Has education expanded your listening tastes?

Frogman nailed it--articulated it with excellence. In my youth, I started down the road of music appreciation and found it unsatifying. I was afraid I'd get lost in the intellectual, cognitive element from what really moves me. Further I have a suspicion that acadamia, the Avante Guarde, the intelligencia are more concerned with perpetuating themselves than with enlightenment with of couse some exceptions. Add to that my somewhat rebellious nature; add to that, I'd rather be snowshoeing right now or gardening in the summer. That's my personality at play.

I do think that education in music is more cultural and social and less personal, and this cultural-social element does not take away from its importance. I'd just rather go out and snowshoe than advance my appreciation of music.

Happy listening.

If you love Classical music as much as I do, over 40 years of listening you pick up the elements and forms of music by yourself, not to mention reading 5k liner notes .
A love of Sibelius leads you to the current treasures pouring out of Finland etc etc.
The greatest advantage of auto-didactism is you own the knowledge you have, the obvious drawback is it takes more time.
All in all, for all but the most intellectually curious, NO put-down intended, the path laid done by Frogman is the most reasonable.
As in all things human , in the end love does conquer all.

Frogman, my next-door neighbor in Berlin was a stay at home Mom, who was also a gifted clarnetist and grad of the Berlin Hochschule of Music .
She subbed in about every ensemble in Berlin, including the Philharmonic. Through her I ocassionaly got to listen in on social conversations between top musicians. I once heard a 1st Chair in the greatest band in the world say he liked to play classical music but not listen to it. His hero seemed to be Muddy Waters !

Well stated analysis of the differences in personal approaches to listening and learning Frogman! Music for me is an amateurs passion, visual art is where I make my living. Frogman's comments regarding people's different degrees of receptiveness to education as enhancement to the musical arts also holds true for visual art. Some viewers want the whole background on a work of art, others think a visual work of art that can't stand on its own without explanation is work without merit. A problem (or maybe not, depending on your perspective) with the later emotion only based relationship with art is that it leaves today's art viewer and too a lesser degree, a listener, without any grounding in why art looks the way it does today or why art music sounds the way it does. Understanding how the arts got to the place they are today requires a lot of background learning, it's not an intuitive process. This leaves an awful lot of people on the outside looking in when it comes to art & music appreciation. As someone working within an academic environment, I find many contemporary artists and musicians want to pull off a near impossible balancing act. On one hand, they profess to want to broaden the appeal of contemporary art and music to a greater, non-specialist audience. But even though post-modern philosophy rejects the idea of the independent originator, they still secretly cling to the lure of the artist as an avante garde originator. An impossible to reconcile conundrum. Ananda Coomaraswmy, the philosopher and one time curator of Asian Art at the Boston Museum of Art once opined that in some sense, it's all been downhill for the arts since the Gothic times. That was the last time Western society shared a common musical and visual arts language throughout the entire spectrum of society. Everyone meet in the cathedral and understood the language of the service, the symbolism of the stained glass windows, etc. Once the arts became a status symbol of conspicuous consumption by the wealthy during the Renaissance, the division of social classes and associated consumptions of different art forms started to accelerate and that hasn't abated five hundred plus years later.

There is a "used to be " well-known tome titled " The Thriteenth Greatest of Centuries " by one James J. Walsh , that lays out the Gothic claim out in a masterful manner.