"My Music"

One time I started listing what Leonard Bernstein meant by "hardening of the categories": rock, classical, pop, country-western, jazz…. A long list, maybe an artifact of recording-era catalogs. 

Some of our patrons come for only one concert each summer, the one in their category.

One determinant of your category is when you grew up. We can predict the age of the audience at Gretna Theater's "retrospectives: music of the '40's, '50's," etc. (disregard the roaring '20's background at intermissions), and maybe those attending our August 30 Tierney Sutton sings Joni Mitchell (music of the '70's, '80's; category: "pop/rock/jazz"). That's because, according to psychologist Dan Levitin, 

Fourteen is a sort of magic age for the development of musical tastes. You’re in the ninth grade, confronting the tyrannies of sex and adulthood, struggling to figure out what kind of adult you’d like to be, and you turn to the cultural products most important in your day as sources of cool — the capital of young life. Musical tastes become a badge of identity in social contexts framed by pop culture.

I don't know the science of that assertion but it held true for me. As a child I raced through categories. Home sick from first grade I called in a request to local AM radio for a gospel song, Up Above My Head. Next I marched to the Cities Service Band of America every Monday night after we finally got FM. I liked broadcasts of Marian McPartland and the Oklahoma City Symphony and the Boston Pops and Leroy Anderson. I wish my parents had listened to the Met Opera on Saturday afternoons.

At about age thirteen, after hearing my father play them since I learned to walk, I invaded his collection of "78's." Schubert, Beethoven, Stravinsky, Sibelius were his badges of identity, and thus became mine. An identity like his was my goal.

Millennials speak of "my music." If it fits into a category ("genre" on iTunes), they may not know which, but they can easily find the most popular songs, the sources of cool. Many avoid the classical genre ("your music," they say), as some parents, schools, and even churches have. What will they will listen to when they mature?

Like arteries, categories start hardening early in life. I try to keep mine open. 

"Music, Mr. Gershwin," said Alban Berg, "is music."