By Julia Zichello

On New Year’s Eve I attended the Concert for Peace at St. John the Divine on Amsterdam at West 112th Street. The cathedral was packed, my friend and I arrived slightly late, and we sat far in the back, a long distance from the cathedral’s orchestra and choir, which performed Beethoven’s Symphony Number 9 in D minor.

The symphony is 200 years old, and its beginning and middle were gorgeous – textured and varied, swinging between low staccato horns that sounded both playful and serious, to mature-sounding stringed instruments, to what I believe were violins (apologies if you were a viola). All of that filled up the magnificent Gothic cathedral which, because of the up-lighting and the inevitable pockets of darkness it created, looked ever-so-slightly spooky.

As I listened, my eyes traced the Gothic-Romanesque pointed and rounded arches. My mind began to wander, and I started thinking I should probably know more classical music than I do. I should have, could have, might have been able to tell the difference between the violas and the violins – and to more deeply appreciate what I was hearing. Then I wondered if welcoming 2025 in a 132-year-old cathedral and listening to music that was even older was an appropriately forward-looking way to welcome a New Year? It isn’t particularly. 

But then my attention was pulled back to the symphony when it reached a portion that I recognized. There was a low and slow murmur at first, then the music grew louder and the primary instruments shifted. And suddenly, one by one, up went the phones, as members of the audience recorded the familiar, triumphant rhythm of Ode to Joy, which is hailed as a masterpiece of western classical music. Even though we had heard it all before, it was no less beautiful or moving. In fact, knowing it seemed intimately connected to loving it. 

Because I am a biologist and a wonderer, I was curious about what happens in our brain when we hear a song like Ode to Joy, one we know well, versus one that we don’t. It turns out that several neuroimaging studies have shown that different regions of the brain are activated when we hear a song that we recognize versus one that we don’t. Though there is some lack of consensus as to exactly which brain regions are activated in these two scenarios, songs we know seem to repeatedly stimulate areas of the brain related to movement and memory. That may explain why, sometimes, you just have to dance. And we don’t need neuroscience to tell us that beloved old songs can elicit positive emotions; whether your heart is made of stone or glass or gold, it’s really where groove lives. 

There is also a psychological phenomenon known as the “mere exposure effect,” which states that the more exposure we have to something, the more we like it. But when it comes to music, there is also such a thing as overexposure. The relationship between musical enjoyment and exposure is supposedly an upside-down “U” (like a Romanesque arch) meaning that when we repeat music that we like, we initially experience an upward swell of loving it. But then, with even more repetition, we tend not to like it as much anymore. It’s the scientific explanation of “played out.” 

But where exactly is the turning point between loving a song because it is familiar and being tired of it because you have played it too much? If you play the same song repeatedly does that mean you are sliding down the other side of a rounded Romanesque arch, never to reach the height of that initial curve again? Perhaps. But to achieve peak musical enjoyment, there are many variables to consider – such as one’s individual penchant for novelty, the context in which the song is played, how much champagne you drank, and if there is a long hiatus between having played it out years ago and hearing it again. Something like meeting your old lover on the street last night. 

It seems to me that an “Ode” can be old to just about everyone, yet somehow – because of the presence of the choir, or the heightened expectations of New Year’s Eve – the joy it brings can still feel miraculously, unequivocally surprising. And new. 

Julia Zichello, Ph.D., is an evolutionary biologist who lives on the Upper West Side.

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