The Fredösphere

The main topic was about mapping musicians' musical tastes to their politics, but what caught my eye was Kyle Gann's great tip for composers:  listening to crap.

I find nothing more inspiring than sitting in a concert and listening to bad music. As a critic-composer, I've started some of my best pieces while listening to music that bored or disgusted me. Often when it looked like I was taking copious notes, I was actually drawing staves in my little notebook and sketching out chords and melodies in a burst of anti-cliché inspiration. The opportunity to hear lousy music live is greatly underrated.

Allow me to develop this idea a bit.  This suggests to me a pair of continua which together form a matrix of four categories of music, the relative merit of which we can debate.  (Of course, you say, a super-geek like the Fredösphere, lover of charts and inventor of nested counterpoint would think of a matrix, wouldn't he.)  Here's the Music Enjoyment vs. Respect matrix:

	Hate	Love
Respect	Force yourself to consume regular doses.  Struggle to understand why someone would work so hard to craft something so unlovely.	Ah, the good stuff!  Educational and inspirational.  Just don't spend all your time here.
Contemn	Draw inspiration here by negative example.  Be reminded why the good is good.	Here be dragons!  Stay away!

For composers, the love-but-don't-respect category is the deadly one.  This is the stuff that lowers your standards, induces complacency, encourages mindless imitation, and generally rots your brain.