Developing musical taste: Concertgoing as a way of life

“Man is a creature who gets used to everything and that, I think, is the best definition of him.”

-Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from a Dead House

“Can you tell me about your favorite meal?” I recently asked one of my elementary school-aged violin students at the end of a lesson.

“Chicken fingers, or maybe spaghetti.”

Can you imagine if this conversation took place between two adults instead of a child and his teacher? Picture with me an adult who had no greater appreciation for a dumpling or taco from a fast-food chain than one made from scratch by a gourmet chef.

Unlike food, when it comes to taste in art, many grown-ups have never developed past the point of naïveté. They have never been shown what to listen for in music and what constitutes authentic musical style. Can adults develop their taste in music similarly to how they work on their mental and physical health? Is simply being exposed to art and music nearly constantly in modern society enough to help us form an opinion about them? If so, on what are we basing our opinion?

I believe our own personal artistic taste is closely tied to who we are as individuals and expresses what we value as a society. Our tastes have the power to not only change us for the better, but also our kids, and even our world. Have you noticed that the correlation between the amount of information consumed by an individual and true understanding of that subject can be almost nonexistent? Since art depicts life, those who have put in the work to develop more than a substantive understanding of art also possess special insight into all of life.

Attending a live concert—experiencing with all the senses in the moment the interaction of performer and audience—is no doubt more enriching than casually listening to an edited recording while engaging in another task. Maestro Daniel Barenboim famously said that there are two ways to listen to music: to escape or to engage. While the latter form demands more, it’s also greatly rewarding. This approach doesn’t mean we only listen to high art in live settings, but we must be aware of the difference. In authentic art, the essence of man, the commingling of our spiritual and animal nature, is most clearly expressed.

I am a violinist, and my dad is a jazz pianist. He can detect authenticity in jazz in the same way a native speaker can detect someone speaking their native language with or without an accent. The sounds of Dad playing jazz harmonies and rhythms on the piano in the evenings form some of my earliest memories. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was absorbing that mood, that style, in the same way that we all take in how our parents speak our native language to us. In our house, going to live shows ranging from Alison Kraus & Union Station to Truls Mørk and the Seattle Symphony was a way of life. I credit my parents for the opportunity to hear such tasteful music in a live setting during my adolescence.

My parents were able and willing to prioritize my musical development over other, more tangible things. I know not all parents have the time or money to devote to hearing live music. But if you do have the means, I would encourage you to consider music as a more meaningful gift you can leave for your child’s memories. It doesn’t have to be an expensive opera or ballet—there are plenty of free opportunities that will expand you and your child’s mind. And if live opportunities aren’t accessible, students can still develop their musical vocabulary online.

Children don’t have much ability to discern good art from bad—they just take it all in. For that reason, we adults must fill their minds with quality music from a young age. We don’t shield our children from sophisticated adult words and sentences, so we should treat the language of music much the same. Even though not all of us have musicians as parents like I did, we can still fill our homes with good music and make attending live concerts a priority. Since few of us have been treated with live concerts during the pandemic, why not make plans now to begin attending them again (safely and responsibly) as concert venues begin reopening?

So what is good art, anyway? Well, what is good food? Every culture features an abundance of good food and unambiguously bad food. To me, the best music, like the best food, is stylistically authentic. Tolstoy writes in What is Art? that while bad art seeks to imitate other art for the sake of inducing interest in its audience, true art has individuality, clarity, and sincerity, the last being the most important of the three. Have you ever seen the video of the great classical violinist Yehudi Menuhin’s attempt at playing jazz with the great jazz violinist Stéphane Grappelli? Yehudi’s jazz doesn’t hold a candle to Stéphane’s, because it is stylistically manufactured.

I can make that judgment because I grew up being taught about jazz and have developed the ability to sort the good from the bad. A good place to start in developing musical discernment is getting recommendations from those who understand that genre of music well. Who is the best person from whom to learn a new language if not a fluent speaker? Of course, there will be disagreements over which artists are the best in the same way that sushi connoisseurs will disagree over which sushi is the best. But I can bet that among expert sushi tasters, very few of them will put a gas station California roll at the top of their list.