The music that I listened to in my teens through early thirties still resonate the most strongly with me. The Clash and other punk bands were the first to grab my emotions when I was in high school in the early 1980s, followed by New Wave, alternative bands, and classic 60s & 70s rock in college, then bands like Nirvana and Oasis. That's around the time my tastes seems to have been defined, though I have kept exploring new bands and genres. I have been subsequently exploring more blues, jazz and classical which are emotionally powerful, but evocative in a different way.
Why Do We Even Listen to New Music?
Our brains reward us for seeking out what we already know. So why should we reach to listen to something we don’t?
By Jeremy D. Larson
April 6, 2020
Why do we even listen to new music anymore? Most people have all the songs they could ever need by the time they turn 30. Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube can whisk us back to the gates and gables of our youth when life was simpler. Why leap off a cliff hoping you’ll be rescued by your new favorite album on the way down when you can lay supine on the terra firma of your “Summer Rewind” playlist? Not just in times of great stress, but for all times, I genuinely ask: Why spend time on something you might not like?
It was a question that Coco Chanel, Marcel Duchamp, and the rest of the Parisian audience might have asked at the 1913 premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s
The Rite of Spring, an orchestral ballet inspired by the Russian composer’s dream about a young girl dancing herself to death. On a muggy night at the end of May, inside a newly constructed theater along the Seine, those who chose to bear witness to something new experienced a piece of music that would presage a new world of art.
Stravinsky, having already thrilled Paris with his ferociously complex
Firebird ballet three years earlier, was the bright young thing of symphonic music in Paris, and
The Rite was to be something essentially unheard of. Drawing from the Slavic and Lithuanian folk music of his homeland and his viscerally atavistic brain, Stravinsky blackened his score with rhythmic and harmonic tension, stretching phrases to their outer limits and never bothering to resolve them. The harmonies were difficult to name and his rhythms impossible to follow. Leonard Bernstein later described
The Rite as “the best dissonances anyone ever thought up, and the best asymmetries and polytonalities and polyrhythms and whatever else you care to name.”
After months of grueling rehearsals, the lights finally drew down at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées that evening.
The Rite began with a solo bassoon squeezing out a riff so high in its register that it sounded uncannily like a broken English horn. This alien sound was—apparently and unintentionally—so strange that chuckles erupted from the bourgeoisie in the mezzanine boxes and rippled through the crowd below. The dissonant opening gave way to the martial assault of the second movement, “The Augurs of Spring,” and the dancers—choreographed by the legendary Vaslav Nijinsky of the Ballets Russes—bounded on stage, moving squeamishly and at jagged angles. As recounted in the daily newspaper
Le Figaro and in various books and memoirs since, the chuckles turned into jeers, then shouting, and soon the audience was whipped into such a frenzy that their cries drowned out the orchestra.
Many members of the audience could not fathom this new music; their brains—figuratively, but to a certain extent, literally—broke. A brawl ensued, vegetables were thrown, and 40 people were ejected from the theater. It was a fiasco consonant with Stravinsky’s full-bore attack on the received history of classical music, and thus, every delicate sense in the room.
Stravinsky’s
The Rite of Spring is now hailed as the most sweepingly influential piece of music composed in the early 20th century, a tectonic shift in form and aesthetic that was, as the critic Alex Ross wrote in his book
The Rest Is Noise, “lowdown yet sophisticated, smartly savage, style and muscle intertwined.” Within the brambles of
The Rite are the seeds of an entire outgrowth of modernism: jazz, experimental, and electronic music flow back to
The Rite.
We love the things we know because we know them and therefore we love them. But there is a physiological explanation for our nostalgia and our desire to seek comfort in the familiar. It can help us understand why listening to new music is so hard, and why it can make us feel uneasy, angry, or even riotous.
It has to do with the plasticity of our brain. Our brains change as they recognize new patterns in the world, which is what makes brains, well, useful. When it comes to hearing music, a network of nerves in the auditory cortex called the corticofugal network helps catalog the different patterns of music. When a specific sound maps onto a pattern, our brain releases a corresponding amount of dopamine, the main chemical source of some of our most intense emotions. This is the essential reason why music triggers such powerful emotional reactions, and why, as an art form, it is so inextricably tied to our emotional responses.
In his book
Proust Was a Neuroscientist, the writer and one-time neuroscience lab worker Jonah Lehrer writes about how the essential joy of music comes in how songs subtly toy with patterns in our brains, spiking the dopamine more and more without sending it off the charts. “Someone Like You” is Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m Goin’ Down” is Cheap Trick’s “I Want You to Want Me” is Rachel Platten’s “Fight Song” and so on—this is the entire neuroscientific marketing plan behind pop music. But when we hear something that hasn’t already been mapped onto the brain, the corticofugal network goes a bit haywire, and our brain releases too much dopamine as a response. When there is no anchor or no pattern on which to map, music registers as unpleasant, or in layman’s terms, bad.
“If the dopamine neurons can’t correlate their firing with outside events,” Lehrer writes, “the brain is unable to make cogent associations.” We go a bit mad. No wonder the audience at the premiere of Stravinsky’s
The Rite of Spring thought that it sucked: there was almost no precedent for it.
The way the corticofugal system learns new patterns limits our experiences by making everything we already know far more pleasurable than everything we don’t. It’s not just the strange allure of the song your mother played when you were little or wanting to go back to that time in high school driving down country roads with the radio on. It’s that our brains actually fight against the unfamiliarity of life. “We are built to abhor the uncertainty of newness,” writes Lehrer.
The coda to the famous
The Rite of Spring riot at its premiere in Paris is not often told, but it’s crucial to the full life of the piece. After the melee of that evening, the ballet continued running at the theater for many months. Alex Ross writes: “Subsequent performances were packed, and at each one the opposition dwindled. At the second, there was noise only during the latter part of the ballet; at the third, ‘vigorous applause’ and little protest. At a concert performance of
Rite one year later, ‘unprecedented exaltation’ and a ‘fever of adoration’ swept over the crowd, and admirers mobbed Stravinsky in the street afterward, in a riot of delight.” What is unheard of could define history—might as well come for the show.
https://pitchfork.com/features/article/listen-to-music/
to have heard it and I definitely don't attempt to relate the music to my personality. Anything goes as long as I like it. Basically, I am more of a nerd so I don't necessarily use music to associate it with old memories. I do revisit songs I had heard years before but that's just because I like them.
that's definitely me too. I tend to listen to music that matches my mood and also time of the day. Is it any surprise, therefore that there are ragas specifically dedicated to mornings, evenings etc?
