Taste and Complexity
February 25, 2023
W. David Marx is doing an excellent job of explaining diversity of taste. When I take a relatively uneducated friend to an art museum, I'm often stumped to explain my taste.
Culture (An Owner's Manual): Three Ways of Enjoying Music (and the Reverse Snobbery of Ultra-Poptimism), 2023-Feb-21 by W. David Marx
Educated listeners grow bored with sensuous music with low syntactical complexity. They seek out music that offers new emotional and intellectual experiences, which require syntactical innovations that only experts can provide.
Where syntactical innovations are too complicated or alien, they often interfere with the immediate sensations of music and become unpleasant for less educated listeners. Herein lies the basic conflict between the two groups.