I've been struggling with this question of whether musical judgments can have objective weight, such that one person's opinion on a performance may be privileged over another's. Just a riddle by which I while away the otiose hours. The problem is thorny and multifaceted, and to be honest I find myself stumped, more confounded than when I began. When I try to consider the question dispassionately I am drawn to conclusions that are plainly contradicted by experience and common sense. In fact, either position -- that what you like in music is unimpeachable, your choice, your early childhood, your wiring; or that what you think sounds good betrays your horrible breeding and taste -- has implications that I find unacceptable.

Analogy, an indispensable brush-clearing tool, is not much help. In its particular balance of functionality and uselessness, predictability and surprise, beauty and distress, naturalness and artificiality, music is, in my view, a unique category. And there's this tree-falling problem, too, because you can be certain that somewhere in the world right now, someone is playing some killer music in a subway station (as Joshua Redman did in the famous Washington Post experiment) or a cabin in the woods, for the appreciation of exactly no one. If it's possible to have music that is good and heard by no one, it is hard for me to understand how the opinions of one person or one million people would affect the matter once the music is heaved into public earshot.

Are the qualities that make good music good measurable? Yes, there are objectively measurable ingredients that are essential to what most of us hear as pleasing music. A summary of recent findings and engaging discussion on this topic are presented in Daniel Levitin's music-and-neuroscience book, This Is Your Brain on Music. Integer multiple frequencies produce synchronous neural firings in our heads. The pleasure we get from perfect fourths and fifths, from the repetition and development of an elegant cadence or rhythmic pattern, from the vibrations and overtone properties of natural materials like metal and wood, are animal pleasures, globally shared. The most elemental components of music that strike humans as intelligible and attractive, such as harmony and timbre and contour, and the way we structure these elements (meter, tempo, key), are constant across styles and eras and individuals and cultures. What makes a good melody or a good song is what made it so 4000 years ago -- it's not subject to daily re-invention.

Anyone wanting to make it, to approach it, finds that music is more like a river to navigate than a room to design. Experiments in disorder and randomness, singers who prosper singing flat or sharp, drummers with weak time-feel who fit well into particular contexts: these are the exceptions that prove the rule. (I don't think music that aims to create tortuous displeasure is a category worth talking about.) Isn't it universally valid and universally negative to describe someone's playing as out-of-tune or out-of-time (as long as the out-of-it-ness is relative to accompanying tones or beats that function as relative benchmarks)? Broad-brush, generic criticisms like these are science-based and perfectly descriptive, and tellingly, they're used by musicians and general listeners alike. The player at whom such a remark is accurately pointed doesn't have a defense that refers to his emotions or his upbringing. He can't discuss the guitar tuning he invented where five of his strings are tuned to 440 pitches and one is tuned to 447. That tuning isn't a live option. He's just out of tune.

So I don't see that, up to a certain threshold of complexity and stylistic specificity, music divides into six billion what-you-likes and what-I-likes. We all like and respond to the same key vibrational properties, as we respond to symmetry and proportion in visual objects or sweetness and and "umami" in food. That threshold, though, is low, and beyond it lie the ever-varying intangibles that would frustrate any attempts at normative pronouncements, at a musical TOE: genetics, breeding, culture, subculture, self-image and status, appetite for adventure. With so much variety in the contexts of music appreciation, it looks as though widely accepted ideas of harmony, contour, et al are necessary to "good" music but starkly insufficient to define it altogether.

When you travel around performing you meet a fair number of people that have their heads deep in their musical TOEs (sorry -- theories of everything). The fellow that thrusts upon you a disc comprising his selections of the year's best songs, the old-timer who maintains that every recording released since 19xx (conveniently, the year in which he turned 30) is horseshit, the guy who puzzledly (or accusingly) inquires into your motivation for recording music of which he clearly disapproves: what, besides sheer rudeness, precipitates these unsolicited bursts? The idea that there's such a beast as good taste, and they have it caged and tamed, that's what. One comes away from the first two dozen or so encounters with these cocksure evangelists cured of belief in any musical gods.

But consider another and more common encounter, one with, say, your neighbor, whose bedazzlement with Billy Joel or Glenn Miller or the Pixies or some other tiresomely obvious figure inspires him to sincere flights of exhortation. I mean to stress the obviousness over any negative quality, because I don't really object to any of these people, even Billy Joel. I had a first appointment a few years back with a dentist who, after he found I was a musician, said: "Ah, I happen to love music, but a kind that your average person doesn't know anything about. I'll bet you've never heard of...alternative country?" I admitted that I had, but he was in too much of a hurry to tell me all about a woefully underrated artist called Steve Earle to notice my jaw clenching and my eyes glazing. 

This is a case not of one cup of tea versus another -- Steve and I are the same cup, broadly speaking. The person who wants to gush at you all about this wacky color called purple betrays not so much bad taste as short sight. Though I find their one-sided conversations excruciatingly dull, I don't think these people should be ridiculed or blamed for not knowing more about music beyond large objects in plain sight. Look how little I know about dentistry: the chair, the drill, and the sadness. Music is not important enough to most people that they would spend hours digging for hidden gems, cross-referencing reviews from demographically disparate magazines (as a hypersmart and hyperdedicated scientist and music fan of my acquaintance does), and seeking out record collectors and musicians to gain insider tips so that he can achieve a better-rounded view of the musical landscape. That's work that never ends. And isn't the typical occupational descriptor -- lawyer, engineer, pilot, doctor, schoolteacher, dentist -- a one-word shorthand for "I prefer to work hard for ten years then coast"?

Where I would definitely like to end my argument, you see, is at the conclusion that music is something that can be learned about, and though what sounds good is a matter of opinion, the opinions of people who have learned more about how music is made and who have a wider grasp of context should weigh more. I don't think this is a merely self-serving attitude. It has been formed in part by respecting people who know more about a musical genre than I do. I don't trumpet, so to speak, my indifference to Louis Armstrong's music, because I take it to be a personal blind spot, given how widely he is revered among people who know more about early jazz than I. I would also like to conclude that the dead know more than the living, that the opinions of masterful musicians are flawless, among many other things that I can't conclude at all. Hard to argue on behalf of any musical norms whatsoever, really; and yet the persistence of these terms, from "in-the-pocket" and "in-tune" to "pretty" and "terrible," suggests we're not strictly speaking for ourselves.