Scenes from a Perpetual Question

I’ve had great listening experiences with instances from almost every strain of music that I’ve encountered—this is no surprise since, as is typical of people these days to a more or lesser degree I suspect, I enjoy listening to many different kinds of music. I also tend to prefer different styles and pieces differently, finding this or that music more or less preferable given the particular context—again, not an especially alien tendency. Music is like wine in more ways than one, and it matters which varietal accompanies which situation (though it’s always important to remember to keep some Carlo Rossi around for safety’s sake).

A great personal irony is that while I love to write so-called new music ("so-called" because this is the least-bad term anyone’s come up with so far for the lucid but elitist “Western contemporary art music”), and while this is what I’ve spent much of the body of my short career trying to actively advocate for, I personally find in reality that, as compared to examples of most other genres, a much smaller percentage of the new music that I encounter is likable. What I mean is that I am likelier to at least reasonably enjoy, or to be entertained by, one out a hundred rock songs, in the way I enjoy a rock song, than I am to enjoy one out of a hundred average works of contemporary music in the way I enjoy (when I really enjoy) a work of contemporary music. And before I go on I need to make clear that I’ve had transcendent experiences with rock songs. However, though most of new music seems so often average to boring and not at all a good use of available resources, the genre more than makes up for itself: In the end, my favorite works of all are still those of contemporary music. The great difference is that when a piece of new music really works, nothing else can touch it.

In the metaphor of the meal, amazing new music is something like an extremely dark rich decadent fudge. The kind of awesome and exhausting experience that you have once in a while and should only usually bother with in extreme quality.