4 ms·

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 liste

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.

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.