I discovered many years ago that music to me is simply music, if it is anything at all, and that I cannot enjoy it in terms of anything else. Often I do not understand it; I hear great music which means nothing to me from beginning to end; but that is the penalty of ignorance...
The first piece of music I enjoyed very intensely was Beethoven's Violin Concerto, played at the Crystal Palace more than thirty years ago. Before then, I had thought of "classical music" as made for musicians and people who pretended to like it. I went to that concert out of politeness to a guest. Some other pieces were played which were just what I had expected them to be; and then suddenly, the second subject of the first movement of the concerto. It was a tune, and I had never heard one that seemed to me so beautiful. Through the whole movement I listened for the tune to return and it returned often.
After that I went to concerts where Beethoven was played, in the hope of hearing other tunes as beautiful. Sometimes I heard them and sometimes not; often I was bored and disappointed. Why, when Beethoven got hold of a beautiful tune, did he not make more of it? But still I went and listened... And gradually I discovered for myself that in music the tune is not everything, that between those parts which seemed to me tune, there were other parts to be enjoyed. I heard the concerto several times and enjoyed more of it each time, heard Richter conduct several symphonies by Beethoven more than once, and began to enjoy a movement as a movement and not merely to watch for tunes.
From that time my enjoyment grew more secure. I no longer fretted for the bits I could recognise, but let the music flow by, sure that its effect would be cumulative, expecting delightfully that at each concert I should make friends with some movement as a whole. :-)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fh0eMXNSPKo
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