Lately, I`ve been going classical

[Ernest Buckley]

The first sounds I remember hearing were classical music when I was a kid. Then opera and Church music. My mother would listen to light FM and I would go to sleep with that in my ear for better or worse... think Air Supply, Billy Joel, Elton John, some Beatles...

 

It wasn`t until I was 9 or 10 that I heard rock and roll. That changed my listening habits but even then I would listen to lots of classical music while in HS and even more in college.

 

Now in my late 30s I seem to enjoy it even more... Bach, Haydn, Mozart.... on and on... just amazing how much I love it and it seems that as I get older, the more I hear in the music or maybe my ears are just better trained at this point and I hear so many more nuances whereas with most rock.... it just gets boring and hurts my ears after awhile.

 

Just wondering if any of you guys have experienced similar things... is there a genre that you are returning to or finding yourself more "in tune" with as you get older?

 

Here in NYC, we have WQXR which is classical music 24/7. My radio is own in the studio 24/7 even when I`m not here. I just find it so centering.... And then the other day while in the car I`m listening to this piece called

by Jennifer Higdon, a contemporary composer who honestly at first I didn`t think I would like because you know... its "contemporary" but then as it started I was completely drawn in. I`m amazed by the color, the tone, the journey this genre takes me on that pop and rock have never been able to do...

[UstadKhanAli]

I grew up with classical, country, and Motown. That's what my parents listened to, not rock or jazz. When I heard rock - Led Zeppelin and ELO and other stuff for the first time - I really liked it. And later, fusion and jazz.

 

I don't know if I could say that I find myself returning to any one thing over and over again in general, but returning to some kinds of music for certain things. I like doing early morning stretches to Carnatic South Indian ragas. I like working on photos while listening to Indian music, ambient, classical or Javanese gamelan. I like driving to American folk music, rock, 1970s Finnish folk music, kozmigroov jazz (spacy jazz like "Headhunters" or Miles Davis' "Big Fun") or hard rock and metal. I like hanging out in the back yard and reading while listening to dub and reggae. I like having African music (field recordings, typically, or sometimes high life guitar) on when I'm just doing stuff around the house. I don't do this all the time, of course, but just have some tendencies in these areas.

[blue2blue]

I was introduced to classical music -- much as I was later introduced to jazz -- by the pop culture in large part. And by my discovery of the FM band in the early 60s.

 

Disney's Fantasia -- with its dinosaurs and goblins and fanciful sylvan scenes -- really got me going when I was a little kid. (And later it was through a series of jazz and big band festivals at Disneyland in the early-mid 60s that I really got my first deep exposure to jazz. I'd end up seeing live Louis Armstrong and a latter day Hot Seven, Duke Ellington doing some of his longer, classically influenced things, Count Basie cooking along, Woody Herman, Kenton, and so on.)

 

I rode my bike to see my first symphonic (youth) concert right after the end of 6th grade. I started buying cheap classical recordings from Europe (Nonesuch Records were $2.50 each while RCA Gold Seals could be 5 or 6 bucks). After I saved up for a Sony 5" reel mono deck, I plundered the library's classical recordings, swapping through a variety of albums on my handful of tapes. (Before the cassette, it could cost almost as much to make a tape copy of a record as to buy the record, although having a top speed of 3-3/4 ips held the cost down along with the fidelity.) And, of course, I listened to the two full time and three part time classical/eclectic stations in LA at the time.

 

My musical path has been a tortuous one, winding through early R&R, classical, jazz, folk, then back to rock, only at the edgy, acid end of the pool, avant-garde/experimental rock, reggae, dub, punk and no wave, neodub, downtempo...

 

But running through most of that time has been classical. In the 80s when I was engineering in studios and still involved in the post-punk scene, one of my near-constant companions was the classically trained electric violinist/singer for what had been one of my favorite local no wave bands. She and I would go see Nick Cave and then turn around and see Itzak Perlman. In the late 80s, I started subscribing to my local symphony, which I've done all but one season since then, meaning I've seen over 140 symphonic concerts (and a number of other 'serious music' oriented concerts, including string quartets and a few chamber orchestras; for a while I was a big Kronos fan, seeing them 4 times by themselves and once in concert with the Modern Jazz Quartet).

 

 

I owe a big tip of the hat to "Uncle Walt" Disney. Seeing Louis Armstrong -- which I hadn't even really been all that excited about, beforehand, thinking, I guess of his then-current hit with "Hello Dolly," but which ended up being hot jazz in a 20's-30's vein, was one of the musical highlights of my life, one of the first moments of musical ecstasy I remember. It was magical.

 

Now, sadly, the crassly commercial rump corporation that so often makes a mockery of Walt's legacy hard sells kids on Auto-Tune annoyances like Miley Cyrus, Hannah Montana, and woeful, plastic protoputas like their earlier creation, Britney Spears.

[D Charles]

I really like sting quartets and just chamber music in general. I mean it's the small band that performed background music for the elite way before electricity. There's loads of great classical music though. Really like the soundtrack to 'A Clockwork Orange' and the Wendy/Walter Carlos synth classical stuff too. Also like to hear real musicians play it live as well (nod to Blue)

 

Ken, you're lucky, my folks just listened to Johnny Cash and Harry Belafonte. I'm sure I can sing a mean 'Folsom Prison Blues' and 'Hey Mr. Tally Man, Tally Me Bananas' though. ;-)

[Lee Knight]

I was introduced to Classical through a garage sale. I was 13 and saw the cover of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1, Van Cliburn. I paid 50 cents maybe. The middle movement killed me. So, as a rock/folk kid, my ears were opened that afternoon listening to my garage sale find on headphones between ZZ Top, Deep Purple and Johnny Winter spins.

 

Recently I read producer Bob Rock commenting on how he gets great rock band arrangement ideas from Beethoven String Quartets. My kind of guy... me too.

 

A lot of people seem to separate genres and not allow for some sort of mental integration. That's a shame. There are a lot of great ideas classical that can spawn unique approaches in pop/rock. And I don't mean classically influenced rock. I mean musical ideas separated from their genre and applied to yours.

[Ernest Buckley]

 

I was introduced to Classical through a garage sale. I was 13 and saw the cover of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1, Van Cliburn. I paid 50 cents maybe. The middle movement killed me. So, as a rock/folk kid, my ears were opened that afternoon listening to my garage sale find on headphones between ZZ Top, Deep Purple and Johnny Winter spins. Recently I read producer Bob Rock commenting on how he gets great rock band arrangement ideas from Beethoven String Quartets. My kind of guy... me too. A lot of people seem to separate genres and not allow for some sort of mental integration. That's a shame. There are a lot of great ideas classical that can spawn unique approaches in pop/rock. And I don't mean classically influenced rock. I mean musical ideas separated from their genre and applied to yours.

 

Very cool info about Bob Rock! When I think of producers/artists being influenced by classical music, I think Led Zep and Pages guitar layering treatment, The Beatles in their later years (especially Magical Mystery Tour) and Trevor Horns productions of Seal. All classically influenced, all great.

[Lee Knight]

 

 

 

^ well, there's that ^ but also, less overt influence. Things like hearing a concept, quantifying it, then applying it. So the idea is removed from anything "classical".

 

The way Beethoven String Quartets play long values against another parts short values. The way a Bach Goldberg Variations use the thematic ammo in clever, simple, and sometimes mind boggling ways. The way Tchaikovsky or Berlioz combine instrumental timbres to create something new.

 

Then use those ideas in a way that doesn't sound like classical music. If oboe and flute sound great doubling, how can you use this idea with modern instruments and stay away from actually copping the direct oboe/flute stack?

 

Lift concepts and apply without the obvious trappings and more in a deeper yet general sense.

[blue2blue]

 

I really like sting quartets and just chamber music in general. I mean it's the small band that performed background music for the elite way before electricity. There's loads of great classical music though. Really like the soundtrack to 'A Clockwork Orange' and the Wendy/Walter Carlos synth classical stuff too. Also like to hear real musicians play it live as well (nod to Blue) Ken, you're lucky, my folks just listened to Johnny Cash and Harry Belafonte. I'm sure I can sing a mean 'Folsom Prison Blues' and 'Hey Mr. Tally Man, Tally Me Bananas' though. ;-)

Belafonte was a giant in my house, along with Nat Cole. By the time I got there, my dad wasn't as big on classical music as he apparently had been in college -- and my mom never had been. (However, she and I have been going to the symphony together pretty regularly for almost a decade. Once she got a taste of it, she was hooked. Frankly, I was a little surprised -- but delighted.) I was a lot more likely to hear show tunes, some latter day big band, and exotica (Lyman, Denny, etc) and the adult pop singers of the day around the house.

 

I'm still a big fan of Belafonte's 50s and 60s work -- I liked the folksinger angle. I liked his way with dialects. My grandfather was a polyglot and big on dialect humor, so it seemed natural to me for Belafonte to sing in a cockney accent ("One Eye on the Pot"). He laid the foundation for my later infatuation in the early 60s with folk music.

[nat whilk II]

I had the same kind of background in classical that so many others have from the boomer decades - stuff that thrills will stick in a kid's mind, like the William Tell Overture, Danse Macabre, Night on Bald Mountain, 1812 Overture (loved the cannons!), LVB's 5th. And stuff with what seemed exotic elements also stuck, like parts of the Nutcracker, Peter and the Wolf, snippets of Debussy/Ravel/Faure.

 

But I think it was Bernstein's Young People's Concerts that gave me my first glimpse of classical music as a serious and unfathomably deep artform. Actually I would say those shows gave me my first understanding of what Art with a capital A was, period. So at a very young age I became a believer in the validity of a genre of music, most of which I really hadn't the patience to listen through or understand. But I was saved from the blindness that comes with the common notion that classical music is just rich people's music that everyone respects only because they've been told it's the best by bogus self-serving authorities.

 

So very early on, it seemed to me obvious that, if I didn't "like" a piece of serious music that other intelligent, serious music lovers liked, that I had a deficiency of understanding, not that the music itself was to blame. A curable deficiency, thankfully. It was okay to have to study and learn before appreciation bloomed. Spontaneous, immediate enjoyment of music was not the only way to go - in fact, as a guide to defining the music I like, it seemed to keep me in a very narrow, densely wooded single-file path that nevers lifted up into anything like a big overview over a broad landscape.

 

And when Bernstein said that She's Leaving Home was as beautiful and anything written by Schumann, I was his fan forever

 

Actually, I'm not sure now Bernstein was right about that, but that's not really the point...

 

As far as what I turn to now in classical - latest CD I've downloaded from eMusic that I really like is Complete Works for Flute by Robert Muczynski. Short forms, which I'm a sucker for (Chopin, etc). And the guy has a way of blending the timbres of woodwinds that is, at least to me, exceptionally pleasing.

 

nat whilk ii

[karlw]

I grew up listening to and playing classical music, something I still do today. Like many of you, I was fortunate that my parents had records of all kinds of stuff, from Elvis, the Beatles, Fats Domino, Take 5, Iron Butterfly, Bob Dylan, etc. But at least half the collection in the house was classical - Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, Shostakovich, Prokoviev, etc. I ended up studying classical music and getting a degree in viola performance. My brother was also a very good violinist (he's still alive, but doesn't play the violin any more).

 

Ernest, I also agree with you that to a large degree, most pop music is boring. Don't get me wrong - I like a lot of it, too. And I play guitar and had a band in college, etc. But I find myself listening to classical music 90% of the time.

 

My friend, a professional classical bass player and teacher, is actually experiencing the opposite. He basically has done nothing but play the bass since he was a kid. Sure, he listened to some pop stuff in high school and all. But only recently, he's re-discovering Led Zepplin and other awesome bands - he just never paid them any mind. So we get together and learn rock licks, which is a blast.

 

On the top of my listening choices: Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn string quartets, Chopin and Rachmanninoff piano music, Mahler and Prokoviev symphonic music. Holst "The Planets" and Berlioz "Symphony Fantastique" aren't bad, either . Oh yeah, and Bach.

[Ernest Buckley]

I grew up listening to and playing classical music, something I still do today. Like many of you, I was fortunate that my parents had records of all kinds of stuff, from Elvis, the Beatles, Fats Domino, Take 5, Iron Butterfly, Bob Dylan, etc. But at least half the collection in the house was classical - Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, Shostakovich, Prokoviev, etc. I ended up studying classical music and getting a degree in viola performance. My brother was also a very good violinist (he's still alive, but doesn't play the violin any more). Ernest, I also agree with you that to a large degree, most pop music is boring. Don't get me wrong - I like a lot of it, too. And I play guitar and had a band in college, etc. But I find myself listening to classical music 90% of the time. My friend, a professional classical bass player and teacher, is actually experiencing the opposite. He basically has done nothing but play the bass since he was a kid. Sure, he listened to some pop stuff in high school and all. But only recently, he's re-discovering Led Zepplin and other awesome bands - he just never paid them any mind. So we get together and learn rock licks, which is a blast. On the top of my listening choices: Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn string quartets, Chopin and Rachmanninoff piano music, Mahler and Prokoviev symphonic music. Holst "The Planets" and Berlioz "Symphony Fantastique" aren't bad, either . Oh yeah, and Bach.

 

My wife and I were watching "The Kings Speech" last evening and throughout the movie, I kept commenting to my wife about the music. Several selections from Beethoven thrown in and I just marveled at the beauty of the music... completely building the scene.

 

After the movie, my wife says to me, "Most people are unaware of this music." That got me thinking about the injustice I am doing my kids by not introducing them to this stuff. So this morning while getting ready for school, I turned on some classical music. My 8 year old says, "This slow music makes me do things slowly."

 

My 5 year old didn`t say a word but went straight to the iPod to change the music.

 

Anyway, I told them we needed to keep it on and so we did. Today was Day 1. Tomorrow... a little of Mozarts Kyrie from his requiem and then some of Beethovens 5th. That should rock their world.

 

My wife made a good point, she basically said that if I was not introduced to classical music at an early age, I would not have listened to it at all. This also goes for the arts in general. Going to the museum, a Broadway play, etc... We`re in NYC... no excuses.

[Lee Knight]

 

My daughter used to say, "Not this stuff with no words again!!!" Now, at 14, she puts up with it but doesn't like it. Yet!

[Jeff da Weasel]

Bach's not classical. He'd be baroque. Hadyn and Mozart certainly are, though.

[Lee Knight]

Bach's not classical. He'd be baroque. Hadyn and Mozart certainly are, though.

 

Ok but... ever try to tell an old school engineer that the term "echo" doesn't really apply to the reverb send? He'll say, "Whatever, kid. I've been saying that for 50 years and it ain't changing today."

[karlw]

I used to do a college guest lecture on "Musical Imagery" and I would start by asking a show of hands for those who listened to classical music. Very few raised their hands. Then I asked "how many here watch movies or TV?" and of course they all raised their hands. So I went on to explain that classical music is often used as the score for movies and TV, and the pieces are chosen to highlight the story at that point. A perfect example what Ernest pointed out: the use of Beethoven's 7th in "The King's Speech" while he's making his historic speech. It really adds something to the scene, I think.

 

From there, I would play short examples of carefully chosen music and asked the students to listen to the example, then write down how they felt about it. The results were always interesting, to say the least! But often, for certain excerpts, the results were similar, indicating that the composer in many ways achieved what he had set out to do: impart a specific emotion.

 

Ernest, one thought I have is to seek out musical examples that are particularly engaging. No slow music in the morning: pick Mozart's Symphony 25. Verdi's Requiem "Dies Irae" is a good one to get them going, too - it's terrifying (and used in a lot of movies and TV commercials).

 

Let them watch Amadeus some time - it's a great movie and the musical choices are sublime.

[Lee Knight]

 

Ernest, one thought I have is to seek out musical examples that are particularly engaging. No slow music in the morning: pick Mozart's Symphony 25. Verdi's Requiem "Dies Irae" is a good one to get them going, too - it's terrifying (and used in a lot of movies and TV commercials). Let them watch Amadeus some time - it's a great movie and the musical choices are sublime.

 

 

And... Rossini Overtures! Little rock tunes of excitement. 5 minutes of building to a crashing climax. Fun stuff.

[Jeff da Weasel]

Ok but... ever try to tell an old school engineer that the term "echo" doesn't really apply to the reverb send? He'll say, "Whatever, kid. I've been saying that for 50 years and it ain't changing today."

 

Sure. Most people -- I'd say 90% or more -- refer to any orchestral music as "classical". Those of us who pursued degrees in music were weaned of that bad habit very quickly.

 

The fact is that there really was more than one kind of music between 1600-1900.

[blue2blue]

I had the same kind of background in classical that so many others have from the boomer decades - stuff that thrills will stick in a kid's mind, like the William Tell Overture, Danse Macabre, Night on Bald Mountain, 1812 Overture (loved the cannons!), LVB's 5th. And stuff with what seemed exotic elements also stuck, like parts of the Nutcracker, Peter and the Wolf, snippets of Debussy/Ravel/Faure. But I think it was Bernstein's Young People's Concerts that gave me my first glimpse of classical music as a serious and unfathomably deep artform. Actually I would say those shows gave me my first understanding of what Art with a capital A was, period. So at a very young age I became a believer in the validity of a genre of music, most of which I really hadn't the patience to listen through or understand. But I was saved from the blindness that comes with the common notion that classical music is just rich people's music that everyone respects only because they've been told it's the best by bogus self-serving authorities. So very early on, it seemed to me obvious that, if I didn't "like" a piece of serious music that other intelligent, serious music lovers liked, that I had a deficiency of understanding, not that the music itself was to blame. A curable deficiency, thankfully. It was okay to have to study and learn before appreciation bloomed. Spontaneous, immediate enjoyment of music was not the only way to go - in fact, as a guide to defining the music I like, it seemed to keep me in a very narrow, densely wooded single-file path that nevers lifted up into anything like a big overview over a broad landscape. And when Bernstein said that She's Leaving Home was as beautiful and anything written by Schumann, I was his fan forever Actually, I'm not sure now Bernstein was right about that, but that's not really the point... As far as what I turn to now in classical - latest CD I've downloaded from eMusic that I really like is Complete Works for Flute by Robert Muczynski. Short forms, which I'm a sucker for (Chopin, etc). And the guy has a way of blending the timbres of woodwinds that is, at least to me, exceptionally pleasing. nat whilk ii

Yeah, the Bernstein concerts triggered a lot of stuff that had been brewing for me. They were pretty crucial at getting me rolling. Also, and it sounds like a joke, but it's not, really... one day when I was shopping with my parental units at a new store called Pic-n-Save (now Big Lots) in the very early 60s, I saw a kid's size sweatshirt with a glowering Beethoven line screened onto it. I was big on Ed "Big Daddy" Roth t-shirts and sweat shirts at the time (though I never actually shelled out the big bucks -- $5.99 -- 3 or 4 times the cost of a sweatshirt at Penneys) and I thought the Beethoven looked "camp" and cool. And since I had Beethoven on my favorite new sweatshirt, I thought I ought to put my ears where my... well, you get the drift. I started saving for the 101 Strings Beethoven Symphonies box set (which was like 7 bucks of so, much cheaper than the big labels, of course, which tended to sell premium records for 5 and even 6 bucks list, and, while rather rather distant sounding in the fi department, were played by one or more more or less professional European orchestras, sort of sub-Nonesuch).

[Ernest Buckley]

Ernest, one thought I have is to seek out musical examples that are particularly engaging. No slow music in the morning: pick Mozart's Symphony 25. Verdi's Requiem "Dies Irae" is a good one to get them going, too - it's terrifying (and used in a lot of movies and TV commercials). Let them watch Amadeus some time - it's a great movie and the musical choices are sublime.

Thanks for the recommendations! When I was in HS, my friend Amadeo and I would cut the last class or so and head across the street to the Lincoln Center library where they had thousands of records. We would pick something to listen to that we thought would be interesting, grab the score and sit down and listen to it together. We would both have headphones on and would often just stare at each other shaking our heads in amazement. Listening to Verdis Requiem was one of those moments... I have not had that ever listening to anything in the pop/rock genre, including The Beatles. Even though they have amazed me at times, along with Pink Floyd, none of it comes close to how Mozarts Requiem, Beethovens 9th (5th mvt), Verdis Dies Irae have made me feel. And thats the beauty of classical music, there really is no end to it. We could add hundreds of pieces that are totally mind blowing. Try that with any other genre.

 

Its time to watch Amadeus again but for some reason, I think my 5 year old will tune it out unless they added some gun battles and cars speeding through Vienna into it. Have they?

[Ernest Buckley]

Sure. Most people -- I'd say 90% or more -- refer to any orchestral music as "classical". Those of us who pursued degrees in music were weaned of that bad habit very quickly. The fact is that there really was more than one kind of music between 1600-1900.

I understand your post, I went to school for music too. I think you know what I meant.

 

And honestly, I listen to all of it so what do you call most music that has an orchestra in it or instruments that you have to blow, pluck or strike to make a sound?

[Jeff da Weasel]

 

And honestly, I listen to all of it so what do you call most music that has an orchestra in it or instruments that you have to blow, pluck or strike to make a sound?

 

 

My senior theory teacher used to call it "art music", but I always found that a little pretentious. And where does it end? Does 20th century avant-garde music by Cage and Schoenberg qualify? It certainly doesn't sound like Beethoven (another non-classical composer... he was in the Romantic era).

[Lee Knight]

Just like "Give me more echo" works fine, even though it's wrong... "Classical works just fine as well." Until you're trying to divide up orchestral music, or music played by those instruments in whatever grouping, I'd say, "Classical" fits just fine.

 

 

"Wow! You see that bunch of Harleys, maybe 10 of them, just roared by here!"

 

"Well, actually, you're wrong! There were a two vintage Indians as well."

 

"You know what I meant!"

 

"Well, no. Indians are very different from Harleys".

 

"Shhh".

[Jeff da Weasel]

"Shhh".

 

 

 

Good analogy.

[blue2blue]

Do you mean real Indians (made by Hendee/Indian Motocycle) or one of the fake Indians made by various other manufacturers in recent years? Two very different things.

[Poker99]

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