NYTimes.com: The Critical Masses. Music critic Anne Midgette discusses what the next big thing in musical ideas might be, and how likely we are to miss it. (Thanks Mom.)

As a consumer of music, I'm comfortable with my own personal focus on certain sub-genres of older, Western music. As excited as I am about the possibilities of new music (in any genre), it's cheaper for me to rely on the test of time to highlight the more engaging, more historically relevant works and ideas. I have no difficulty keeping an open mind to newer stuff, but, at a critical level, it takes more effort to put it into a useful context. I'm getting better at differentiating between stuff I don't understand and stuff that I understand but sucks, it's just that there's inevitably much more irrelevant material in the new than in the surviving old. So I shall focus on the old while I build a foundation for appreciating the new, in the hopes that my mind will not shrivel and close before the new gets a chance.

To be sure, when I say "understand," "appreciate," and "relevance," I mean more than drawing an academic landscape. Enjoyment, the sympathetic vibration of the soul to a piece of music, is the end goal, and I'll listen to anything to meet that end. Here's hoping the critics can dig up and broadcast the good stuff that I don't have time to find on my own.