wnyc.org / 93.9fm / am 820

So if a new study is to be believed, reading program notes (that explain about a piece of music before you hear it).is actually a bad thing.

My initial reaction: disgust, revulsion, and blinding rage, subsiding into a deep, spiritual malaise from which I will never recover. Or maybe it’s just skepticism. I have, after all, written a fair amount of program notes myself, and I have to admit to being a music geek – I’ve always listened to music analytically, trying to figure out how they did that or where that sound came from or why that melody sounds different the third time around; so when I read someone else’s program notes it’s like giving a baseball fanatic a whole new bunch of stats to ponder.

I like listening to music and knowing something about its context, and maybe even about it’s structure. I suppose I can imagine how that stuff wouldn’t impress everyone, but I just don’t see how knowing it can actually make you like a piece less.

As I say, that’s my initial reaction. But upon further review, I’m thinking back to when I first started getting into classical music, and I’d read these notes about symphonies where the writer would talk about the music evoking a storm or a meadow, and I wouldn’t hear it in the music myself. Maybe it’s because I was just learning how to “decode” the sounds of the orchestra, although at the time, I just thought it was because these writers were hopelessly pretentious.

So maybe the notes are, if not counterproductive, at least off-putting to newer listeners. But hey, no one’s making you read them. (Maybe that was the problem with the new study.)