Old music, new music, and the better question

A student told me last winter that she did not really like old music. Two months later she was learning a Bach sarabande and could not leave it alone; she played it before dinner, after dinner, and once at half past eleven at night, which I heard about from her neighbour rather than from her. Nothing about the category had changed. What changed was that she had finally met one particular piece instead of a shelf label. I have had the same conversation in the other direction with adults who tell me they cannot get on with modern music, and with teenagers who assume anything written before 1900 must be homework. In both cases the sorting happens before a single note is heard, and in both cases it costs them something.

The label arrives before the music does

Calling a piece "old" or "new" is a filing decision, not a musical one. It tells you roughly when the ink dried and almost nothing about what the piece does to a room. Yet the label is powerful, because it arrives first and it comes with expectations attached: old means serious, dusty, correct, probably good for you; new means difficult, spiky, possibly a joke at your expense. Students then listen to confirm the label rather than to find out what is there. I notice it most in the first thirty seconds of a piece they have decided about in advance — they are not really listening, they are checking. The odd thing is that composers themselves almost never think in these terms. Every piece we now call old was new to somebody, written by a person who was trying to solve a problem in front of them, not to sound historical. Bach was not writing early music. He was writing this week's music, on a deadline, for people who would hear it once.

What actually ages, and what does not

Some things about a piece really do date. Notation conventions, ornament practice, the instruments themselves, the assumptions about how loud a hall is and how long an audience will sit still — all of that belongs to a time, and knowing about it makes you a better player. But those are the surfaces. What does not age is the part that made someone write the thing in the first place: a harmonic turn that opens a door, a phrase that hesitates in exactly the right place, a rhythmic idea with real muscle in it. When you play a Scarlatti sonata well, nobody in the room is thinking about 1750. They are hearing something happen now. The reverse is also true, and worth saying plainly: a piece written last year can already sound tired if its ideas are secondhand. Age is a fact about a manuscript. Freshness is a fact about the music.

Every century produced good music and a great deal of forgettable music

This is the part students find surprising. The eighteenth century did not consist of masterpieces. It consisted of an enormous quantity of competent, pleasant, entirely ordinary music, out of which a small amount survived because players kept choosing it. What reaches us from two hundred years ago has already been through a filter that nothing written in the last twenty years has been through yet. So when someone says older music is better, they are partly comparing a curated selection with an unsorted pile. That cuts both ways. It means we should be more patient with contemporary music, because we are hearing it unfiltered and some of it is genuinely marvellous. It also means we should not treat every eighteenth-century piece as automatically worth our two months of work. Good and bad were distributed across every era. Only the sorting is uneven.

A practical test for choosing repertoire

When a student asks me whether they should learn a piece, I do not ask what period it is from. I ask three other things. First: after hearing it twice, does anything stay with you — a phrase, a harmony, a mood you cannot quite name? Music worth months of your time usually leaves a residue. Second: does the piece give you something to do that you cannot do yet? Every good choice is also a small technical or musical assignment, and it should be the right size — a stretch, not a cliff. Third: will you still want to hear it in March? You are about to live with this piece through the boring middle stage, and affection is what carries you across it. Notice that none of these questions has a date in it. A student answering them honestly will end up with a repertoire spanning three centuries, not because balance was the goal, but because good music does not cluster in one place.

What this changes in the practice room

Dropping the old-new frame has a practical effect on how you work. You stop playing baroque music as though it were a museum object to be handled with gloves — carefully, quietly, and without opinions. You also stop treating a contemporary score as a puzzle to be decoded rather than a piece to be phrased; those clusters and silences still have direction, and you can ask a twentieth-century phrase where it is going in exactly the same way you would ask a Mozart one. Historical knowledge stays useful. Knowing how a trill was played in 1720, or why a composer in 1955 wrote no dynamics at all, tells you what the notation is asking for. But that knowledge is a tool for finding the music, not a costume you put on instead of playing. The question at the keyboard is always the same: what is this sound doing, and what does it need from me?

So I have stopped debating old versus new with students, and I ask them instead to tell me what a piece is worth to them and why. It is a harder question, and much more useful. It puts the judgement back where it belongs — in their ears rather than in a date on the page — and it tends to make them more adventurous in both directions. The student with the Bach sarabande is now working on a short piece written in the 1970s and complaining about it in exactly the same affectionate way. That seems to me like the right outcome. There is only music you have met and music you have not met yet.