Unlike the last entry with this title, this is (tangentially) a post about Roxy Music.
Last week, I was having a look at Tony Bennett, Mike Emmison and John Frow’s 1999 book, Accounting for Tastes in my QUT Creative Industries postgrad class. Bennett et al were doing something similar to Pierre Bourdieu in Distinction, mapping the social patterning of cultural taste. But unlike Bourdieu’s work on France in the early 60s, the data their team collected in Australia in 1994/5 showed social status/education level, age and gender to be more powerful predictors of taste than social class.
The chapter on music was particularly interesting - for instance, they found only 1.6% of respondents aged 18-25 and 4.0% of those aged 26-35 nominated classical music as their preferred genre, while 11.3% of the 60+ cohort did. As Bennett et al correctly surmised, without longitudinal data you can’t tell whether there’s a cohort effect (that is to say - older respondents liked classical music in their youth and continued to have that preference) or whether musical tastes change with age. But their qualitative interviewing found a lot of stability in music preferences over time - that is to say, people still liked the same or similar music as they grew older. It would be really fabulous to have comparable data 13 years down the track, but I suspect the conclusion drawn from the qualitative responses is right and that’s why classical music audiences continue to decline, why we’ve got radio stations devoted to “the best of the 60s/70s/80s”, why JJJ (at least in terms of people I know) has lots of 40ish listeners and why tix for 80s acts are now in the hundreds of dollars because promoters think Gen X kids can afford that for a gig.
We had a bit of a chat in class about why music preferences might be established in adolescence. Most of my students - generally in their mid to late 20s - thought they were. I’d be interested in people’s thoughts, and whether people think the same pattern applies to other cultural forms - ie literature.
There was a New Scientist article a few years back that talked of a significant correlation between information rate and people’s taste. Above or below an individuals “bandwidth” they were either overloaded or bored, and thus didn’t like the music. Of course, different individuals had different “information bandwidth comfort zones”: which is why someone who likes a 5 part fugues, lots of key changes, etc doesn’t mind Emerson Lake and Palmer but gets driven bonkers by Rondo Alla Turca and elevator music. So, I’d expect that even if the genre changes with age, the degree of comfort with a particular density won’t.
Recent studies looked at music preference of non-humans.
See New Scientist 2008-Feb and this search
Yep. The monkeys didn’t mind gentle baroque, but hated doof doof. Weirdly, they treated a melody as DIFFERENT if played a tone or two up or down, but treated melodies an octave apart as the same.
Do you remember anything about the methodology, Dave? And when the differences are established?
Human infants can’t discriminate octaves either. They develop the skill sometimes are early as two years old and usually by five.
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Must agree with Dave Bath. The notion of complexity and “bandwidth” is one I subscribe to - my tastes are complex, my partner’s are not. Two of my sons share this complexity, the third does not. Interestingly, native musical ability (not of the learned type) correlates pretty highly with this, with three singers and two (mostly) non-singers, though we all like music.
As a teenager, I had debates with musical friends as to who would be listing to MoR by the time they were forty. Shamefully, my tastes have become even more extreme since then and I am listening to most types of complex metal, prog, industrial, experimental, world, pretty much anything with a wall of sound, or contrapuntal music. Layered, swirling trance is fine. Dislike country, 4/4 folk and most Top 40 material. The other aspect though, is visceral or emotional music, anything with charge, which does pick up a few simple forms.
I don’t think music is stratified according to generations so much any more and the complexity argument is much more powerful. If you are listening to Top 40 now, you will be in thirty years. The rest of you freaks, rock on.
Though what do we do with 80 year old Goths, Rivetheads, Metal Freaks and Techno Babes? The retirement home of the future may need a mosh (Mash?) pit.
My musical tastes have broadened rather than changed over the years. I’ve always liked both blues and baroque, but have fairly recently started to enjoy modern jazz (well … not really modern … stuff like Monk and Dolphy, which was mostly recorded before my balls had dropped). I even like some rap, and much more C&W than I did 40 years ago. I draw the line at metal and prog rock though - most of it seems to be self-indulgent, played by clever musicians who don’t actually have anything to say.
Slighty(?) off-topic, but the ABC is reporting that Tristam Cary has died in Adelaide.
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