While I appreciate your analogy and largely agree, allow me to play devil's advocate and pose the following question: with a park, there is some quantitative way of demarcating the space you have to explore, but with music, that's a lot blurrier. For example, with pop music, I think that - and this might just be the '80s post-modern media studies sympathizer in me - there might be as yet unexplored depths in anything I listen to and that cultural norms influence me to find something "interesting" or dismiss something as "merely enjoyable" (again to briefly erect this as a strict-ish binary). However, when I read Armond White review Tyler Perry or Adam Sandler films, I might disagree with his interpretations a lot of the time, but I can see that there is a dimension of extreme depth that can be teased out by the right critic or appreciator. But maybe this line of thought just delves into my personal grappling with what I "allow" to interest me and what I don't. I shun academics who find free jazz to just be cluttered noise that can be set to the side and dismissed as uninteresting, but I also tend to be completely unmoved to further dissection after I listen to about 99% of indie rock albums.
I can summarize this well though in a Sun Ra quote that he used when confronted by musicians about the "corniness" of disco numbers he was handing out: "What you call corny is someone's hopes and dreams. Don't be too hip."
However, when I read Armond White review Tyler Perry or Adam Sandler films, I might disagree with his interpretations a lot of the time, but I can see that there is a dimension of extreme depth that can be teased out by the right critic or appreciator. But maybe this line of thought just delves into my personal grappling with what I "allow" to interest me and what I don't.
I can summarize this well though in a Sun Ra quote that he used when confronted by musicians about the "corniness" of disco numbers he was handing out: "What you call corny is someone's hopes and dreams. Don't be too hip."
I love you already, Bro. You really "get it". Also, Diary of a Mad Black Woman is one of the most narratively bizarre films I've ever seen, and y'all should get on that.
I guess that there really is a difference between "interesting" and "enjoyable", but we shouldn't have the difference affect our listening. The mind and heart are both sexual organs, so if they give you a boner, it's all good.
While I appreciate your analogy and largely agree, allow me to play devil's advocate and pose the following question: with a park, there is some quantitative way of demarcating the space you have to explore, but with music, that's a lot blurrier. For example, with pop music, I think that - and this might just be the '80s post-modern media studies sympathizer in me - there might be as yet unexplored depths in anything I listen to and that cultural norms influence me to find something "interesting" or dismiss something as "merely enjoyable" (again to briefly erect this as a strict-ish binary). However, when I read Armond White review Tyler Perry or Adam Sandler films, I might disagree with his interpretations a lot of the time, but I can see that there is a dimension of extreme depth that can be teased out by the right critic or appreciator. But maybe this line of thought just delves into my personal grappling with what I "allow" to interest me and what I don't. I shun academics who find free jazz to just be cluttered noise that can be set to the side and dismissed as uninteresting, but I also tend to be completely unmoved to further dissection after I listen to about 99% of indie rock albums.
Yeah, I was a little hesitant to use the park analogy for this reason, but I wanted to keep it simple for fear of obscuring the main message. Yes, the judgement is still subjective, so some people might find Beyonce Presley State Park to be more interesting than the other, but the question is not about the park/music itself, it's about the feeling we get after or during our experience of it.
Yeah, I was a little hesitant to use the park analogy for this reason, but I wanted to keep it simple for fear of obscuring the main message. Yes, the judgement is still subjective, so some people might find Beyonce Presley State Park to be more interesting than the other, but the question is not about the park/music itself, it's about the feeling we get after or during our experience of it.
Yeah, that's where I thought you might be heading with it, but do you think that there is any merit to pondering the objective qualities of music (not to say universal abstract qualities, but more using objective in the sense of "corporeal," "physical," "the sound waves themselves,") that pique interest and do not in ourselves individually? Do you think there's some amalgamation of cultural and these aforementioned "objective" factors that can create something of a mosaic against which our subjective evaluations fly, or do you think we engage otherwise?
To bring it to the park analogy and to simplify a bit, after going to enough parks or listening to enough music, do you think there are musical proxies to mountain ranges that can be taken in and acknowledged as being beyond the scope of one trip? What do you think the impacts of that are on our tastes and preferences? Or yours in particular?
Yeah, that's where I thought you might be heading with it, but do you think that there is any merit to pondering the objective qualities of music (not to say universal abstract qualities, but more using objective in the sense of "corporeal," "physical," "the sound waves themselves,") that pique interest and do not in ourselves individually? Do you think there's some amalgamation of cultural and these aforementioned "objective" factors that can create something of a mosaic against which our subjective evaluations fly, or do you think we engage otherwise?
To bring it to the park analogy and to simplify a bit, after going to enough parks or listening to enough music, do you think there are musical proxies to mountain ranges that can be taken in and acknowledged as being beyond the scope of one trip? What do you think the impacts of that are on our tastes and preferences? Or yours in particular?
Yes, but I think they're very hard to pin down. From the purely quantitative standpoint, there are mathematical techniques that could give you a measure of "complexity" in a particular piece of music and these could, in turn, give you a pretty good idea of how much effort a human would have to expend to pick out the patterns. This certainly wouldn't be a good measure of "quality" for any practical purpose, seeing that it ignores lyrics, emotion, cultural context, etc., but it might give you a very crude measurement of the extent of the mountain ranges in our analogy.
However, I tend to treat the properties of music as purely subjective in casual conversation. It's very difficult to determine ahead of time whether I can expect universal agreement on any particular aspect of my experience with it. What's more, I find I tend to be more "interested" in lyrical mountain ranges (e.g., Bob Dylan, Joanna Newsom) than complexity in the melody/arrangement... and I don't know how I would even begin to quantify lyrical depth.
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