Some years ago, I was offered the opportunity to express the opinion that it is possible, and indeed in my view desirable, to gain pleasure even from the contemplation of «bad» art and «bad» music. [1] By «bad music» I meant at the time, as I do now, music which the competent listener easily recognizes to be unprofessionally made, by someone who does not thoroughly master the sonic material he is using, and is therefore unskilled and awkward in «putting together» the composition. In other words: when we as competent listeners know what a musician would like to do, but does not succeed in doing - then the result is, in this sense of the word, «bad music».
Such music can be, nonetheless, quite revealig from a sociological standpoint (no less than Marcel Proust once explained how important la mauvaise musique could be in the life of people).
I would like now to go a step further and explain why I feel that today, whether we like it or not, we often cannot help but to «misunderstand» the music we listen to - as good or bad as it might be. In fact, my impression is that of late a considerable number of people have indeed developed a talent for enjoying bad music. Even more intriguing, they have learned to give a «sense» of their own making to music, which, because of its origins, they could not possibly comprehend on its own terms.
No anthropological expertise is necessary for us to recognize the original significance of music coming to us, like a meteorite, from a totally unfamiliar cultural universe (be it the European Middle Ages or a tribal culture in Papua New Guinea), can hardly be accessible to most of us. I find it therefore fascinating that so many people today, while missing the original import of much of the music they listen to, nonetheless «misunderstand» it in quite a successful way: they gain gratification from it. If so many people can indeed enjoy the sounds of alien musics, that must be thanks to a new esprit capable of «producing meaning» for alien musical styles and genres, which even educated Westerners of a few decades ago did not possess. Not many Westerners of our parents' or grandparents' generation could have taken seriously, as music, the sound of an Australian didjeridu, an American Indian song, or the Inuit «throat games».

Let me recall how, many years ago, the newly born field of ethnomusicology took upon itself the task of convincing the Western world that all cultures produce music deserving to be heard. Now, at least in principle, the message has been received. Various kinds of music - Indian, African, and others - are accessible today through the massmedia, and this colorful rainbow of sounds is becoming more and more a part of our everyday experience. It is 'indeed a much more colorful musique d'ameublement than Eric Satie could ever have imagined. Of course, «ethnic music» is also easily available on CDs. Such records are bought by people of different extraction (albeit with the almost sole exclusion of conservatory teachers and classical musicians) and listened to with little or no understanding of the reasons that put those musics into existence. It is intriguing that such musics are nonetheless enjoyed in some way by casual listeners.
There is of course at least something to be said for the widely shared idea that music is «naturally accessible», that sound speaks for itself, and that one only needs to listen with an open mind. No less than Hugo Riemann, with his dissertation «Über das musikaliscbe Hören» of 1873, [2] was one of the first scholars to point out that music is naturally accessible only when certain cultural pre-conditions exist and that, otherwise, listening is no simple and straightforward activity. Although he was only considering the Western art-music of his time, it takes little effort to realize that any attempt at «listening» to sound objects that do not belong to our tradition can only be more problematic. For example: how can we really tell a good performance of classical Indian music from a bad one? How do we know what the musician set out to do? Do we realize under what constraints his creativity is working? Have we heard enough of that music to be able to make comparisons, and understand - for instance - whether the performer is having a bad day? If such pre-conditions are not met, how can we appreciate the music in such a way that the performer would recognize an adequate response to his work?

It is intriguing to consider how, in our multicultural world, musical pieces, styles, and genres of geographically or historically diverse origin become part of the same «global soundtrack» available everywhere. Of course, this is too big a topic for me to deal with satisfactorily in this essay. But I can, perhaps, at least touch upon the especially notable «gray area», where I feel good music loses much of its original import and lives side by side with bad music, which, bad as it is, seems nonetheless to become a carrier of some kind of sense. It is an area where the most diverse products meet, selected by a process in which serendipity seems to play quite an important role, indicative perhaps of how points of reference can easily be lost in a condition of musical over-stimulation and overexposure.
One such case is, for instance, the «Andante» from Mozart's Piano Concerto K- 467. Its melody is universally popular, thanks to its role in the sound track of a world famous film of some thirty years ago. And the melody is now remembered by the broad public through the film character it was meant to identify-like a leitmotifi Elvira Madigan . [6] A second instance might be the «Aria» from Bach's Third Suite, already popularized by the violin transcription of August Wilhelmj, which, because of its sad thoughtfulness, has now become devotional music for funeral ceremonies the world over. [7] Absorbed as they are in our contemporary life experience, such «musical asteroids» coming from the musical past, are insufficient to give a picture of what the planet they once were part of looked like. In other words: their ties with their tradition of origin have been severed, and, as they are now used, they no longer convey the values that made distinctive their tradition or provenance. On the contrary, such fragments of pur musical past are absorbed into a present which erases their original meaning while failing to give them a substitute «sense» comparable in depth and «thickness» to the one they lost.
t is also increasingly frequent that musical artifacts by «second rate» authors (... absit iniuria verbis) are absorbed into the mainstream of background music or «easy listening» that we come across in our everyday life. The music of such minor composers is also taken out of its original context and absorbed into a «collective memory» that ignores authorship and either makes the music «anonymous», or attributes it, unwarrantedly) to composers whose names are, for a number of reasons, more evocative or easier to remember. I find significant in this connection the «Concierto de Aranjuez», just because it is essentially insignificant for the history of twentieth-century music, and the name of its author, Joaquin Rodrigo - the Spanish composer who recently passed away (on 6 July 1999), is almost solely remembered for this one tide of his. From the «Concierto de Aranjuez» comes the fortunate «Adagio», which entered the repertoire, not so much of the concert hall, but rather of that pervasive soundtrack of our life which includes records, radio stations, wall-paper musics in supermarkets, airports, and other public buildings. This is perhaps sufficient to highlight how much of the music disseminated across the planet is not selected by the quality and originality the author was capable of, but rather in the coincidence of fortuitous factors (in this case Spanish exoticism, archaic, «quasi-Baroque» ornamentations of the melody, and so on.).

One could go on and on, but overemphasizing the issue might be counterproductive and only stimulate more efforts at philological restorations and reconstructions. The essential point is, rather, elsewhere. No musical work of the past ever arrived into our hands in its pristine form and shape. On the contrary, it carries layers of physical and psychological sediments collected in the course of time. Each epoch leaves its own mark. Each epoch, in turn, guards and preserves those marks, which, in its judgement, are part of the work's «essence». Ultimately what we inherit from the past is a constellation of footprints in which earlier ones are seldom distinguishable from those made later. What we perceive as the «unity» of the work of art is an interpretation of metamorphoses that erase any trace of borderline between a hypothetical original authenticity and the history of its occurring in time. What we call the «Musical Work» is that history. Already in 1906 Gaston Rageot observed, although few took notice at the time, that it is more significant to study «what happens» to a work of art in the course of history than to study the work of art in «itself «, or how it came into existence. [12] In sum, there is more than enough evidence to bring to dust the totem of faithfidness to «the Original» because... there is ultimately no Original to be faithful to. On the contrary, one may do justice to music by «letting it happen» once again, as the historical conditions of the time allowand not by reconstructing its hypothetical past identity. In other words: one does justice to a musical work by «Misunderstanding» it, by discovering with our intelligence and creativity what kind of sense it can still have in our time - if it can at all.
Indeed in the world of art paradoxes occur. Among others, this one: a creative misunderstanding of music is the basis for our personal growth. Music is 'indeed a listener's art. And not only as Harold Bloom once suggested, that each work of art results from the misunderstanding of previous art-works. But even our appreciation of the art of times past can only be a misunderstanding of it, [13] and that misunderstanding may 'in it-Self be a «Work of Art».