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The NCMF winter concert on Sunday, December 22nd at 3:00 at St. Paul’s is a Baroque greatest hits concert, a kind of “easy” musical comfort food. Last summer, we did a string quartet by György Kurtág which I would describe as “difficult” yet feedback was unanimously positive, many in the audience crying at the end. Is there an implied value judgment in “easy” vs. “difficult” music?

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In high school, I gobbled up the writings of New Yorker food writer Calvin Trillin. He identified as a gourmand, making the distinction between that and a gourmet. Gourmands love good food, but it doesn’t have to be fancy: the best hot dog in America? Gray’s Papaya in New York on 72^nd and B’way (obviously). The most delicious Phở in Philadelphia? Phở 75 on 11^th and Washington (visit Philly and I’ll show you). The best lobster roll in Newburyport? Ha, nice try (I don’t get involved with local politics).

The gourmand/gourmet division is not unlike the distinction between easy/difficult or what is called lowbrow vs. highbrow culture. Literary critic Alan Jacobs dives in on his thought-provoking blog “Homebound Symphony.”

1. A work of art can largely confirm the expectations of those who encounter it, largely thwart those expectations, or touch any point between those extremes.

2. These expectations can be of many kinds, but the most commonly invoked expectation involves difficulty: How hard-to-track, hard-to-comprehend do we expect and want a book to be?

3. The reader who demands that all of his or her expectations be met is often called a lowbrow reader; the writer whose work habitually meets such readers’ expectations is often called a lowbrow writer.

4. The reader who craves surprise, excess, extremity, who is impatient with work that confirms typical expectations, is often called a highbrow reader; the writer whose work consistently violates norms and transgresses standards is often called a highbrow writer.

Music, of all the arts, is the only one that exists purely in the fourth dimension: time. A piece incomprehensible at first may yield to the listener upon second or third hearing – you just need to live with some of this stuff. While each time you listen to a piece of music is an opportunity to hear new things you didn’t catch earlier, my favorite part is actually the opposite: it is the anticipation of knowing what’s coming that might be classical music’s most sublime pleasure. The reward for patience is being taken to new emotional depths; George Crumb’s “Black Angels” goes places Beethoven never ventured.

This also works on a broad cultural level; art is full of examples of works that caused controversary only to eventually become standard repertoire. Heck, this is probably more rule than exception.

Sometimes, for a thorny piece of music, you can slip through a kind of cultural back door if the right entry point is presented. An analogy or a personal anecdote can make a world of difference, helping the audience to calibrate their ears before listening and allowing them a path into a new piece they may otherwise have missed.

So too, physical context is important. We sit down in a concert hall with expectations based on experience. Those expectations will be different at a dance club, or listening to live salsa while eating roast pork at a lechonera in the mountains of Puerto Rico.

Furthermore, most people listen to music that includes a mix of so-called "highbrow" and "lowbrow" genres: there isn’t any contradiction in loving Bach and the Beatles.

To complicate matters further, even within each musical genre there is highbrow and lowbrow: Louis Armstrong doing “Sunny Side of the Street” is as much jazz as Miles doing “So What” on his ground-breaking album,  “Kind of Blue.”

And just to really mess with your head, some composers themselves write a mix of "high: and "low" pieces. Aaron Copland, composer of the much-loved “Appalachian Spring" (about as mainstream classical as it gets) is the same fellow who based his 1950 Piano Quartet on the 12-tone serial system invented by Arnold Schoenberg.

Duke Ellington said: “if it sounds good, it is good.” I apply this to highbrow, lowbrow, and everything in between. Bartók’s music isn’t better than Stevie Wonder, it just (usually) affects different parts of the body. For the record, I’m sure that Bartók, an ethnomusicologist as well as composer, would agree.

See you in December!

David Yang, Artistic Director