary folks....


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## MarkW (Feb 16, 2015)

Denial
Anger
Bargaining
Depression
Acceptance


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## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

I started listening to classical music by borrowing some old cassettes to my mother which she used to listen while painting. Most of them were of Bach's music. Then I bought some Bach cds by myself, and then some cds with Beethoven's piano sonatas. Until that time, I used to listen to some prog rock and played some guitar. Then I went to see a concert of M.Argerich around the year 2005 which deeply impressed me. Inspired by that experience, I decided to learn to play the piano and that music from the classical tradition was going to be my main listening. Then my first piano teacher introduced me to a lot of early music repertoire, of which he was a big fan (he used to sing that stuff in a choir), like Perotin, lots of ars antiqua and nova, Gesualdo, etc. At some point he decided to go to live to France and he gave me before leaving all of his cd collection. Thus, I kept expanding my exposure to the repertoire. An important moment was when I discovered a cd in that pile which included Debussy's Children's Corner and Ravel's Le tombeau de Couperin. Then I saw on tv a performance and introductory explanation of Stravinsky's Rite of the Spring, another important moment. Then around the year 2007 I discovered youtube and my exploration of the repertoire increased exponentially and I had a crash course on modern music by just exploring videos there. With the years, by lots of reading and youtube, around the year 2012 I came to finally have a global view of the whole classical repertoire, from Perotin to the 2010s, the big names in each period and the big pieces in those same periods. I like a bit of music from all the periods, and I equally dislike bits in each era. I have some holes in my exposure, mainly because I didn't find certain composers interesting and therefore I desisted to explore in those directions. My favorite periods came to be early music (from medieval to late renaissance) and modern and contemporary (that is, the whole 20th century and the 21st century). I don't find this very surprising since it seems to go in line with my early preference for prog rock before listening to classical music. Today I don't really explore much, just what the posters here post and is new to me, particularly music from the 21st century.

So, a typical 'millennial' experience, I guess (born in 1988, so that silly brand fits on me like a hand in a glove  )


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## Larkenfield (Jun 5, 2017)

MarkW said:


> Denial
> Anger
> Bargaining
> Depression
> Acceptance


I doubt if Kübler-Ross would have given you grief over your list.


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## science (Oct 14, 2010)

Well, how about the topic of the OP? 

What are the stages of musical taste that one would ideally go through?


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## Kjetil Heggelund (Jan 4, 2016)

I liked your first post, but thought that it wasn't a typical or ideal way. I don't think you really can tell! It's like fortunetelling  or a theory of everything...


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## Eusebius12 (Mar 22, 2010)

I learned the piano at a young age. I was somewhat familiar with classical music from as far back as I can remember. I grew up though in an atmosphere of pop. It was a recording of Horowitz (and also outgrowing pop) given me by one of my mother's friends that changed my musical tastes 180. Also being able to play interesting stuff by that stage on the piano seemed to happen about the same time. Thereafter my tastes became very aligned with classical.


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## Richannes Wrahms (Jan 6, 2014)

Musical experience usually goes:
Listening
Misunderstanding
Overstatement
Relistening
Reevaluation
Understatement


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## starthrower (Dec 11, 2010)

I developed my taste on my own with almost no influence from my parents who had no records or interesting books. I was somewhat inspired to take up music due to the fact that my second cousin went to Eastman, and my mom's stepfather played drums in his youth. But I had very little contact with their musical activity.

But I've been obsessed with music since the age of 8 or 9. I couldn't afford to buy any records until age 14 when I bought a few Lps by Yes, Deep Purple, and few others. I decided on my own to learn guitar at 15, and I read the music magazines at my high school library. At age 18 I discovered jazz and classical radio which turned me onto a whole new world of music. I continued to listen and read about all kinds of music. 20 years later I had built a nice collection and started doing jazz radio shows at Syracuse University drawing on my personal collection for most all of my material.

In 2010 I discovered this place which opened my eyes and ears to dozens of composers I was unfamiliar with at that point. I now have a comprehensive collection and could probably host a classical radio program if I so desired. But most folks don't want to tune in to dissonant modern classical music anyway so I wouldn't bother. I'll let somebody else program the warhorses ad nauseam.


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## haydnguy (Oct 13, 2008)

There is a lot of the characteristics that the OP describes me. I'm a boomer. I'm embarrased to say that my mother had a music degree and I didn't take advantage of the free piano lessons that she would have offered. I would have been about 9 years old or so. I was more interested in going outside and playing football with my friends.

I went to a liberal/arts college that had a good music department (one of the schools strengths) but by this time I was more interested in girls. I did, however, take a music appreciation class that was required. That's where the real seed was planted within me to explore classical music. 

After I graduated from college I moved to Washington, D.C. (I had lived in the South). Obviously, a culture shock when I moved to D.C. But the seed for classical music started sprouting. Except for the first couple of years I bought season tickets to the Washington Symphony for my girlfriend and I. I do remember now many people I saw there but at the time I didn't have any idea who I was looking at except a few people that I had heard of like Isaac Stern, Copeland, Bernstein. I can't remember but I've always wondered if I saw Elliot Carter.

I didn't really start listening to classical music in earnest until my father died. I had to take care of him for a number of years. When I came to the forums, everyone was really nice but I had no idea where to start listening. I came up with two ideas. The first, you can start with a composer and then go from there. Like from Haydn to Mozart and then to Beethoven. Just a journey through composers that interests you.

The other way, (which I did), was to take a few well respected composers from each genre and try to determine which genre i liked best. When I started, I didn't know Baroque from Romantic. In a way, though, it was an advantage because I didn't come with any real preconceived notions. I knew Bach, and the regulars, but when I finally came to people like Schoenberg I really treated him like I did everyone else I didn't know. And I think I finally "got it". 

So that's my story. And the journey continues.......


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## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

Listening to Ferneyhough after your very first year of exposition to classical music.
Feeling shocked, horrified, revolted, confused, irritated, betrayed, scammed.
Going back to Vivaldi's Four Seasons.
Listening to Ferneyhough after your second year of exposition to classical music.
Feeling irritated, betrayed, scammed.
Going back to Rach's Second Piano Concerto.
Listening to Ferneyhough after your first decade of exposition to classical music.
Feeling strange, maybe even secretly a bit tempted eek: God forbid!)
Going back quickly to Ravel's Le jardin feerique for soul cleaning and forgetness.
Listening to Ferneyhough after your first quarter century of exposition to classical music and a thread by shirime.
Feeling realized, moved to tears.
Going back to tonality is for sissies 
Being banned by the mods of TC after erratic behaviour and accusations to the owner of the site about being part of a world wide conspiracy to erradicate flu vaccines.
End of taste development.


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## Eusebius12 (Mar 22, 2010)

aleazk said:


> Listening to Ferneyhough after your first quarter century of exposition to classical music and a thread by shirime.
> Feeling realized, moved to tears.
> Going back to tonality is for sissies
> Being banned by the mods of TC after erratic behaviour and accusations to the owner of the site about being part of a world wide conspiracy to erradicate flu vaccines.
> End of taste development.


I wonder if these steps are all related in some way


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## Luchesi (Mar 15, 2013)

aleazk said:


> Listening to Ferneyhough after your very first year of exposition to classical music.
> Feeling shocked, horrified, revolted, confused, irritated, betrayed, scammed.
> Going back to Vivaldi's Four Seasons.
> Listening to Ferneyhough after your second year of exposition to classical music.
> ...


You reminded me of this clip where the privileged population was only interested in comfortable escape from the noises, comotion and threats of daily life. So, when Prokofiev is put on the newfangled record player the man of the house gets up and scratches the needle across the old disc.

25 minutes in;






I also enjoyed Goodall's discussion of the Pythagorean comma.

here 10 minutes in;






But especially the beginning of the development of notation by the Guido guy in this other video

15 minutes in;


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## endelbendel (Jul 7, 2018)

We think more in terms of the Pleasure Principle repressed and then sublimated in various ways by the social and oppositional aspects of adolescence. So, serving the ego, taste would function for suppression of sexual enjoyment. Therefore, a sort of jouissance, a complex idea which can be reasonably simplified as painful joy.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

I've had a love-hate relationship with classical music. It could be summarised to date as:
Discovery
Rejection
Rediscovery
Consolidation

My parents listened to it, but they also listened to other music. Although I would have liked to have learnt an instrument, my parents couldn't afford it, but I did start collecting recordings of classical. Like many listeners I've gone through periods of radically altering my taste in music. In my twenties I got rid of all of my classical recordings and started listening to other types of music. In my thirties I started collecting classical again and going to concerts whenever I could. In recent years I've culled heavily but not made the mistake of getting rid of it all. I hardly listen to anything that I don't know (unless its on radio), and rarely go to concerts. I still enjoy reading about music, particularly biographies of musicians.


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