I absolutely agree that memorizing facts help you understand the world. Famously, students find memorizing dates in history tedious and useless, but it's important. Any new event you hear of can be compared with many concurrent events. I don't know all that much about Shostakovich, but hearing that he composed a symphony in 1937 triggers a sequence of questions. What was his relationship to Stalinist purges in the 1930s? Did he have contacts with the Russian post-revolution emigre artists across Europe and America. What did he think of Stravinsky or Ravel? I'm listening to his fifth symphony now and I can't help but imagine the ominousness of the first movement having to do with all this.