Modern Classical for Beginners
Searching for “classical music beginner’s” on Google shoves up this result somewhere on the first page (I say somewhere coz Google magically switches around the order of results depending on where you access it from) which I actually read yesterday, or two days ago, or whenever. It’s a parallel interview with several of classical critics, specifically focusing on whether classical is getting young, new listeners, or whether it always has and always will be the same old, old, crowd.
The question that the link goes to is of particular interest as it’s about what new non-classical fans, who want to start listening to classical music should start listening to. That is to say, it’s pretty much what the theme of this site is supposed to be. One response stood bang up out to me (yeah dodgy grammar there I know) from Anne Midgette:
“I’ve heard from a couple of different people who have TA’d in university music courses that the kids responded best to 20th-century music–Shostakovich, Stravinsky–and that the best modus operandi was to start from there and work backward”
Which I totally agree with, but hadn’t quite realized or accepted until I saw it there. For me the older eras, romantic and classical classical, sounded so stereotypical at first. I couldn’t get past how totally classical they sounded, all those swoops and strings and trills. It’s only after a year or two of listening to mostly 20th century pieces that I can go back and appreciate Beethoven.
In fact, I’m pretty confident in saying that most new classical listeners would be surprised that a lot of modern pieces fall under the classical genre. I’m quite sure that before I got into classical I assumed it was basically all like Beethoven and Mozart. If someone had played me one of Prokofiev’s late piano concertos, or Shostakovich’s 8th, 12th or 13th string quartets I might have become a fan much earlier.
I think I might write a permanent page giving modern pieces as a jumping board into the start of classical appreciation.
