Post Written By: Chris Stein
In class this week, we have finally finished reading Wuthering Heights and now we're moving on to (hopefully) better things. It's similar to sitting in a car and listing to someone else's horrible music because you're too nice to tell them they have poor taste in music. I'm neither implying that Wuthering Heights is only chosen by people with poor taste, nor that we shouldn't have read it. Reading different novels outside your typical genre only makes you more experienced and more intelligent in the world of literature. The same can be said of music. People have different tastes in music and although music beings up together, it also can set us apart. One could, for example, be a folk music aficionado yet the only reason they may or may not like other genres is because they have listened to them before. Fortunately, music is much easier to judge. We can often times listen to a few seconds of a song before we find out that we really done enjoy that type of music. Brontë's novel is heavily layered into the sub-genre of gothic romance yet it draws people out from their typical genre to read. This is because of the quality and artistic merit the book demands. It isn't a book you read then don't have an opinion about. If you actually read Wuthering Heights, you will have some type of feeling about it, and chances are, it's a rather strongly opinionated one. It is the factor of provoking emotion that earns this book the title of a classic. Similarly, music needs to have some describable quality to be considered "good." Classic music, like classic literature, has a quality that provokes feeling or some type of thought. Classical music is called "classic" music for a reason. Sure, it's boring and it's old but thats not what makes it a classic. In the same way literature speaks to us personally through the letters of a novel or the pages of text in a biography, classical music reaches out from the strings of the violin, deep within our mental self to provoke some kind of thought that speaks to, and relates to us personally.
