A new study by three researchers at Cambridge University have taken a comprehensive look at people’s relationship with music through different life stages to show that our musical preferences change over time — and discovering classical music late in life is perfectly normal.
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Musicians, presenters and patrons often wring their hands over how old the classical music audience appears to be. If Cambridge University academic researchers Arielle Bonneville-Roussy, Peter J. Renfrow and Man K. Xu (plus Jeff Potter from something called Atof Inc.) are right, classical music may be something most people grow into rather than find naturally attractive in adolescence or early adulthood.
Their research has been published online in the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Personality and Social Psychology as “Music Through the Ages: Trends in Musical Engagement and Preferences From Adolescence Through Middle Adulthood.” And, to be clear, it’s not about classical music, but about all sorts of genres. But the implications related to classical music are very clear.
Because this study is so rigorous, and so pertinent to discussions about where the future of classical music is going, I’ll try to lay out some essential points and keep editorializing to a minimum.
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The academics set up their own study by first reviewing all the existing scholarship on people’s relationship to music — the basis of which goes back to the end of World War II and the explosion of the use of scientific method in analyzing people’s behaviours.
Erik Homburger Erikson, the transplanted German psychologist who gave the world the term “identity crisis,” wrote Childhood and Society in 1950 — a book filled with insights still relevant 63 years later. As Bonneville-Roussy & Co. write:
For example, Erikson’s life span model of development argues that individuals are faced with the challenge of balancing the demands of certain psychosocial conflicts as they progress through different life stages. The challenge during adolescence is to develop a coherent identity and autonomy; from late adolescence through early adulthood, the challenge is to develop intimate bonds of love and friendship; and through middle adulthood the two major life challenges are to maintain intimate relationships and to pursue a profession. Given that individuals use music for self-expression, arousal regulation, and social bonding (tasks that are more or less salient at different life stages), it is conceivable that musical preferences change in concert with the social roles and life stages encountered throughout life.
Because the researchers took this to be true, they designed a very complex, multi-dimensional study that would link the progress of time to the evolution of different personality types as well as with musical tastes. As they succinctly write: “The theoretical framework guiding our investigation was informed by interactionist theories positing that individuals seek out environments that meet their needs.”
Or, as I wrote in a Toronto Star feature in 2007, people self-medicate with music (you can read it here).
To help set their parameters, the researchers set up an initial study that analyzed the responses from 13,089 people, recruited live and online in 2009 in the United States and United Kingdom for a questionnaire built around the recording roster of EMI, a large label that can claim artists from all genres.
The study participants were evenly split between males and females, representing ages 13 to 65 as well as different ethnic backgrounds.
The study’s writers are also very careful to point out that, after all is said and done, when we look at differences from one age group to another, it is often hard to tell whether this is because of different stages of psychological development, or the good, old-fashioned generation gap, where the next age group wants to do things their own way.
Here are some of the fascinating findings (all achieved using rigorous statistical analysis):
- “Post hoc comparisons between groups revealed that the expected percentage of participants who were passionate about music decreased from 41% at age 13 to 15% at 65, whereas the proportion of participants who thought that music was as important as other hobbies remained fairly stable, from 38% at age 13 to 35% at 65.”
- “Our analyses of music-listening contexts indicated that adolescents listened to music in a wide variety of public and private settings, whereas adults listened to music primarily in private. It is worth noting that although music’s prominence declined after adolescence, in an absolute sense, music continued to play an important role throughout adulthood.”
The second study followed the music-genre preferences of 254,825 people (again featuring a cross-section of age, sex, education and socioeconomic as well as ethnic backgrounds) over eight years, using a web-based questionnaire.
The data from this questionnaire was used to correlate personality characteristics (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness) with types of music (mellow, unpretentious, sophisticated and intense) (and, as tempting as it might be, this is not the place to discuss the specifics of what these categories represent. Classical, for all its diversity, is lumped into the “sophisticated” category).
Conclusions?
- “The current findings suggest that adults may not have as much psychologically invested in music as young people, and instead listen to music for purposes of relaxation and entertainment. In this way, adults may rely on music less as a means for identity development and more for purposes of emotion regulation or stimulation.”
Good news for fans of new music comes from measures of people’s psychological openness — a conclusion that caught me completely by surprise: “There is also evidence that Openness increases as people age, suggesting that people become more imaginative and aesthetic … which appears to be reflected in greater preferences for reflective, imaginative, and unconventional music.”
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For more details on the article, you can start with an information link at the American Psychological Association here and read a summary of the article’s findings here.
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In the end, the authors point out how research in the area of how we relate to music is still in early stages, and how any study needs to take in a lot of different variables across several disciplines.
The key, as I see it, is having some sort of confirmation that there are some monsters in the art music closet that need to be exorcised. I propose three exorcisms to be lumped under the “Keep Calm and Carry On” poster:
- There is no need to engage in fear-mongering that not exposing a child to any classical music will preclude the possibilities of discovery and enjoyment later in life.
- A grey haired audience is not the same thing as a death-knell for an artform.
- The audience for William Lawes, Igor Stravinsky and Philip Glass may actually be three completely different audiences and need to be addressed in different ways.
John Terauds
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
