“Make new friends, but
keep the old;
One is silver and the
other gold.”
I had put on an old
playlist yesterday as I unloaded the dishwasher, and was really enjoying the
songs. Many of them had been my favorites long ago, such as “Fame”, “The Sound
of Silence”, and “Johnny B. Goode.” That started me thinking about balancing
time spent listening to familiar music versus time spent listening to music I
haven’t heard before.
This is really a dilemma
that applies more broadly, such as to movies and books, but maybe it is more
vivid in the case of music because so much of listening to music is re-listening. We don’t even bother to
call it “re-listening”, though we often say we are “re-reading” a favorite book,
or (less often) that we are “re-watching” a movie we’ve seen.
When we start life, it’s
all new. “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”, “The Itsy-bitsy Spider”, “The Wheels
on the Bus”—it’s all wonderful new stuff to learn and sing over and over (and
over and over and over…). For quite a while, we get flooded with new music to
enjoy, even as we love to repeat our (still few in number) favorites.
Somewhere along the line,
the situation changes. We already know a lot of songs, have long lists of
things we like to hear, and spend less and less time listening to new ones.
Obviously some people, especially people who are very into music, still spend a
lot of time listening to new stuff, but people like me hear remarkably little
of it. (The situation is exacerbated in my case by the fact that I rarely turn
on the radio.)
One source of new songs
is other people, but here technology has interrupted the proper passing on of
musical knowledge. So many people listen to music on headphones—I’m referring
of course to teen-age daughters—that although parental ears are spared a constant
barrage of Someone Else’s Music and especially What Are They Listening To Now?, it also means fewer opportunities to
make new discoveries.
I think my mom quite
liked some of those Billy Joel songs.
The song on the playlist that
brought this particular fact to mind (remember, I said I was listening to an
old playlist) was “Mean”, sung by Taylor Swift. It was on my playlist because
at the time my daughter was listening to Taylor Swift, she didn’t have a
cellphone (smart or otherwise) and all the music ended up on my hard drive. For
some reason, I really liked “Mean.” I doubt I would have heard it if not for
her.
But as fun as “Mean” is,
I owe a much greater musical debt to my daughter.
Hamilton.
She was walking around
the house for weeks—or was it months?—earbuds plugged in, humming happily,
before I said, “Maybe you could play it for me while I’m sewing.”
The first listen-through
was confusing and I hardly understood any of the words, but the second half
sounded promising. Some music needs more than one hearing to be appreciated,
and the second listen-through was the charm, in this case. I’ve been playing it
in the car for months now, I think.
So how should I balance
re-listening versus trying new music? At this point, I’ve heard enough music in
my life (including all the stuff that was playing when I was in high school and
college, whether I remember it vividly or not), that I could probably get
thro
ugh the entire rest of my life just listening to things I already enjoy.
Why make an effort to hear anything new?
I say again, Hamilton. (Really, I cannot recommend it
enough.) I could easily have missed Hamilton entirely, because most of my accidentally-discovered
new music comes from movies (“Try Everything” in Zootopia) or TV (“Tiny Winey” in Death in Paradise) and occasionally my husband (when he discovers
someone new, which isn’t all that often—Paul Thorn, e.g.)
And without Hamilton, my life would be that much
poorer.
So what’s the take-home
point of all this? Nothing surprising. Just that it’s worth trying something
new, sometimes, even when you’re happy with the tried-and-true. In the case of
music, the song about friends I quoted doesn’t really even apply. The mere fact
that you’ve been enjoying a song for decades doesn’t confer gold status on it,
and not all new songs are mere silver by comparison.
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