As a teenager, I really tried to avoid listening to Tchaikovsky. Understanding exactly why this was so requires some difficult self-reflection of the sort that I would be hesitant to undertake, but suffice it to say that as an adult I overcame this dislike and I’m now very fond of much of Pyotr Ilyich’s work. In his book chapter, “Symbolic listening: the resistance of enjoyment and the enjoyment of resistance”1, Jun Zubillaga-Pow explores how the psychoanalytic concept of resistance helps us to understand how we listen to music. Put simply, resistance is a kind of opposition to realisation and it is enacted in multiple different ways: we may become extremely emotive or we may become extremely cognitive, but it always has the effect of preventing an engagement with something which may facilitate a realisation of the unconscious. When we listen to music, we experience this resistance in the form of strong emotive responses, either towards or against the music, or in the form of cognitive-analytical behaviour. When I say that to understand why I disliked Tchaikovsky as a teenager would require difficult self-reflection, I mean that I would have to examine in the way in which the music formed meaning within me via my resistances, and this could facilitate uncomfortable self-realisations.
The same could be said of my journey with Abba, a similar journey from disliking to liking, or of the kinds of music which I still choose not to listen to, such as music of the Metal genre; many pieces by Rachmaninov; all pieces by Einaudi; or any performance of any kind by André Rieu (to name but four of many possible examples). It is easy, when we dislike a piece of music, to decry it in strongly emotive terms. It is harder, but still somewhat easy to musically educated people, to construct clever intellectual reasons to dismiss and devalue the disliked music. What is truly difficult is to carefully examine our subjective dislike of something and thus to understand what this music really means to us. Understanding the subjective meaning of a disliked piece of music involves a reflexive understanding; the thing we dislike in the music might well reflect on some equal part of ourselves.
To acknowledge that we dislike something is to acknowledge that something has meaning to us. If we then refuse to engage with this thing, then we refuse to realise that meaning. If we want to understand ourselves better, then we should listen to music that we dislike, we should carefully consider the undesirable feelings that the music stirs up and should wonder, “why this feeling from this music?” Of course, the really scary thing is that we might get the answer to that question.
At the very least, take this as a reason, if one is required, to be less judgemental of people who like music that dislike. After all, do we have the courage to undertake the reflective task of tracing the yet-unconscious roots of our resistance? Until we have truly understood our dislike, then we cannot truly know if some selfish motive lies beneath our reaction.
1Zubillaga-Pow, J. (2018). Symbolic listening: the resistance of enjoyment and the enjoyment of resistance. In S. Wilson (Ed.), Music—Psychoanalysis—Musicology (pp. 151-163). Routledge.
James Waide 