Essay: Is There Such a Thing as Good or Bad Music?

ESSAY

Is there such a thing as good and bad music?

Is deciding whether music is worthwhile or not just a matter of personal preference? Acclaimed music educator and MSO Creative Chair for Learning and Engagement Dr Anita Collins says it’s much more than that.

Illustration CARMINE BELLUCCI

Ihear people describe music in varying degrees of good and bad all the time: “That’s a great piece” or “That work just meanders around and doesn’t move me”. These are both derivations of good and bad, but is music itself good and bad or is it our interpretation, perception and judgement that puts it into either one of those two buckets?

I am a music educator and originally a teacher of teenagers; a group that tends to think in black and white. Music is a very easy target when it comes to their opinions. My job as their teacher is to help them understand that they can have a subjective response to music: so, “I love Lady Gaga’s Poker Face” but equally “I don’t like Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, but I can appreciate it as a piece of art.” As adults, we tend to do the same thing. There’s music we deem as “good” because it moves us emotionally or maybe takes us back to a powerful event or moment in our lives. We might consider other music as “bad” because we get agitated and distracted by it or have an overwhelming desire to turn it off.

Some might say that this just comes down to personal preference, but are some preferences more equal than others? Is music that is centuries old and has stood the test of time “good” and the latest Ed Sheeran album “bad” solely because it is new? The answer is that the determination of what’s good and bad is literally in the ears and brain of the beholder.

Let’s get away from the idea of good and bad for a moment and think about music as food for the brain. Research has shown that the more exposure to music – especially learning music – a child has, the more effectively their brain will learn, grow, change and age. This is because music has such a variety of sounds, structures and variations, and the greater the variation, the greater the challenge for the brain to process it. Throw in making music on an instrument and the brain is doing one hell of a workout.

I think of it in terms of diet. A good diet has a variety of food types, and a good “diet” for the developing brain has a variety of sounds and music. Where the complexity comes is in the kind of music “diet” the brain is ready to digest.

Think of a pop song: it is, generally, three minutes long, has four parts (singer, lead guitar, bass guitar and drums), has a predictable structure (verse, chorus, indulgent sax solo if it’s from the 1980s) and a catchy melody. In terms of food for the brain, it’s a hamburger: tasty, easy to digest, dependable and enjoyable. Now think of a Tchaikovsky symphony: it’s just under an hour long, with up to six different parts happening at once across 14 instrument groups and who knows how many subgroups. It has a structure but your brain has to work very hard to recall all the motifs and tone colours across four different movements. In terms of food, it’s a degustation: a feast for the tastebuds and a memorable culinary experience. In a good diet, we wouldn’t eat hamburgers every day. By the same token, we wouldn’t want a degustation every night. Our bodies and our brains need variety.

The human brain is incredible when it comes to digesting music information. More than any other cognitive activity known to date, music-processing requires and activates more parts of the brain simultaneously. Just like exercise, our brain thrives on learning new movements but once we have accomplished that movement, we need to go looking for the next challenge.

We can play a new song on repeat for weeks and then, one day, it just doesn’t do it for us anymore. That’s when our brain goes searching for the next auditory challenge. We like our hamburger pop songs and return to them when we need comfort, but we also need to find a new and challenging musical meal.

An English teacher in his 30s barrelled up to me one day in the playground and said, “I have just discovered Mozart, I can’t believe I didn’t know about his music before.” I was very happy for him, yet the reason he “discovered” Mozart was, I think, because his brain was ready for that musical challenge. It was searching for a new musical feast that would feed his brain and his soul at the level he was ready to conquer. So, music is not good or bad, it is exactly what it needs to be for the person that is experiencing it. ■

Dr Anita Collins is an award-winning educator, researcher and writer in the field of brain development and music learning. She is the founder of Bigger Better Brains, wrote one of the most-watched TED Education films and the author of two books, The Music Advantage and The Lullaby Effect. Anita is a music teacher and conductor at Canberra Grammar School, Creative Chair for Learning and Engagement at MSO and lead expert for the national collaborative initiative Music Education: Right from the Start.