The Easiest Job in the World
Last week a poster to these pages claimed that I have the easiest job in the world. At the time I read the comment, I was on three fairly massive deadlines; I was simultaneous too overwhelmed to respond and tempted to drop everything in order to set the record straight, so to speak. I ultimately chose the former path. But reflecting on it over a longer period of time has allowed me to formulate what I hope is a constructive—albeit soberer—response, and to pose additional questions folks will hopefully want to respond to in kind.
While I can’t possibly agree that I have the easiest job, I do think I have the best job since what I do here enables me to be exposed to such a wide variety of music. It is a constant source of stimulation and growth, both as a listener and as a creator. When I first arrived at the American Music Center nine years ago, there was a lot of music that I was not particularly excited about. But repeated exposure to that music, plus the opportunity to meet the people who had made it and to learn more about it directly from those people, has made me expand my aesthetic horizons considerably. I hope those horizons never stop growing, although they have now almost completely filled up every possible inch of wall space in my apartment!
Admittedly, I’m being rather vague about music I previously was not excited about, but the specific music in question is not really the point. The point is whether or not it is easy to be open. I’m not sure it is and I find myself working at it all the time. Do you think it is easier to like a piece of music (any piece of music) or to dislike it? Is it easier to like something that sounds similar to other things that you like or to like something that seems to have no relationship to anything else you’ve ever heard?
New music is an unqualifiable entity, or at least it should be, as far as genre distinctions go. Potter Stewart, a one-time Associate Justice to the United States Supreme Court, once famously declared that while he was unable to define pornography, he knew it when he saw it. While his comment accompanied a majority opinion in a 1964 ruling which overturned the state of Ohio’s attempt to ban a screening of the 1958 French movie Les Amants, I have heard his sentiment evoked in a variety of contexts over the years. I still remember hearing a radio programmer at a conference of the American Music Personnel in Public Radio almost smugly declare, “I can’t tell you what classical music is, but I know it when I hear it.” The minute I know what new music is when I hear it is the minute I’ll stop listening to it.