4 ms·

How do you get into classical music? I enjoy listening but I can’t keep track of all the different pieces and the performers as they are often bizarrely named o

How do you get into classical music? I enjoy listening but I can’t keep track of all the different pieces and the performers as they are often bizarrely named or have no consistency between composers.

hellofunk 6y ago
Don't try too hard. Classical music is more varied in history and style than any other genre, so it cannot be considered a single kind of music. Just keep listening to different composers, different eras, to see what resonates with you. Even among professional classical musicians, there is strong preference for one period over another. There is so much to explore between 1650 - present day, all "classical" and all entirely different. If you want a geeky but artful introduction to Bach (the composer I dare say that really "started it all"), you could do far worse than this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switched-On_Bach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switched-On_Bach If you find anything you like there, go find it in its more authentic form and just keep peeling back the layers. :)
- petewailes 6y ago
  Not to be that guy, but Monteverdi, Schutz and Gabrieli, along with their ilk predate Bach by a century and kick off the Baroque period, and you've got the entire two centuries of the Renaissance period before that. Bach is awesome, and the man had an awful lot to draw on for the emotion in his music, but he was a long way from kicking off the evolution from plainchant to Messiaen.
  - hellofunk 6y ago
    Well, I guess you are being that guy :) but Bach certainly went much further than nearly any composer in advancing the state of music harmony that allowed the explosion of the classical and romantic areas. Composers from Chopin to Mahler cited Bach as their main influence. I was just offering an arbitrary line to represent “classical“. Of course there’s a lot of great music written in ancient Greece as well.
    - madhadron 6y ago
      > Bach certainly went much further than nearly any composer in advancing the state of music harmony It's easy to have that impression because JS Bach (justifiably!) looms so enormously over music since then. But it wasn't so much that he advanced the state of harmony as that he was so encyclopedic and powerful in his ability to use the material of his age that he somewhat obscured his source material, rather the way Newton did in classical mechanics. Then his sons basically created the classical style just to get out of his shadow. And for many years JS Bach was far less famous than his sons JC Bach and CPE Bach.
TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
The names aren't usually relevant. Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata was actually a funereal piece written after the death of a friend, and was named by a critic, not by Beethoven. Performers are relevant, but you can ignore them until you can hear the differences between them - which may take a while. Enjoying the music is the best way in. Like a piece? Remember the composer. Find other pieces by the same composer of the same kind - such as Mozart piano concertos. Find a guide to the most popular examples of that type and listen to those first. Try some other types by the same composer, or the same types by different composers. It helps a bit to know a little about the history and the different periods - early, baroque, "classical" classical, Romantic, modern, contemporary, and so on - but only because most people like music from some of the periods more than they like others. It's not an exam. The object isn't to remember all the details, but to keep exploring so you can find the pieces and composers you enjoy. Eventually you'll start hearing shades of emotion and expression in pieces you're already familiar. Mozart often sounds sugary to beginners, but he's also quite sarcastic and sometimes has unexpected dark undercurrents. I got a lot more out of the music when I realised composers weren't unapproachable geniuses, but they were very human - and that's what the music is really about.
ssttoo 6y ago
"How to Listen to and Understand Great Music" by Great Courses is really good. The lectures are by a professor/composer. Forget about consistency or naming conventions. But you'll get a lot more out of the listening experience once you know a bit about different composers from different periods: baroque, classical (talk about confusing!), romantic, contemporary. Now when I dial the classic radio station I can often tell the period and even the composer even if I've never heard the piece before. Fun :)
- ssttoo 6y ago
  Oh and after this overview you can dig into more specific periods and composers, also by Great Courses and same prof. If you're in US, you can check the local library, they have these audiobooks by the great courses for free.
petewailes 6y ago
Classical musician here. I'd start off with a good guide to the history of music. That'll give you an understanding of why what we call classical music has so much range in it. The context helps immensely. After that, there's an element of accepting that the longer forms of music are going to take a while to listen to. Remember they were meant to be performed by musicians, with an audience listening from start to finish. The bulk of what you'll probably think of as classical music is essentially concert stuff, rather than 3 minute standalone pieces. That being said, there's huge range in the canon. From short practice pieces and tone poems which stand alone to huge many hour opera pieces, and everything in between. I'd start with The Story of Music by Howard Goodall, and How to Listen to Great Music: A Guide to Its History, Culture, and Heart by Robert Greenberg. After that, pick a period and start listening. Feel free to ping me any time for more information. EDIT: It's also worth noting that there's huge range in any particular piece depending on who's conducting it. For example, if you take a commonly performed piece like the Overture to Le Nozze Di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro), you can get everything from Teodor Currentzis to Georg Solti to Karl Bohm. Three different styles of playing exactly the same thing. So it's also, in time, worth looking into how music is arranged and performed and how that affects both what you hear now, and how people composed at the time.
eitally 6y ago
As others have noted, it's useful first to understand the setting and context for a given period or style of classical music. After you've read an overview or few, pick representative pieces of each sub-genre, preferably ones you've already read about or which you already recognize, and start listening to them through a new lens. Then, pick a sub-genre you enjoy and dive deeper. Read a more pointed book or few and start listening more expansively to works by multiple composers. Ignore the performer and conductor/orchestra/symphony at this stage. Start appreciating the macro-level structures that make them what they are, and the internal nuance that makes them famous. If you find yourself particularly drawn to something, whether it's a genre, a time period, or a composer, dive deeper. At that point, you should start listening to multiple recordings of the same pieces and get a feel for the difference an arranger, conductor or performer can make (or if you want to become a true fanatic, an orchestra/symphony, venue, or recording equipment). If you get to this point, it becomes a passion just like any other, and you can start calling yourself something of an expert. :) (Source: play classical piano and am currently trying to pick up popular guitar to have something more accessible & casual.)
hugh-avherald 6y ago
Listen to a piece of music you liked from a film. Then listen to more of the same composer or more of similar works of a similar period.
bjornlouser 6y ago
Adventures In Good Music w/Karl Haas https://archive.org/search.php?query=subject%3A%22Adventures+in+Good+Music%22 https://archive.org/search.php?query=subject%3A%22Adventures... You could also pick a piece from the list of Grammy winners of yesteryear and find a recording on YouTube... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammy_Award_for_Best_Classical_Album https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammy_Award_for_Best_Classica... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammy_Award_for_Best_Chamber_Music_Performance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammy_Award_for_Best_Chamber_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammy_Award_for_Best_Orchestral_Performance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammy_Award_for_Best_Orchestr...
madhadron 6y ago
> I can’t keep track of all the different pieces and the performers as they are often bizarrely named or have no consistency between composers. Yup. You're at sea in a thousand years of music with all the fads, conventions, and expectations of various places and times layered up. Take the word "sonata," which referred to a piece of music to be sounded on instruments, as opposed to "toccata" (touched on a keyboard) or "cantata" (to be sung). And then a generation later people are writing piano sonatas and no one writes a toccata again unless it's a direct homage to JS Bach. So, honestly, don't worry too much about it. A course in music history will help you get a bit of framework around it, but most courses will only give you a fragment, because it gets really confusing around the edges because the distinction between folk and classical music didn't exist (to this day, Celtic music is a slight evolution of Baroque) and the edges of it and other traditions such as Arabic, Balkan, African, and Indian, and various other musical traditions get really blurred, or sometimes outright removed (such as Lou Harrison, who was as comfortable in gamelan as western classical). No one has all of this in their head. They have areas that they have dug into in depth and more or less of an overall framework for what was going on musically in various times and places, but even then if you take your average symphony goer and ask them about the Ars Magis Subtiliter codex or Lou Harrison, you're going to get a blank expression. Really, it's about listening, thinking about what you like, and talking to other enthusiasts about it and listening to other things they suggest. But that's the thing. Those of us who love this stuff love talking about it. If you say, "Hey, I really like this," or "I don't get this piece at all," every classical musician around comes out of the woodwork with suggestions of stuff to listen to. For example, my parents completely did not hear music in Schoenberg's music. So I took them step by step through the sounds they needed for Pierrot Lunaire to make sense. First we stepped back into the Renaissance, and then slowly forward from the romantics through Puccini, Mahler, and the like. I've lost my list of what the progression was, sadly...
Tycho 6y ago
I recommend getting a good box set, eg Classic FM Favourites, which will be filled with popular pieces or the most memorable sections of longer works. Then see what you want to hear more of. There’s orchestral, solo piano, chamber (eg. string quartets), opera, choral... and then there’s the styles from different eras. I think the most rewarding step is when you go from appreciating the “famous” part that most people will have heard somewhere, to appreciating the full work. Eg. everyone knows the opening to Beethoven Symphony 5, but the full 45 minute symphony is incredible all the way through. Individual performers/orchestras you don’t need to worry about until there’s some works that you really like and you want to hear some different takes on it.

hellofunk 6y ago

Don't try too hard. Classical music is more varied in history and style than any other genre, so it cannot be considered a single kind of music. Just keep listening to different composers, different eras, to see what resonates with you. Even among professional classical musicians, there is strong preference for one period over another. There is so much to explore between 1650 - present day, all "classical" and all entirely different. If you want a geeky but artful introduction to Bach (the composer I dare say that really "started it all"), you could do far worse than this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switched-On_Bach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switched-On_Bach If you find anything you like there, go find it in its more authentic form and just keep peeling back the layers. :)

petewailes 6y ago
Not to be that guy, but Monteverdi, Schutz and Gabrieli, along with their ilk predate Bach by a century and kick off the Baroque period, and you've got the entire two centuries of the Renaissance period before that. Bach is awesome, and the man had an awful lot to draw on for the emotion in his music, but he was a long way from kicking off the evolution from plainchant to Messiaen.
- hellofunk 6y ago
  Well, I guess you are being that guy :) but Bach certainly went much further than nearly any composer in advancing the state of music harmony that allowed the explosion of the classical and romantic areas. Composers from Chopin to Mahler cited Bach as their main influence. I was just offering an arbitrary line to represent “classical“. Of course there’s a lot of great music written in ancient Greece as well.
  - madhadron 6y ago
    > Bach certainly went much further than nearly any composer in advancing the state of music harmony It's easy to have that impression because JS Bach (justifiably!) looms so enormously over music since then. But it wasn't so much that he advanced the state of harmony as that he was so encyclopedic and powerful in his ability to use the material of his age that he somewhat obscured his source material, rather the way Newton did in classical mechanics. Then his sons basically created the classical style just to get out of his shadow. And for many years JS Bach was far less famous than his sons JC Bach and CPE Bach.

TheOtherHobbes 6y ago

The names aren't usually relevant. Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata was actually a funereal piece written after the death of a friend, and was named by a critic, not by Beethoven. Performers are relevant, but you can ignore them until you can hear the differences between them - which may take a while. Enjoying the music is the best way in. Like a piece? Remember the composer. Find other pieces by the same composer of the same kind - such as Mozart piano concertos. Find a guide to the most popular examples of that type and listen to those first. Try some other types by the same composer, or the same types by different composers. It helps a bit to know a little about the history and the different periods - early, baroque, "classical" classical, Romantic, modern, contemporary, and so on - but only because most people like music from some of the periods more than they like others. It's not an exam. The object isn't to remember all the details, but to keep exploring so you can find the pieces and composers you enjoy. Eventually you'll start hearing shades of emotion and expression in pieces you're already familiar. Mozart often sounds sugary to beginners, but he's also quite sarcastic and sometimes has unexpected dark undercurrents. I got a lot more out of the music when I realised composers weren't unapproachable geniuses, but they were very human - and that's what the music is really about.

ssttoo 6y ago

"How to Listen to and Understand Great Music" by Great Courses is really good. The lectures are by a professor/composer. Forget about consistency or naming conventions. But you'll get a lot more out of the listening experience once you know a bit about different composers from different periods: baroque, classical (talk about confusing!), romantic, contemporary. Now when I dial the classic radio station I can often tell the period and even the composer even if I've never heard the piece before. Fun :)

ssttoo 6y ago
Oh and after this overview you can dig into more specific periods and composers, also by Great Courses and same prof. If you're in US, you can check the local library, they have these audiobooks by the great courses for free.

petewailes 6y ago

Classical musician here. I'd start off with a good guide to the history of music. That'll give you an understanding of why what we call classical music has so much range in it. The context helps immensely. After that, there's an element of accepting that the longer forms of music are going to take a while to listen to. Remember they were meant to be performed by musicians, with an audience listening from start to finish. The bulk of what you'll probably think of as classical music is essentially concert stuff, rather than 3 minute standalone pieces. That being said, there's huge range in the canon. From short practice pieces and tone poems which stand alone to huge many hour opera pieces, and everything in between. I'd start with The Story of Music by Howard Goodall, and How to Listen to Great Music: A Guide to Its History, Culture, and Heart by Robert Greenberg. After that, pick a period and start listening. Feel free to ping me any time for more information. EDIT: It's also worth noting that there's huge range in any particular piece depending on who's conducting it. For example, if you take a commonly performed piece like the Overture to Le Nozze Di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro), you can get everything from Teodor Currentzis to Georg Solti to Karl Bohm. Three different styles of playing exactly the same thing. So it's also, in time, worth looking into how music is arranged and performed and how that affects both what you hear now, and how people composed at the time.

eitally 6y ago

As others have noted, it's useful first to understand the setting and context for a given period or style of classical music. After you've read an overview or few, pick representative pieces of each sub-genre, preferably ones you've already read about or which you already recognize, and start listening to them through a new lens. Then, pick a sub-genre you enjoy and dive deeper. Read a more pointed book or few and start listening more expansively to works by multiple composers. Ignore the performer and conductor/orchestra/symphony at this stage. Start appreciating the macro-level structures that make them what they are, and the internal nuance that makes them famous. If you find yourself particularly drawn to something, whether it's a genre, a time period, or a composer, dive deeper. At that point, you should start listening to multiple recordings of the same pieces and get a feel for the difference an arranger, conductor or performer can make (or if you want to become a true fanatic, an orchestra/symphony, venue, or recording equipment). If you get to this point, it becomes a passion just like any other, and you can start calling yourself something of an expert. :) (Source: play classical piano and am currently trying to pick up popular guitar to have something more accessible & casual.)

hugh-avherald 6y ago

Listen to a piece of music you liked from a film. Then listen to more of the same composer or more of similar works of a similar period.

bjornlouser 6y ago

Adventures In Good Music w/Karl Haas https://archive.org/search.php?query=subject%3A%22Adventures+in+Good+Music%22 https://archive.org/search.php?query=subject%3A%22Adventures... You could also pick a piece from the list of Grammy winners of yesteryear and find a recording on YouTube... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammy_Award_for_Best_Classical_Album https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammy_Award_for_Best_Classica... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammy_Award_for_Best_Chamber_Music_Performance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammy_Award_for_Best_Chamber_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammy_Award_for_Best_Orchestral_Performance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammy_Award_for_Best_Orchestr...

madhadron 6y ago

> I can’t keep track of all the different pieces and the performers as they are often bizarrely named or have no consistency between composers. Yup. You're at sea in a thousand years of music with all the fads, conventions, and expectations of various places and times layered up. Take the word "sonata," which referred to a piece of music to be sounded on instruments, as opposed to "toccata" (touched on a keyboard) or "cantata" (to be sung). And then a generation later people are writing piano sonatas and no one writes a toccata again unless it's a direct homage to JS Bach. So, honestly, don't worry too much about it. A course in music history will help you get a bit of framework around it, but most courses will only give you a fragment, because it gets really confusing around the edges because the distinction between folk and classical music didn't exist (to this day, Celtic music is a slight evolution of Baroque) and the edges of it and other traditions such as Arabic, Balkan, African, and Indian, and various other musical traditions get really blurred, or sometimes outright removed (such as Lou Harrison, who was as comfortable in gamelan as western classical). No one has all of this in their head. They have areas that they have dug into in depth and more or less of an overall framework for what was going on musically in various times and places, but even then if you take your average symphony goer and ask them about the Ars Magis Subtiliter codex or Lou Harrison, you're going to get a blank expression. Really, it's about listening, thinking about what you like, and talking to other enthusiasts about it and listening to other things they suggest. But that's the thing. Those of us who love this stuff love talking about it. If you say, "Hey, I really like this," or "I don't get this piece at all," every classical musician around comes out of the woodwork with suggestions of stuff to listen to. For example, my parents completely did not hear music in Schoenberg's music. So I took them step by step through the sounds they needed for Pierrot Lunaire to make sense. First we stepped back into the Renaissance, and then slowly forward from the romantics through Puccini, Mahler, and the like. I've lost my list of what the progression was, sadly...

Tycho 6y ago

I recommend getting a good box set, eg Classic FM Favourites, which will be filled with popular pieces or the most memorable sections of longer works. Then see what you want to hear more of. There’s orchestral, solo piano, chamber (eg. string quartets), opera, choral... and then there’s the styles from different eras. I think the most rewarding step is when you go from appreciating the “famous” part that most people will have heard somewhere, to appreciating the full work. Eg. everyone knows the opening to Beethoven Symphony 5, but the full 45 minute symphony is incredible all the way through. Individual performers/orchestras you don’t need to worry about until there’s some works that you really like and you want to hear some different takes on it.