I thought I was the only person who would ever say that foreign music was like a foreign language but Ben, The Classical Convert, beautifully stated the idea:
Listening to a new piece of music is sort of like learning a new language. You initially get faced with all these sounds and melodies which you can sort of follow, but don’t have their own bit of brainspace. If you hear the notes which make up the melody one by one, there probably would not be a sudden moment of recognition, they are all just notes because you do not yet understand the piece. They are like a foreign word, which you understand is a word, but you do not have any mental object associated with it. If it were spelled differently you wouldn’t notice. It’s non-meaning would not be affected. In the same way you probably couldn’t tell if one of the notes in the music were altered.
Eventually you get to the stage in which those melodies provoke an instant response. The words make sense. The music has been imprinted into your head in such a way that it has become a piece of you. You can hum the melodies.
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