I agree - if listening to classical music is more a pastime of the socioeconomic classes who are also educated to a higher level, there is going to be a correlation there.
But the OP’s question - “Do people **who truly enjoy **… artists like Mozart or Tchaikovsky … tend to possess a higher intelligence?” - is quite disagreeable in itself. What if you have a ‘tin ear’? Does your inability to enjoy music confer an intellectual defect?
The OP included:
and I would say that that is the more important aspect of the question than the genre. The desire and capability to enjoy anything “on an extended level” is probably some indicator of intelligence. Then there is the question of whether the something being enjoyed has the depth to have an “extended level”. No-one would doubt that classical music easily has the depth, and that most top 40 (if such a thing is exists anymore - but you get the idea) does not. Music that is disposable and more about the video clip and the hairstyle of the performer isn’t going be be enjoyed at any extended level, except perhaps by anthropologists. We could make the same distinction about literature, movies, food, many sports and so on. There are genres in each that have zero depth, and genres that admit a lifetime of study and deep appreciation. There are people that make a lifetime’s obsession zero depth genres. I would be prepared to go out on a limb and suggest that they are probably generally a bit thicker than those that get involved in the deeper genres. Someone who can list off every Britney Spears recording and knows the lyrics to every song is probably not going to be quite the same quality of conversationalist as someone who can talk about Frank Zappa, Beethoven, Miles Davis or John Adams. There is the danger that every one of these people might be the most frightful bore, but that is a different problem. (It will be a race between the Zappa fan and the Miles fan.)
I think a taste for Mahler is an indication of high intelligence.
For some reason, all the really really smart people I’ve ever known (folks working on Fermat’s last theorem, musical prodigies, intuitive business geniuses) seem genuinely entranced by the music of Gustav Mahler.
Maybe it’s because he was an unconventional “outside-the-box” composer, and his style is so much different from, say, Vivaldi, Mozart, or Beethoven (or even a “modern” like Shostakovich), but these brainy-types are smitten with the guy.
Me, I don’t see the attraction, and the wildly alternating dynamics just bother me; the melodies don’t do anything for me, and I’m not at all “affected” by, say, his 9th Symphony, which apparently will send a prodigy into fits of ecstacy.
So, I guess I’ll just have to accept my own mediocrity, and learn to start liking Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber or whatever. But I still feel like a cretin whenever I “thumbs down” a Mahler piece on my Pandora stations.
Maybe that’s your problem right there - Gustav Mahler’s music doesn’t really lend itself to listening casually on an iPod - you want to experience it in concert, or alternatively in your leather slippers with a glass of single malt scotch in front of your fireplace on a high class stereo (only slightly exaggerating). If you’ve got 10 minute sections that are basically one big crescendo, listening to it track by track on the subway doesn’t give you a proper feel for the music.
Mahler is a complicated composer. I think the thing I learnt is that it is hard to really appreciate him without context. This includes political, personal, historical and musical. Also, some of his works just don’t work at all when heard in a recorded medium. I find the 8th a meandering trainwreck of a work listened to at anything less than concert levels. Mahler understood and used the orchestra’s dynamics and sheer power as an integral part of his work. The emotion and many nuances are simply lost if you don’t have the quality of reproduction. Most works are also very demanding on the conductor. We forget that Mahler came to prominence as, and was foremost, a star conductor in his lifetime. He believed that a conductor should be free to stamp his mark on any work he conducts - but he thus also left a huge burden on later conductors of his works. Some recordings find conductors that have simply not managed to inject the life needed. And a conductor that nails one work might miss the point on another. Mahler was a friend of Richard Strauss and a supporter of Schoenberg (to the point of having his publishing company publish his compositions, and helping him with money as a young man). Mahler sat astride some big changes in music. He had an emotionally charged, challenging and pretty amazing life, and he put that into his compositions. It is bridging that gap to get to his music that takes a bit of a jump. It isn’t about intelligence.
I don’t think anyone posting in this thread has suggested that though. Saying that there may be some correlation between interest in and enjoyment of classical music and intelligence does not mean that inability to enjoy classical music demonstrates a lack of intelligence.
A lot of classical music doesn’t lend itself well to being listened to on headphones, due to the large dynamic range (difference in volume between the loudest and softest sounds). Especially if there is a bit of background noise, it leaves me messing with the volume controls to hear the softer parts and avoid getting blasted by the crescendos.
Just had a listen to some Mahler, searching on Spotify. The 3rd movement of his 1st Symphony is exactly the sort of classical music I like, with very natural-sounding progressions of a simple melody (I’m sure I’ve heard that melody somewhere else). From the comments above I take it that isn’t typical of his music? I know very little about orchestral music, but occasionally I come across a piece I really like, and I’ve just added that to my list.
If you buy the theory of Multiple Intelligences, this breaks down into two questions:
Do people who truly enjoy classical music (e.g. Mozart) tend to have higher musical intelligence, and
How does musical intelligence correlate with general IQ?
I think the answer to the first question is yes, because classical music tends to be more complex and intricate than, say, dance-pop: there’s more to it; it uses more advanced compositional techniques, and less repetition and cliche and predictability.
Since people have brought up Mahler, I’ll suggest that it takes a lot of musical intelligence to write, and to appreciate, a long instrumental composition that remains interesting all the way through.
I don’t know the answer to the second question, but there may well be “idiot savant” types who are highly musical but of below-average intelligence in general.
[QUOTE=Alka Seltzer]
Just had a listen to some Mahler, searching on Spotify. The 3rd movement of his 1st Symphony is exactly the sort of classical music I like, with very natural-sounding progressions of a simple melody (I’m sure I’ve heard that melody somewhere else).
[/QUOTE]
Is that the movement that has “Frere Jacques” as a funeral march?
Had a look on Wikipedia, that’s the one.
Back in the 1950s, Frank Sinatra said, “Rock 'n Roll: The most brutal, ugly, desperate, vicious form of expression it has been my misfortune to hear.” And also “Rock ‘n’ roll smells phony and false. It is sung, played and written, for the most part, by cretinous goons. And, by means of its almost imbecilic reiteration, and sly, lewd and in plain fact, dirty lyrics … it manages to be the martial music of every side-burned delinquent on the face of the earth.”
That was expressed a little over-the-top, but it probably represented a consensus of what adults thought at the time.
Fastforward to 2010. The default assumption today is that every adult (under the age of about 70) likes, loves, or is obsessed by some version of the giant octopus of musical arms that rock and roll grew into. (Country music counts for the purpose of this definition.) You would be very surprised to find someone who thought that no aspect of popular music wasn’t great, no matter what they thought of rap or metal or Britney Spears or fill in the blank.
Culture counts. You can’t take culture out of music because music is intrinsically culture. If you asked your question about rock music in the 1950s, even the most broad-minded would have agreed that classical music fans were truly more intelligent. In today’s world, every intelligent and super-intelligent person brought up in the rock era loves some form of rock.
Is it still possible that the small, self-selected group of people who love classical music are smarter on average? Of course it’s possible. For one thing, they are about 1% the size of the other group. And to be exposed to classical music in equivalence to rock music takes more time, effort, money, and association with people who have those things, which are also highly correlated with education. The average intelligence of a educated, selected 1% of the population will obviously be higher than the average intelligence of 99% of the population.
Is there any evidence that the 1% are more intelligent than the top 1% of rock lovers? None whatsoever. Are there studies that control for education and culture that show this? I don’t know of any and this one doesn’t. It’s worthless as other than a factoid. Can you take people outside their cultures and experiment on them for a lifetime to test this? Not likely. A teenager who has never been exposed to classical music is a wholly different kind of person than one who has listened to rock for all those years. You can’t suddenly introduce one and have it equal to the other.
People have been approving and denigrating types of art for the history of humanity. And what gets approved varies for the history of humanity. The only thing that proves is people like to define the world to include themselves and exclude Others. That may be human but it’s not intelligent.
Why is this being asked in GQ? At best, the answer is YMMV/de gustibus…/Beauty is in the eye of the beholder…
I will say this: being able to *compose *truly great classical music requires a specific type of genius. Please note that I am NOT saying that it is a better form of genius than, say, The Beatles - merely a specifc manifestation of musical genius.
Creating a great pop hook, like Keith Richards did for Satisfaction or Dr. Luke does for popstars today is a different form a genius vs. grasping the deep harmonic structures that a symphony provides, and how to manipulate them, which is what the Beethovens and Mozarts need to do.
Which doesn’t mean Mozart or Beethoven didn’t invent their own pop hooks. I believe the beginning of Beethoven’s 5th or Eine kleine Nachtmusik rival the riffs to Satisfaction or Smoke On The Water in many ways.
Damn, I never made that connection. You have killed that movement for me!
I’ll go along with the complexity postulate. I would consider an appreciation of multiple genres and of complex musical compositions to reflect an appreciation of complexity and subtlety.
For example - I stopped reading reading most comics at an early age - they were predictably identical. Superman/spiderman solves everything in a fistfight to the knockdown with the enemy of the moment. Said enemy is simply one-dimensionally pure evil, rather than a complicated, differently motivated person. Japanese magna (What little I’ve seen) seems to similarly trite. Even the original Star Trek ended, as often as not, with the captain of the most sophisticated starship of the future winning a fistfight against his opponent. Much of Hollywood is equally formulaic and trite.
This is what I see in the equivalent most formula-driven products of their genre - whether country music, rap, heavy metal, or the pop fashion of the day. Such music is formula based, like action movies or sitcoms, to fill entertainment space and generate themost money for the least creative effort. Every once in a while a gem slips through the cracks and actually makes it into the media. The filler, however, exists to generate a mood orbrain pattern or whatever you want to call it, that substitutes for thinking in he lower classes.
I don’t think it’s that people who appreciate classical music are smarter; I think it’s that classical music, like some other forms, lacks a large number of the camp followers of fashion, it is not like country or rap or acid rock a genre that attracts people looking to override their brain waves with a repetitious lyric or rythm. There may be a small following that listens to classical because they are pretentious snob (“upper-class wannabees”) but I suspect these are mostly people showing up to the symphony or ballet to be seen, not people who go home to listen to Wagner’s Ring Cycle over a weekend.
So I equate “smarter” with “willing to listen to / appreciate a variety of inputs”. That would likely be the same as “curious” or “appreciates complexity”.
BTW, I don’t know what most chimps listen to, but I assume Bubbles mostly listened to Michael Jackson music…
Why? It’s still the same piece of music it was before you knew it was based on a nursery rhyme.
Which Mozart(?) was it that used “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”?
Based on personal experience, I would hypothesize that people who enjoy obscure or underground music are likely to be less socially connected - odder ducks, aka geeks - than people who like highly popular (or even widely-accepted classical) music.
Well stated and very true. In the opposite direction, there are deep harmonic structures in rock music, it’s just that they don’t require the ability to consciously hold dozens of symphony instruments in your head simultaneously and shape the structure - they require a Les Paul, a Marshall and a good distortion box 
I think the idea that intelligent people tend to listen to classical music is a bit misrepresentative for a few reasons. First, I agree with the idea the intelligent people are more likely to be curious, so they’re probably more likely to branch out of popular music or even music in their prefered genres. As such, since classical music really isn’t exactly in the mainstream in the same way that top 40 songs are on the radio and MTV, it probably favors a higher degree of intelligence.
More importantly though, I think that intelligent people are more likely to enjoy more complex music. Mainstream music is mainstream because it is accessible to large audiences. Whether it is done deliberately to take advantage of that or not, it often means that it’s going to have simpler attributes, whether its more basic rhythms, scales, or general structures. A lot of classical music is much more structured and utilizes much more complex melodies, scales, and rhythms than most mainstream music does, so under this hypothesis, it’s going to be mroe attractive to intelligent individuals.
Expanding on that, IME, it doesn’t limit itself to just classical music, but a lot of non-mainstream music in other genres too. I’m very much into the underground metal scene, and more often than not, when I’ve found someone that likes some of the bands I do, we can not only have an intelligent conversation about that music, but we can also have intelligent conversations about other topics.
And, of course, in general, music is much more accessible in creating today than it was at any time in the past. As such, the talent saturation of music composers is likely to be much lower now than it ever was in the past. That’s not to say that I don’t think there are musicians today on a similar level to Beethoven or Mozart or other well known classical composers, in fact, there’s probably more now than there ever were, but those same composers didn’t have to compete for mainstream attention with thousands of untalented bands. As such, it probably means that a larger amount of the surviving classical music is likely to have that level of complexity that only the higher level of talent can bring.
Then again, I’ve also met plenty of quite intelligent people who just don’t care about music that much and, so, are perfectly fine listening to the top 40 stuff. So, who knows.