How To Disappear Completely

Interestingness in Music

I was recently asked the following questions regarding my musical taste, as prompted by several argument/conversations in which I (lazily) described the music that I like as "interesting." I include both question and my rough response below:

I was just thinking about what you like in music, Sarah, and I have a question.

In other words, how do you define the quality of being interesting? Is it simply something new? If you had listened to Glass and Stravinsky all your life, would you then find Britney Spears "interesting?" Or is it something else?

"One of my favorite composers is Bach for the following reasons:
1) Bach is, on one hand, easily understandable for anyone fluent in the Western musical tradition (for the most part, anyway ).
2) Bach is, on the other hand, so complex that analysts can still find more patterns, codes, puzzles, and other structural intricacies encoded within his music even centuries later.

3) Finally Bach really tries to use his music to depict what he has to say accurately (further explanation would lead me into an entire area of language, signs, semiotics, etc., so I will just say that most musicians who sing about losing their girlfriends in a major key with upbeat rhythms are not very aware of how to fit the music to the text. Not every piece has to say something profound, or even say something at all, but music is more "interesting" to me when it does, and that element of intentional communication is what pushes a piece of music over into art, for me.)

Stravinsky and Glass, though to a lesser degree perhaps, also demonstrate a similar balance between accessibility and complexity, between the familiar and the new. I think the best compositions achieve a balanced tension between the familar and the new: too much familiarity and we become bored after a few repetitions, yet too much variety or newness, and our concentration abilities are taxed. A lot of people find Stravinsky too "new" and Glass too "familiar" at first, but after more listenings, this feeling tends to decrease rather than increase.

I am not particilarly familiar with Britney Spears' music. However, my guess is that I would discover nearly everything there is to know about one of her songs after a few listenings. This doesn't mean that I wouldn't be able to continue to enjoy her songs as fun pieces, but I would no longer find them "interesting." But, as I think Britney most likely intended that her songs entertain people rather than cause them to sit down and think very hard, her music nevertheless fufills its purpose, small though it may be."

[Points (1) and (2) are important characteristics in judging music quality. Point (3) is debatable (at least, I believe that a piece of music can be good without conveying an explicit message). However, every piece of music will convey an implicit message, even if just the very basic ontological assumptions of the composer (i.e., "This is what I believe music to be.")]