“It is just a matter of taste.”
People often say this when a musical argument becomes uncomfortable.
Sometimes it is exactly right.
You prefer brighter voices. I prefer darker ones.
You enjoy long improvisations. I lose interest.
No tribunal is required.
But now change the sentence:
“This is a badly performed concerto.”
That is not merely a report about what the listener enjoyed.
It is a claim that asks other people to consider reasons.
This is where taste becomes criticism.
This article is the third pillar beneath How Music Works | Music Criticism. Description asks what happened. Evidence asks what supports the claim. This leg asks what happens when the listener cannot be removed from the system.
Quick Read
Musical taste is subjective in the sense that it involves individual response, history, familiarity and preference. But criticism is not arbitrary because judgments can still be better or worse informed, more or less coherent, more or less appropriate to the musical practice and more or less supported by evidence. A mature critic does not erase personal taste; they disclose it, refine it, test it against alternatives and learn to distinguish “not for me” from “poorly done.”
response → preference → reflection → comparison → criteria → judgment → revision
Taste Begins as Response
Music reaches a body before it reaches a review.
A bass line feels satisfying.
A soprano’s vibrato irritates.
A distorted guitar feels exhilarating.
A minimalist repetition calms one listener and frustrates another.
These reactions are real.
They are not yet universal laws.
Hume’s Problem Still Lives in Every Review
David Hume’s aesthetics remains useful because it refuses an easy choice between “taste is entirely private” and “experts possess mathematical proof of beauty.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s account of Hume notes that taste begins in sentiment but can be refined through practice, comparison and more general points of view.
That sounds surprisingly modern.
A critic still feels first.
Then the critic asks whether that feeling survives better listening.
Aesthetic Judgment Sits in an Awkward Middle
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes judgments of taste as occupying a strange middle position. They arise from subjective response, yet people often make them as if others ought to recognise some force in the judgment.
When someone says, “I like this song,” disagreement is easy.
When someone says, “This is a great song,” they usually expect reasons to matter.
Criticism lives in the distance between “I felt this” and “there are reasons you should take this judgment seriously.”
Preference Is Not Quality
A listener can dislike opera and still recognise an excellent operatic performance.
A critic can love a band and still hear a weak album.
A student can dislike a piece assigned in class while accurately analysing its compositional craft.
The distinction is not perfect, but it is trainable.
Ask two questions:
- Do I enjoy this?
- How successfully does it perform the musical job it appears to be doing?
“Not for Me” Is a Mature Critical Sentence
Critics sometimes fear that admitting personal mismatch weakens authority.
Often it strengthens it.
“I find the vocal timbre unpleasant, but its compressed, nasal edge is clearly controlled and fits the production’s confrontational aesthetic” is more useful than pretending dislike proves incompetence.
Taste Is Learned
The music that feels immediately “normal” usually arrived through previous exposure.
Listeners learn:
- what counts as a stable beat;
- how long a phrase usually lasts;
- which timbres signal prestige or roughness;
- how much repetition feels ordinary;
- what kind of vocal production sounds skilled;
- when harmony feels resolved.
Culture becomes expectation.
Expectation becomes taste.
Familiarity Can Produce Fluency
When a musical language is familiar, the listener predicts its grammar more easily.
That fluency can feel like naturalness.
An unfamiliar tuning system, rhythmic cycle or vocal technique may initially feel “wrong” not because it fails, but because the listener’s predictive model was trained elsewhere.
Good criticism notices this possibility before condemning difference.
But Familiarity Can Also Hide Weakness
The reverse problem exists.
A familiar progression may feel comforting enough that a critic overlooks lazy execution.
A beloved performer may receive charitable interpretation unavailable to a newcomer.
Familiarity can increase understanding and increase bias at the same time.
Expertise Changes Taste by Increasing Resolution
An expert does not necessarily feel less.
The expert often hears more distinctions inside the feeling.
A novice hears “fast drumming.”
A drummer hears subdivision, ghost notes, placement and control.
A novice hears “out of tune.”
A specialist may hear a tuning practice appropriate to the tradition.
Expertise changes the available idea-space of the listener.
Expertise Does Not Make Preference Disappear
Two highly trained critics can disagree.
They may value different criteria:
- structural coherence;
- risk;
- historical fidelity;
- groove;
- innovation;
- emotional immediacy;
- technical polish;
- social function.
Expertise narrows some disagreements by correcting errors. It does not eliminate all reasonable pluralism.
Criteria Are Where Taste Becomes Inspectable
“I hate this performance” does not reveal a criterion.
“The performance sacrifices rhythmic momentum to reveal inner counterpoint, and I think the trade-off is unsuccessful” does.
Now another critic can disagree at one of several points:
- the description;
- the importance of momentum;
- the value of inner detail;
- the weighting between them.
Disagreement becomes productive because its location is visible.
Taste Has Weights, Not Just Votes
Imagine two critics hear the same evidence.
Both agree the recording is technically clean, formally conservative and emotionally restrained.
Critic A values innovation heavily.
Critic B values formal control and durability.
Different verdicts can emerge without either critic fabricating facts.
Some aesthetic disagreement is disagreement about weights, not evidence.
The Critic Should Reveal the Weighting When It Matters
A reviewer who prizes novelty should say so when judging traditional craft.
A critic committed to historically informed performance should reveal the framework when reviewing Romantic interpretations.
Transparency does not make judgment weaker.
It shows the receiver how the verdict was mixed.
Genre Knowledge Changes What Counts as a Fair Standard
Evaluating ambient music for insufficient melodic development may miss the practice.
Evaluating punk only by conservatory vocal ideals may miss the aesthetic function of rawness.
Evaluating improvised music entirely by notated repeatability may misunderstand the job.
Taste Can Become Cultural Hierarchy
When one group’s preferences acquire institutional power, taste can begin to look like universal quality.
Concert programming.
School curricula.
Review space.
Record labels.
Awards.
Archives.
These institutions can stabilise some judgments across generations.
That may preserve genuine excellence.
It may also preserve inherited exclusions.
Canon Is Taste With Infrastructure
A canon is not merely “the best music.”
It is music repeatedly selected for performance, study, recording, criticism and preservation.
The master Music Criticism article already follows criticism’s role in canon formation. Here the key point is narrower:
taste becomes historically powerful when institutions give it repetition.
Popularity Is Not the Opposite of Taste
Popular success can indicate that a musical solution reached many receivers.
That is meaningful.
But mass preference is still preference aggregated at scale.
It does not automatically answer questions about craft, innovation, historical significance or long-term durability.
Snobbery Is Often an Unexamined Comparison Class
“This is too simple.”
Simple compared with what?
“This is commercial.”
Does commercial success prevent musical invention?
“This is not serious music.”
Which institution decided seriousness?
Taste becomes snobbery when cultural status substitutes for musical reasoning.
Anti-Elitism Can Become Lazy Too
The reverse mistake is to assume all standards are oppressive.
Technical control can be real.
Historical knowledge can matter.
Expert listening can detect genuine differences.
A healthy critical culture avoids both authoritarian taste and effortless relativism.
Relativism Sounds Tolerant but Can End the Conversation
If every judgment is automatically as good as every other because “taste is subjective,” then criticism becomes impossible to improve.
The Stanford Encyclopedia’s discussion of aesthetic judgment makes this problem explicit: actual aesthetic practice involves disagreement, defence, revision and the possibility that a judgment can be better informed.
Tolerance does not require pretending reasons are irrelevant.
The Opposite Danger Is False Objectivity
Star ratings.
Metacritic averages.
Technical measurements.
These can look precise.
But a 9.1 rating still compresses many criteria into one number.
Aesthetic precision is not the same thing as numerical precision.
Taste Changes With the Receiver’s State
The same listener can hear the same music differently while:
- studying;
- dancing;
- grieving;
- driving;
- hearing through headphones;
- sitting in a concert hall;
- listening socially;
- analysing for an examination.
Receiver state changes the weighting of features.
Criticism should know which listening job is being judged.
Repeated Listening Can Reverse a Verdict
Some music announces itself immediately.
Some withholds its organisation until the listener learns the pattern.
A critic may therefore need to record temporal confidence:
- first reaction;
- after three listens;
- after score study;
- after hearing live;
- after learning the historical context.
Changing one’s mind can be evidence that taste became more resolved.
Taste Can Be Contaminated by Reputation
“Masterpiece.”
“Legendary.”
“Worst album of the year.”
These labels arrive before listening and can bias attention toward confirming what the listener expects.
Blind or partially blind comparison exercises can expose how much reputation was doing.
Taste Can Also Miss What Has Become Too Normal
A familiar production convention may stop generating questions.
The critic hears it as “just how records sound.”
Then an unfamiliar recording reveals how many hidden choices had become background.
Good critics periodically defamiliarise their own taste.
Cross-Cultural Taste Requires a Longer Apprenticeship
A critic should be especially careful when their dislike tracks unfamiliarity with a musical culture.
Learn from practitioners.
Hear canonical and ordinary examples.
Understand the event in which the music lives.
Find out which distinctions insiders make.
The goal is not to surrender judgment forever.
It is to earn enough resolution to know what is being judged.
Singapore Is an Excellent Test of Critical Pluralism
Shzr Ee Tan’s Cambridge chapter on music criticism in Singapore shows criticism operating in a culturally layered environment shaped by institutions, cosmopolitan aspirations and multiple musical traditions.
A Singapore critic may move among Western classical concerts, Chinese orchestral performance, Malay and Indian traditions, global pop and experimental music.
The responsible response is not one universal scorecard.
It is a critic capable of changing resolution and criteria without abandoning rigour.
A 22-Lens Taste Audit
- Reaction: what did I feel immediately?
- Preference: what do I normally like?
- Familiarity: how well do I know this musical language?
- Exposure: how many relevant examples have I heard?
- Expertise: what distinctions can I reliably perceive?
- Blind spot: which features may be below my current resolution?
- Criterion: what am I rewarding?
- Weight: how heavily am I weighting it?
- Genre: does the criterion belong to this practice?
- Receiver: what listening job am I assuming?
- State: did environment or mood change my response?
- Reputation: what did I know before listening?
- Status: am I mistaking cultural prestige for musical quality?
- Popularity: am I mistaking audience scale for quality?
- Novelty: am I rewarding newness simply for being new?
- Difficulty: am I rewarding complexity simply for being difficult?
- Craft: can I recognise excellence I personally dislike?
- Alternative: what would an informed admirer hear?
- Comparison: is my reference set fair?
- Culture: whose standards am I importing?
- Revision: what might change my taste?
- Disclosure: which personal preference should the reader know?
Listening Laboratory 1: Dislike but Respect
Choose a well-regarded piece from a genre you do not enjoy.
Write two paragraphs:
- why it does not attract you;
- what it appears to do well by the standards of knowledgeable practitioners.
Listening Laboratory 2: Blind Comparison
Have someone prepare two or three recordings without telling you the performers.
Rank them and write reasons.
Reveal identities only afterward.
Notice where reputation had been carrying taste.
Listening Laboratory 3: Weighting Sheet
Choose five criteria and assign each a percentage weight before reviewing a track.
Then change the weights and see whether the verdict changes.
The exercise reveals that some disagreement lives in weighting rather than facts.
For Primary Readers
Teach the sentence pair:
I don’t like it / I think it is badly made.
Ask children why those are not the same statement.
For Secondary Readers
Require students to name the criterion behind every evaluative adjective.
“Effective” at what?
“Weak” by which standard?
For Advanced Readers
Model aesthetic judgment as a weighted relation among evidence, learned criteria, receiver history and cultural practice.
Then distinguish disagreement caused by factual error from disagreement caused by reasonable value pluralism.
Common Misconceptions
- “Taste is subjective, so all judgments are equally good.” Judgments can differ in knowledge, coherence, evidence, comparison and fit to practice.
- “Experts have objectively correct taste.” Expertise increases resolution and informed comparison; it does not eliminate all value disagreement.
- “If I dislike it, I cannot review it fairly.” You can if you disclose preference and use criteria appropriate to the music.
- “Popularity proves the public has better taste.” Popularity measures uptake, not every dimension of musical value.
- “Changing your mind means the first review failed.” Revision can be evidence of learning.
Research and Further Reading
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Hume’s Aesthetics — taste, sentiment, refinement, comparison and the problem of critical standards.
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Aesthetic Judgment — subjectivity, normativity and why aesthetic disagreement is not identical to preference reporting.
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Kant’s Aesthetics and Teleology — classical philosophical background on judgments of taste.
- Shzr Ee Tan — Music Criticism in Singapore — critical subjectivity inside a layered cultural environment.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is music taste subjective?
Yes in the sense that liking involves individual experience and response. But criticism can still compare how informed, coherent and well-supported different judgments are.
Can music be good even if I dislike it?
Yes. A listener can recognise strong craft, performance or coherence while not enjoying the resulting style or timbre.
Does expertise improve taste?
Expertise can refine perception, comparison and contextual understanding. It does not guarantee one universally correct preference.
Why do musical tastes change?
Exposure, learning, social context, new comparison sets, life stage and changing receiver goals can all alter what a listener notices and values.
Final Thought: Taste Is Where the Listener Enters the Music
We cannot criticise from nowhere.
We arrive with ears trained by a life.
The solution is not to pretend the life disappeared.
It is to know when the life is speaking.
Preference may begin the review. Criticism begins when the listener is willing to test preference against the music, against other listeners, against history and against the possibility of changing their mind.
MUSIC CRITICISM · FOUR PILLAR LEGS
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