4 ms·

Unexpected Thoughts Regarding Classical Music

16 points by rms 17y ago

patrickgzill 17y ago
The author does not have a place for comments on his blog ... so I will use this space to suggest that: 1. anyone interested classical music should use Pandora.com to find out what they like: I ended up with a lot of Telemann and Corelli as performed by Manze and Egarr 2. if you have space in your apartment/house, go on Craigslist and get a decent set of speakers and a CD player and tuner/amp. Listening to classical on headphones is good but listening in open air is better.
- stcredzero 17y ago
  A pair of high-end Sennheisers can be a great investment. (I have the 580s, which were once the flagship, now outdated, but still very good.) I can also recommend the Etymotic ER4P in-ear headphones. Inexpensive but highly accurate small acoustic suspension speakers have been a commodity for awhile. Put these with a decent subwoofer with a built-in crossover, and you can get a very formidable setup, if you are willing to move your furniture around and hang things on your wall. Really good headphones can give you plug & play high fidelity, if you can live with a soundstage that's inside your skull. (I use a Velodyne powered subwoofer with a pair of NHT Subzero-XUs, with a home-made external high-pass filter between my NAD receiver and the Subzeros. The natural rolloff from the speakers, plus the high-pass filter and the low-pass filter on the subwoofer gives me a bi-amplified system on the cheap.)
- rinich 17y ago
  I never thought to use Pandora for classical music! Upvote for a marvelous suggestion.
  - sp332 17y ago
    It took Pandora a long time to get classical music into their system because they weren't sure how to classify individual pieces. I mean, once you have a dozen versions of the same song by different orchestras with different conductors, the "What's your favorite song?" interface kind of breaks down.
    - jobrahms09 17y ago
      The crappy thing about classical music in Pandora is that if your piece spans multiple tracks (a good 80% of classical music falls into this category - multiple movements) you never get to hear the entire piece at once.
jberryman 17y ago
as a classical musician, this was inspiring and makes me feel happy :)
snitko 17y ago
The reason classical music is less popular among the masses is not that it does not appeal to emotions - a lot of people would argue with that. Half of the story is indeed in the conservative nature of it (my father is a musician and I know how he goes about interpretation of classical compositions, stage appearance and all these rules). But there's also another half of the story which is simply lack of education in listeners. I only started to listen to different kinds of music (including jazz and classical) after I played an instrument for a year. It takes understanding and practice and since classical music is not really about any social group (like, say, punk-rock or classical rock are to some extent) it's hard for it to get this attention from people seeking for just emotional satisfaction. Over time, when a person gets more musically educated (and I mean doing music, not listening) his emotions require more intellectual sources, which is the structure of the composition (harmony and melody) and skills of the performers. That you can only appreciate when you try something yourself.
- stcredzero 17y ago
  another half of the story which is simply lack of education in listeners. A lot of people just don't have the wherewithal to appreciate melodic music. Melody just escapes them. They want chords and riffs to wash over them while moving with a strong beat. The kind of lyric dance implied by other musical forms escapes them, and they have no hope of appreciating anything that wasn't once based on some kind of dance. What really frightens me, though, are all these young people killing their fine cochlear structures with headphones. The wispy nuances of acoustic music don't even exist for them. They don't even exist in the same aural universe.
  - snitko 17y ago
    I use headphones because the only time when I can spend some conscious time listening to music (not just filtering it with my ears) is when I'm taking a 30 min walk to the gym and then 30 min back. I realize, it's a trade off though, but don't be so hard on that.
    - stcredzero 17y ago
aristoxenus 17y ago
The main buyers and patrons of "classical" music turn out to be a pretty conservative bunch. Have you ever listened to radio stations or concert promoters try to be humorous or hip? It's generally pretty puritan and sad, like something you'd find on the Disney Channel. Until a new generation really takes ownership of this stuff, selling it to new listeners will remain an endeavor with dwindling returns.
gb 17y ago
Something that strikes me - whenever I've seen pieces like this before, they often seem to ignore that people still write classical music. It's nearly always Mozart, Beethoven, Bach but no mention of any modern or contemporary composers... I wonder why that is. Sure some contemporary classical music is a bit more esoteric and even less likely to appeal to the average listener, but it's certainly not all like that. Maybe I'm slightly unusual in that most of the classical music I enjoy comes from the late romantic period onwards, but I do find it slightly disappointing that often when people "discover" classical music they seem to think it mostly stopped in the 1700s.
- snitko 17y ago
  That's understandable. Have you heard of any new classic rock bands lately? I doubt that. They do exists though. It's just that people lose interest in new faces playing the same old things. I mean sure, the scores may be different, but still somehow the music sounds the same, because they do combine chord progressions and melody parts in a certain painfully familiar way. Well, most of the time at least, that's what happens to the second generation of the genre followers. Same as in web-apps industry. People like twitter and they are doing a good job. But having yet another one in a different skin would make no sense.
- jpwagner 17y ago
  This phenomenon is similar to the class of posts that say "why [business] is like [poker]" etc. A vast majority of these posts are by people with amateur-at-best experience with the comparison topic. This article is no exception.
  - rinich 17y ago
    And admittedly so.
    - aristoxenus 17y ago
      It's hard to imagine it playing out otherwise -- you need to start somewhere, and that stuff is: a) more familiar to the ear b) more plentifully recorded c) more widely discussed and recommended etc.
jtnak 17y ago
OK, so he said that classical music and the community around it is more rigid than most newer forms of music and their communities, and that it's dying, and the former might cause the latter. What is so unexpected, I wonder
- rinich 17y ago
  Unexpected not perhaps for a vast audience, but for me. What you didn't mention was perhaps the core of the post: Classical music isn't dead, it's living and breathing and subject to interpretation. Then the points you mentioned carry with them certain implications, namely that classical music could benefit from irreverence and innovation, and that modern music would benefit from classical music's being made more accessible.
teeja 17y ago
"When I listened to Mozart last year, I thought classical music was all about the composer. Today I realized the performer matters just as much" That's certainly true to an extent. But some performers won't suit your taste, and if you judge the music because you picked a poor performance (like you might get on the cheap imports), you might miss some incredible music. I can't stand Karajan's Beethoven, good thing I didn't start listening with him. I can't tell someone exactly why I like Mozart best when Marriner's conducting, or why Serkin just does the Emperor better. But once you know you like a composer's work, then you'll start to prefer some performances over others. The great part is that this slowly changes all your life, and that really great music never gets old and you can repeat the same chills you got when you were 20. It's a lot like Sherlock Holmes that way!
julius_geezer 17y ago
Education: One thing that strikes me in looking at Loony Tunes from (I suppose) that 1950s is how many allusions to classical and folk music they could slip in. I'm guessing that something has been lost in music education in the schools over the half century. Stodginess: as aristoxenus says, the classical stations do figure on an older, more conservative audience. I used to get a kick out of a Washington, DC station, since defunct. It wasn't unusual to hear a commercial with a relaxed, folksy voice telling one how important the F-15 was too our national defense.

16 points by rms 17y ago

The author does not have a place for comments on his blog ... so I will use this space to suggest that: 1. anyone interested classical music should use Pandora.com to find out what they like: I ended up with a lot of Telemann and Corelli as performed by Manze and Egarr 2. if you have space in your apartment/house, go on Craigslist and get a decent set of speakers and a CD player and tuner/amp. Listening to classical on headphones is good but listening in open air is better.

stcredzero 17y ago
A pair of high-end Sennheisers can be a great investment. (I have the 580s, which were once the flagship, now outdated, but still very good.) I can also recommend the Etymotic ER4P in-ear headphones. Inexpensive but highly accurate small acoustic suspension speakers have been a commodity for awhile. Put these with a decent subwoofer with a built-in crossover, and you can get a very formidable setup, if you are willing to move your furniture around and hang things on your wall. Really good headphones can give you plug & play high fidelity, if you can live with a soundstage that's inside your skull. (I use a Velodyne powered subwoofer with a pair of NHT Subzero-XUs, with a home-made external high-pass filter between my NAD receiver and the Subzeros. The natural rolloff from the speakers, plus the high-pass filter and the low-pass filter on the subwoofer gives me a bi-amplified system on the cheap.)
rinich 17y ago
I never thought to use Pandora for classical music! Upvote for a marvelous suggestion.
- sp332 17y ago
  It took Pandora a long time to get classical music into their system because they weren't sure how to classify individual pieces. I mean, once you have a dozen versions of the same song by different orchestras with different conductors, the "What's your favorite song?" interface kind of breaks down.
  - jobrahms09 17y ago
    The crappy thing about classical music in Pandora is that if your piece spans multiple tracks (a good 80% of classical music falls into this category - multiple movements) you never get to hear the entire piece at once.

jberryman 17y ago

as a classical musician, this was inspiring and makes me feel happy :)

snitko 17y ago

The reason classical music is less popular among the masses is not that it does not appeal to emotions - a lot of people would argue with that. Half of the story is indeed in the conservative nature of it (my father is a musician and I know how he goes about interpretation of classical compositions, stage appearance and all these rules). But there's also another half of the story which is simply lack of education in listeners. I only started to listen to different kinds of music (including jazz and classical) after I played an instrument for a year. It takes understanding and practice and since classical music is not really about any social group (like, say, punk-rock or classical rock are to some extent) it's hard for it to get this attention from people seeking for just emotional satisfaction. Over time, when a person gets more musically educated (and I mean doing music, not listening) his emotions require more intellectual sources, which is the structure of the composition (harmony and melody) and skills of the performers. That you can only appreciate when you try something yourself.

stcredzero 17y ago
another half of the story which is simply lack of education in listeners. A lot of people just don't have the wherewithal to appreciate melodic music. Melody just escapes them. They want chords and riffs to wash over them while moving with a strong beat. The kind of lyric dance implied by other musical forms escapes them, and they have no hope of appreciating anything that wasn't once based on some kind of dance. What really frightens me, though, are all these young people killing their fine cochlear structures with headphones. The wispy nuances of acoustic music don't even exist for them. They don't even exist in the same aural universe.
- snitko 17y ago
  I use headphones because the only time when I can spend some conscious time listening to music (not just filtering it with my ears) is when I'm taking a 30 min walk to the gym and then 30 min back. I realize, it's a trade off though, but don't be so hard on that.
  - stcredzero 17y ago

aristoxenus 17y ago

The main buyers and patrons of "classical" music turn out to be a pretty conservative bunch. Have you ever listened to radio stations or concert promoters try to be humorous or hip? It's generally pretty puritan and sad, like something you'd find on the Disney Channel. Until a new generation really takes ownership of this stuff, selling it to new listeners will remain an endeavor with dwindling returns.

gb 17y ago

Something that strikes me - whenever I've seen pieces like this before, they often seem to ignore that people still write classical music. It's nearly always Mozart, Beethoven, Bach but no mention of any modern or contemporary composers... I wonder why that is. Sure some contemporary classical music is a bit more esoteric and even less likely to appeal to the average listener, but it's certainly not all like that. Maybe I'm slightly unusual in that most of the classical music I enjoy comes from the late romantic period onwards, but I do find it slightly disappointing that often when people "discover" classical music they seem to think it mostly stopped in the 1700s.

snitko 17y ago
That's understandable. Have you heard of any new classic rock bands lately? I doubt that. They do exists though. It's just that people lose interest in new faces playing the same old things. I mean sure, the scores may be different, but still somehow the music sounds the same, because they do combine chord progressions and melody parts in a certain painfully familiar way. Well, most of the time at least, that's what happens to the second generation of the genre followers. Same as in web-apps industry. People like twitter and they are doing a good job. But having yet another one in a different skin would make no sense.
jpwagner 17y ago
This phenomenon is similar to the class of posts that say "why [business] is like [poker]" etc. A vast majority of these posts are by people with amateur-at-best experience with the comparison topic. This article is no exception.
- rinich 17y ago
  And admittedly so.
  - aristoxenus 17y ago
    It's hard to imagine it playing out otherwise -- you need to start somewhere, and that stuff is: a) more familiar to the ear b) more plentifully recorded c) more widely discussed and recommended etc.

jtnak 17y ago

OK, so he said that classical music and the community around it is more rigid than most newer forms of music and their communities, and that it's dying, and the former might cause the latter. What is so unexpected, I wonder

rinich 17y ago
Unexpected not perhaps for a vast audience, but for me. What you didn't mention was perhaps the core of the post: Classical music isn't dead, it's living and breathing and subject to interpretation. Then the points you mentioned carry with them certain implications, namely that classical music could benefit from irreverence and innovation, and that modern music would benefit from classical music's being made more accessible.

teeja 17y ago

"When I listened to Mozart last year, I thought classical music was all about the composer. Today I realized the performer matters just as much" That's certainly true to an extent. But some performers won't suit your taste, and if you judge the music because you picked a poor performance (like you might get on the cheap imports), you might miss some incredible music. I can't stand Karajan's Beethoven, good thing I didn't start listening with him. I can't tell someone exactly why I like Mozart best when Marriner's conducting, or why Serkin just does the Emperor better. But once you know you like a composer's work, then you'll start to prefer some performances over others. The great part is that this slowly changes all your life, and that really great music never gets old and you can repeat the same chills you got when you were 20. It's a lot like Sherlock Holmes that way!

julius_geezer 17y ago

Education: One thing that strikes me in looking at Loony Tunes from (I suppose) that 1950s is how many allusions to classical and folk music they could slip in. I'm guessing that something has been lost in music education in the schools over the half century. Stodginess: as aristoxenus says, the classical stations do figure on an older, more conservative audience. I used to get a kick out of a Washington, DC station, since defunct. It wasn't unusual to hear a commercial with a relaxed, folksy voice telling one how important the F-15 was too our national defense.