Taste

 

Yesterday evening I forced on of the other retired Americans who lives in our compound to listen to the famous last movement of Beethoven's Ninth. It is not a terribly well organized thing, with bits of melodrama, but of course the choral theme is just overwhelming, if maybe too short or too undeveloped. He complained about the sudden bursts of lightning, as he described them, and about the operatic soloists, and completely missed the glory.

That’s almost a perfect example of how differently people listen rather than just what they hear. You gave him the summit, and he spent the time noticing the loose stones on the path up.

🎼 Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (Final Movement)

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The last movement of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 is, structurally speaking, a bit of a mad contraption. It doesn’t behave like a tidy classical finale at all. Instead it feels almost argumentative—like Ludwig van Beethoven is wrestling in public with what music can even be.

Those “bursts of lightning” your neighbor complained about are quite deliberate. They’re interruptions—almost like the orchestra saying, no, not that, as it rejects earlier themes before landing on the “Ode to Joy.” It’s messy because it’s trying to stage a kind of discovery in real time.

And then, when the choral theme finally arrives—simple, almost disarmingly so—it lands with that overwhelming sense of inevitability. Not because it’s complex, but because everything before it has cleared the ground for it. That’s why, even if it’s “too short” by symphonic-development standards, it doesn’t feel insufficient. It feels like a resolution that refuses to over-explain itself.

As for the operatic soloists—he’s not wrong that they’re theatrical. But that’s part of the gamble. Beethoven drags the symphony into the human voice, into text, into something almost embarrassingly direct. It’s as if he’s saying: instrumental music alone isn’t enough for what I want to say here.

Your friend, though, is listening with a kind of architectural expectation—coherence, proportion, development. You’re responding to the gesture, the moral and emotional thrust. Neither is illegitimate, but they rarely line up. It’s a bit like someone criticizing a cathedral for asymmetry while you’re standing there looking at the light through the glass.

And there’s also a temperament issue. Some people are almost allergic to overt exaltation—especially when it’s communal, choral, unapologetically idealistic. The “glory,” as you put it, can feel to them like excess or even manipulation.

Out of curiosity, did he react the same way to the slow movement? That one tends to separate listeners in a different direction entirely.

He said it was nice. I think this was a perfect example of a self-fulfilling prophecy: Beethoven is too deep for him so he won't be able to really hear it.

I’d be a little careful there—because that explanation is very satisfying, but it’s also a bit too neat.

What you’re describing does happen: people can talk themselves out of an experience before it even begins. If someone approaches Ludwig van Beethoven thinking “this is supposed to be profound, therefore I probably won’t get it,” they may keep the whole thing at arm’s length. That kind of guarded listening flattens everything.

But there’s another possibility that’s less flattering to your position, and therefore worth taking seriously: he may simply be attending to different things than you are, and valuing them differently.

When he calls the slow movement “nice,” that’s actually quite revealing. That movement is orderly, spacious, internally consistent—it rewards a kind of listening that looks for proportion and continuity. The finale, by contrast, is disruptive, rhetorical, even a bit chaotic. If someone’s musical instincts lean toward clarity and structural elegance, the last movement can feel like a violation rather than a revelation.

And those “bursts of lightning” he mentioned—that’s not an unintelligent reaction. It’s a perfectly accurate description of something real in the music. Where you hear drama and breakthrough, he hears discontinuity.

There’s also a deeper divide that has nothing to do with intelligence or depth. Some people respond strongly to what you might call transcendent assertion—music that declares something large, communal, almost moral. Others are suspicious of it. The “Ode to Joy” can feel, depending on temperament, either like a genuine universal embrace or like something bordering on grandiose proclamation.

So I’d gently push back on the idea that he “can’t hear it.” He is hearing it—just not organizing what he hears into the same kind of meaning you are.

If anything, the more interesting question is why it strikes you as “glory” and him as something closer to excess or disorder. That difference tells you more about both of you than about Beethoven.

Though I admit—there’s a particular frustration in watching someone sit through that final choral entry and respond with something like “well, that was nice.” It does feel a bit like offering someone a view from a mountaintop and hearing them comment on the weather.

I first heard it in high school as something the librarian picked out just for me. I was carried away and only much later learned to hear it a bit more critically. Heard live one is transported.

That tracks beautifully—and it’s a very recognizable arc, actually.

That first encounter, especially when it comes a bit by accident and feels almost chosen for you, tends to bypass all the analytical machinery. You don’t yet have the habits of listening that say “this is structurally irregular” or “that passage is overblown.” You just get swept up. And with something like Beethoven's Symphony No. 9, that first impact can be almost disproportionate—because it isn’t subtle music. It goes straight for the largest possible human response.

Then later comes the education of the ear. You begin to notice the joins, the rhetorical devices, the places where Ludwig van Beethoven is pushing things a bit hard, even awkwardly. And if you’re not careful, that kind of awareness can cool the whole experience down into something merely “interesting.”

But the best outcome—and it sounds like you’ve landed there—is when the critical ear doesn’t replace the original response but coexists with it. You can hear the seams and still be moved. In fact, sometimes the seams become part of the meaning: you hear the effort to say something that maybe can’t quite be contained in the form.

And yes—live performance changes the whole equation.

🎻 The Ninth Symphony in Performance

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There’s a physicality to it that recordings can’t quite carry. The sheer mass of sound when the chorus enters, the way the basses underpin that opening of the “Ode to Joy,” the human breath behind the phrases—it stops being an object and becomes an event. You’re not just hearing an idea; you’re inside something happening.

And perhaps just as important, you’re sharing it. That communal aspect—hundreds of people producing it, hundreds more receiving it—makes the whole “universal brotherhood” theme feel less like proclamation and more like a temporary fact.

It’s interesting, too, that your friend reacted the way he did to a recording. Some listeners only really “get” this piece live; on a recording, the discontinuities stand out more than the sweep. In the hall, the momentum tends to carry you past objections.

There’s something rather nice in the thought that a librarian quietly handed you that experience at the right moment. That’s a very understated kind of intervention with long consequences.

Do you remember which recording it was, or is it one of those things where the impression stayed but the details vanished?

My agenda here was to talk about self-fulfilling prophesies, and you don't persuade me that is mainly what was going on. This was "classical" music, and I don't like classical music, it's square or out of my class or whatever. Therefore, I will listen for things I don't like.

I see what you’re getting at—and in this case, I think you’re largely right.

What you’re describing isn’t just a neutral difference in taste; it’s a framed listening. If someone goes in with “this is classical music, and I don’t like that sort of thing,” they’ve already selected what to attend to. The mind starts filtering for confirming evidence: the “lightning bursts,” the operatic voices, anything that feels excessive or unfamiliar. The rest—the cumulative build, the arrival of the choral theme—gets underweighted or even missed.

That’s very close to a textbook self-fulfilling prophecy. Not in the sense that he can’t appreciate Ludwig van Beethoven, but in the sense that he has pre-decided the category, and the category does most of the work for him.

It happens in all sorts of domains. Tell someone a wine is cheap and they’ll find faults; tell them it’s rare and they’ll discover nuance. With music, the label “classical” carries extra baggage—elitism, complexity, “not for me,” sometimes even a faint sense of being judged by it. So the listener defends himself in advance by staying slightly detached and critical.

What’s interesting, though, is that this kind of listening is often quite active. He wasn’t disengaged—he was engaged in the wrong direction. He was listening for objections. That’s why he had specific complaints rather than just boredom.

Where I’d still push back a little is on the word “mainly.” The prior attitude sets the stage, absolutely. But the Ninth’s finale really does give a resistant listener plenty of material to work with. It’s not like a perfectly polished surface that only prejudice could reject; it’s a rough, ambitious, sometimes unruly thing. A listener inclined to skepticism will find confirmation there very easily.

So you get an interaction: the expectation primes the ear, and the music obligingly supplies the evidence.

If you wanted to test your hypothesis, the interesting move wouldn’t be to argue him into liking Beethoven. It would be to smuggle the experience past the label. Play him something without naming it, or pick a piece that doesn’t trigger the “classical” category so strongly—say, a movement that feels more immediately atmospheric or narrative—and see if his listening changes before the category snaps into place.

Because once that label locks in, you’re no longer just playing music—you’re playing against a story he’s already telling himself.

It's like me and rap. I have to pay attention to the poetry and, as with most poetry, hear it several times to get it. The attitudes are deliberately in your face, and I just don't like that part and never will.

That’s a very honest comparison—and it actually strengthens your original point rather than weakens it.

You’re describing almost the same mechanism from the inside. With rap, you already know where your resistance lives: the confrontational stance, the deliberate “in your face” posture. So your ear has to work around that to get to what you can appreciate—the verbal craft, the rhythm, the layering. And even then, it takes repetition, because your first-pass reaction is partly defensive.

That’s very close to what your neighbor did with Beethoven's Symphony No. 9—except you’re willing to override your initial filter, and he wasn’t.

And you’re probably right about the limit. You say you’ll “never” like that aspect of rap, and that’s not necessarily a failure. Some aesthetic responses really are temperamental. If a style leans heavily on an attitude you instinctively resist, you may only ever meet it halfway—appreciating parts while remaining unmoved by the whole.

But notice the subtle difference in posture:

• You: there’s something here, but I have to get past my own resistance to reach it.

• Him: this isn’t for me, and here’s why.

Those look similar on the surface, but they lead to very different outcomes over time.

There’s also an interesting inversion. In Beethoven’s Ninth, the “problem” for your neighbor is excess—too many interruptions, too much declaration, too much voice. In rap, the “problem” for you is also a kind of excess—too much directness, too much attitude, too much rhetorical pressure. In both cases, the art is doing something emphatic, and the listener has to decide whether that emphasis feels like power or like intrusion.

So yes—self-fulfilling prophecy is real. But your example shows it’s not absolute. You can recognize your own bias and still push against it, at least partway.

And that’s probably the dividing line: not whether someone has an initial resistance (almost everyone does), but whether they treat that resistance as a signal to stop—or as something to examine and, occasionally, step past.

I've always been somewhat highbrow: classical music, opera, theatre (spelled that way), literature. For sport tennis and badminton, gymnastics and diving. I think so many lose so much life closing off quality.

There’s something true in that, but it cuts two ways.

On one hand, yes—closing yourself off a priori does shrink life. If someone writes off whole domains like classical music or opera or literature as “not for me,” they’re not just skipping preferences, they’re declining entire modes of experience. And some of those modes—like the one you had with Ludwig van Beethoven—can be among the most expansive a person ever has.

But “highbrow” carries a quiet risk of its own, which you’ve mostly avoided but not entirely escaped: it can become another kind of filter. Not closing off quality, but predefining where quality is expected to be found.

You’ve already shown you’re aware of that tension with rap. You don’t naturally like it, but you’re willing to concede there’s something there—poetry, craft, rhythm—even if the overall attitude repels you. That’s actually the same openness you’re asking of your neighbor, just applied in the opposite direction.

The interesting thing is that “quality” isn’t distributed as neatly as culture likes to pretend. There’s extraordinary refinement in a Beethoven quartet, yes—but there can also be precision and invention in forms that present themselves very differently, even abrasively. The difficulty is that sometimes the packaging of quality is what triggers the resistance.

Your list—classical music, opera, theatre, certain sports like tennis and gymnastics—leans toward forms where control, discipline, and structure are visible. That’s a coherent aesthetic. But other forms trade in immediacy, confrontation, or rawness, and if one isn’t attuned to those, their quality can be harder to perceive.

So I’d sharpen your statement just a bit:

It’s not that people lose life by rejecting “highbrow” things.
It’s that people lose life when they decide, too early, what kinds of experience are worth having—whether that boundary is drawn high, low, or anywhere in between.

You’ve kept that door at least partially open, even where your instincts resist. Your neighbor, in that moment, didn’t. That’s the real difference—not cultivation versus lack of it, but curiosity versus preemption.

And to be fair, everyone has their blind spots. Yours just happen to be ones you’re willing to look at.

Oh I don't reject "lowbrow." I love square dancing, but just standing on a floor jumping around is boring. I played high school football (kinda necessary to be as popular as I wanted to be, and I had the build) and really enjoyed it when we got a coach who thought strategically.

That’s a really helpful clarification—and it actually sharpens your pattern rather than contradicting it.

What you’re drawn to isn’t “highbrow” so much as structured engagement. You like things where there’s something to grasp—a system, a strategy, an interplay of parts that rewards attention.

Take square dancing. To an outsider it can look almost quaint or simple, but once you’re inside it, there’s a logic to the calls, a geometry to the movement, a kind of living pattern. It’s not just motion—it’s coordinated intention. Compare that to what you describe as “just jumping around,” where the structure dissolves and there’s nothing to hold onto intellectually.

Same with your experience in American football. With the right coach, it stopped being brute force and became something closer to chess with bodies—formations, timing, deception, adaptation. Without that layer, it would be much less interesting.

And that connects right back to your musical preferences. With Beethoven's Symphony No. 9, you’re responding not just to the sound but to the sense that something is being worked out—even if imperfectly. There’s intention, struggle, architecture (even when it’s messy).

So the dividing line for you isn’t high vs. low culture. It’s more like:

• Structured vs. unstructured

• Intentional vs. arbitrary

• Something to follow vs. nothing to latch onto

That’s a much more interesting—and frankly more defensible—position than just “highbrow taste.”

It also explains why you can appreciate something outside your comfort zone (like rap) if you can locate the structure—the verbal craft, the rhythm—even if the surface attitude puts you off. You’re finding the handle that lets you engage with it.

Your neighbor, in contrast, may not be finding a handle in Beethoven’s Ninth—so he defaults to reacting to surface features he dislikes.

So I’d revise your earlier thought one more time:

People don’t just lose life by rejecting “quality.”
They lose it when they fail to find a way in—a structure, a pattern, a foothold—from which the thing can make sense.

You’ve spent a lifetime finding those footholds. He, at least in that moment, didn’t.

You mention chess; that's odd. I never liked it much, vastly preferring bridge. I think chess is too obvious and like trying to figure out what the opposition has.

That’s not odd at all—in fact it fits your pattern almost perfectly.

On the surface, chess looks like the more “intellectual” game, but it’s actually very exposed. Everything is on the table. The problem is fully visible, and the challenge is to calculate, foresee, and outmaneuver within a completely known system. For some minds that’s pure elegance; for others it feels a bit stark—almost like doing mathematics in public.

contract bridge, on the other hand, has that extra layer you seem to value: hidden structure. You’re not just analyzing position, you’re inferring it. You’re reading signals, reconstructing unseen hands, coordinating with a partner under constraints. It’s part logic, part psychology, part communication system.

That difference maps very neatly onto what you’ve been describing all along:

• Chess: total information, explicit structure, nothing concealed

• Bridge: partial information, emergent structure, meaning discovered through interpretation

Bridge gives you something to uncover, not just something to calculate. It’s closer to listening to a complex piece of music where you’re constantly asking, “what’s really going on here?” rather than solving a fully specified problem.

And interestingly, it even echoes your reaction to music. In something like Beethoven's Symphony No. 9, part of the engagement is that sense of discovery—the feeling that the piece is finding its way, not just executing a plan. Chess, by contrast, can feel like everything is already defined, and you’re just working through it.

Your phrase—“trying to figure out what the opposition has”—is exactly bridge thinking. In chess, there’s nothing to “have” except position; in bridge, the unseen is the whole game.

So if anything, your tastes are remarkably consistent. You’re drawn to forms where:

• Not everything is given up front

• There’s inference and interpretation

• Structure reveals itself over time rather than being immediately apparent

That’s a very particular kind of intelligence at work—less about brute calculation, more about reading into things. And once you see that, your preferences across music, sport, and games all line up rather neatly.