Things you are supposed to like

A handful of points, without any particular axe to grind, from a professional music scholar:

(1) The Great Fugue is difficult to like, difficult to know what to make of -- even most of its passionate advocates would agree to that -- and there's no particular reason to think that opinions from wildly positive to wildly negative are not all within the realm of the reasonable responses to this piece. A huge amount of scholarly ink has been spilled on why it, and the late string quartets, and the Missa Solemnis, are so peculiar.

(2) Relatedly, people who love it and think that it's obviously, uncomplicatedly lovable may well be putting on airs or signaling. And as with any piece of music that has gigantic prestige built up around it (partly due to its reputation for being super-profound and inscrutable), all opinions are probably to be somewhat taken with some suspicion of signaling behavior.

(3) Think of someone who has repeatedly shown herself to be a brilliant, extremely sound thinker. You come to trust her opinions on a wide range of topics. When she says something you find absolutely bizarre or inscrutable, you're going to at a very minimum think carefully about what she says to see if the fault is with you. If you're a fan of most of the music Beethoven writes, I encourage you to give him a similar benefit of the doubt.

(4) I myself find the Great Fugue remarkable but not at all pleasant -- in fact, while Beethoven holds me enraptured right up through the Last Five Sonatas and the Ninth Symphony, he loses me a bit with the Missa Solemnis and the late string quartets, with the exception of a few isolated movements. You're certainly not wrong to suggest that admitting these views in academic music circles is low-prestige (although not as much so as it used to be), but a major factor in this is my point (3) above: Beethoven has generally earned the benefit of the doubt. Also, it's equally low-prestige in those circles to run around gushing about how amazing the Great Fugue is without having some interesting things to say about why you think so.

(5) I am totally baffled why you are so convinced that quality must be something that inheres to a piece of music. Quality is subjective, or at most inter-subjective, and aesthetic judgments do not contain truth value.

(6) Whatever you think you mean by suggesting that the music of Alban Berg (not sure why you picked him) lacks "basic music theory," I can completely guarantee you that you are wrong. Music theory is not a property of musical compositions any more than linguistics is a property of language. If what you mean is that Alban Berg was not a composer of tonal music in the 18th- and 19th-century sense, then that is true, but (a) his music contains structure, just not tonal structure; (b) the relativism of aesthetic judgments means that that is neither a bad thing nor a good thing except insofar as the pleasure some people take in his music is good; and (c) if you are hinting at the claim that people who say they like Alban Berg's music don't actually like it but are just signaling social prestige, then that may be true for some individuals but is false in the general sense.

(7) Liking has a great deal more to do with familiarity than you think it does, and substantial music cognition research backs this up.

(8) It is probably impossible to separate individual aesthetic pleasure from socially-pressured aesthetic pleasure as thoroughly as you want to. (I'm reminded of the famous Judgment of Paris wine-tasting episode (link is to Wikipedia, tinyurl is the only way I could get it not to be broken).) We are social beings, so we should release ourselves from the imagined obligation to make all our aesthetic judgments in a social vacuum. Even the pleasure you take from the things you think you like in the most genuine and uncomplicated way is to some degree socially determined. Liking things is something that we're in many ways primed to do by what we hear from others -- if my best friend recommends me a novel, I'll read it with somewhat more patience knowing that someone whose opinion I value has vouched for it. If in the end I like it, even if I wouldn't have liked it otherwise, there's no reason to think of that liking as being less genuine or less valuable.

(7+8) If you listen to the Great Fugue a hundred more times, unless you find something viscerally unpleasant about it (which, make no mistake, some people really do, since it's pretty loud and screechy), you will probably like it, because familiarity and social conditioning tend to do that to us. If you like it, stop driving yourself crazy and just like it. If you can't stand to like something thinking that there's some element of social conditioning driving you to do so, then by all means stop listening to the Great Fugue.

(9) That said, many people do find that it's interesting or pleasant to expend a little effort to see if they can learn to like something that they don't immediately like but have some reason to think they may like eventually. That's what an acquired taste is. If you give it a shot and it doesn't take, then let yourself off the hook. And you can always take some pleasure in being the aggressive countersignaller who goes around telling anyone who'll listen that the Great Fugue is totally overrated (some people will take a lot more pleasure in that than they ever could in the piece itself (the politest, but by no means only, word for those people is "contrarians")).

I think the concept of inferential distance applies to art. As a kid, I was mostly exposed to classic rock (Led Zeppelin, Queen, and so on), and I felt something close to disgust when listening to anything significantly removed from that genre. However, I eventually bridged the gap between genres by finding music that mostly resembled classic rock but with a bit of something else. Eventually, this led me to enjoying entirely different genres that I'm fairly sure I'd otherwise hate.

It's the same with film. I moved from only enjoying blockbuster-type films to very strange films that some might say are pretentious or boring.

Before I thought there was an inferential distance for art, I tried to expose friends and family to some of my favorite movies. So, for example, I'd show them a movie like Festen--which I thought was actually somewhat tame and easy to like--and they'd hate it from the outset. The subtitles were a problem, the plot was a problem, it was boring, and so on. These were intelligent people with complex tastes in other areas. And now that I think about it, I'm confident that I'd feel the same way if I didn't have the progression of experiences that allowed me to love that movie the first time I watched it.

So, I'd say if you want to enjoy the things "you're supposed to like," bridge the distance with things similar to what you already enjoy.

Phil, I'll remind you of your own comment:

Incommensurate thoughts: People with different life-experiences are literally incapable of understanding each other...

Analogy: Take some problem domain in which each data point is a 500-dimensional vector. Take a big set of 500D vectors and apply PCA to them to get a new reduced space of 25 dimensions. Store all data in the 25D space, and operate on it in that space.

Two programs exposed to different sets of 500D vectors, which differ in a biased way, will construct different basic vectors during PCA, and so will reduce all vectors in the future into a different 25D space.

In just this way, two people with life experiences that differ in a biased way (due to eg socioeconomic status, country of birth, culture) will construct different underlying compression schemes. You can give them each a text with the same words in it, but the representations that each constructs internally are incommensurate; they exist in different spaces, which introduce different errors.

It seems entirely plausible that a person's appreciation of a piece of music depends strongly on all the music to which she's previously been exposed. Two different observers with different music-histories may have very different internal representations of the same piece of new music. A given piece of music may be well-formed or high quality in one representation, but not another.

"Burning Man changed my life completely" - I liked Burning Man; but if it changed your life completely, you probably had a vapid life.

That isn't required. Just a good drug that you hadn't had before. Having the right drug in the right environment is perhaps the simplest way to make a significant long(ish) term change. Excluding "change by damaging something" which is easy! Also excluding "met my significant other".

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To understand musical consonance/dissonance, you must understand that consonance of simple harmonic ratios is an artifact of a much simpler underlying rule. The human hearing system does not analyze frequency ratios of individual notes, it examines the frequency domain clustering of partials of the sound as a whole.

If you listen to two sine waves of near identical frequency they sound consonant. Widen the frequency difference and they become dissonant. Further widen the frequency difference and they become consonant again. This was measured back in 1967 by R. Plomp and W. J. M. Levelt. The consonance of a musical harmony depends on the separation of the individual partials. We need a "critical bandwidth" of separation between frequencies to clearly distinguish them. You could think of dissonance as the unpleasant feeling of hearing different frequencies but failing to resolve them.

The majority of musical instruments used in Western classical music create sound by vibration constrained at two points, either the ends of a string or the ends of a column of air. Therefore the partials are all integer multiples [2] of the fundamental. It turns out that if these sounds are played together at small integer frequency ratios, the frequency of the partials align such that the quantity of dissonant, smaller than the "critical bandwidth", frequency differences is at a local minimum.

However, percussion instruments are not constrained in this way, so cultures with a percussion focused musical tradition (eg. Indonesian gamelan music) developed alternative tuning systems better suited to the timbres of their instruments. Early electronic musicians, eg. Wendy Carlos, also noticed how the consonance of different tuning systems depended on the timbre of the notes.

As far as I am aware, the first person to mathematically formalize this relationship, and develop a method to generate arbitrary tuning systems for arbitrary timbres and vice-versa, was William Sethares [3]. He has a great webpage at http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/ , with many audio examples. His book "Tuning Timbre Spectrum Scale" should be considered the most important book on music theory ever written because it generalizes all previous musical theories, and solves the problem of the exhaustion of harmonic novelty in music without having to resort to unlistenable crap like serialism.

And now we get to the link to the main article, and the reason why Sethare's work was such a revelation to me. I shared a house with a music student for several years, and I became heavily involved in the classical music subculture. Back then I only knew of the Pythagorean ratio-based concept of harmony. I listened to a great variety of Western classical music, and attended several concerts. As my knowledge increased, I became disillusioned with pre-modern classical music, because each new composition began to sound like a reworking of something I had heard before. Traditional music theory simply didn't have enough scope for novelty. I studied the works of Harry Partch, who pushed ratio-based music theory about as far as it can go, and I wasted a lot of time attempting to extend his theory, but I never felt I had reached a satisfactory conclusion.

Of course I was exposed to atonal composition via my musician friends, and my initial reaction was the same as almost everybody's: I hated it. But both the obvious high status of this kind of music and my lack of knowledge of any alternative source of novelty slowly changed my preferences. I started listening to Second Viennese School composers and free jazz. The more I listened the more I liked it, and I gradually turned into an atonal music snob like my musician friends.

And then I left university and lost all contact with them. I forgot all about classical music for several years. When I listened to atonal music again I found I had reverted to my original preference. I'm now very certain the only reason I liked it was social signaling. I declared music to be dead and lost all interest in it.

When I later discovered Sethares's work it shook my beliefs about music to the core. My whole atonal adventure was built on a mistake. We're no longer limited by physical instruments and it's really possible to compose music simultaneously strange and beautiful. I now promote Sethares's work in the hope that more musicians will adopt it and create sometime great.

[1] R. Plomp and W. J. M. Levelt, "Tonal Consonance and Critical Bandwidth," Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.38, 548-560 (1965). [2] Approximately. Note that octaves on a piano are tuned slightly sharp, because piano strings are not simple mathematical abstractions, but have thickness and other properties such that they don't produce perfectly harmonic sound. [3] Sethares, W.A. (1993), Local consonance and the relationship between timbre and scale. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 94(1): 1218.

It is a runaway peacock's-tail phenomenon: Someone made something that stood out in some way, and it got attention; and people learned to like things like that, and so others made things that stood out more in the same way, until we ended up with Alban Berg.

As people learn more about an art form, they can more-easily predict it, and need more and more novelty to keep them interested;

I suspect Methods of Rationality may be the end product of a similar phenomenon with respect to a number of trends in speculative fiction, e.g., of putting in more and more elaborate Xanatos Gambits and more and more subtle pop culture references.

Or as Eliezer put it:

it's hard to beat the Algorithm of Awesome, which works as follows:

First, know the overarching direction in which your fic is going. Then, think of possible events that move in this direction. If they are awesome, add them to the plot. If they are not awesome, leave them out.

Try looking at the above quote while tabooing the word "awesome", or better yet replace it with a word that has a similar meaning to an art movement you aren't involved in e.g., "groovy" for psychedelic, "transgresive" for modern art, etc.

I am reminded of this classic paper on wine-tasting:

Do More Expensive Wines Taste Better? Evidence from a Large Sample of Blind Tastings

Individuals who are unaware of the price do not derive more enjoyment from more expensive wine. In a sample of more than 6,000 blind tastings, we find that the correlation between price and overall rating is small and negative, suggesting that individuals on average enjoy more expensive wines slightly less.

Experts do prefer the more expensive wines, but this only means that for the non-experts, the negative correlation between price and popularity is even stronger.

In terms of a 100 point scale (such as that used by Wine Spectator), the extended model predicts that for a wine that costs ten times more than another wine, non-experts will on average assign an overall rating that is about four points lower.

Because I accidentally derailed my last post into pedantry, let me try again with a clearer heuristic:

A TEST FOR ART YOU REALLY LIKE:

Try to make fun of it.

If you can make fun of it, and you still like it, then you don't like it just because it's sacred.

This doesn't have to be a deep parody - I don't really think I could write a deep parody of Bach's Magnificat in D. But I can definitely imagine the parts that move me the most, the sublime moments that touch me to my core, played by a synthesizer orchestra that only does fart noises.

The books we think we ought to read are poky, dull, and dry
The books that we would like to read we are ashamed to buy
The books that people talk about we never can recall
And the books that people give us, oh, they're the worst of all.

• Carolyn Wells

The Willat Effect-- people's taste in food becomes more sophisticated as a result of side-by-side comparisons

More about the Willat Effect

If there were departments of pornography at ivy-league universities, they would scoff at the simplicity of films lacking bondage, machines, or animals.

It is called 4chan.

I unintentionally hurt someone on Hacker News when I mentioned that:

I played Deus Ex when I was in high school and was more impressed by its storyline than anything I read in English lit.

I know I am "supposed" to like Of Mice and Men, Animal Farm, The Catcher in the Rye, The Crucible, Moby Dick, A Doll’s House, The Scarlet Letter, etc... more than a "mere video game", but the fact is, I don't.

You can find just about any color in vomit, if you eat creatively beforehand.

All joking aside, I really mean this. Try listening to it as a solemn piece. I don't think it's that great of a fugue, but it has some nice stuff in there. The lack of rhythmic and tonal movement becomes more appropriate all of a sudden if you put on a sour-puss face. If you imagine that its torturous, repetitive nature, is an intentional part of the emotional experience Ludwig wanted to give you, it becomes less annoying and more powerful, to my ear anyway.

and also:

I could keep listening to the Great Fugue, and see if I, too, come to love it in time. But what would that prove? Of course I would come to love it in time,

Why not just make an earnest attempt to like all art in that case. You'll be better off. Is there some artistic merit out there which you would not be rewarding accurately if you liked all art? If you end up liking the great fugue after you listen to it a bunch, even though you didn't like it at first, sweet deal.

I got into jazz, essentially because i thought that it was cool to be into jazz. I did not like it when I bought my first jazz album, and I probably didn't like the next ten I bought either. But I'm really glad I thought it so cool that i was willing to torture myself for those hours at a time until i liked it. If I hadn't I wouldn't have the crazy good relative pitch I have today, nor the ability to mind-cream myself when someone rips Coltrane changes.

So, is my appreciation of jazz, then somehow shallower by virtue of my forcing myself to like it? Or perhaps in some way inauthentic? Well I'm not being inauthentic about loving jazz now. And I def have an above average ear for changes and improv. Ultimately, I don't think I should care at all what i did to like it now; who cares? I seriously doubt that someone who liked jazz from their first time hearing it, gets more happiness chemicals from jazz than I do by virtue of their being naturally into jazz, and my forcing myself.

The question is "if there's something new, and I don't like it, how much suffering should I be willing to put up with to learn to like it?" The answer clearly depends on juxtaposing the quantity of pleasure I should expect after I like it, and the availability of this thing , with the amount of suffering and time I'll have to put in to learn to like it.

Don't worry about why you like a terminal value. Just get it.

This may shed light on the phenomenon and start value judgement-fuelled arguments in equal measure: what works are we "supposed to like" in the Less Wrong community?

I may get the ball rolling by mentioning that although I like GEB and think it has plenty of merit, I think it's ridiculously non-commensurate with the amount of praise it receives.

We're now basing judgments of highbrow status-seeking behavior by sampling YouTube commenters?

Oy.

Point of evidence re learning to like any kind of music:

Until I was about 11 years old, I didn't like music. I didn't dislike it, per se, but I didn't pay much attention to whether there was music playing or not. I have memories of going to the local Folk Festival and playing at the crafts table or playing tag, but no memories of actually noticing the live music that was playing. I was pretty much completely tone deaf at the time, and my parents decided not to put me in piano lessons along with my siblings, partly because they didn't think there was much point for someone as unmusical as I appeared to be.

This changed when I started learning an instrument at school (flute) in seventh grade. Once I was actually using my own fingers and lips to produce notes, I started to notice melodies, and get them stuck in my head sometimes. I joined choir originally so that I wouldn't have to go outside for recess in winter, but after a few months I started having emotional responses to music, having favourite songs, etc.

Skip forwards by 7 years of playing in various school bands, singing in various choirs, and learning enough classical music theory to start composing singable choir pieces, and almost all music affects me deeply once I know the song, whether it's 16th century sacred choral music or modern heavy metal.

Summary: I see nothing contradictory about having to learn how to appreciate music.

Feeling as if you "should" enjoy something seems like a natural reaction to a -wanting/-liking/+approving behavior, in this case enjoying the Great Fugue. For the most part +approving behaviors have high status, so feeling confused that you don't like it isn't surprising--different parts of your desire are conflicting.

There is a fifth hypothesis, which is a more general form of #4, that could explain the popularity of the piece: when appreciation for an art form becomes sufficiently developed, the criteria for judging it changes as a result of the psychologies of the people who make up the institutions devoted to that art form. For example: literary criticism. What the layman looks for in a novel is drastically different from what an English professor looks for, and that's because of the institution of literary criticism and the kinds of people it attracts. This trend probably has a self-reinforcing effect for two reasons: a) there are strong status reasons to signal enjoying +approving works, e.g. literary critics gain status by saying they enjoy Shakespeare, and b) institutions devoted to art forms can become more homogenous over time. Thus, a popular piece of art need not be more novel to be "fine art," it just needs to be better optimized for the new criteria. This hypothesis is consistent with pattern features 1, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

I've been listening to it as I read your post, and I like it well enough so far, despite not being a huge classical music person. (I will probably get bored of it before the end though since I don't really have the patience for long classical works.) I also liked Pollock's paintings the first time I saw them in person, and generally prefer abstractish art to representational, despite not being an art connoisseur. My point being, some people really do like these things without having to try :).

I do think you have a point overall, in that stuff that's harder to appreciate can become higher in status for precisely that reason. However, just because it takes a while to "get" something doesn't mean that it's secretly bad. In particular, listening to music multiple times could have a "key" effect similar to the effect where an incomprehensible distorted sentence can be understood clearly after hearing a non-distorted version (I can't find a video of this right now). Similarly, just because you don't understand some piece of mathematics the first time (or two) you read it doesn't mean that people who claim to find it beautiful are lying or have tricked themselves into liking it. Some things really do require more effort to appreciate.

The problem is more dramatic in architecture. The latter is the point where the crisis of modern art moves from a bugbear of the chattering classes to a genuine problem. If someone insists that you just need to learn to appreciate some ear destroying extended technique violin piece, you have a difference of opinion. If someone insists that the solution to the residents of the new brutalist tower block wanting to kill themselves is to educate them on the finer points of architectural theory, then you have a civic problem. (Incidentally, are there any other forms of art that require the destruction of old pieces?)

With food though, "just learn to like it" is absolutely good advice as, a childish aversion to, say, cabbage is an unnecessary barrier to eating arrangements that could be solved with a few meals. And because food is such a flexible art form, learning to appreciate new elements dramatically increases your enjoyment. Though I suppose these are really two sides of the same coin, like the OPs definition of art snobbery as insisting that art should not contain certain features that indicate the wrong culture: perspective, raw meat, any consideration for the surrounding space whatsoever, etc, etc.

The problem is that artists generally like to focus on reducing the number of features, partly because it makes it easier to compose but mostly, I suspect, because it makes it easier for other people to compare your compositions. This is most obvious in fashion (take one accessory off, even after accounting for the fact that you were going to have one accessory too many) but compare any home recipe to any cooks recipe, the former will have all sorts of pinches of this and that and the other added in which make it taste muddier, which is not necessarily worse but harder to analyses.

This is the blockbuster problem basically: if you want to appeal to a lot of people you have to do a lot of things, and then the quality of your work will just be an average of how each person thought you did on the stuff they cared about. So you insist that dance scenes aren't serious and a real director doesn't put dance scenes in their movie, and gradually the quality improves (from the artists POV) even as the appeal narrows.

There's probably an economic paper treating this like a market with artist surplus and consumer surplus, with the artistic surplus narrowing to nothing as you reduce barriers to entry for artists.

Celine Dion's Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste is a good little book about the formation of taste and learning to like something you'd been avoiding. It's by an indie rock critic/snob who decided to find out what there was of value in Celine Dion's music, and discovered there was a fair amount even if it wasn't the best thing ever.

How confident are you that your Beethoven fugue informants are reliable?

I am not an expert, but I do own a dozen or so Beethoven CD's and I have never heard of "Beethoven's fugue" as a standalone title. I do know that there are some pieces he wrote which are widely disliked. In particular there is one called "Wellington's Victory" which the current wikipedia page says, among other things,

The novelty of the work has worn down over the last two-hundred years; as a result, "Wellington's Victory" is not much heard in concert halls today.

Now, one day around seven or eight years ago I was reading a piece in the Sunday New York Times which was titled something like "the worst music ever composed by the greatest composers". This Beethoven work was very close to the top of the list. Then, a day later on the classical music station they played the sucker, it did sound ridiculous, and it was obvious from the way the DJ spoke that one of his friends or co-workers had played a practical joke on him (or maybe he was a great practical joker of a DJ--which I doubt, because I listened to that station all the time and this was a third string substitute DJ) because he just went on and on about the fantastic, but not much appreciated Beethoven work. It was kind of surreal.

You are going to have to provide more evidence than some cut paste you tube comments to convince me of this:

Articulate music lovers with excellent taste praise this piece to heaven.

According to the wikipedia page on op 130,

After the first performance of this work, mixed reactions and publisher suggestion convinced Beethoven to substitute a different final movement, much shorter and lighter than the enormous Große Fuge. This new finale was written between September and November 1826. This movement is marked:

1. Finale: Allegro

(Also I mostly agree with what the musicologist said in his comment.)

Just a couple of thoughts about this:

1) This paper by Juergen Schmidhuber was very helpful in un-confusing me about a lot of aesthetic things. But in particular, it accounts for things like subjectivity of preference and the way you can learn to like things with continual exposure. Whether you want to learn to appreciate a piece of art seems like a matter of preference, in general it doesn't seem like there should be any reason to get normative about it.

2) Like most people, I have experienced things that I was supposed to like and actually liked them, and things that I was supposed to like that I didn't end up actually liking. I see no reason to find this surprising. So when people say things like "if you don't like this then you MUST (have no taste|have no attention span|be a moron|etc), I feel confident in saying that these people are making the mistakes discussed in Generalizing from one exmaple, or doing related things we discuss on LW, like simulating me in their brain and jumping to conclusions based on the implicit assumption that we are virtually identical. In fact, I tend to do this with any statement of the form "you have opinion X, therefore you must have trait Y".

3) I think it's perfectly fine to see that something is praised highly and use that as evidence that you should at least check it out. From your post, it looks like the opposite might be true for you (that is, once praise surpasses a certain level, you can heuristically assume that you actually won't like it), but it works okay for me and many others. And in particular, I see no reason not to treat it as typical Bayesian evidence: If recommendations from Source A tend to correlate with your own judgements, use them, otherwise do not.

4) I don't think there's any absolute truth of "Great Art"-ness. We can dissolve the question down to things like "Is it enjoyable?" or "Is it historically significant?", but "Great" seems like one of those dangling, orphaned categories to me. Feels real, but probably isn't.

5) I see no reason that learning to like something is a bad thing, so long as you end up actually liking it. That is, if you will look back on it and be glad that you gave it a 2nd (or nth) chance, then this is probably something you should do. If you think you'll look back on it and still feel confused about why you occasionally decide to put this piece of music on, yet you'll feel pressured to continue doing so, then don't bother.

On further reflection, I don't think disliking any particular highbrow cultural symbol necessarily conveys low status. People in the know are only supposed to like the works of either Tolstoy or Dostoevskiy, but not both. Having an opinion either way is fine. Not being able to offer an opinion -- now that's low status.

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I've found that a lot of music takes 5+ listens before I really start to enjoy it. This is particularly the case of complex, subtle music. This could be just me adjusting to social demands but I find it can happen even with music I want to dislike. Katie Perry grows on you.

As people learn more about an art form, they can more-easily predict it, and need more and more novelty to keep them interested; like porn viewers who seek out movies with continually-stranger sex acts. (This is a cognitively-plausible variant of "there is no such thing as objective beauty".) If there were departments of pornography at ivy-league universities, they would scoff at the simplicity of films lacking bondage, machines, or animals.

Most of what I listen to is popular music and I find that a lot of the music I used to love just goes down too easily now. It's a very similar experience to eating sugary candy you loved as a child but is too saccharine now. When I listen to new music that is at similar levels of accessibility and ease of listening this manifests itself in a lower limit to the number of times I can hear the song without getting sick of it.

I think whenever you have the scenario of other people enjoying a musical work (or an artwork) that you don't enjoy, you can reduce the explanation to three possibilities: (1) Everyone else is under some kind of mass delusion and you're sane (or stupid/smart) (2) Everyone else is correct and there's something wrong with me or (3) there's no objective "greatness" in music (or art or food etc.)

I think believing (1) is a symptom of extreme narcissism, and believing (2) is a symptom of low self esteem. But (3) is unsatisfactory and incomplete, although it leaves an opening to at least ask why we like certain things more than others, and why some people "like" differently than others. I don't think you have to submit to a world in which everything is as good as everything else and no qualitative judgments are valid, but you have to accept that there are just limits to how much we will ever agree on what's good. And there are interesting questions to study about how the human ear responds to certain sounds, and whether and how it can be "trained" to like things. And there's actual research on all that stuff, and I'm not an expert in that field so I won't try to get into it.

I will say this though -- your article implies that you find initial, "untrained" impressions of a work more valid than opinions that come from repeated listen or even study. I feel like there's a fallacy in this kind of thinking -- the idea that there's a pure essence of a piece, and of one's reaction to it, that gets somehow contaminated by repeated listen or study -- love at first sight or it's not love. What if music doesn't operate like this? What if it's more like a coded message, and it can take several listens or even study to decode the message?

If a class of 5-year-olds found Hamlet "boring" we wouldn't say "well, it must be so, because here is the pure honest reaction of unpretentious people who haven't been told they're 'supposed to' like this yet," we'd say that the 5-year-olds haven't acquired the language skills and life experiences to even understand the play and therefore can't properly evaluate it.

I'm not saying you're a musical 5-year-old -- maybe you just don't like the Great Fugue, and that's fine. Personally, I think it's an interesting piece of music. It's not my favorite, but it's striking, and worth listening to.

Most lovers of any artform eventually come to the conclusion that reasonable, well-educated people can differ about these things and that some of it is "taste," by which we mean some hard-to-pin-down combination of emotions and experiences and ear structure and brain structure and who knows what else. Most classical music lovers consider Wagner a great composer, yet some can't stand his music, etc. But let's not dismiss the idea that it might take some work and/or knowledge and/or skill acquisition to understand what's going on in some works of art.

http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/experimental_philosophy/2011/10/mere-exposure-to-bad-art-experiment-results.html

In a 2003 study, psychologist James Cutting (2003, 2006) briefly exposed undergraduate psychology students to canonical and lesser-known Impressionist paintings (the lesser-known works exposed four times as often), with the result that after exposure, subjects preferred the lesser-known works more often than did the control group. Cutting took this result to show that canon formation is a result of cultural exposure over time. He further took this to show that the subjects’ judgements were not merely a product of the quality of the works. “If observers were able to judge quality alone in the image pairs, their judgments should not have been contaminated by appearance differences in the classroom. To be sure, quality could still play a role, but such an account must then rely on two processes- mere exposure and quality assessment (however that might be done). My proposal is that these are one-process results and done on the basis of mere exposure inside and outside the classroom” (Cutting 2003, 335).

...It could be that exposure is giving subjects an opportunity to learn what is good in the painting, and so does not by itself control preference, but rather facilitates evaluation, whether positive or negative. If this latter explanation were right, whether or not the exposed paintings are good or bad should make a difference. This is what our study examined. We replicated Cutting’s study exposing subjects to 12 little-known late landscapes of John Everett Millais, alongside 48 paintings by the American artist Thomas Kinkade, (again, half of each group of paintings were exposed four times as often). We asked control groups[1] and the experimental group to express the extent to which they liked each painting using a 10 point Likert scale. We found that with bad paintings by Kinkade, exposure decreased, rather than increased, liking in relation to our control groups. This is consistent with the Humean challenge to Cutting's conclusions.

...Comparing the ratings given by our experimental subjects to those given by the members of our philosophy control group, we observed almost uniformly lower ratings for the Kinkade paintings. 47 out of 48 Kinkades received lower mean liking scores from the experimental subjects than they received from those in the unexposed control group. This resulted in mean scores of 5.9 (control) versus 5.1 (experiment) for the single exposure Kinkade paintings, and mean scores of 5.74 (control) versus 4.75 (experiment) for the multiple exposure Kinkades....We conclude from these results that mere exposure will not always produce an increase in liking for paintings. This puts pressure on Cutting’s conclusions that canon formation is simply a function of cultural exposure, and that quality is not playing a role in artistic judgement.

Relevant is the experimental musical results: http://www.gwern.net/Culture%20is%20not%20about%20esthetics#the-experimental-results

I think that a significant component of the enjoyment of certain kinds of art comes from subverted expectations. When, for example, what begins as a lighthearted romantic comedy ends up with both leads killing themselves. Or when the killer turns out to be the last person you'd have suspected, even when you take into account that the author was trying to trick you.. You can't have subverted expectations, however, if you don't have expectations in the first place - which is one reason that some works need "experience" in order to appreciate.

Hm. If you put Jackson Pollock in the same category as The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, maybe I should re-evaluate my opinion of Jackson Pollock.

The real question is, why do you care about peer pressure?

EDIT: I just listened to it for the first time, and really liked it. Still, tastes differ.

I will submit two things first: (1) Jackson Pollock paintings are excellent, that you don't like them just demonstrates you're not in their audience; (2) the normal way for Burning Man to change someone's life completely is through drug use.

Over the course of my art history degree, not once did anyone insist I had to like any work. I had to recognize its importance--either as inspiration others drew on or as an exemplar of some type--but never actually be attached to any of the work. I think this tendency to demand others like a work is unserious. But this is where I wonder about the work "like" is doing.

I'm not a fan of Bouguereau, for example, but I actually "like" his work in the sense that I often trot it out when I need an example of late academic painting. In fact, he might actually be my most-referenced artist and I admit that, while I wouldn't hang any of it on my wall, I have a certain affinity for his work borne entirely of my distaste for it. I think you should consider this possibility: experts "like" a work in this sense--it is useful to them in explanation--but not in the "hang it on my wall" sense but others posture using the term but not really understanding what is meant by the expert.

Naturally, I think the posturers are fairly useless and have since my seminar days.

Anybody else drink IPAs just cause they are cool? I know there's someone in here. I admit it: I hated it when I first tried it. And I would have never drank that bitter^10 garbage long enough to like it, if I didn't know it was hip first.

Maybe if it wasn't for people doing things cause they're hip, hard things to like at first with high future payoffs, would not even get as popular as they are today. AND THAT INCLUDES LW! Did you really love LW the first time you came across it? I did honestly fall in love with LW upon first contact, but I was already an aspiring rationalist with quite a radical take on the virtue of rationality.

So, should we care? I don't think so. Actually i think it might even be possible that we should make LW hipper. We perhaps should make EY the Fonz of rationality; and start wearing catchy uniforms; and start speaking a secret code, etc. if we really want LW style rationality to start to catch on in meat-space. The karma system already does well to motivate you and make you feel like a part of a community; but why not just go full on cult tactics? If it'll make people jealous, lets do it. Of course, we should always educate LWers about things you are supposed to like. But i see no good reason to turn down those that join LW because it's hip, or any reason why we shouldn't make it hipper, as long as we don't change the karma system it'll be good.

This feels wrong to me. But I don't know why. Wanna help me out.

I think having the idea that one should like a work of art is going to distract from the chance of actually liking it.

If you're confused about whether or not you like it, there might be something interesting going on. Trying to find out what it is might or might not distract you from the music.

It probably isn't pretentious garbage, though it might not be the greatest thing ever.

For what it's worth, I liked the beginning, but find it hard to believe people think this is better than the more popular Beethoven symphonies. It seemed like bits of Beethoven, and Beethoven is pretty good. Then I got bored, and started reading while using the Great Fugue for background. Long about 11:00, the music got sweet and intense and grabbed my attention, and I stayed with it, really enjoying it till the end.

My suspicion is this:

You can learn to appreciate anything that requires creativity if you understand what they're trying to do and stuff like that. It starts out that they're creatively trying to accomplish something, like making a soothing sound in this case. Once people start appreciating it for the art, rather than just sounding nice, people will then create it for the art, rather than to sound nice. After a while, you end up with an art form that's very different than what it started as. It's still good. It's just something completely different, and each will look bad if you don't realize it's what you're looking at. Never read a literary masterpiece if you want a nice story. Never read a popular story if you want a literary masterpiece.

As a freshman in college, I feel I am 'supposed to like' beer and parties. I don't. I like Cuba Libres, and relaxing in the dorm with floor-mates, but that's beside the point. As an avid reader, I feel I am 'supposed to like' the accepted classics of literature (Mrs. Dalloway, Ulysses, etc.), but I don't. I generally consume pulp fantasy and thrillers, despite being perfectly capable of reading said classics. I liked the Great Gatsby, Les Miserables, and Dracula, but that's beside the point.

In my opinion, when you feel you're supposed to like something, it's because a group of people with whom you strongly identify (lovers of Beethoven's music) like that thing, and you've adopted that group as a sort of label for yourself. It's easier to say "I am an aficionado of classical music" than "I like classical music of many types, in particular Canons, I love Chopin's nocturnes, I appreciate..." and thus one gets the feeling of "My feelings should more closely tie in with those my label would indicate."

We sometimes see the same thing with political parties.

Link to Paul Graham's take on the subject of what is good art.

I am afraid to listen to the Great Fugue. I would come to like it, whether it is great art, or whether it is pretentious garbage. That would not rule out any of my theories. How can I figure out which it is before listening to it repeatedly?

Do you want to know enough to administer a musical taste test for this?

If you give people links to two fugues (unlabeled and untitled at the link source), and do not tell them which is which, and they aren't familiar with either, enough responses of which is better might give you at least a rough idea of to what extent it's actually great or whether it's just riding on reputation. Although, if they've heard either, we would need to discard their results because of likely bias.

People say they hated it at first, but over time, grew to love it. One must be trained to like it.

This can raise a warning flag but I've experienced this myself with coffee and some other foods. It didn't take any training for me but a lot of people who like beer don't like the bitter, hoppy beers like IPAs without some training - and while pretentious beer snobs are annoying and amusing on several levels I can't quite doubt them when I have the same preferences.

I've been listening to the Fugue now while reading Less Wrong and enjoying it! Thanks!

I hate bitter cabernets though.

This Xkcd strip comes to mind

I had forgotten about this until just now, but there are examples where the connoisseurs actually are on to something that the average viewer/listener is missing. In a class I once took on Russian art, we watched a wordless documentary that was meant help one see the world the way avant-garde artists like Malevich or Kandinskiy did when they were painting. It changed my appreciation of this kind of art considerably -- I would now tend to dispute claims that these sorts of paintings are not representational. (I still have to regard this as a joke, though.)

Also, I genuinely, non-ironically like Russian Primitivism even though it often sort of looks like "my seven-year-old could do that".

W. H. Auden had an excellent heuristic for dealing with this problem:

"Between the ages of 20 and 40, the surest sign that a man has a taste of his own is that he is unsure of it."

I can like or dislike anything I want, as long as I'm willing to update. The space of possible art is huge, and I would cheat my future self if I excluded entire genres from consideration on the belief that they exist solely as pedant-bait.

I was slightly unhappy to see "Prufrock" mentioned in the same rhetorical breath as modern poetry that relaxes the demands of scansion, rhyme, and readability. I also dislike free verse, generally speaking, But "Prufrock" isn't even close to that! It uses some of the same metrical tricks as John Milton's "Lycidas":

I come to pluck your Berries harsh and crude,
And with forc'd fingers rude,
Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.

--- John Milton, "Lycidas" (1637)

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

--- T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1920)

It's not as modern as it looks!

There are many places where prefixing the word "poetry" with the word "modern" signals that it can be dismissed off-hand, but I think that this is a bad way to categorize poetry. For one thing, it hides the way that new poems draw inspiration from older ones.

I think this helped me enjoy Godel, Escher, Bach more, on my second reading, after reading lesswrong. I am happy about this.

This post has generated enough interesting comments that I would ordinarily move it to LessWrong at this point. But I posted it to Discussion because it is a discussion; I don't have answers. What do you think - should I move it?

I have an experience that seems relevant.

I was assigned several chapters of the high-status The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War for a class, and fell in love with it, reading it over and over. I don't say status had nothing to do with it, for every effect has multiple causes (and every cause affects multiple things).

When the translator finished the similar-status and somewhat similar content The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories, I bought it and began reading it with the expectation I would find it stimulating on multiple levels. I found it very boring and randomly meandering, in the same way so many people say they find all of history, which I was finally able to relate to.

Perhaps I was sabotaged by high expectations that I only noticed not being met, but on the other hand I was primed to consider the book favorably and confirm that opinion.

Regarding your point 5., these are two of the earliest works of the art form, which is also a mark of something one is "supposed to like".

A meta-status theory would be that I validated my appreciation for Thucydides by disparaging Herodotus.

As for the Fugue, it was quite pleasant, though I thought the thirty seconds after 11:48 were silly.

I feel like I feel a similar thing, but with regards to effective altruism and learning intellectual things. I sometimes ask myself, "are my beliefs around EA and utilitarianism just 'signaling'", especially since I'm only in high school and don't really have any immediate plans. But I'm also not a very social person, and when I do talk to others I don't usually talk about EA. I guess I'm not a very conscientious person: I like the idea of "maximizing utility" and learning cool things, but my day-to-day fun things (outside of "addictions": social media, games) are just like reading books and essays and listening to music. It's as if, I "want to like" EA and learning. Like, I don't really see any point in being rich and famous, unless you're going to do good with it, and so just doing to minimum to enjoy my life and not be a net negative in utils seems fine. (That is usually a thought I have when I'm sad+unmotivated.) Does it even make sense to say that EA/utilitarianism is just signaling? Is there any reason for me to make my actions inline with my "true" preferences (i.e. egoism)? As in: if it wasn't, "should" I listen to my "true" preferences? grouchymusicologist seems to think, no: whether or not we get those preferences from repetition and socialization, they're still our preferences.

People's judgements on music often amount to "The pattern in which your brain releases dopamine in response to music is inferior to mine."

I can definitely imagine coming to love Beethoven's Fugue (which I played in the background while reading this post & comments) because - it's not fundamentally different to other pieces I've come to love. But I seem to be a neophile in many ways, and I've been exposed to certain types of music, so I count tastes as personal and I find the Youtube comments you quote to be ridiculous.

Re repeated exposure: The pieces on an album that start out as my favourites tend to lose much of their appeal before very long, and I might even skip those tracks; pieces that didn't grab me at first become my favourites and keep their appeal for much longer. (I can only think of one strong exception: As a teenager: I loved Rachmaninov's 2nd concerto from the first time I heard it, liked it more as I listened to it more, and continued to love it for years. I still play it in my head to get rid of an earworm.)

I watched the video, and I must say I like the colors and shapes and the way the light is moving through them.

4 and 5 are anecdotally true for me, as a trained practitioner of two artforms (music and theatre); I often find that I can appreciate something greatly for its technical expertise and novelty of style or content at the same time as acknowledging that some things that achieve greatly in those areas actually fail at being accessibly entertaining.

I also definitely think 2 and 3 come into play a lot, especially when it comes to considering the monetary difference people are willing to pay artists (in terms of the price of paintings/sculptures, ticket prices, grant money etc) depending on whether they are famous or considered excellent by influential critics. We certainly don't consider the artistic quality of a newly discovered piece by a famous artist entirely on its own merits compared to a new or newly discovered piece by someone who isn't a big name.

I'm pretty comfortable liking things that others don't, but less comfortable not liking things others consider great. I do know that after listening to bluegrass music for a few years, learning it on the mandolin was challenging but doable. When I switched to jazz, both listening and learning at the same time, it was much harder. Now, I can hear jazz melodies and rhythms and structure that was just not reaching my brain earier. And they are lovely.

On another note: one time on a bicycle trip I passed through Paris and wandered into the Louvre. I hadn't planned to; it was just there and I said to myself, "Why not?" It was my first time in an art museum, even though I was nearly 60 years old. I'm somewhat of a hillbilly. Anyway, I wound up sitting in front of a huge painting by a Duch master (can't recall the dude's name). I sat for nearly three hours, transfixed. I wound up coming back to it and sitting transfixed for another hour. I can't describe the feelings, only that when I returned the second time, it was like seeing long lost friends: I was so happy! If I had had that experience at an early age, I would have devoted my life to art. I mean Art.

This brings up another issue that is more extreme. Here we find the piece boring, which is certainly a bad thing for artistic ideas. But what if the piece is the other way: actually unappealing?

Anyone who hears Penderecki's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfEye2YBGTM) for the first time gets an idea of what I mean.

Like anyone, my first reaction to the piece is negative. And I think with any work you can find legitimate criticisms of it in terms of form or construction or whatever. But I just don't see it as simple as that. The fact is that this piece is insanely influential on all work that proceeds it. Just listen to the soundtrack to any recent horror films. Hell, even the soundtrack to Lost gives many impressions that Michael Giacchino must have been familiar with the piece (and it's obviously a famous piece). Quite frankly, I love the soundtrack to Lost.

But this may be a difference of execution, rather than of musical ideas. Perhaps I think the execution of Giacchino's music is more appealing and so I like it more. People are suggesting that it's a matter of social stigma, but having been exposed to some of the crappier portions of classical music I would have to disagree. I would honestly say if you took a blind test of Salieri's music (or really anyone of the same time period) and Mozart's music, with somebody who knows little of classical music at all, you have an overwhelming amount say Mozart is better, because there is a matter of craft and execution to take into account.

This is probably relevant: Mere exposure effect

I am afraid to keep listening to the Great Fugue. I would come to like it, whether it is great art, or whether it is pretentious garbage. That would not rule out any of my theories.

How can I figure out which it is before listening to it repeatedly?

Can't believe I didn't notice this. Who cares man? Caring about whether its "pretentious garbage" or "actually complicated hard to like art", is just as silly as liking something cause you think it makes you cool to like it. That;s not the point. The question is will you dig your time here more, have more musi-gasms, if you keep listening, or less.

The SkyTopia site that grouchymusicologist dislikes posted its raw survey results here. It would be interesting to break the survey results down according to whether or not respondents believed in God or the soul.

As someone who considers himself an unusually general art connoisseur, I can simply tell you the answer as more or less fact from personal experience:

While within at least some art forms (taste based ones seem prone to it, probably due to how taste works biologically...) all of these might exists, most of them only do so as rare exceptions.

The main mechanism behind the vast majority is a combination of something very similar to your 4, and that MAKING art changes your evaluation relative someone who has merely consumed and studied existing works. The reason they become so high status is because working towards this specific niche audience with the handicap of not being able to use common tactics because they're bored of them, and not being able to cut corners without it being spotted by someone because they have been cutting those same corners themselves, and still being able to make something enjoyable, is much harder. Sort of, there are some confounding variables and additional effects and other random details I've skipped over to save space.

And don't attempt to learn likening something you don't naturally. Not only will you get spotted as an imposter by anyone who ACTUALLY know something about the field, it's also a negative sum game creating noise and more of those nasty exceptions. If you want high status you have to work for it: consume lots of the art form, with variation, including historical ones that are strictly less enjoyable but are referenced by later works a lot, read up on the history of the field, and try MAKING rather than just consuming.

Art is nothing significant. A matter of taste, which can be quite odd. Or quite common.

Art is a good decoration, at its best.