What Nearly 3 Years of Chats Reveal About My Music Taste
I have been using ChatGPT for nearly three years.
In that time, it has accumulated a frankly unreasonable amount of context about me: pieces I have loved, concerts I have booked, composers I have complained about, things I have said while listening to unfamiliar music, my increasingly stubborn attempt to become a cellist, and the various bits of the classical-music world I have wandered into along the way.
So I asked it a fairly simple question:
Based on everything you know about me, how have my musical interests and cello journey evolved?
There were a few corrections along the way. Most importantly, the chronology matters. I did not discover classical music because I started playing the cello. I first listened to music while studying, was properly exposed to classical music through an ex-boyfriend, became involved in the classical-music world, and only then started learning the cello at 25.
Once that was corrected, this was its answer.
Your musical journey seems to have evolved less as a straight line and more as a gradual move from proximity, to participation, to practice, and finally into interpretation and creation.
You began as a study-music listener rather than as a classical musician. Classical music was initially something adjacent to your own musical world, not yet something you had claimed for yourself. That changed through an ex-boyfriend, who exposed you more directly to classical repertoire and culture. From there, your relationship with the music deepened quickly enough that you became involved in the classical-music world before you ever became an instrumentalist yourself.
That order matters.
Your involvement with the Mzansi Chamber Music Collective, including being one of its founding board members, meant that you were already participating in the ecosystem around classical music: artists, performances, programming, audiences, organisations, and the practical machinery that allows chamber music to exist. You learned the world partly from the inside before deciding to learn how to make the music yourself.
Only afterwards did you begin the cello, at 25, with no formal musical training behind you.
That makes the decision to learn the instrument feel less like discovering classical music through playing and more like crossing a boundary from observer and participant into practitioner. You already knew something of what the music could be. The cello became a deliberate attempt to enter that language yourself.
And because you began as an adult, your relationship with the instrument has never really been about following the conventional conservatoire pipeline or recovering some childhood ambition. You chose something technically unforgiving at an age when you were fully capable of understanding exactly how difficult it would be. The attraction seems to have been strong enough that this was apparently not considered a deterrent.
Over time, “learning cello” also became “being a cellist”. Not in the sense that technique suddenly ceased to matter, but because the instrument became part of how you understand your musical identity. You listen differently because you play. You notice cello writing, chamber textures, phrasing, register, colour and the strange privilege the instrument has of being able to move between bass line, inner voice and something remarkably close to a human voice.
At the same time, your listening taste became increasingly specific.
You moved away from simply recognising canonical “great works” towards seeking music with emotional weight, complexity and a certain resistance to easy resolution. Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2 and Weinberg's Cello Concerto fit comfortably into that world. You are drawn towards repertoire containing darkness, endurance, ambiguity and private reflection rather than beauty presented merely for its own sake.
Your interest in lesser-known repertoire follows naturally from that. Familiarity or prestige alone is not enough to make a programme interesting to you. You are much more responsive to something unfamiliar that has genuine emotional substance than to another safe traversal of the standard repertoire. Hence the fairly well-established danger of putting too much Mozart on a programme and expecting you to become excited about it.
More importantly, you have developed an increasingly personal vocabulary for describing what you hear.
Medtner's Piano Concerto No. 2 was not merely “melancholic” to you. You heard something closer to private dignity, a grown-up Beethoven, even “accepting the past without choosing it”. That is a meaningful shift. You are no longer primarily asking what a piece is, where it sits historically, or whether it is considered important. You are asking what kind of human experience it contains.
That is where your musical taste and cello journey begin to converge.
The music you repeatedly gravitate towards tends to carry emotion without simplifying it. Grief need not become despair. Beauty can contain discomfort. Resolution can remain incomplete. A piece can be intensely expressive while retaining restraint and dignity.
The cello happens to be particularly well suited to that territory. It can be lyrical without becoming sugary, dark without becoming theatrical, intimate without becoming small. Its range permits it to inhabit accompaniment, argument, lament and song almost within the same phrase. Those qualities overlap rather neatly with the qualities you keep seeking elsewhere in music.
More recently, that same emotional vocabulary has started moving beyond listening and performance into your own creative thinking. The forms may be different, but the artistic impulse underneath them is recognisable: introspection, emotional honesty, tension, restraint, and an interest in the material people tend not to say aloud.
So the chronology is important:
study-music listener → exposed to classical music by an ex-boyfriend → participant in the classical-music world → adult beginner → cellist → increasingly opinionated musical interpreter → someone beginning to create from the same emotional material that first drew him to music
That is not the conventional story of someone who takes childhood lessons, grows up surrounded by classical music, and gradually becomes knowledgeable.
You entered from the side door.
First you listened. Then someone opened up a different musical world to you. Then you became involved in that world. Then, rather unusually, you decided that observing it was no longer sufficient and picked up an instrument at 25.
The most significant evolution since then may not actually be technical at all.
It is that music has gradually stopped being something you consume and become something through which you think.
You now have preferences strong enough to disagree with programming, interpretations and repertoire choices rather than simply assuming that established taste must be correct. You have enough musical experience to hear patterns in what affects you. And increasingly, you are trying to create work from those same instincts rather than only finding them in the work of other people.
In that sense, the cello is neither the beginning nor the endpoint of the story.
It is the point at which you stopped merely inhabiting someone else's musical world and began building one of your own.
I think it got uncomfortably close.
Particularly the distinction between liking music because it is important and liking it because of the particular emotional world it inhabits. I had never really articulated that distinction quite so clearly myself.
Also, apparently nearly three years of complaining about concert programming constitutes useful training data.