Get it?
A few years ago, a new colleague joined the place where I was working. We got on extremely well, found that we had much to talk about, and would often visit each other’s homes for dinner after work. Because we both loved music, we started talking about the kinds of music we loved the best. She felt deeply connected to the pop music of the 1980s, whilst I (as you will have gathered from previous posts) feel more at home in the 1880s and earlier. And so, thanks to the great joy of Spotify, and the emailing of mp3s, and the making of mix tapes (well, mix CDs, but you know what I mean), we started sharing music with each other. Music that meant a lot to us personally, or music that was important in explaining the cultural worlds we loved exploring, or music that we thought the other would like and be able to connect with. It has been amazing, and we still do it – we are, every week, learning from each other and finding things we love (and yes, occasionally hate) that we would never even have known about if we hadn’t met.
Such exchanges are a massive exercise in trust. And this is for a very simple reason – one which I think all of us who engaged with cultural activities, be it music, reading, poetry, art or dance, find difficult. To get to know something new, you have first to admit that you don’t know it. And to understand some things, new or not, you have first to admit that you don’t get it.
The great irony, of course, is that we can none of us move forward without admitting to gaps in our knowledge of understanding. Once again, I direct you to other writings on this site about the bravery of amateurs and the importance of trying new things. It takes guts to stand up and say: I’m not great at this right now. But I’d like to be, and I’m prepared to try.
But somehow it’s less of a terrifying prospect when what you are learning involves doing something – a new sport, a kind of dance, a language you’ve never spoken before – rather than engaging with some kind of cultural artefact as a viewer, listener or reader. Sometimes, this can be a simple case of feeling uncomfortable with admitting that you don’t share the same knowledge and tastes as a peer group. I mean, pop music kind of a bit happened to me, but mostly through the auspices of GWR FM being switched on for a few hours a day whilst I was at school, and mostly ignoring it. I’ll be honest: I can still sing you the entire jingle, complete with phone number, of Corsham Building Plastics thanks to their super-catchy advert… but, although I recognise many of the bit hits of the 1990s from what amounts to little more than a process of osmosis, I would be hard-pressed to tell you the names of most of the songs or the artists. I never found this to be a problem at school, but I have found myself in social situations since (and almost always the kind of informal events which are supposed to be about having fun, being relaxed, singing along and dancing badly), when I feel completely outside of what’s going on… because I don’t know all the words, and I don’t know who’s singing or what it’s called, and it’s not unlike being at a church service where you suddenly realise that you don’t know this set of responses and there’s no printed copy to crib from.
It can be just as tricky if the musical genre is classical, and you are classically trained, but there is a particular bit of the repertoire that you simply can’t get your head around. I have a singer friend who really struggles to understand German Romantic Lieder. She’s smart, very musically talented, cares about languages and understanding the text… but she just can’t see what it is in some of this music that so moves her friends and colleagues, because she can’t make that connection herself. We’ve had several interesting conversations about because I, conversely, find certain kinds of French song very hard to relate to, and she loves it. Sometimes it’s because of the poetic language and imagery, which I find rather baffling… sometimes it’s the music, and I can’t understand why a composer has chosen to set something a particular way. I don’t think it’s bad music – that’s not it. I just find it very hard to… get it. To see what it is that is causing others to speak about it in such raptures, and seek it out within every concert brochure and CD compilation.
Sometimes, it’s a question of time and patience. I want to understand better why some Fauré leaves me utterly baffled (and yes, sometimes completely cold) when I can merrily listen to an enormous range of other pieces and be moved and engaged from the very first bar. So I keep trying, and listening to different interpretations, and different songs, and different composers… and I also spend time talking to my 1980s-music-loving friend, who also happens to be a big fan of French poetry. And gradually, bit by bit, I’m getting there. I’m starting to understand, and see things I hadn’t previously been aware of, and it’s very exciting. But you have to want to spend that much time, and be that patient, to try to understand… and sometimes you might find that the best you can manage is an intellectual grasp of the importance of something without really being emotionally engaged by it.
The good news is this: that’s ok. It’s totally fine – it’s allowed. You are not in fact required, regardless of your career path, to love everything. Maybe you think Titian is a genius and Rubens is baffling. Or that you could read Thomas Hardy forever, but happily consign the complete works of Dickens to the dustbin. If you’re an art historian or a literary scholar, it will almost certainly be of benefit for you to read about the things that don’t appeal, and see if you can at least understand why they are important to know about… along the way, you might end up becoming rather fonder of them. But if, at the end of the day, it turns out that Shostakovich is meaningless to you, or Duran Duran brings you out in a rash, then it’s alright. We are blessed with a tremendously rich and varied cultural history – and present. Find the stuff you love, that speaks to you.
And, if you’re feeling brave… share the stuff that doesn’t. Who knows? Maybe you’ll find, with a bit of time and help, you’ll come around to it in the end.
