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A "sudzy" question: Can non-musicians ever truly appreciate/understand music to the extent that musicians do?

Posted by caspian@peak.org (A) on August 6, 2012 at 11:48:49

Certainly they can "enjoy" it: this initial enjoyment, usually in childhood, is what drives people to become musicians in the first place.

But once you take up an instrument and begin serious study, your appreciation (as opposed to mere emotional response) tends to increase along with your technical grasp of performance technique and formal structure. You begin to understand how music works from an "inside" perspective, which is vastly more rewarding than just letting it wash over you as an external stimulus. Like the difference between hearing poetry in an unknown foreign language, and actually understanding the language it's spoken in.

At least this has been my experience. I started out, around age 11, wanting to fingerpick like Joan Baez and some of the other popular "folk" artists of the era. As I got better on the guitar, I came to appreciate more how these simple songs were constructed, which gradually led to a greater appreciation of how more complex songs were constructed, and what could be done with chord extensions and substitutions to make them more interesting. This led in turn to more study of theory (scales, harmony, counterpoint, and compositional structure), which vastly increased my understanding (and hence enjoyment) of Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, and Classical repertoire. A Bach fugue makes a lot more sense when you understand how a fugue is constructed; a Haydn quartet or symphony makes more sense when you understand sonata allegro form; and so on.

I'm not saying one has to be a professional player, or even a particularly skillful amateur, to truly appreciate music. But some technical grounding in how it actually works seems essential to "getting it" on more than a childish emotional level.

Agree? Disagree? Other angles?

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