The pleasures of listening are many and varied, but there are some wide, general categories. One of these is the unique and rare pleasure of hearing something so new and unusual you have little to compare it to. This is a pleasure associated with new music. Some examples I can recall: the first time I heard one of the piano-roll compositions of Conlon Nancarrow; the first time I heard Steve Reich (it was the DDG recording of Drumming); the first time I heard music by Arvo Pärt.
Another and contrasting pleasure is that of hearing a piece or group of pieces that you have heard hundreds if not thousands of times before--and the pleasure is enriched and deepened every time. This is what we experience when we listen to some of the music of J. S. Bach in particular. I have been listening to the Well-Tempered Clavier for some fifty years and it just gets better.
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