I grew up a classic rock guy: Stones, Zeppelin, Beatles, Van Halen. Songs like "Eruption" and "Thunder Road" were the soundtrack of my teenage years, and to this day, I still love that music. There's nothing like it when you're on the open highway. I liked a few country acts like Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, and maybe a couple of Motown songs, but not jazz, which was weird, and not disco, even though I secretly found a few of the songs catchy, and not classical music, which was boring. Classical music was for dull old men.
Then I went to college. The second semester that I was there, the spring of 1985, I had to take a class in the humanities. I didn't really want to take it, but it was required, so I signed up to get it out of the way. I wasn't even sure what it was about, really. When I got to class on the first day, the professor handed us a syllabus, and from the looks of it we were going to spend our time looking at paintings, reading poetry, and listening to music-classical music. Oh my gosh, I thought. I wonder if there is another section available so that I don't have to listen to this. There wasn't. I was stuck.
The professor asked us to buy a tape of Sergei Prokofiev's "First Symphony," also known as his "Classical Symphony." I grumbled all the way to the record store, where I forked over $3.99 for a cassette tape. What a waste, I thought. I took it home and put it in the tape player and pressed "play." Thankfully, the whole symphony was only about 15 minutes long. I could get through only about 5 minutes of it. I had never heard such noise and chaos.
Apart from making us buy that tape, the professor seemed to be a nice, intelligent man. I trusted his judgment as he lectured on paintings and talked us through poems in the first part of the semester. His analysis of paintings revealed that he had a more discerning eye than I did. He and I could look at the same thing, the same canvas, and he would invariably see so much more than I did. I had to admit that that was kind of cool. He also knew the story behind every painting. When he led us through poems, many of which at first made no sense to me, I felt myself enlightened by degrees. I had never met anyone before who could think out loud like he could.
Then, near the end of the semester, we came to the music. The professor explained what an orchestra was and how it worked, and he played us samples of all the different instruments so we could recognize them when they played. He talked about melody and harmony and rhythm, which were pretty familiar concepts, and when I listened again to the symphony I could begin to hear some of those things. It gradually became less chaotic to me. When the professor explained the form of the symphony, though, and I learned to hear its parts clearly, that's when the real revolution took place between my ears. Prokofiev wasn't just making stuff up as he went along when he wrote the music; rather, I came to understand that he was operating in the context of a tradition that guided the listeners' expectations. By the end of the semester, when a classmate would describe the B motif of the first movement and the way that it provided a counterpoint to the A theme, I knew what she was talking about and could share my own views on it. That's when things began to click for me intellectually. Not only did I learn something about music in that class, I learned something about myself. I learned that I was the kind of person who could understand and enjoy classical music. That, in turn, gave me the confidence to enter different social circles and to see myself successful in them.
Today, when I hear people wonder out loud if college is worth it, I often respond by sharing my experience. I could, of course, answer them with statistics and tell them that college graduates have lower rates of unemployment and earn more money over the course of a lifetime than their counterparts who have only high school diplomas. But I find it more effective to tell them how I became a different person because of my education, one better prepared to engage the world in all of its richness and diversity. I still love classic rock, but I also appreciate a good symphony and that increased capacity to enjoy all that life has to offer has been worth a lot to me.