Daniel_Burfoot comments on Things you are supposed to like - Less Wrong
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Phil, I'll remind you of your own comment:
It seems entirely plausible that a person's appreciation of a piece of music depends strongly on all the music to which she's previously been exposed. Two different observers with different music-histories may have very different internal representations of the same piece of new music. A given piece of music may be well-formed or high quality in one representation, but not another.
I read somewhere that people who have seen few movies tend to appreciate different kinds of movies than people who have seen lots of movies. Part of the reason is obvious: something that is clichéd and trite to one person may seem like amazingly original and creative to someone who hasn't seen it done over and over. At the same time, a newbie might not appreciate the way some movie turns the cliche upside down.
Something similar probably also applies to other forms of fiction, and possibly to music as well.
This also goes some distance to explaining (in an alternate fashion) why repeated exposure to the artwork increases appreciation for it. Assuming the piece really relies on their exposure to related music, extended exposure forces people to have increasingly similar backgrounds.