OFF: Age and taste

Dave Berry daveb at HARLEQUIN.CO.UK
Wed Sep 10 09:02:00 EDT 1997


On 10 Sep 00:12, J Strobridge wrote:
> Daniel Wikdahl writes:
>
> > I once read an article that quoted a scientific report that said
> > that "the music you listen to when you're 24 is the same [kind of] music that
> > you'll be listening to in the rest of your life".

Then you'd better make sure that you're listening to a wide range of
music when you're 24, or you'll get bored!

I don't think that's true for me.  My tastes have continued to change --
mainly adding new stuff, but occasionally junking older music along the
way.  I'm now 36.  In the last ten years I've come to like house and
dance music, and more folk music than I used to.  In classical music,
I used to like orchestral works and minimalism; now I've come to like
chamber music as well, and some more abstract stuff too.  And some
genres didn't even exist, so I couldn't have liked them!  (E.g. drum
and bass).

So maybe I'll always like the music I liked when I was 24, but learn
to like other sorts of music as well?  There's some truth in this,
but it's not a hard-and-fast rule.  Of the music I listened to in the
seventies, only a few albums have stood the test of time.  Much of
what sounded new and/or sophisticated then sounds really dated and
clumsy now.  Gong, Gryphon, Gentle Giant, King Crimson and the Stranglers
have all survived in my collection, but much else has been chucked.  With
one obvious exception...

Also, I'm *much* less likely to listen to standard rock music these days,
because so much of it is just repeating what has gone before, rather
than providing something new to listen to.

I'm not completely inconsistent -- I'm still not keen on opera, country,
rap, fusion, or most of the contents of the charts!

Dave.
--
Harlequin Ltd., Technology Transfer Centre, King's Buildings,
Mayfield Road, Edinburgh, EH9 3JL, UK.
Tel: +44 131 472 4782



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