Notes on my listening habits

Previously: Notes on my reading habits.

1. I’ve seen it remarked as a truism that the music you love when you’re between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five will be the music you listen to for the rest of your life. There are a few things I loved at a younger age that I can’t handle these days — some of the aughts-era indie rock I loved in my twenties now sounds a bit too twee — but that has generally held true for me.

2. At the risk of being glib: much of the enjoyment in music comes from familiarity and repetition. People love to hear melodies they know, but this isn’t just about nostalgia. They love when the big chorus returns. They love the device where a catchy motif is played over and over again at a steadily increasing volume (I’ve written about this before). Most classical musical forms are defined by how and when to repeat things. Precise repetition is what makes a beat; once you can anticipate it you can dance to it. Most tunes become hummable if they’re repeated often enough.

3. I myself don’t have good taste in music. I love showtunes¹ and disco and Henry Mancini and Burt Bacharach and waltzes by Johann Strauss. I love when pop music has strings and brass and big hooks. I love classical music, which is so far from the realm of coolness that it is “tasteful” almost by definition, but even there some of my faves are a bit sentimental and embarrassing: Richard Strauss, Massenet. I like other things too, but if I’m honest with myself, these things are most “me.”

4. The RCM curriculum, the standard for learning the piano in Canada, requires passing exams in music history, harmony, and counterpoint. These courses, probably even more than playing the repertoire, were what really made me love classical music. All music benefits from a familiarity with its context. If you want to enjoy yourself at a concert or opera, never go in cold. And mixtapes and playlists are most fun coming from a close friend.

5. My mom always listened to CBC Radio Two in the car, back when it only played classical music. My game as a kid, while she was driving me places, was to try to guess the composer of each piece that came on. I still can’t help doing it.

6. During high school I worked for one summer in a classical music store in Edmonton, Alberta. The owner’s son was a friend of my brother’s. I was the only female employee, and spent a lot of what I earned on opera CD box sets — plus a Teac CD player and matching amp. I still have the stereo and the box sets and I’m glad I kept them. But the owner laid me off after that one summer. Knowing about music is different from knowing about recordings, he explained at the time. I still don’t know very much about recordings.

7. Things that signify “beauty” in classical music, to modern ears: two women singing together in close harmony². Harps and pizzicato strings. Slow melodies that climb higher and higher. Deceptive cadences. Rolled chords, soft arpeggios, or anything designed to imitate the sound of rippling water. Anything meant to imitate birdsong. For romantic nostalgia, a waltz suffices.

8. My taste in music was heavily influenced by my first boyfriend. We were together more than a decade. He loved the Beach Boys, powerpop, Marvin Gaye, The Hold Steady, and Sloan. He was also a member of a successful band, and we went to lots of shows together. Because of him, I had a reasonable proximity to “cool,” at least in the context of mid-to-late-aughts indie rock, and could sound a little less tragically under-socialized when talking to people about what music I liked. I’ve never minded having my taste influenced by people I was dating. All of them taught me something.

9. One thing I miss from that time in my life is going dancing. I went dancing all the time and it felt like a drug. Dancing to music is one of the great pleasures of life.

10. I left that boyfriend shortly after their band signed with a hip American label. In the months after we split, one of their songs became a genuine hit, eventually hitting number one on the Billboard Alternative chart. It made me feel a little bit like I was living in a movie with a breakup soundtrack. It still comes on sometimes in restaurants and grocery stores, and is always a bit of a jolt.

11. One of my longtime routines: listen to the Met Opera Radio channel on Sirius XM while I’m making dinner. Every evening they play complete performances of operas from their vast archive, and usually I’m tuning in toward the end of Act I. I try to guess the opera before intermission, something that usually isn’t very difficult, since the standard repertoire of operas is so small. If I don’t recognize the music directly, usually it’s not very hard to deduce based on the language and the general era — there are only about fifty operas that get performed with any regularity.³ Usually I can pinpoint the specific opera within about five minutes; sometimes it takes only seconds. Tonight was one I couldn’t guess. It was Italian, sounded late 19th-century, wasn’t Puccini. I figured it was a lesser-known verismo opera and guessed Fedora, which the Met recently revived; it was actually Francesca di Rimini, which I don’t know at all.

12. Familiarity again: the idea of the Standard Repertoire in opera is kind of comforting to me. All those operas become old friends. I like seeing different conceptual takes on the same material, and I like leaving a performance of Rigoletto freshly reassured that it’s one of the greats. I have had bad nights and boring nights at the Metropolitan Opera, but on none of those nights would I rather have been somewhere else.

13. Seattle has a place called Shibuya Hi-Fi, a take on a Japanese vinyl bar. These kinds of places are sprouting up in many cities, with a space for drinking cocktails and a separate audiophile space for Deep Listening. Patrons buy tickets to listen to a particular album, start to finish, shoes off, in silence and contemplation. They play an eclectic mix based on the staff’s tastes and patron requests, but they have a standard repertoire too: Random Access Memories, Dark Side of the Moon, Kind of Blue, Hot Buttered Soul, In Rainbows. They also play lots of jazz and some classical now and then. I love going there, even though they give the spiel about their speakers every single time. I’m preparing a list of records to request them to play. Sitting quietly and listening to music is how I get a lot of thinking done.

14. Once I was talking to someone who loved Mahler and Beethoven but who had never had any formal musical training. I asked him if he could identify by ear whether a piece was in a major or minor key (assuming it’s not ambiguous), and he told me he couldn’t. Since then I’ve wondered how common this is among music enthusiasts. I have no sense of whether this is something most music-lovers can do, or only people who have had music lessons.

15. For a few years starting during the pandemic, when I was spending holidays alone, I would ring in the new year by lying on my living room floor, eyes closed, and listening to Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, timing it so that it would complete exactly at midnight. Giving my full attention to Mahler in all his agonies is the closest thing I can have to a religious experience, but that particular ritual is associated with feelings of deep loneliness. I was happy to break it; I will not be reviving it.

16. People talk a lot about how they wish they read more books, but I don’t hear them talk about wanting to listen to more music. Sometimes they lament that they don’t keep up with new music — don’t know who the buzzy bands are, who put out a new record this year, that kind of thing. I get the sense that this is more about fearing a loss of relevance than loss of connection to Art. But I’m sure a lot of people my age can remember a past when they spent time just listening to music for its own sake. For my part, I remember listening to lots of music on my iPod while on busses, or walking from place to place. These days, I mostly fill that time with podcasts: Odd Lots, Slate Money, Money Stuff. I love listening to people talk about money, but swapping music for podcasts can feel a little like replacing books with twitter.

17. Learning to play a piece on the piano changes my relationship with it, but that relationship isn’t really a listening relationship. I sometimes find Beethoven tiresome to listen to but his piano sonatas are extremely rewarding to learn. The joys of playing music are physical and cerebral in a way that listening isn’t — you’re constantly making decisions about how to execute a passage, constrained by your technical skill, focus, and musical understanding. Sometimes listening to great pianists play the same pieces as me is disheartening because the gap between my playing and theirs is so wide.

18. A long time ago I set myself the goal of learning to play Chopin’s Scherzo No. 2 in B-Flat Minor. It’s big and flashy. As a teenager I learned to play the introductory sections, very badly. As of this summer, I can play the whole thing, somewhat less badly.

19. Also this summer, the son of the classical music store owner and I are together and in love. He loves the American minimalist composers, and can reply to “Your flight was smooth, I hope” with “Oh yes, smoo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oother than usual.” He even joined me on a spur-of-the-moment trip to see John Adams’ Antony and Cleopatra at the Met. I’m looking forward to his influence — and past the age where people stop listening to new music, that’s a significant thing.

1. Actually, only showtunes from before 1990 or so. Whenever I see a new musical I almost always hate it.

2. “Canzonetta sull’aria” from The Marriage of Figaro. The “Flower Duet” from Lakmé. The duets (and trio) from Der Rosenkavalier. The duet from the Pearl Fishers (if we’re including men).

3. Oddly, there are a few operas that get played on Met Opera Radio far out of proportion to their popularity. Puccini’s Manon Lescaut is one, Alban Berg’s Lulu is another.