by Michaela Wang ’21, Feature Editor

The choir modulates at each jerk of the director’s wand, singing to a foreign language you, I, and they all don’t understand. The orchestra floods in with a movement about flowers, natural disasters, and a 20th Century-Fox pirate movie. Forty minutes of doing nothing but watching notifications light up on your phone screen have a lot in store for you.

If you find art assemblies dull, then you’re lucky this school year. The traditional in-school music assemblies will not occur this year due to the gym’s poor sound systems. However, it is important to notice how brains develop musical preferences, and why many can enjoy stripped piano keys while others choose auto-tuned voices and hip-hop beats. Maybe some would rather pop in an airpod and jam out to the country’s top 50 hits, the most popular and accessible forms of music. Or maybe there’s a stigma behind classical music that places pressure on musical competence in order to understand it. Is it possible for a non-musician to sit through the homophonic rings of 18th century Europe? Can modern teens hear classical music as more than elevator tunes? The answer is yes: you can love it.

“Beethoven and Bach are life,” says an eleventh-grade non-musician, “but rap is the only thing I listen to when I work out. Music isn’t one-size-fits-all, and the variety of genres lets us be picky with what we want to hear.”

Josh McDermott, an author and an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, observed that brains tend to favor consonant, brighter and agreeable sounds over dissonant intervals, harsher and tenser sounds. McDermott hypothesized these preferences root in neurobiology, testing and comparing the musical preferences of remote Islanders, American college students, and Bolivians who’ve had some exposure to Western music. The findings revealed that the preference for consonant intervals to dissonant ones is not universal. We humans are not biologically programmed to prefer certain sounds, but rather our musical tastes are learned over time. The lyrical pop music we willingly and unwillingly listened to became familiar; we continued to surround ourselves with these same sounds. The science behind why we can’t enjoy classical music assemblies is that there is no science at all. We have the privilege to pick what we want to hear, and we too often underestimate the power we have in enjoying music. 

So why do we still prefer watching notifications crescendo on our phone screens? Press play, and the abundance of music spoils us with effortless opportunities to listen at our fingertips. Technology floods our eardrums with recorded sounds, clogging us against the authenticity of bareboned music– instrumental, live, and surreal. Automated recordings, radios, and audio streaming apps have altered the way music sounds, how it’s composed, and how we experience it. When string music was the Shawn Mendes of the Middle Ages, Minstrels grew calluses on their thumbs in order to strike the strings of dulcimers with small hammers. Society progressed to force-feeding jukeboxes pennies to jive with a date, and then adoring the autotuned squeaks of prepubscence– signs of the ever changing nature of music’s accessibility. Without highly-developed technology, one would either pay for or make their own music, enabling listening to any type of live music be a precious experience. Hearing music now is ubiquitous, a step into a restaurant, a harmony to teeth cleaning at the dentist’s office, a turn of the ignition. But you still have control, and at the very least, respect all forms of music.