seismic changes

Is it a sign of maturity (read: old age) that I'm starting to appreciate music by composers I used to loathe? First, I succumbed to Bach - I think the definitive capitulation took place last December, with the cello suites already mentioned in an earlier entry from November. And now, I'm listening to Mozart (Sonatas for Piano and Violin, Mitsuko Uchida and Mark Steinberg - thanks to B for the CD, which is one of those gifts that ages much like wine), and enjoying it tremendously. Not only that, I've also picked up Bach's Preludes & Fugues and started sight-reading through them on the piano - the thought of which would have induced nothing but horror in the 16-year old me from years ago.

This signifies. It does, really. Friends have already remarked on how 7 years in the old workplace have changed me somewhat (with different people having different opinions on the degree of that change). And I think that the shift in musical taste away from the Russian Romantics (Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky) says something. So now there's a ground-bass that's made up of music by Beethoven and Brahms - somehow, I cannot imagine ever growing out of their music; and these rather alarming descant voices comprising Bach and Mozart...

Imagine the movement of tectonic plates - buoyed up by molten crust, sliding, grinding, crashing into each other, all these seismic movements that have made the earth the way it is, that continue to remake the earth every day. Slow and inexorable - things are moving, moving, changing all the time. These shifts in musical taste feel somewhat like that.

I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear my trousers rolled - good grief, whatever next? Gregorian chants? Beijing opera???
...
...