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Abstract

This study investigates the relationship between expert taste and broader taste patterns, focusing on professional musicians. It combines a survey experiment with original music compositions and interviews with musicians to explore how they evaluate music. The survey reveals that musicians, regardless of their educational background, exhibit greater openness to diverse musical genres than non-musicians. This openness extends beyond abstract genre labels to concrete musical experiences, as musicians rate original music excerpts more positively than non-musicians. To understand this seemingly puzzling finding, in-depth interviews are conducted with musicians. The interviews uncover two key mechanisms underlying musicians' evaluations. First, musicians engage in empathetic listening, often imagining themselves as the performers. Second, they evaluate music not solely based on its present form but also on its potential, considering how it could be improved with better composition and execution. These findings challenge the notion of a simple opposition between "highbrow" and "lowbrow" tastes and highlight the complex interplay of social and aesthetic factors in shaping professional musicians' evaluative judgments. They also reveal a distinct evaluative approach among musicians, emphasizing empathy and potentiality, which differs from the evaluative strategies employed by non-experts.

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