Status Updates From What to Listen for in Music

today’s music appears to avoid sentiment and feeling, that it is merely cerebral and clever rather than emotionally meaningful.

Never allow a composer to justify his piece to you because of the story content. It is not sufficient to close a piece slowly because the heroine meets an untimely end. That slow end must also be justified by the musical content

and that no amount of reading could possibly replace that listening.

there is every likelihood that when you return to it again, there will be something different for you to listen to. You can always hear it from a different angle.

Always remember that in listening to a piece of music you must hang on to the melodic line. It may disappear momentarily, withdrawn by the composer, in order to make its presence more powerfully felt when it reappears.