Transcendent music

People have often asked me why my wife and I often limit ourselves to a narrow range of classical music. I've had a lot of trouble explaining this, so I want to try here.

First of all, these are some of the reasons that have been speculated for our choice of music, all of which are wrong:

1. We think it makes us smart
2. We think it makes us look smart
3. We have an elitist disdain for other music
4. We have a moral issue with other music
5. We haven't been exposed enough to other music

We both actually listen to and appreciate a wide variety of music. But we still keep on discovering that nothing reaches us like our music, particularly late romantic chamber. One of the reasons for this is a feeling that we have both arrived at independently, and describe in the same language. I'll try my best to explain from the bottom up:

There are many categories of "bad" music [of course judged by how it affects and reaches us]. I won't discuss this here, it should be fairly obvious what makes up the bulk of the inhabitants of these categories. And there are "good" music categories. Here are some examples of pieces and composers which might fit under various good categories, based on our tastes:

Merely good: most of Mozart. Schumann, most of Mendelssohn, Lizst, Chopin, etc. Almost anything you hear on a classical station is here or below.
Really good: most of Dvorak, most Beethoven, Stravisnsky, Shostakovich, Rachmaninoff, etc. I don't think we bother listening to anything below this category.
Spectacularly good: Mendelssohn quartet Op. 13; Ravel and Debussey quartets; Bach Cello suites; some Beethoven; Smetana quartet and Moldau, Dvorak serenade for strings, etc. This is a huge category considering how distinguished it is.
That much gooder [a.k.a. perfect]: Schubert late chamber and nearly all Brahms chamber. Grieg g quartet.

Most of the non-chamber music we listen to falls within the "merely good" to "that much gooder" categories and this includes non-classical music, what we listen to for dancing, and whatever else we have on our iPod.

This is pedantic.

The point is that there is great music everywhere, even music that rivals our holy "that much gooder" music.

But there is one more category that we have both arrived at without triangulation. It is transcendent music. This is music that breaks some invisible barrier and really deeply penetrates us. This is music which feels like it was written by God, and probably was. There are only certain passages in certain pieces which are transcendent in this way for us, and they hold a very special place in our lives. We both claim the most profound spiritual, emotional, and penetrating experiences with these passages. It's different than very, very good music; it is very, very good music with a divine touch. Here's what is transcendent for us:

Scattered passages of the Dvorak cello concerto, mostly in 1st and 2nd movement.
Brahms piano quintet in f, especially the B and D sections of the 4th movement [this trumps all for me, put me on a desert island with this and I'll die a perfected saint].
Schubert quintet in C, B section of the second movement

I want to stress that we dearly love and are passionate about other music. The second movement of the Ravel quartet, Schubert's Death and the Maiden 1st and 2nd movements, the opening sequence in Grieg's quartet in g, the first movement of Smetana's "From my Life" quartet, Brahms' piano quartet in g final cadenza and piano quartet in c 2nd movement climax and a huge amount more, Schubert's G quartet 1st movement, Bach cello suite #5 prelude. These are all the absolute pinnacle of human musical achievement. But the transcendent passages [of which there are few more] go beyond the pinnacle and enter into another realm for us. And the key is that these transcendent passages cluster mostly around late romantic chamber music. That's why we listen to chamber as much as we do. It doesn't hurt that the non-transcendent stuff is flappin' awesome also.

So we don't think music can make us smart. And we're not musical snobs or prudes. We just found a little patch of the transperfect and we can't get enough of it.