By any other name

In this extract from his book, Vanderbilt asks whether we can like what we don’t know.

On a Saturday evening in 1950, the Danish Broadcasting Service played a series of unidentified songs it labelled “popular gramophone music”. On the following Saturday, the evening when listenership was typically at its peak, the service played a programme of music it called “classical”. As you might expect, the audience was larger – by a factor of two – for the first programme.

There is an interesting twist to the story, however. On both Saturdays, the same set of recordings was played. Only in the second week were the titles (with key, opus number and so on) mentioned. Danish listeners, unbeknownst to them, were being subjected to an experiment by Theodor Geiger, a sociologist at the University of Aarhus. The Danish Broadcasting Service had been concerned about the public’s seeming lack of regard for classical and “the more serious kind of modern music”. But Geiger wanted to know this: did people really not like classical music? Or did they just think they were not supposed to like it, because they lacked musical expertise or it was not “appropriate” for their social class?

Curiously, during the first week’s listening, the number of listeners actually increased during the programme. It was not as if people were being lured in by the “popular” tag and then, encountering music that Geiger described as “by no means too ear-pleasing”, abandoned the show. Listeners mostly stayed. Some people – presumably classical fans – even called in to crankily ask why the music was being called “popular”.

The question is, how often does our “taste” get in the way of what we might actually like? What if someone presented music without the trappings of socio-economic classification, the way the Argentine musician Miguel Ángel Estrella hauled his piano to “a village on the Andean plateau” and simply played, to his peasant audience, by trial and error? The villagers, it turned out, seemed to prefer Bach. And the name Bach by itself, it seems, can sway liking. In one study, people liked the same piece of music more when it was described as being by Bach versus a fictitious composer.

Tell people that Hitler liked a certain music? They will like it less than if you simply call it “romantic.”

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE: TASTE IN AN AGE OF ENDLESS CHOICE, by Tom Vanderbilt (Simon & Schuster, $37.99)