You don’t have to like music right away. Most of the time, good music has to be tried and it takes a lot of work. Sometimes you have to listen to a piece many times before it begins to please you. Many people ask, why listen to something you don’t like when you can listen to something you do? The answer is very simple – for the sake of a future of disproportionate enjoyment.
Unfortunately, I don’t know how to enjoy fiction, but I think my analogy would be apt: why read long novels when there are plenty of great anecdotes? Reading a novel is much more work, and the reward for it does not come immediately, but I suppose it is much more valuable.
Music is a pattern and order in sounds, and the pleasure comes from understanding that pattern. The more complex and witty the pattern, the harder it is to hear, but the greater the pleasure of understanding it. Simple patterns we understand immediately, and we enjoy it. But these also get boring quickly. Complex patterns we don’t grasp at first, and we don’t like them. But after several listens, when we get to know the piece better, we do find order in the sounds, and we begin to like it.
The simple conclusion is that to try a complex piece, you must first memorize it, and to do that, you must listen to it several times. Fortunately, you don’t have to make any special effort to memorize, it happens all by itself.
But that raises another question: how do you know if the music is worth the effort? What if a piece of music won’t be enjoyable even after the tenth time? Well, maybe it’s just bad.
At school, my philosophy teacher, Alexander Ivanovich Pasternak, taught me an important thing. He said: “When choosing music, don’t think about whether you like it or not; think about whether it’s interesting to listen to.” Honestly, I don’t know how to define what “interesting to listen to” means, but for some reason I got that feeling very well without any further explanation. Try to catch it, too.