@PapaLeo I know that it lacks depth and sophistication, but that doesn’t really have much to do with how music gets its hooks into you, does it?
I think there’s a certain price we pay for expertise. I have the same relationship to chocolate that you have to music. Having worked with it professionally for decades, I became attuned to nuances that completely escape most people. I have a conceptual framework now that supercedes, to a large extent, my more elemental emotional response to chocolate. Where I used to be able to pop a piece of Dove chocolate into my mouth and just enjoy it for what it is, I now bury that enjoyment under a pile of critical judgment and comparison.
In a way, I may be better off for my chocolate expertise, in that it has opened up unsuspected dimensions of experience in this domain. But, much of that added appreciation is intellectual, not emotional. I can’t really say that I get more of a charge now from tasting my Valrhona than I used to from my Dove.
I recognize that there’s a simple beauty in lack of discrimination as well. I suppose the ideal would be to be able to turn off one’s powers of discrimination at will, and occasionally see, hear or taste the world as a child does.