> 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

> 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...