Classical Music—huh?

Had an interesting chat with my student the other day. He found it difficult to appreciate classical music. I pointed out that actually we all naturally respond to classical music intuitively, even if we don't realise it.

"Huh?"

Just observe yourself the next time you watch a movie like Harry Potter, or Lord of the Rings, or Star Wars. In fact, any movie which uses an orchestra for the soundtrack. Then try watching it with the sound switched off. You will get what I mean.

Movie soundtracks are written in pretty much the same medium, or language, as any standard classical music. The only difference is, for a soundtrack, the emotional context is provided for you visually in the movie. The music reinforces the thoughts and emotions going through your mind and heart as you watch the movie. When the cognition and affection match the music, magic happens.

Appreciation of classical music requires the same process, except for a catch: you have to provide your own cognitive and emotional context. In short, your own "movie". This is where an active participation is demanded of the listener. The listener must assimilate the music which is being played, and then match it to the experiences and the emotional bank of a person. When a match occurs, the listener is 'moved'. When the two 'click' together, it becomes beautiful

The problem is most people cannot perform this matching, which is why classical music is foreign and inaccessible to them. Appreciation of classical music demands quite a bit from the listener as he has to first, "learn up" the music, and then find and match it to his prior knowledge, or schemata. Of course, a regular listener would already have a shortcut to this schemata and can quickly match music with schemata.

And this also accounts for why some people are so quickly turned off by music which does not "appeal" to them. Essentially, what is happening is the new music does not match the existing schemata and will be rejected, unless the listener is willing to reconstruct a new link surrounding the new music. This is the process of what we frequently refer to as "acquiring the taste" for something new.