How do music tastes change as one ages?

[Rsachi]

Hi!
I found an interesting report about how people lose interest in the music they liked as teenagers, once they cross 30. Here it is :

"Music was better back then":
When do we stop keeping up with popular music?
http://wp.me/p3Mtta-58 via @ajaymkalia

Interestingly I developed a similar theory about CM tastes some time back. Here it is:

http://rsachi.blogspot.in/2014/01/sixte ... c.html?m=1

Your thoughts please?

[varsha]

Reading books in one’s youth is like looking out at the moon through a crevice. Reading books in middle age is like looking at the moon in one’s own courtyard. And reading books in old age is like looking at the moon on an open terrace. That is because the depths of the benefits of reading varies in proportion to the depths of one’s own experience. Somerset Maugham

Same or Music too , I guess .
I can narrate horror stories of how I missed some great music in childhood .
But then it is a long and arduous journey ... this business of appreciation

[munirao2001]

RSachi Sir,

Yet another timely and good topic from your mental assembly-thought constructs. Your blog is interesting. Other one was interesting for the scientific-statistical analysis and report, taking music appreciation and consumption as centrality.

Related to Karnataka Sangeetham, my observations are:
1. Age 2 to 6:
1.1. Child not born in to musician family-
* Mother's interest;
* Father's interest or limited interest, supporting role, disinterest;
* sibling learning, neighborhood and friends learning, curiosity of being amongst the children learning;
* Grand parents encouragement;
* School teacher's demand or encouragement with promise for a performance and photo opportunity;
* popular child artist performance(s) in TV program;
* child icon interest in music;
* 'smart' thinking for avoiding much serious academic study tuition;
* not social and withdrawn child, going to class for engagement.

1.2. Child born in to or closely connected musician family -
* exposure;
* environment;
* curiosity;
* motivation;
* support;
* need for recognition;
* inheritance of talents based on the instinct and intuition;
* pleasure of attendance of performances;
* one parent, parents or elderly exerting pressure;
* escapism-act of avoidance of parents and elder (s) pressure;
* urge to compete with other talented with recognition;
* disinterest, distaste or disability for academic subjects or its studies;
* guru's talent recognition and encouragement;
* Sudden inspiration or urge or compelling family need and responsibility.

1.3. Child with extraordinary talent, discipline, intelligence, commitment and dedication, very high motivation with quick recognition.

If this posting is interesting and engaging, on receipt of encouragement, I shall continue or end with this posting.

munirao2001

[Rsachi]

Sir,
very detailed analysis from you indeed.
Please also touch upon what you have observed about passing fads and lasting tastes in music. In CM particularly, we see many great musicians in the 25-45 years age, each with their own fan base. Do you think one musician can hope to win over fans from another musician? In what age groups of rasikas do you think these loyalty shifts can take place?

[VK RAMAN]

Exposure to music by the child as he or she is growing in mother's womb is powerful for child to develop interested in music and I am experienced in that.

My Dad used to take me where he used to sing bhajans/kirtans when I was 2 to 13 years and several thousand are hidden in my little brain and I am still discovering as I come across music and I can sing immediately after listening but my teen years were to move away from such exposure.

[munirao2001]

Sir,
Change is universal in nature and also in all the times-past, present and future. Attraction is for one's own pleasure for discerning rasika. Attachment is for recognized and popular expert, authority and identity. Rasika with conditioned mind and attachment to the artist while expressing 'one and only' will switch over to newer attractions and experiences with continued proclamations of 'one and only'. Only rasikas with deep understanding and realization of quality and values in music will not be attached to the artist and popularity but for excellence. This category of rasikas were very much higher in earlier era.
In the present times, knowledgeable rasikas are relatively very few in terms of percentage and numbers. Obsession and equation of qualities are with only 'immensely popular', trendy, satisfaction in excitement, surprise and instantaneous gratification and temporal pleasure. It is also fact that young maestros with sadhana and success, with the advantage of higher education and intelligence are able to develop following and also retain and even attract new following with change management in style and practices. Young maestros are able to cultivate and reach out to youthful rasikas, in ever growing numbers. Tech savvy and skillful in using the technology and social networking art.

Loyalty shifting can happen in the age above 16 with rasikas not becoming knowledgeable and discerning and find ease and comfort with large group of rasikas, unquestioning and undemanding.

previous posting part continued...

2. Boy and Girl -Age group 7- 20:
2.1. Peer group interest or disinterest
2.2. Academic educational pressures, stress and time management challenges
2.3. Attraction of sports, outdoor and its related activities
2.4. Change in preference, urge for change, rebellious attitude, other experience.
2.5. Interest, admiration and worship of immensely popular artists, attracting full house and high profile-Media, visual and print and endorsement, sense of ownership success of the artist.
2.6. Continued support of family, guru and patrons and institution-financial aid for learning and practice.
2.7. Pleasure of initial success and resolve to compete and achieve higher success.
2.8. Change in location-living and working.
2.9. Change in the family or personal finance and or life style.
2.10. Enhanced and deep realization in values to pursue achieve highest pleasure
3. Man and Woman-Age group 21 – 40:
3.1. Conditioned in expectation, demand, response, allocation of time & resource, in attendance and support.
3.2. Challenges of time management.
3.3. Work pressure resulting in the drop of interest.
3.4. Accommodation for the other (s) interest by sacrificing one’s own interest
3.5. Disappointment of not getting sense of satisfaction in recall pleasure
3.6. Lack of good alternative or choice of new experience.
3.7. Exposure and cultivation of interest in other activity or other form of art.
3.8. Enjoying success as a practitioner, sense of mind firmly set to meet the challenge of competition and to retain gained popularity.
3.9. Challenge of New technology and practices.
3.10. Emerging and new challenges in health management and curtailed leisure time.
3.11. Change in the living style habits, location and not conducive external environment.

to be continued...

[hnbhagavan]

Rsachi,

Sri Sanjay Subramanyam mentions in his blog how he used to chase Sri TV Shankaranarayan 'concerts in his formative years.Both the artists are still performing,but you can see the overflowing halls for Sanjay's concerts.Earlier people would throng Sri TV Shankaranarayan' s concerts.but i was shocked to see very thin crowds in Chennai for TVS sir concerts.I understand that what i have written is not exactly on your topic.My experience is that whatever listeners form opinion in the age say 21-35 will hold good for their life time.I know that several people keep remembering earlier years say when MDR or KVN was performing and refuse to venture into concerts.

[SrinathK]

Mainly, as one grows older, one's emotions become more refined, the experience well deepens and a lot of the music you liked as a teenager is either too shallow or too loud and stressful. So automatically you start seeking more depth.

I can tell you that listening for all these years, now I find my brain plunging deep into the intricacies of phrasings and subtleties in a way that I could not do 10 years ago and I am now all the more astonished as to the creativity of some musicians or the matchless refinement of others (e.g. M S Subbulakshmi) because now I can hear many minute details which I could not pick up. I am also developing a better eye for observing musical skills at work.

Also the bhava connection to music has deepened a lot in the past 10 years. As a kid it was like my favourite bed time story that I wanted to listen to LGJ's Hindolam or a Maharajapuram's Mohanam (the same recording, in the same order!). Now that spectrum of rasas that I can feel has increased massively. Now I can listen to a broader range of genres too. WCM entered my ears in college. Music at it's finest can bring tears to me today, something that I couldn't feel nearly that much as a kid. Let's see where I am 10 years further along the line.

I also came across an interesting observation as to why our audience population trends on the other side of 50 in the halls today. It's because the age group of around 20-60 or so is really stressed out with work pressures and commuting and I seriously doubt how often they can even afford the energy to take themselves or their kids to CM concerts even if they wanted. Consequently our senior citizens are the only ones with enough free time to attend the concert (health permitting) and if anyone can reliably take the kids to concerts, it will be them. But with nuclear families emerging and people working far from home, there are many difficulties with that too.

I am also unsure as to how many parents make an active effort to expose their children to CM at home, despite the rise of the internet. I won't blame them if all they want to do is to drop on the bed at the end of the day. Seriously, mentally, we are far more stressed than we have ever been.

In this regard I can't tell you how my father spent GB's and GB's of data back in the early days of broadband to get as much music as he could simply because I said, "I want to listen to more CM" and encouraged me to listen to many an artiste. Or how my grandfather would come home during December and we would go to quite a number of concerts -- he would give me examples of the best music he's heard and he was a huge encouragement. Or how my mother would patiently wait till past dinner time if the night concert went till late. That REALLY matters. And then there was Worldspace radio. By the time I was out of school, my tastes had become self sustaining. I don't think I would have come anywhere near to where I am if they hadn't ACTIVELY encouraged me to this point.

[SrinathK]

The December season also falls around exam time for a lot of local schools so that makes it doubly difficult. When you're a teenager, your circle of friends is quite high on the priority list -- a Carnatic music concert is either a family affair or a lonely one . And when you are not doing that, it's lots and lots of academics from IX class onwards. I should tell you I was busy from 6 in the morning to 10 at night in those days of preparing for JEE while balancing violin classes and school work so I had virtually no time to attend concerts till my first year of college. Fortunately by that time, I knew what music I had to listen to and where to find it and plenty of internet access and I had my driver's license to roam about wherever I wanted freely.

Speaking of college, fortunately acads came easy for me, or else I would have been burdened with tution classes in my school days. Doubly fortunate was that IITM is a residential college with a fine CM community and a lot of time and total flexibility outside class hours. If I had landed up in a place that required me to travel in a bus for hours together, I don't think I would have gained any depth in my CM tastes. That's where I struck the jackpot in music collections. And that's where i listened to so much music that in just 5 years, I went from being familiar with about 50-60 compositions and about 25 ragas to over 800 compositions and almost 350 plus ragas and the A-Z of musicians and almost all the history of CM shared on rasikas.org! I have also devised an easy way to take this to even greater heights by studying my memory patterns and finding how long I need to listen to a raga or a tala or a krithi, etc... before I am quite familiar with it.

I also understood at that time that a music like CM is like a companion who you must be with for life -- in stark contrast to the "use and throw music" that goes viral one day and fails to survive by next year and it takes only a little effort everyday to develop that mindset, but it has to be consistent.

Now I am in that category of people far away from Chennai and burdened with huge workloads and trying to save enough holidays to come home this December. In the meantime, a good broadband plan means I've just doubled my music collections and I've got some spare time to spend with all of you rasikas.

[VK RAMAN]

Now a days most of the parents in their high 30s having children of the age of 5 to 9 would like for their children to learn music in a short span of one month to 6 weeks so they can show case their children to perform during celebration of community events. After the event, they miss classes until the next event to show case. They is most disconcerting

[SrinathK]

@VK Raman, It's a scandal Just so...wrong.

[varsha]

Ah ! The tricks, Age plays ...
As the saying goes
Little boys like soldiers
Little girls like Dolls
....
Big boys like dolls
Big girls like soldiers

[Rsachi]

My approximation:

[Rsachi]

VKR sir, its no wonder that such short courses are also called crash courses!

[SrinathK]

@Rsachi, Sir, that graph is absolutely brilliant. It reminded me of something that I had forgotten. As a kid, there was a point where faster (and a little louder) was better. 15 years later, now I do not see so much value in simply running up and down mere scales or just banging the mridangam in the finale. I look more for control, phrasing, bowing articulation, shruti shuddam, modulations, creativity, tone and aesthetics and intricate rhythmic patterns. I can also understand why some artistes as they age sometimes just hover around one note while the audience is mesmerized -- there is quite a lot of depth even in very simple things. Now-a-days my ears have also started complaining about acoustics.

We may even do a similar study for musicians and see how they evolve over time.

[Nick H]

I really don't understand why speed should matter to anyone. Oh wait, perhaps I do: slow is good for me!

Actually, that doesn't mean that I can't appreciate the skills involved in fast, but I can never enjoy fast for the sake of fast, nor can I enjoy maths for the sake of maths. I have a CD with a varnam played in something absurd like 15 speeds. What's the point? To prove it can be done, and that artist involved can do it, I suppose. Fine. Go run faster than anyone else on a tread mill and get name in Guiness book of records and plaque on wall, but there is nothing there for anybody else to enjoy.

[ganesh_mourthy]

Those varnam is for appreciating only once. But, the instrumentalist would have practiced it 10000 times. Play a varnam slowly and increase the speed in a software and it does the same. well the artist did not get the point. But can't complain, he won a lot of money than anyone of these slow players. Sometimes gimmicks works, but may not work for all.

[VK RAMAN]

rsachi: Very illustrative graphical representation. If 25% Sahitya matters in 60+age, how do they enjoy melody, bhavam, etc because they are listening intently on sahitya and not enjoying the music; is that what we should surmise? In other words what part of this graph represents enjoyment of music?

[SrinathK]

Why not we have a survey of listening experience based on several parameters (like the ones in your chart) right here on the forum and see how some of us stack up?

[Nick H]

I think we did that. I think it might even have been one of Rsachi's poll projects?

[Rsachi]

Yes long back we did a survey

I am able to enjoy the sahitya as well as raga bhava as well as melody at the same time. In fact I can think of specific instances where the melody and raga essence helped in the enjoyment of sahitya. That is perhaps also the definition of a great composition, that maatu and dhaatu are synergistic!

The most recent instance was Sri Venugopala in that micless concert by candle candle light, sung by Ramakrishnan Murthy!

[vasanthakokilam]

Excellent chart Sachi. Good presentation of the data.

I agree the younger ones as a group would not care much about Bhava and Sahitya and the elderly ones on showmanship and speed. So your heights of those boxes will be similar to my impressions. I thought 'melody' may not follow the trend you are depicting, but you may be right (true the attraction for noisy melody less sounds is inversely proportional to age)

[shankar vaidyanathan]

Good data and graphs, Rsachi. The analytics may come out differently based on listening live vs. recording; viewing vs. listening; the team; number of times heard; etc. I am in my mid forties and my tolerance for good music very much depends on Shruthi first and Nadham (Sound) quality next. The calming nature of the music (including the vocal and laya sections) is important to me. I tend to have a bias towards artists who perform at a higher intellectual plane so Vidwat is key as well.

May be its time to rerun your survey poll?! We can ask "Who do you listen to more frequently?"

[Rsachi]

Shankar,
those who remember the earlier survey (you can track it down here) would know that rasikas.org members have a little bit more cultivated tastes, especially regarding Sruti, manodharma, etc. I wouldn't mix up this discussion with that one.
I think the mix may vary for a bit but the trend would be "generally" the way this graph shows it.

[SrinathK]

I have my own set of parameters today on which I evaluate my music experience :

1) Sound level & Sound balance * (which includes how well the tanpura sound can be heard and how loud the mridangam is).
2) Shruti & swarasthana Shuddam & Tone.
3) Tempo (A specific category would be high speed)
4) Energy level
5) Melody
6) Laya level (My scale starts at poor, the penultimate item is "brahmalayam", but the last one is "alien math" for when it goes overboard )
7) Bhava & Rasas
8) Sahitya
9) Non-verbal communication (a.k.a. body language) -- One example, just look at the way M S Subbulakshmi sings and expresses.
10) Overall aesthetic -- what we call showmanship can fall in here. Or is it just a show of technique?
11) Manodharma - Raga, Tanam, Svaras, Neraval
12) How well the compositions are rendered -- this is more of an issue that comes at the beginner level, but still, some musicians have reached a truly astonishing standard at this.
13) Tradition -- As an example, changing a well known raga today into something else isn't acceptable to me.
14) Innovation -- I have to apologize to some of you, but this is a creative field. I am not contradicting Point #13 by doing this.
15) Audience -- Nothing bothers me more than a bunch of loud gossip or the fact that some people make it a point to bang the doors while entering or leaving. Or leaving the ringer volume on max.
16) Organizers -- You will not get points if your toilets make me lose my appetite.

[Rsachi]

SrinathK
you're blessed with high rasikatva, if you will allow me to say so!

[VK RAMAN]

Perhaps some of the rasikas are writing sitting in their toilet to pass time!!! ha ha ha

[rajeshnat]

Rsachi
Just a different viewpoint. Attributes like speed ,energy and sahithyam indeed have a very clear meaning and it is self contained and has a sure boundary. When you put bhava you cannot objectively define a boundary. We had many threads defining bhava but for me as such it is a total experience.I recollect bhava has many meanings and each of us swear by that word . I am not sure how does Rsachi define bhava - it is the most hackneyed term ever in CM.

[munirao2001]

RSachi Sir,

After your chart diagram and its findings, I felt my posting continuing my observation on age above 40 is redundant.

Srinath.K. Sir,

On your (13) and (14) - Tradition and Innovation, I wish to inform you that - Tradition is body, works and state of excellence, misunderstood as 'convention', 'sampradaya' 'system & practice' with held values. Innovation, time tested, with recognized values, pleasure and excellence, seamlessly absorbed in tradition as a welcome addition. Innovation without the offer of pleasure and recall pleasure with higher values, other than temporal excitement and wonderment, will not last and be part of the tradition.
When the performer offers pure and pristine quality of music, it is of highest order, it is traditional. Manodharma skills and acquired standards enables innovation and is welcome. But innovation has to be anew and afresh in style and substance.

Your posting with 'apology' for innovation Vs tradition, prompted me to bring this to your attention.

munirao2001

[Nick H]

SrinathK, I think you should split the list: items 1 and 16 being for the organisers, item 15 being for the audience. The musicians are not responsible here.

Of course, under item 1, the musicians are responsible if they have no idea how to use a microphone.

It doesn't matter how good the music is if we cannot hear it or it deafens us, or if the balance is all wrong.

[munirao2001]

Rajeshnat Sir

Why 'bhava' is hackneyed term? Bhava is simply emotion. Emotion in relationship with either sahithya or sangeeta, in perception and in abstract form. In perception, with established image and identity. In abstraction, one's own perception and attainment. In general, bhava is used for the established.

munirao2001

[Nick H]

whatever the word, I don't think that anyone of any age enjoys music that they do not feel.

There may be exceptions where the experience is either a mental or physical workout. Certainly carnatic music attracts a very intellectual crowd, as do certain other kinds of classical and jazz, but they are not mental robots, young or old.

[Rsachi]

Rajesh,
I promise you I will not go to the toilet until I answer your query about bhava.