How to Learn to Love Classical Music

Another discussion of aesthetics, this time on the importance of appreciating good music, instead of the popular noise that masquerades as 'music'.

I think most people can appreciate that there is something supreme and rewarding in classical music but at the same time, it feels like it’s out of reach for most of us and it’s not uncommon to hear people say things like, it doesn’t do anything for me. For most of us, we just don’t get it, even if we can appreciate the impressive skill required to compose and perform it. When people say that it doesn’t do anything for them, I think they mean that it doesn’t make them feel a certain way like more popular forms of music do. And this is one of the first big challenges with classical music, it isn’t designed to manipulate our emotional triggers as immediate as pop music does. And that’s the first thing to realize, if you can first appreciate that there’s some good in classical music that you want to learn to appreciate, then it’s going to take some effort on your part. It’s like being conditioned by a steady diet of junk food. If you want to learn eat healthy, you have to simply choose to expose yourself to better and more healthy food at the expense of what you’re used to until your palate can learn to appreciate it. I should point out, too, that I’m no aficionado of classical music. I’m still in the throws of learning to love it myself, but as I’ve been doing so, I think I’ve picked up some insights to help other people learn to love it as well. GK Chesterton described romance as a kind of balance between the unfamiliar and the familiar. We want to be exposed to something unfamiliar so that we can get a sense of adventure but with enough familiarity so that it still resonates with our sensibilities and feels safe.

And music and branding accomplish this by introducing us to something new but with just enough of a dose of the familiar so that it doesn’t feel too alien. Again, this is done through associations. It’s associated with something we already know and like. And think about the way that pop music is marketed to us in the age of visual media. Now it’s a given that unless you’re good looking, you’ll have a tough time making it as a musical act because the music alone doesn’t merit our attention. It doesn’t meet a standard of quality that would capture our interest unless, in addition to it, there’s some mesmerizingly beautiful person in a music video performing it for us. Because popular music today is an industrial product. It’s designed to maximize our consumption without having to put much effort into the production. So, they crank out mediocre songs and enhance them with sex appeal and apparent cultural significance to compensate for what’s lacking. And they can do this because almost anyone with a reasonable amount of talent can perform music at this caliber, so they hold out for people who can both perform the music and who are also extremely good looking.

But this isn’t so easy to do with classical music, because the artform demands so much of its artists, that you can’t find just anybody to do it. Pop music also benefits from the way it’s aggressively marketed to us as a form of social inclusion. Imagine how much more you’d be incentivized to listen to classical music if it meant you’d be more likely to gain social acceptance the way listening to Billie Eilish or Shawn Mendes does in 2019. And if you doubt this idea that associations accessorize music and art in such a way that stimulates our ability to learn to like it when we might not have otherwise, let me draw from an example that will fit a lot of this together because I’m willing to bet that a lot of you already do like classical music but only when you can associate it with something else to make it easier for you and that’s in the form of movie soundtracks. If you’re a big Star Wars fan, I bet you love hearing the rousing music written by John Williams and likewise if you’re a big Harry Potter fan. When you hear something like that opening theme, it can insight feelings of nostalgia and adventure. In these instances, there’s a context that taught our emotions to appreciate the music because of a story and characters that it’s associated with. And this was and is my gateway to appreciating classical music. I started by listening to scores by John Williams and James Horner because they meant something to me and because they meant something to me, that emotional kick that pop music conditioned me to depend on was available. This is why it’s so important to create your own associations that will augment the music for you. Make it a part of the soundtrack of your life. If 90’s grunge was the background of your coming of age moments, like it was for me, then make classical music the background for the moments that are significant in your life now. If you have a special occasion coming up, plan on going to the symphony so that the music featured there will forever be associated with that occasion and the memories associated with it.