Music is universal among humans, typically used for immediate benefits: aesthetic pleasure, accompaniment to ritual, dance or work or even getting a baby to sleep. However, there is a 2.0 kind of music. You may like it fine on first hearing, but only with repeated listenings do you fully take it to heart and feel that magic click.
This music does not follow predictable patterns, the harmonies might be complex, the instrumental arrangement might be agitated with countermelodies and eccentric frills, the piece might not have been designed to summon you to move your body, or maybe the thing is just kind of long. It’s hard to embrace its full essence until you’ve experienced it a few times.
When you like a beat or the texture of a voice or are hooked by a catchy chorus — the prime elements in most modern pop music — songs can grab you instantly. Here’s to them! But when music is founded on things beyond those three elements, it can take a few listens — for me, often about seven — before you connect with it as viscerally as you do to your favorite pop.
It is not the most intuitive way of engaging with music, concentrating on it in solitude, hoping for enlightenment. And I realize that my predilection for this kind of listening, inherited from my father, is weird. After all, it doesn’t even always pay off. For example, Harvey Sachs’ new study of Arnold Schoenberg is a sad book in its way, asserting that the composer’s serial music, based on unalterable sequences of twelve tones rather than conventional melody and harmony, will never truly move any but a sliver of listeners, even with repeated exposure.